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It is more fun to lead an organization where people are inspired by the impact they are making than one where money is the main reason — or, worse still, the only reason — people show up. At least that was our experience as business school deans (Richard, of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; Andrew, of Trinity Business School at Trinity College Dublin). It drives better performance, too.
Independently, on two different continents and within a few years of each other, we each embarked on a process to articulate organizationwide leadership principles. These principles reflect distinctive values and future goals. And they resulted in demonstrable enhancement of organizational capabilities and innovation, with reputational and financial benefits for both institutions.
Here, we will detail the experiences each of us had at our organization in developing and then fully integrating those principles so that they were known to our stakeholders. We will then share four lessons that emerged from that process: How leadership principles are created matters; effective leadership principles reflect the distinctive character of the organization; dynamic leadership principles create dynamic organizations; and — our favorite — leadership principles should be enjoyable. You can use these lessons to examine your organization’s current leadership principles or prepare to shape its next ones.
Our Experiences Cultivating Leadership Principles
Richard’s Story: What Happened at the Haas School
The process of establishing leadership principles at the Haas School was evolutionary. It started as it so commonly does — from a discussion around “core values” for a strategic plan. It included leaders among the faculty, staff, and students, and our advisory board. The process, which began in 2008, also included much iteration. Many faculty members preferred the word principles over the word values, largely because it connects more directly to action, and that steered the discussion toward core principles. But that discussion, too, was initially so plain-vanilla and so unobjectionably similar to what so many other schools had done that we shifted to the phrase defining principles. For whatever reason, that resonated more strongly. Which principles were the most deeply defining of our school? Could we articulate a set of principles that we held dear and delivered on relatively well? We knew this would effectively rule out principles like “excellence,” since, despite that being core to the school, putting a word so commonly used in an exercise like this would suck all the air out of the room.
The four defining principles we agreed on as a Haas community, and on which the faculty voted overwhelmingly to support, are Question the Status Quo; Confidence Without Attitude; Students Always; and Beyond Yourself. “Question the status quo” is very UC Berkeley, and also not something every business school dean is going to be comfortable trumpeting at the top level. True confidence, we believe, comes without arrogance, which is also something that not every top business school dean is going to promise the world.
We published the plan in 2010 and pushed it out to our whole community, including alumni, using video and social media. The four principles immediately struck a chord with students, alumni, recruiters, staff members, and faculty members, which afforded us the opportunity to take the plan one level up, tying it to the school’s mission.
Often, values are not directly tied to the enterprise’s mission, even if they are designed to tie into it indirectly. The mission of the Haas School, like so many other business schools, has, at its core, the development of leaders. A couple of years after the launch of the principles, based on their success, we redubbed them the school’s defining leadership principles (DLPs).
The principles were integrated into every business process at the school that could sensibly incorporate them. Examples include how we prompt and review admissions essays and interviews, hire staff, conduct teaching evaluations, and make promises to recruiting firms (telling them, for instance, “If you are not seeing confidence without attitude, then we have not delivered”). Execution is, in the end, most of the battle. Importantly, it was phased in: For example, faculty members needed to see some success before they were comfortable adding “represents well the Haas School’s four DLPs” to teaching evaluations.
Subsequently, survey data revealed that the Haas “culture/defining principles” were the most important driving variable for students choosing Haas over other business schools. When students were asked, “What is the single most important reason you chose Haas?” not only was “culture/defining principles” the most cited reason, but it was also cited roughly three times as often as either “reputation/ranking” or “location/Silicon Valley.”
Andrew’s Story: What Happened at Trinity Business School
Meanwhile, at Trinity Business School of Trinity College Dublin, the catalyst for identifying leadership principles began with a mission to transform what was then a small, 90-year-old business school into a full-suite international school with triple accreditation (AACSB, AMBA, and EQUIS) and a high ranking. We hoped that this would enhance the school’s ability to seize the opportunity of being located at the heart of a thriving European capital city and hub for global business. Financial constraints would require that Trinity Business School self-finance both threefold revenue growth to hire staff and the costs to construct a central state-of-the-art building for classrooms and community. A mature organization would have to be rejuvenated to become entrepreneurial and dynamic.
Like the process taking place in California at Haas, the development of leadership principles in Ireland happened in an exploratory manner. When I joined Trinity, it was the first time the school had hired an external dean, and it made sense for me, as an outsider, to start by having coffee with as many people as possible to connect and gain insights into their hearts and minds. These conversations revealed many leadership characteristics that, through an inclusive and organizational-level process, were later distilled and crafted into five leadership principles.
These principles became known as the Trinity Business School DNA: Put in More Than You Take Out; Transform Careers and Organizations; Personal Well-Being; Real Business; and Rigorous Impactful Research.
The principles are based on shared values and purpose across stakeholder groups. They became a means to achieve the specific ends of enhancing academic performance, growing revenue, financing new campus infrastructure, and positioning the school for important new accreditations.
