A development of leadership philosophy.

I was afforded the opportunity and encouragement recently — which was also the inspiration to start writing again in general — to think about myself and write those thoughts down in a more-or-less long form. It was the catalyst to compose various ideas I had been thinking deeply about for a while, that only existed as scattered individual notes, into something that resembled a coherent narrative.

One of the writing topics was about leadership philosophy; what mine was and how it had developed over time. Without the specific impetus to formalise this body of thought, I’m not sure I would have and I’m grateful that the opportunity presented itself; it’s absolutely been worth it. The experience has been interesting and valuable and I strongly encourage you to think of doing the same: write down your answer to the question “what is your leadership philosophy and how has it developed over time”.

My philosophy of leadership is: do what you say you’re going to do.

With “do what you say you’re going to do” as the firm foundation to build on: making conscious, considered choices; having clear objectives, relentlessly choosing positivity, taking responsibility, being uncompromising on quality and starting the hard things and getting them done, complete the structure of my view on life and my leadership philosophy.

I work hard to surround myself with people who value what I value and I value the people who surround me. I have high expectations of everyone: the people I lead, myself, my leaders. I empower my team to make decisions and take responsibility.

I recognise that collaboration, relationship building and team formation is hard and difficult work but is crucial to success and I make these activities a focus and a priority.

The evolution of my leadership philosophy is characterised by a small number of crucial moments of insight and in more recent years by consistent self retrospection. One particularly crucial moment occurred in the year between my departure from the business partnership that I had spent the first 12 years of my career in, and my immigration to New Zealand.

Around the time my business partners and I established our holding company in 2001, a hosting and networking company that we would end up working closely with was formed. Our company built websites and software — some of it for that hosting and networking company — and in turn we hosted with them and used their networking services. The CEO and founder of that company — Ed — sold his company around the same time as I left mine. Ed was very successful even by global standards, where my financial success was considerably more… modest. I reflected on, and made a concerted effort to analyse, how my business ventures had transpired and on what Ed had done differently. I thought about what my partners and I had done and what I could learn from the experience.

Two things in particular stood out to me:

• Whenever you asked Ed how he was, his answer was inevitably a genuine “I am fantastic”. He was relentlessly positive.
• When Ed’s company sold anything, did anything, promoted anything, hired anybody the focus was always on quality: customer service through network cables.

The process of immigration is a reasonably tumultuous life event and during this time of change I consciously chose to apply the insights learnt from Ed: always choose to be positive; choose quality in everything you do.

I immediately started reaping the rewards of making this change: being positive improves the quality of all your interaction with other people and leaving a smile on the face of every person you interact with eventually puts a smile on the face of every person you need to interact with again. When people are happy to see you, even hard conversations get much easier.

Consciously making choices is empowering.

More recently I read a quote that crystallised and put into words something else that I had learnt during the exit from my business just prior to my immigration, but couldn’t concisely articulate. The quote is from Tim Ferris:

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have”.

Choose to have the uncomfortable conversations, as soon as possible. Choose to be positive. Choose to take responsibility. Choose quality. Choose to do what you said you would. Choose to start.