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My Leadership Principles

10 min read

My Leadership Principles

Summary: Paul’s core leadership behaviors, five guiding principles, and a set of memory aids he uses to orient himself and coach other leaders.

Sources: My Leadership Principles.md (original content, authored by Paul; updated 2026-07-09 with new and revised material)

Last updated: 2026-07-09

Flagged as a verbatim-indicated source (see verbatim sources): these are pithy, quotable memory aids where the exact original phrasing is the point, not just the underlying idea.

Core leadership behaviors

Paul names six behaviors as the foundation of how he leads (source: My Leadership Principles.md):

  1. Servant Leadership. The leader is not at the top of a hierarchy. The memory aid is “Leaders Eat Last.” The leader exists to help the group navigate uncertainty, anticipate and evade obstacles, and make sure the group has the materials, tools, training, and safety procedures to succeed.
  2. Lead from the Front. A leader must be willing, even if not always fully capable, to perform at the level they demand of their team.
  3. Create psychological safety. Great leaders make space for every team member to contribute their full talent, thinking, hopes, and fears. They celebrate diverse thinking and sponsor inclusivity. They worry more about the absence of dissent than its presence.
  4. Humility and vulnerability are hallmarks of courage.
  5. There is more than one right answer, and the one the leader prefers is not always the best one.
  6. Understand “the weather.” Leaders are responsible for reading the macro environment that shapes and restricts choices. Paul calls this “the weather” because, like real weather, it is rarely something a leader gets to change. In a work context it shows up as: financial limitations and competing priorities, skilled resource constraints, corporate brand identity, regulatory and compliance restrictions, internal competition among operating segments, cherished beliefs (reading only their own press releases), lack of literacy on key topics, and lack of awareness of alternatives (being caught in an echo chamber).

Five guiding principles

Paul describes these as a “proven philosophy” (source: My Leadership Principles.md):

  1. Focus on solutions, not models. Solve business problems end to end, and build for reusability and scalability.
  2. Trust comes from transparency. Design collaboratively for alignment, adoption, and ethical integrity.
  3. Safe to own promise. Lifetime solution reliability through validation, documentation, monitoring, and workflow integration. Once trust is earned it must be vigorously maintained. This is the same “Safe to Own” promise named in powermapping.
  4. Earn the right to influence. Become a trusted partner through humility, listening, and co-creation.
  5. Practical and evolutionary. Start small, and expand through feedback and realized business value.

Practices for developing other leaders

  • Create Space for Other Leaders. Leadership is about inspiration and risk assessment, not setting direction and supervising. Take turns leading: if a peer has conviction, let them lead, be first to celebrate if they succeed, and first to help if they don’t. Weigh the cost of a possible failure against the value of the lesson a peer or employee stands to gain. Expanded in a later LinkedIn post into four concrete patterns: handing over real decisions and accountability, not just tasks; inviting others into hard conversations early rather than presenting a polished plan; normalizing asking for help as a leadership muscle; and staying present without crowding others out, echoing voyage-planning’s captain-on-the-bridge frame. Read the verbatim post.
  • Seek Forward Motion. Leadership matters most when things are uncomfortable. When a team gets stuck, which almost always happens, leadership has to get things moving again, the same way a ship without way on cannot change course. This closely parallels voyage-planning’s harbor-transit analogy: reading the weather and other ships, preparing contingencies, and sometimes actively managing through a crisis. Paul’s content-planning notes connect this to a “Risk Goldilocks Zone” concept that hasn’t been written up anywhere yet (source: LinkedIn Post Concepts.md, see linkedin post concepts).
  • Balance Design with Adoptability. One of the core tradeoffs, especially at the Minimum Viable Product stage, is balancing solution design and feature richness against something users will actually recognize and willfully embrace. Gaining user adoption is the hardest milestone in the whole AI build lifecycle, so this principle values intentional choices that prioritize user confidence, even postponing or sacrificing some design features to get there. Echoes Good Enough is Good Enough, Better is Better, and Candles Not Lightbulbs. A companion idea: value users over features, once users have integrated a solution deeply enough to have rewritten their own job description around it, upgrades become future improvements delivered alongside the next retraining obligation, not a reason to delay adoption now.
  • Brave and Bold. Courage and fortitude are the two hallmarks. Bravery means being the first to act and to accept accountability, especially on unexplored opportunities, the same courage required for first-wrong-answer, where offering a first, imperfect solution exposes it to critique. Boldness means leaning into ambiguity and extending a leader’s contribution beyond their formal area of expertise. Take turns leading, but don’t skip your own turn.
  • Advocacy Without Competition. Balance support for your team with the need for progress across cooperating units. Useful ideas here: and-not-or, “good enough is good enough,” and “there is more than one right answer.” Give space on marginal preferences to build partnership at low risk, and invite leaders who often hold contrary views into the process. Debate the issue, not the advocate.
  • Focus Without Overfitting. Focus is required, but a solution crafted too precisely to the current understanding of needs and constraints becomes brittle. Drift is relentless: requirements, goals, macro factors, and confidence all keep changing, so the balance is designing for future ambiguity without losing focus in the present. Paul draws the parallel directly: this is the philosophical scale-up of not overfitting an algorithm to its training data, for exactly the same reasons.
  • Exploration With Discipline. Balance the need for focus with adaptability, and sustain excitement in the face of ambiguous goals and measures of success.
  • Systems Over Components. Keep sponsoring problem solving, but look for end-to-end, sustainable solutions. Don’t let a team over-index on individual components; push them toward shareable capabilities, methodologies, and architectures.
  • Situational Leadership. Borrowed from Ken Blanchard’s system of the same name. Everyone is both expert and novice depending on the situation. The leader’s job is to adapt to what the employee needs, understand their own default leadership style, and make an intentional choice rather than falling back on habit. Empathy for the doubts that come with any learning curve is the goal.
  • Humility and Expertise. Stay eager to learn from partners while also educating them about alternatives. Approach problems with curiosity. Respect a partner’s expertise, but don’t apologize for your own.
  • Grow Your Brand. Use leadership opportunities outside the immediate team to build reputation, and use that reputation to coach peers, push ideas, and reach a wider audience.

