Connecting Intentions to Impact: Crafting Your Leadership Principles

  Photo by Jordan McDonald on Unsplash

A big part of my coaching role is helping my clients make connections between intentions, ideas, thoughts, behaviours, and people. Most often, that occurs within coaching sessions for an individual client. Sometimes, a theme emerges across different client conversations. Yesterday was one of those days.

I had two different yet similar conversations—one with the Founder of a rapidly scaling health-tech startup and another with an experienced not-for-profit executive. Despite their different contexts, both leaders were keen to consider how they might dial up their leadership to match what they described as their strong management capabilities. In both cases, the initial focus was on specific leadership goals: creating a vision, providing effective feedback, and scaling their teams' development in line with the company's growth.

Our discussions soon shifted to ensuring the team could experience all their leadership and management activities coherently, connectedly, and consistently.

We discussed developing a leadership manifesto—guiding principles to inspire confidence and trust, drive performance, and foster a highly engaged culture. The principles form a commitment to consistency, authenticity and leading by example. But where do you begin if you want to capture the leader you are and the leader you aspire to be?

I recommend starting with an impact statement. Ask yourself:

• What impact do I want to have on my team?

• How would I like my team members to reflect on my leadership 10 years from now?

Once your desired impact is clear, you can develop your guiding principles. There are many ways to do this, but one technique that I find helpful is connecting your values and beliefs with behaviours.

Here is a simple structure for making those connections:

I believe ... I commit to demonstrating this belief by...

I believe that for people to do their best work, they must understand what good looks like. I commit to demonstrating this belief by creating regular opportunities to revisit their role expectations.

I believe people will leave our team unless we create opportunities for growth and progression. I commit to demonstrating this belief by ensuring we have rituals and habits that support each team member to define and execute their development plans.

Once you have drafted your guiding principles, I recommend cross-checking them against your leadership and management responsibilities.

Consider things like:

• Setting purpose, vision and strategy (where are we going and why)

• Providing role clarity (what's your part in delivering our vision, purpose and strategy)

• Aligning on clear expectations (what does good look like)

• Giving specific and timely feedback (where you're doing well and where there are opportunities to do better)

• Creating space for growth and development (where would you like to grow)

• Making decisions, connecting teams and sharing critical information (how can I unblock barriers for you)

• Getting out of the way (how can I make sure that work is allocated to the right people)

• Fostering innovation (how can we do things better)

Of course, this isn't an exhaustive list but I'm sure you get the idea.

The final step is sharing these commitments with your team. That way, they'll understand how your intentions relate to your behaviours and can hold you accountable for keeping them.

If you'd like some help developing your principles, I'm only an email away...