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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
Consensus, Consultation, Command
Three legitimate modes for reaching a decision. The damage comes not from choosing the wrong one but from running one while appearing to run another.
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02
Who Decides: Allocating Decision Rights
Most organizations have never written down who decides what. The map exists anyway, assembled informally from habit and precedent, and it is discovered only when it fails.
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03
The Unbooked Cost of Delay
Waiting is the only decision an organization can make without anyone being accountable for it. That, rather than caution, is why so much of it happens.
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04
Sort by Reversibility, Not by Importance
How much process a decision deserves should be set by how hard it is to undo, not by how large it looks. Size is visible, reversibility is not, and organizations sort on the visible…
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05
The Anatomy of a Decision
Choosing, deciding, and committing are three separate acts. Most organizations perform the first, believe they have done all three, and then wonder why the matter keeps returning.
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06
The Judgment Review
A quarterly ninety-minute session for scoring your own past decisions against what actually happened. The instrument that converts a decision record into calibration.
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07
The Traps That Survive Knowing About Them
Awareness of a reasoning trap does almost nothing to prevent it. Every countermeasure that works operates on the procedure or the order of information, never on trying harder.
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08
Deferring to Someone Else’s Judgment
Deference is not an escape from a decision. It is a decision about whose judgment is better here, and you remain accountable for making it well.
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09
Knowing the Limits of Your Own Judgment
Overconfidence and chronic hedging are the same defect wearing different clothes. Calibration is not humility; it is an accuracy property, and unlike humility it can be measured.
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10
When to Trust Your Instinct, and When It Is Lying
The strength of a gut feeling carries no information about its reliability. A hunch from a domain where you have no valid experience feels exactly as certain as one from a domain where you…