Memory aids

Paul uses a set of short, pithy reminders to guide daily behavior (source: My Leadership Principles.md):

  • Better is Better. Prefer improvement over perfection. If a customer is sitting in the dark, making them wait for the invention of the lightbulb is worse than giving them a candle now. This is the same parable behind candles-not-lightbulbs.
  • Good Enough is Good Enough. Know when a solution provides real value and get it into use, rather than endlessly chasing corner cases.
  • And, Not Or. Reject the false dichotomy. The harder, better path usually balances both extremes and manages trade-offs across the short and long term. Leaders are often the only people on a team positioned to see this trade-off within the surrounding macro environment.
  • Fast in Series Beats Slow in Parallel. Spreading attention across too many projects at once kills progress, even when it produces reassuring status updates for every stakeholder. Focus on a few projects that can actually be delivered, and accept the friction from stakeholders temporarily out of focus. Their turn will come.
  • More Than One Right Answer. Academic training pushes people to seek one perfect answer, but business problems usually have several viable paths, each balancing a shifting set of capabilities, restrictions, and priorities. This reminder is aimed squarely at governance: Legal, Compliance, Procurement, Architecture, Security, and Risk Management can arrive with a hardline view of the one correct answer. Leaders need to model acceptance of alternatives and negotiate a shared path, the same instinct behind team-yes and safe-enablement.
  • Earn the Right to Influence. Balance humility with expertise, and build transparency to earn trust, the same trust discussed in foundation-of-trust. Once trust is earned it must be maintained. Once a seat at the table is earned, contribute; staying silent erodes influence too, just more slowly. “One Aw’ Shit erases twelve ‘Attaboys.‘”
  • Take Turns Leading. A reminder to create space, embrace other people’s perspectives and approaches, and play copilot when someone else has invested more time and study, or has more skin in the game on the outcome. It’s easy to take a position and go rigid in the face of alternatives; this is the check on that instinct, forward motion and mutual trust don’t build if every debate has to be won.
  • Be the Strong Zebra. A reminder about professional hygiene with corporate guardian functions, HR, Legal, Finance. They’re partners day to day, but when something goes wrong they convert quickly into auditors seeking to contain damage and protect the enterprise, that’s their priority, not a betrayal. In practice this shows up as being prepared, transparent, and on time, failing to complete required training after three reminders is the opposite behavior. Paul’s own analogy: these functions in auditor mode are like lions at a water hole. When the lion is sated, it’s safe to drink; when the lion is agitated, you want to be the strong zebra, not the one limping fifty yards behind the herd. The same standard applies to business leaders and IT partners, a reputation for unblemished hygiene in how you manage commitments.
  • Leaders Eat Last. The fuller behavior lives under Servant Leadership above; this memory aid amplifies it with a specific Navy phrase and a sharper contrast. Studying and navigating “the weather” is the leader’s ultimate accountability, work that happens most intensely before and after the group’s own effort, with presence during the work calibrated by Situational Leadership. In the Navy, a leader who did this well was described as having “a light hand on the rudder”: paying close enough attention to every environmental factor, the mission, and the team’s readiness to make early, subtle corrections rather than dramatic ones. A well-led team rarely notices this while it’s happening, they feel it only as lower chaos, and they notice its absence immediately. The servant leader shares credit and hoards blame, using honest, non-repeated mistakes as coaching opportunities, the direct opposite of a leader who sits atop a talent pyramid, collects credit for success, and lets blame flow downward.
  • Stop the Dumb. Before chasing clever new ideas, eliminate the dumb, self-inflicted friction that has built up through uncoordinated choices over time. Removing self-inflicted pain often produces more progress, faster, than adopting the next big idea. Good outcomes and bad outcomes are not weighted equally: one mistake outweighs twelve successes.
  • Feed the Beast. Be transparent and proactive about keeping stakeholders informed, rather than making them chase for status. A request for an update is itself a sign that a stakeholder hasn’t been kept informed.
  • Upgrade Your Shop. When starting an assignment, plan deliberately for what tools, jigs, and reusable assets will be built and retained for the next assignment, the way a master craftsman accumulates a workshop of tools over years of solving problems. What distinguishes a master from a journeyman is intentional investment in future speed and consistency, not just finishing the current job.