Seth Dobbs (he/him): When faced with a new challenge, do you rely on fixes that have worked in the past? Do you believe your team could handle a new challenge in your absence? And could the practices you rely on actually be stifling your team’s ability to lead and create forward motion? 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 understanding that best practices aren’t, in fact, always the best approach. They can limit people’s thinkings, and that sometimes if applied too heavily, they can actually prevent the people you lead from developing their own leadership skills.

So for this, I want to talk about Soren. Soren had long worked as a director of corporate operations at a sports equipment retailer. They learned a lot throughout that experience. They helped develop many best practices and were a key contributor to their successful operation.

Soren eventually felt it was time for them to move on and jumped at an opportunity to be the VP of Operations for a small, recently started company serving athletes with direct to consumer products and online services. This was the big chance Soren had been looking for to really make their own mark on something new.

They immediately went to work, assembling a book of best practices to guide the team that they were building out. The startup had strong financial backing, and so Soren was able to build a small team of successful, experienced people. And when they handed out the book to the team, it was met with mostly enthusiasm and a little bit of questioning on just how much they had to strictly follow as it provided a how-to for nearly every possible aspect of their work.

Soren assured them these practices were tried and true and helped their previous company grow, and in fact trained the new managers to follow those processes to the letter.

That way, Soren said, they would avoid risks and defer any deep decision making to themself. Now some concerns filtered up to Soren’s boss, the CEO. But Soren assured the CEO that these processes were centered around flawless execution, which would ensure a level of efficiency that would please their growing customer base.

Over time, Soren’s team learned that they were rewarded for never deviating from the handbook, and in fact, that deviation would be considered reckless. As all this was going on, the company was expanding rapidly. Creating many new situations and a lot of last minute problems that needed to be solved.

Unfortunately, Soren had built their team into expert followers and conditioned them to avoid adapting, to making their own decisions and to innovating. The team felt it was better to wait for instructions than risk breaking protocol.

This all came to a breaking point when a fast moving competitor entered their space while Soren had to deal with a personal emergency and was unavailable for several weeks. Their team trained to follow rather than lead, failed to act. Instead of analyzing the threat that was coming up and pivoting, the team hesitated trying to determine if there was a practice in Soren’s beloved handbook that could guide them through this new challenge.

By the time Soren returned, the company had lost its first mover advantage and was struggling to compete. The investors were unhappy and the next round of funding was in jeopardy. Looking at what happened with Soren leads me to a fundamental principle of Principle Driven Leadership, which is Principles Are More Important Than Practices.

This simple concept has many applications. In Soren’s situation, you can see a couple problems related to this principle. Their practices weren’t adaptive, which is fairly typical of practices and processes. Practices and processes are typically designed to handle known situations. So when Soren’s team was faced with an unforeseen threat, there was no practice on how to handle that.

We’re still, and the bigger focus for this episode is that the leaders that reported to Soren were unable to adapt. They only had a list of actions which were no longer applicable, and they were not able to lead their teams through the new challenge. In other words, by leading through practices, Soren was only creating followers, not leaders.

I had a chance to chat with Soren not long after they returned to their job and saw the problems that they were newly faced with. Their first reaction was that they had neglected to document process and practices to address the problems, that they can never take time off again, which of course is neither feasible nor healthy.

Soren described what they felt the team should have done in their absence. I asked Soren why they felt that those were the right things to do.

After a little back and forth they stated their reason pretty clearly to me, and I suggested that they had found their first principles to teach. And that’s really what this principle is about, leading through principles rather than through to-dos, through actions. Practices can be great, they can be great shortcuts, particularly when appropriately applied in a specific situation.

But for leaders, it’s always more important to give people principles so that they can make decisions in your absence. Soren reflected on this idea and admitted that they had been burning out, trying to field the growing number of questions that the organization’s growth was driving, but couldn’t think of any other way to lead the team.

As it turns out, this is actually a very common problem in various levels of leadership. People are promoted and hired into leadership often based on what they can do and what they’ve done rather than in specifically how they can lead and move into the unknown.

It can seem subtle, but that is different than being promoted or hired based on what you can achieve. After further discussion, Soren started jotting down the why behind all of the practices in their handbook.

And this was the foundation of a new guidebook that they provided to their team. Now, fortunately, they had hired a great team that was able to pick up this new approach quickly. This guidebook was far more principle driven rather than outlining specific actions and activities and decisions. And it certainly helped that it was a preferable approach for them.

They didn’t just want to follow orders. They were strong. They were really good in their fields. They were themselves leaders. And so Soren saw the team taking better steps when the team’s conversations became less about, “well, what should we do in this situation?”, and more about ” what outcomes are we trying to achieve?”, and “what are the parameters that define success?”

This kind of change in an organization or in a team can take time even for as smart and eager a team as Soren had. In part, Soren needed to define and refine their key principles in order to enable the team. They put in a ton of time to do this because of their competitive situation, but they found it to be worthwhile.

Soren confessed to me that it was great that the team didn’t have to come to them for everything and were able to handle challenges on their own even if Soren hadn’t documented that situation already. And that’s the thing. Soren was now creating leaders, not followers. I believe that leading through principles is the best way to give guidance, to create more leaders. Passing on your principles,

the why behind your decisions and actions, is the best way to teach and grow people. And I can say from my own experience, it helps improve your own understanding of how you lead and can make you stronger as well. And that’s why Principle Driven Leadership isn’t just a checklist. It isn’t a big to-do list.

Instead of providing principles, I could try that. I could try to give you a to-do list of 10 practices to become a better leader. That kind of defies the whole point of Principle Driven Leadership, which is that leadership isn’t about doing things, it’s about achieving things,

using your skill, your expertise, and your experience. Practices and processes often simply sustain themselves in organizations. And to be clear, I’m not saying that you should be in a constant state of recreating the wheel with everything, with creating new practices week in and week out. But, it’s about embracing a mindset of ensuring that your methods, your practices, and your processes are fit for purpose, the vision and the outcomes that you’re driving towards.

And most important to understand is that using principles to lead enables more people to take on leadership because they can adapt your principles to their expertise and their experience. Focusing on processes or practices for their own sake is destructive.

Focusing on artifacts to create and deliver the “this is how we do it” sort of mindset narrows the scope of your team’s thinking and restricts how they collaborate. And it’s far too common for organizations to enshrine their processes and elevate them over all else. Again, practices have their place and can be good because they keep us from wasting time and reinventing the wheel.

Principles, on the other hand, help us realize when a wheel is no longer what we need. While I’m not saying that the end justifies the means, that’s an approach that can lead to a whole other set of problems. I am saying that elevating the means over the end, over the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve is a sure way to reduce the effectiveness of your organization.

Leading through principles essentially means teaching others how you think, how you reason, what’s important and what isn’t. In doing that, you’ve enabled others to create durable results.

I’d like you to take some time to think about the why behind the decisions you make and consider what principles can come from that. And then think about how to share that information with your team. And what are some strategies that you could use to provide structure to your team without stifling creativity or critical thinking?

And what can you start doing today to create more leaders, not followers. Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it, and send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. And join me next time where I’ll bring the past few episodes on creating leaders together and reflect more on that subject.