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Character and Conduct
Integrity as a practical constraint, composure under provocation, and the public ownership of error.
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01
Conflicts of Interest You Do Not Notice
Disclosure frameworks catch money and miss almost everything else. In a small state the bidder is your neighbour, no financial interest exists, and your judgment is affected anyway.
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02
Humility and Self-Doubt Are Not the Same Thing
Humility includes knowing what you are good at. A leader who will not assert competence they actually hold is not being modest; they are buying their own comfort with everyone else's clarity.
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03
Owning a Mistake in Public
The partial admission does more damage than silence, because it establishes that you know and are managing. The gap between what you conceded and what everyone knows becomes the story.
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04
Courage Is Situational, Not Dispositional
Nobody is brave in general. The moments that actually require it are few, recurring, and describable in advance, which means they can be prepared for rather than summoned.
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05
Composure Under Provocation
The cost of losing your temper is not that people think less of you. It is that they now know what triggers you, and they will route information around it without ever deciding to.
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06
Predictability Is an Asset
A reliably strict leader and a reliably lenient one are both workable. One who alternates without a discernible rule is worse than either, because people optimise against the rule they can infer.
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07
Integrity as a Practical Constraint
The value comes from certain moves being genuinely unavailable, not from their being usually declined. Partial integrity returns nothing, because the whole benefit is that others stop modelling your incentives.