Seth Dobbs (he/him): How do you ensure that your team can make decisions in your absence? How do you provide the guardrails so that your team can act freely, but with alignment to your vision? And how do you approach improving yourself as a leader? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs. And this is the Principle Driven Leadership podcast, where I share principles of leadership along with examples of how to apply them, to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results.

And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today, involves talking about how you can define and refine your own principles. I think that doing this as actually central to leading and in particular to developing your own authentic style of leadership. And it helps you make it clear to yourself and to others

what guides you. Now for the most part in my podcast, I talk about general leadership principles:

there are the three core principles. One that leaders provide vision. Two that leaders resolve problems. And three, that leaders create more leaders.

I’ve also talked about various enabling principles to help you get a better handle on navigating those three core principles. Now, all of these are intended to be fairly broad in coverage in that they can apply to many, many different leadership situations. But throughout the years of my career, I’ve developed principles around narrower subjects as well. . So for example, I formed several principles for developing software when I was deep in that kind of work. I’ve also found that when running a particular project to achieve some specific goals that can actually require principles for the team that are narrowly focused around that work. And same with running an organization or a business or whatever, regardless of the scope of your role in the scale of your work. You’ll find it useful to develop principles, to help clarify what’s important to you and how you make your decisions so that you can also not just guide yourself, but guide others through that work on the path to reaching outcomes. Developing your own principles taking the time to do this really helps bring clarity to your vision, to what you are trying to achieve.

And in fact helps provide guidance in getting there both for your team and for yourself. So there’s many ways to go about crafting principles, but for this episode, I’m going to focus on a few core concepts. One, what principles actually are. Two. How to craft some basic principles and then three, how to apply those principles and shape them over time. So first number one, what are principles? Now often when I’ve run training sessions and ask people for their principles, I often get responses like this: integrity. Honesty. Empathy. And things like that. Now, these are all important values for a leader. But they’re not actually principles, at least not in the scope of Principle Driven Leadership. So if that’s the case, what is a principle? A principle in the context of Principle Driven Leadership: it should be a simple, short concept that provides guidance on how to think, decide, and act, and that’s in line with achieving a desired outcome. So when you think about that definition, the word “integrity” by itself

doesn’t do this for us. “Act with integrity” really isn’t enough either. Integrity can be thought of as being fair or adhering to a moral code or set of values. So by definition, the word integrity actually doesn’t really provide a lot of guidance because what is the measure of fair? What, and perhaps more importantly, whose code or whose values are we promoting? One person’s integrity can be another person’s betrayal and there’s cultural differences in all of this. So because of this, just telling people that they should behave with integrity actually provides little guidance. And the same can be said for honesty. I’ve known some people who use phrases like, “oh, I’m just being honest” to say fairly mean and destructive things. And there’s also a nuance and sometimes not so nuanced difference between honesty, transparency and forthrightness. But the bottom line here is that values are just that they’re important, but they’re values. They don’t provide clear guidance in and of themselves.. Your principles should guide you and ultimately others in making decisions and taking actions and in reaching outcomes.

And again, a principle should be a simple, short concept that provides guidance on how to think, decide, and act that is in line with achieving a desired outcome. Now, if we view them this way, we can then analyze the impacts of the decisions we make, the actions we take and our ability to reach outcomes in light of our principles and determine if those principles, are actually serving us.

All right with that.

Let’s go to number two. How do we go about crafting principles? With this understanding, we can actually start thinking about how do we make them. And so to do that, I’m going to recall a couple from season one to use as examples. But to start. The core driver to creating principles is to think about why you make the decisions you make. This is what you really want to impart to others, to help them learn, as well as be able to check for yourself if your principles are working. Leadership is not just about the decisions themselves. You can’t truly lead just by making decisions. If for no other reason than it’s hard to create leaders that can only learn by observing your actions. How can they handle something they haven’t seen you handle,

if all they get is just to learn from seeing what you do? It’s also hard for you to grow, for you to improve yourself, if you don’t have a handle on why you make the decisions you make and can then analyze them. So encoding your why into principles is key, making them short, memorable, and able to guide decisions. This is what you want to do, but it’s not always easy. So I’ll give a couple of examples. First one I’m going to analyze is my principle “Doing Less, Lets You Achieve More”, which was originally discussed in season one, episode three. And with this principle, I wanted to capture a key lesson that I’ve learned repeatedly. That in spite of many of us believing that success comes from doing lots of different things and whatever comes our way, overcommitting can actually be disastrous. Overcommitting can get in the way of you achieving what’s really important. So if we parse out this principle, “Doing less, lets you achieve more”. I want to first look at the doing versus achieving part of this principle. And this is a key message in Principle Driven Leadership that you need to shift your thinking from doing to achieving. And so I wanted to capture that in this. I think most can understand that achieving results is really what we’re after, as leaders.

So this is really a deliberate contrast.