The Trinity Business School DNA comprised a North Star for every activity we engaged in. For example, the principle of putting in more than you take out prompted the redesign of education degree programs in order to deepen students’ understanding of business impact beyond profit.
Principles that we thought of as latent and aspirational (see Lesson 3 below) became more active. New, aspirational principles were developed. Combined, they led to the creation of a new overarching leadership principle: Transforming Business for Good.
Payoffs have been significant. The process helped create a stronger sense of community within Trinity Business School because people had collaborated to create the principles and felt a common sense of ownership and responsibility to ensure that they reached their potential. The school achieved the performance objectives of its internationalization strategy ahead of schedule and greatly exceeded its financial targets. In 2023, the EQUIS accreditation review gave Trinity Business School a special commendation for an exceptionally strong sense of community as part of its culture.
Lessons Learned on Principles and Performance
We took away four key lessons about how the work we did on leadership principles enhanced performance in our organizations.
1. How leadership principles are created affects their adoption and impact. Organizations must recognize that the journey involved in creating genuinely effective leadership principles is as important as their final form. Any opportunity to engage in a principle-creation process ought not to be taken lightly. This is because an inclusive and collaborative process of developing leadership principles, of itself, raises the sense of belonging that the people in an organization feel toward those principles.
People need to feel that these are their principles and that their personal involvement in the creation process has already made a positive difference. The greater the extent to which this happens, the more a person will feel a moral obligation — even a somewhat parental responsibility — to ensure that these principles take root and grow.
It is important that leaders are not “above” this dynamic development process but instead are an evolving part of it. This is a two-way street in terms of leaders both influencing and being influenced by their communities. In the case of organizations with multiple purposes, leaders need to galvanize a more extensive, diverse, and often dispersed stakeholder base.
2. Principles enable strategic alignment and decentralized leadership. Principles provide focus for the entire organization, with well-articulated principles making clear what is in, and out, of scope. New decisions can percolate right through the organization rather than having to be referred up to the top for advice and approval. This enhances productivity.
This focus enables organizational agility by signaling areas that need development (for example, an activity that currently neglects one or more principles), and the resulting clarity of purpose and direction makes it easier to allocate leadership responsibilities to more people.
3. Leadership principles set an ambition and dynamic for change. Leadership principles are captured at a specific point in the development of an organization, but they are not intended merely to serve an audit function of current leadership characteristics (although this is a key part of having authentic leadership principles). Instead, their aim is to help shape the future — and hence they are a dynamic component of leadership.
On a developmental and dynamic level, leadership principles divide naturally into three categories: active, latent, and aspirational.
Active leadership principles are those that are already widely practiced within the organization. They are the values, objectives, and associated practices that people recognize. They may not currently be articulated as leadership principles but nevertheless are cultural norms known throughout the organization. External communication of active principles can increase brand clarity, and if they are inspiring, they can enhance customer loyalty — or even inspire a movement of support for the organization.
Latent leadership principles are inherent but not active across the entire organization. They may underlie some activities without being explicitly recognized as guiding principles, and they are latent to the extent that they are widely shared even when not reflected generally in what the organization is actually doing. These latent characteristics become leadership principles only if they are recognized and then adopted as such.
Aspirational leadership principles are those that have little or no presence in the current activities of the organization. They can still be powerful objectives when shared by a community, though. As a result, once identified and agreed upon as future goals of the organization, they can become transformational.
4. Leading with principles should be enjoyable. Leaders who are energized by what they are doing can generate positive ripple effects across the organization. Their passion when they’re “in the zone” and fully engaged manifests authenticity. Energy is infectious, especially when driven by a common purpose shared across the organization. Leaders’ effectiveness is closely aligned to the extent to which they themselves are inspired and excited by leadership principles: Such leaders are more likely to derive enjoyment and a sense of purpose in bringing leadership principles and their consequences to fruition.
This does not happen by accident. In part, leadership of purposeful organizations requires a genuine fit between the leader’s persona and the organization. As a leader, you have to ask, “Am I the right leader for this organization at this stage of its development?” Having the right fit enables leaders to be themselves and enjoy more fully what they are doing.
When we, as leaders, were performing happily, we felt that we could better propel the organizational energy derived from being part of dynamic communities, based on authenticity, trust, and integrity. Furthermore, when this happens, people in an organization sense that leadership principles are not some managerial fad or gimmick. They know that they are deep-rooted and will serve the organization for the long haul.
The experiences we have shared here are primarily about revealing and nurturing a common sense of purpose — an increasingly relevant component of responsible enterprises that have greater and more diverse stakeholder interactions. The overarching lesson we have drawn from our experiences is that the ideal manner of determining and designing leadership principles is to forge them inclusively and collaboratively, laying a strong foundation upon which transformation and growth can be built.