Principles to Lead By

There's an almost sacred space on my whiteboard, an area that occasionally gets tweaked, but not erased. This area of the whiteboard is stable and provides guidance to how I strive to lead. It provides the core principles that are important in serving those I work with. These principles were developed over the years, with many hands involved in finding the right words and tone. To erase or revise these words take time and effort, and the scrubbing and cleaning of the white board is a simple object lesson of how much thought and purpose need to be a part of the consideration.

These are the words that are now nearly permanently written on my whiteboard, along with a brief description of why they are important:

Serve others first

As human beings, we are a social group. Even us introverts come alive when we see a spark of joy and connection serving others, even in simple ways. This service to others is personally fulfilling, but also builds trust and engagement in being successful together. Serving others first reorients thinking to ensure that we see people as people, and when people are seen in this way, they can be helped in the immediate, and encourage and inspire their growth (as well as your own). Serving others first provides the right mindset to approach work and life. The payoff to serving others first is both the feeling of fulfillment, and more often than not, engagement in helping you solve your opportunities as well. This engagement often allows creative solutions come to light that otherwise would not have.

Cultivate a creative team

Serving others also opens the eyes and the hearts of the people around us. If done consistently, it affords the opportunity to better understand, and inspire the creativity of the team. A leader's job is to make purposeful progress in exploring how their team's strengths and goals can be used to encourage and inspire, and the ability to serve others well.

Helping create an atmosphere of creativity requires a great deal of work and involvement in people. It requires the development of trust between team members, and most importantly, trust in their intent. When a team trusts each other's intentions and actions, they are able to be creative together, handling any challenge that comes their way.

Deliver clarity in chaos

One of the greatest strengths of a team that is focused on cultivating creativity is that it opens the door to find and deliver clarity in chaos. Whether we like it or not, there are portions of our life, and portions of our work that feel chaotic. They feel that any step that we make might have an unknown effect on everything else and the slightest touch might cause the whole thing to fall apart. A creative team is able to see this chaos and identify potential paths to respond well. They pilot through the chaos when needed, or avoid it when not needed. Their confidence in themselves and their team shines even when perfect clarity of future steps is not obvious. They navigate toward the next right step, and assess, decide, and execute rapidly and confidently. Their poise, aligned with their clarity in chaos, allow immense progress to be made in a short amount of time.

Make the essential easy

More often than not, our chaos looks like an unmanaged backlog of work, with more things coming in than we are able to complete. These items often feel both urgent and important, as we tend to overestimate the value and urgency that the item brings. We also tend to get frustrated with these unimportant things and try to improve or automate them away. In our efforts to automate the unimportant items, we lose sight of the essential.

Understanding what is essential provides opportunity to deliver clarity in chaos. It allows engagement of your team’s creativity in defining what is essential. Understanding the essential also allows the team to focus on improving the right things. Those things that will ultimately provide the most value to the team, organization, and individual. Improving the right things creates scale, momentum, and inventiveness.

Maintaining a focus on the essential is a tremendously challenging endeavor, but doing so will allow you to shine in exactly the right ways.

Embrace value

As we find the essential, we recognize that value changes between people and teams. In an organization, or in life, there are many perspectives on what provides value. These perspectives matter, and are important to acknowledge. As we embrace this simple fact, our eyes can be opened to how we can best serve others, provide larger value to the organization, and encourage a creative team to deliver simple, effective solutions, even in chaos. By embracing the different value(s) that exist in the organization, you are able to draw out the best in people and encourage a culture that builds the organization, and more importantly the people in the organization.

For additional reading on several of these topics:

Greg McKeown's books "Essentialism" and "Effortless" and Arbinger Institute's "Leadership and Self Deception".

Comment below on your leadership principles and why they matter to you.