You Get to Decide

Nobody hands you a leadership philosophy on your first day. You assemble one - slowly, sometimes unconsciously - from the people you work for, the situations you survive, and the quiet moments where you notice how something made you feel and decide: I want to do that or I never want to do that.

The tricky part is that both reactions are doing the same work. The leaders you admire and the leaders who make you uncomfortable are both teaching you who you are. But only if you're paying attention. And only if you've done the harder work of knowing what you actually believe.

Principles Aren't Preferences

There's a difference between having principles and having preferences. Preferences are things you like: open floor plans, async communication, flat hierarchies. They're contextual. They change with the situation. They're negotiable.

Principles aren't negotiable. They're the things you believe even when they're costly. Especially when they're costly. That's what makes them principles.

Mine look something like this:

• Lead with authenticity. Not the curated, conference-keynote version of yourself. The real one. People can tell the difference, and the trust gap between the two is enormous.
• Listen more than I speak. Not performative listening — not waiting for my turn to talk. Actual listening, where I might change my mind based on what I hear.
• Interrupt only when excited, never in disagreement. This one took me years. The impulse to cut someone off because you think they're wrong is strong. Sitting with it is a discipline.
• Offer to help, with specifics. "Let me know if you need anything" is a pleasantry, not an offer. "I can take the customer call on Thursday so you can focus on the architecture doc" is an offer.
• Lead with empathy. Not sympathy — empathy. The difference is whether you're feeling sorry for someone or actually understanding what they're navigating.
• Lift others up. The work that matters most is often invisible: making someone's idea better, clearing a path they didn't know was blocked, giving credit in rooms they're not in.
• Celebrate my failures by knowing what I'm learning. This is the hardest one. The instinct is to hide mistakes or minimize them. The practice is to name them, learn from them, and let other people see you doing it.

I didn't arrive at these through careful reflection. I arrived at them through violation. Every principle on that list comes from a moment where I either watched someone break it or broke it myself, and the experience left a mark deep enough that I decided: not again.

That's how most people find their principles, I think. Not through philosophy but through friction. You discover what you believe by discovering what you can't tolerate.

The Leader You Admire

At some point in your career, you'll find someone worth emulating. Someone who runs meetings the way you wish you could. Someone whose team genuinely wants to be there. Someone who makes hard calls and somehow keeps everyone's trust.

Study them. Absorb what you can. This is one of the most accelerating things that can happen in a career - finding a model that actually works.

But here's the thing: even the best leaders are running their playbook, built from their principles, shaped by their experiences. It fits them. It might not fit you. The parts that work for you will feel natural - like discovering a word for something you already felt. The parts that don't will feel like wearing someone else's clothes.

There is no one single leader I have worked for yet who is perfect--though this might come as a surprise to some of them. What I have learned is that everyone has something to teach you, even if you're incredibly experienced and competent. I've learned a lot from so many of my previous leaders, and those I have supported. If you want to know what you're made of, deliver hard feedback, and through the tears come out stronger together.

Pay attention to the difference. Take what aligns. Leave what doesn't. And never mistake admiration for obligation.

When Someone You Respect Breaks Your Principles

This is the hard one.

It's easy to hold your principles when they're violated by someone you don't respect. That's just disagreement. It's clarifying, even energizing. You see the wrong thing, you know it's wrong, you move on.

It's much harder when the person breaking your principles is someone you admire. Someone who's taught you things. Someone whose judgment you trust in most other areas. When that person cuts a corner, or treats someone as disposable, or optimizes for their own career at the expense of the team - your brain wants to make excuses. They must have a reason. Maybe I'm missing context. Maybe this is what leadership requires at their level.

Maybe. Or maybe you're watching someone show you who they are in a situation where the cost of doing the right thing was higher than they were willing to pay.

This is the moment that matters. Not because you need to confront them or make a scene. But because you need to be honest with yourself about what you saw. If you rationalize it away, you've quietly lowered your own standard. Do that enough times and you'll wake up one day running a playbook you don't recognize as yours.

The Principles You Break Yourself

Here's the part nobody wants to talk about: you will break your own principles. Not hypothetically. You will actually do it.

You'll ship something you know isn't ready because the pressure is real and the deadline is real and the people depending on the deadline are real. You'll avoid a conversation you should have because you're tired and the conversation is going to be painful and you tell yourself tomorrow will be better. You'll take credit you should have shared, or stay silent when you should have spoken up, or make a call that prioritizes your comfort over someone else's growth.

The question isn't whether you'll break your principles. The question is what happens next.

Once, I stood at a crossroads.

The leaders I respect most aren't the ones who never fail their own standards. They're the ones who notice when they do. Who feel the dissonance and don't look away. Who course-correct - sometimes publicly, sometimes quietly, but always honestly.

That's the practice. Not perfection. Recognition and repair.

You Get to Decide

Here's the thing I wish someone had told me twenty years ago:

You get to decide what kind of leader you are.

Not your boss. Not your role model. Not your company's culture. Not the industry's norms. You.

You get to decide what it feels like to work for you. Whether people in your org feel safe bringing bad news. Whether meetings are a place where ideas get better or where the loudest voice wins. Whether "high performance" means burning people out or building something sustainable. Whether your team looks back on this time as a period of growth or a period of survival.

These aren't things that happen to you. They're things you choose. Every day. In small decisions that nobody's watching and big ones that everyone is.

The culture of your team is not an abstraction. It's the accumulated weight of every decision you make about how to treat people, how to handle pressure, how to respond when things go wrong. It's built one interaction at a time, and it can be damaged just as incrementally.

Finding Your Own Playbook

Your principles will evolve. The ones you hold at thirty won't be identical to the ones you hold at fifty. That's fine - it means you're learning, not that you lack conviction.

But at any given moment, you should be able to answer these questions:

• What do I believe about how people should be treated at work?
• What am I unwilling to do, even if it would get results?
• What does "success" look like that I'd actually be proud of in ten years?
• When I've been at my best as a leader, what was I doing?
• When I've been at my worst, what was I tolerating?

If you can answer those honestly, you have a playbook. Not someone else's - yours. Built from your own principles, your own mistakes, your own hard-won understanding of what matters.

That's enough. In fact, it's everything.