The second thing to look at in this principle is the contrast of less versus more. This gives guidance on behavior and decision-making. That you want to do less of one thing, more of another. In particular less doing, and by doing so you get to focus on fewer things or put more energy and achieve more. So the idea with this principle then is that when you hit a point where you’re wondering, why you, or those you lead are getting the results you want, you might remember at least part of the principle, the achieving more and maybe “why am I not achieving more at this moment?” Then you can analyze what you’re doing and see what’s getting in the way,

and what’s sort of blocking you from achieving, using your vision to provide guidance. And even better, this principle is really intended to be preventive and should become central to how you lead and how you think about leading. Now the second principle I’ll analyze is “A Bias to Outcomes is Better Than a Bias to Action”, which I presented in episode two of season one. Now this format is an easy format to actually help provide guidance.

I think of it as a, “this over that” type of format. It’s a great way to encode your thinking without being overly prescriptive. Now, this kind of principle doesn’t mean that it’s always one thing and never the other. It means you should favor “this” over “that”, whenever possible. Now, in this case with outcomes over actions. Ultimately, we always have to take actions.

Our team needs to take actions. But what this principle tells us that it’s more important to think about outcomes first. And let actions stem from understanding how we want to reach those outcomes. And so this kind of thing is typical of this over that format of principle and I’ve found it can actually help others rapidly learn how you think when you can put concepts in this format. It can take some experimentation to get effective at this and that’s okay.

We’ll get things wrong before we get them right. So that brings us to number three. How do we apply and shape our principles? I’ll start with a full confession, the principles I use in share throughout these podcasts, didn’t all just magically fall into place one fine morning. Many have actually changed over the years, even as I’ve been using them, teaching and coaching others with them. And this is to be expected to actually how we learn, how we get better. So here’s the idea.

Once you’ve defined a principle. Write it down. Put it on a sticky note, real or virtual. Keep it in front of you where you can look at it. See it. Think about it. Talk about it with other people. Help others understand the principle. Put it to use. All of these things allow you to think more deeply about your principal. The thing is the work to put your thoughts into a principle in and of itself, forces you to think more deeply, which is valuable. Then imparting your concept to others is another step in getting deeper into it, into your concept and applying it. And you’ll find when you explain a principle, sometimes people don’t actually understand and have immediate questions. That’s good. It will help you clarify your principle, both for yourself and for others.

So don’t be afraid of that. Because once you start explicitly thinking about a principle and applying it, you are likely going to refine it over time. And that’s okay. This is how we get better. The basic idea though, is, is to analyze when you don’t get the outcomes that you want in a situation. You should look at the principles that you applied and check a couple things. And actually the first thing is, did you apply a principle to the situation? And if not, you need to make sure you’re applying your principles to get the outcomes that you’re looking for. And the second thing is if you did apply a principle. Was it not clear enough or not suitable enough to drive behavior and decision-making in the right way to reach the outcomes that you needed. And if not, you’ll need to refine the principle.

Now, if you apply this thinking, you may even refine some of the ones I’ve shared to better suit your situation. And that’s great. So I’ll give an example of this method from one of my principles. I used to have a principle “don’t just say yes”. Short and simple, really liked it. And early on, as I was coaching others, it seemed reasonably suitable. I don’t just say yes to everything that comes my way.

Doesn’t mean, I say no to everything, but that I filter and prioritize. The thing is that I found as I started teaching this to other people, Is that this principle fails a key test. That it was not helping others make decisions or take actions and specifically it wasn’t helping people decide when to say no when to say maybe and so forth without a lot of additional material and discussion. And so what I started to realize is that this principle “don’t just say yes”, is actually about over-committing it’s about filtering out less important tasks so that you can achieve more. And so it became “Doing Less, Lets You Achieve More”. Now this phrase has caught on much more quickly because of its clarity. Because the concept really isn’t about saying yes or no. It’s about finding the path to results. By being observant and centering on results, you can put your own principles to the test and continually shape them over time to improve them. I fundamentally believe that principals are essential to good leadership. Getting better at crafting and communicating and refining them will help better guide you and the people you lead. Now your principles will mostly never be perfect. And again, that’s fine.

The path to refining them is part of your growth, part of what will make you a better leader. Because in particular, great leadership comes in part from getting this kind of clarity behind your “why” behind how to make decisions. So the more you analyze the “why” behind your decisions and actions, the better able you are to lead. Having a strong and clear leadership vision for yourself, built upon your principles brings authenticity

that in my experience really defines you as a leader.

So I’d like you to think about. What decisions did you make yesterday? And why did you make them. Sometimes your gut reaction to “why” might be “well, because it’s right”. But I want you to push yourself to think more deeply about why you think that decision was right. Because what might seem obvious to you won’t be to others. And with those thoughts in mind, can you capture that “why” into a principle? And if you have applied principles, did they help you get the outcomes that you needed. And if not, how do they need to change?

Thanks so much for joining me, please subscribe, share with a friend.

If you liked it, send thoughts and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. And we’ll answer a few later in the season. And join me next time where I’m going to talk about how sometimes even with the best of intentions, Leaders and organizations can lower their standards. Then we’ll talk about some of the negative impacts that follow.