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Leadership Principles
The durable rules of leading well: judgment under uncertainty, the weight of a decision, delegation, and the discipline of holding a standard when no one is watching.
Chapter contents
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Authority and Delegation 7 entries Transferring authority with the task, supervising without reclaiming it, and refusing delegation upward.
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Character and Conduct 7 entries Integrity as a practical constraint, composure under provocation, and the public ownership of error.
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Decision-Making 8 entries Reversibility, decision rights, the unbooked cost of delay, and the discipline of reviewing your own choices.
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Judgment 8 entries Pattern recognition under incomplete information: how judgment is built, how it is tested, and how its limits are known.
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Self-Management 7 entries Attention, filtered information, isolation, endurance, and thinking about succession from the first day.
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Standards and Expectations 6 entries Setting a standard, answering the first violation, correcting without humiliating, and ending employment properly.
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The Nature of Leadership 6 entries Authority, influence, and standing: what the role actually consists of, and what it costs the person holding it.
Entries filed directly to this chapter
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01
Correcting Without Humiliating
A correction that lands on the person rather than the act produces defence instead of change. The distinction is audible in the first sentence and decides everything that follows.
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02
The First Violation
The response to the first breach is the moment a standard becomes real or becomes a suggestion. Everything after it is negotiation against a line the organization has already located.
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03
Setting a Standard and Holding It
Your standard is the worst behaviour you have permitted, not the best you have praised. Everything above that line is aspiration, and the organization worked out the difference some time ago.
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04
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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05
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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06
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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07
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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08
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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09
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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10
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.