Leadership Philosophy: Write One You Could Lose To

Take the first line of any leadership philosophy and write its opposite underneath it. “We lead with integrity” becomes “we lead with dishonesty.” “We value our people” becomes “we do not value our people.” Nobody holds those positions. Nobody has ever held those positions. Which means the original lines are not choices, they are throat-clearing.

Now run the same test on this one, published on Amazon’s own leadership principles page under the heading Frugality: “There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.” (aboutamazon.com) Its opposite is that a bigger team and a bigger budget mean a bigger job, which is not an absurd position. It is how a great many organizations actually operate and how a great many managers are actually promoted. The reversal survives, and that is exactly why the line is doing work while the first two are not.

That test is the whole of what follows. A line in your leadership philosophy is worth keeping only if somebody could sincerely believe the opposite. Everything else is decoration, and decoration is why these documents get written once and never opened again.

Both kinds of line live inside the same famous documents

The interesting thing about the published philosophies people copy is that they are not internally consistent about this. They contain both species, side by side, and once you can tell them apart the copying gets a lot more careful.

Amazon publishes sixteen principles. Some of them settle arguments. Bias for Action reads: “Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.” (aboutamazon.com) Reverse it and you get measure twice and cut once, study before you move, a position with a long and respectable history that plenty of good businesses run on. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit goes further: “Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” and then, in the same principle, “They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.” (aboutamazon.com) The opposite is keeping the peace in the room and quietly relitigating afterwards, which is how most small teams handle disagreement, including probably yours.

Then, on the same page, the other kind. Learn and Be Curious: “Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves.” Earn Trust: “Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully.” (aboutamazon.com) Reverse either one and you get a position no person and no company has ever defended out loud. They are pleasant. They decide nothing.

Netflix’s culture memo does the same thing in one document. It lists eight qualities under the heading “these are the values we value,” Selflessness, Judgment, Candor, Creativity, Courage, Inclusion, Curiosity and Resilience, all of them the unopposable species. (jobs.netflix.com/culture) Elsewhere in that same memo it states that “we model ourselves on a professional sports team, not a family,” and describes what it calls the keeper test, in which managers ask “if X wanted to leave, would I fight to keep them?” and, when the answer is no, “we believe it’s fairer to everyone to part ways quickly.” (jobs.netflix.com/culture)

Set aside for one moment whether that is a good rule. Structurally it is the real thing. It reverses cleanly into the position most small businesses genuinely hold, which is that you carry people through a rough patch because they are yours, and it tells a manager what to do on a specific Tuesday without asking anyone. The eight adjectives a few paragraphs above it do neither.

Our read, and it is a read: passing the test does not make a rule right

Here is where the test needs a warning label attached, because on its own it will lead you somewhere bad.

The reversal test measures one property: whether a line is capable of settling an argument. It is completely silent on whether the line settles it correctly. Those are two different questions and only the first one can be checked from outside your business. The second one is yours and nobody publishes the answer.

The keeper test is the cleanest illustration available, which is why it is worth being blunt about. At Netflix’s scale a role is a position on a roster, and the memo says so in as many words. In a six-person business the identical rule prices differently in at least three ways that document has no reason to mention: the person is a large fraction of your total delivery capacity rather than one seat of thousands, you are personally the entire appeal process, and you will see them at the grocery store on Saturday. A rule can be beautifully formed and still be the wrong rule for the building you are standing in. Take the shape from these documents. Do not take the content.

There is a second thing worth saying plainly, because the version of this exercise sold online usually gets it backward. The reason to write down decision rules is not to run a leaner operation. It is that a manager who cannot point at a rule has to interrupt you, and an owner who is the only decision-making device in the building is a bottleneck who cannot take a week off without the business pausing. What a working philosophy actually buys is that other people get to decide things. That is close to the opposite of a cost-cutting exercise, and any version of this that ends with fewer people making judgment calls has been run backward.

Four moves, and the first one is not writing anything

Every template starts you at a blank page headed “core values.” That is the wrong starting material, because values are what you believe on a calm morning and rulings are what you did under pressure. Only one of those two is evidence.

1. Pull the last ten things somebody escalated to you

Open your messages from the last month and find every time a person on your team asked you what to do about something. A discount someone wanted. A deadline that was going to slip. An exception to a policy. A refund. A supplier who missed. A customer who shouted. Write down ten of them, just the situations, no commentary. If you cannot find ten in a month, widen to three months rather than inventing any.

2. Write the ruling you actually gave, one sentence each

Past tense, and describe what you decided rather than what you believe. “We gave the refund and kept the delivery fee.” “We told the client the date moves rather than the scope.” “We covered the shift ourselves rather than calling in someone on their day off.” Ten sentences, twenty minutes. This is the only part of the exercise that requires you specifically, because nobody else was in those conversations and no tool can reconstruct them.

3. Run the reversal on all ten and delete what fails

Under each sentence, write its opposite. If the opposite is something a reasonable competitor down the road might genuinely do, keep the line. If the opposite is absurd, delete it, and notice what that tells you: you did not make a decision there, you did the obvious thing and it felt like leadership because it was hard work.

Most lists lose about half at this step. Losing half is the point. What survives is short enough for somebody to remember at the counter, and being remembered is the only property that has ever mattered here.

Expect one uncomfortable result. Two of your surviving rulings will contradict each other, because you decided them three weeks apart in different moods and nobody laid them side by side until now. That contradiction is the actual work, and it is the thing no template will ever surface for you, because a template does not know what you did in March. You have to pick one and be able to say why. Sorting which of those calls deserved deliberation in the first place and which were reversible enough to make quickly is a separate discipline, worked through in Decision-Making Framework for Small Business Owners.

4. Put the survivors where the escalation happens, not on a wall

These documents get ignored for a boring reason: they live somewhere nobody visits at the moment of the decision. Framed in reception is worse than useless, because the question never gets asked in reception.

Reachable means three specific places. Pinned in whatever channel your team messages you in, so the answer sits above the question. First section of whatever a new hire reads in week one, before the parking and the passwords. And quoted out loud in interviews, because a candidate who flinches at one of your rules has told you something valuable for free. That is a smaller instance of a problem worth solving properly, which is the subject of Process Documentation Template: Cut It to Five Fields.

Where the document lives, at prices checked today

A shared document and a pinned message cover this completely for most businesses, at zero dollars, and if that is what you will genuinely maintain then stop reading this section. Nothing below makes the philosophy better. What it buys is that the file sits next to the other things your managers already have open.

Notion runs a Free plan at $0 per member per month, with Plus at $10 and Business at $20 per member per month on monthly billing, and the pricing page advertises savings of up to 20 percent for paying yearly. (notion.com/pricing) One page with the surviving rulings, linked from the team wiki, is the entire implementation.

Google Workspace is the option to look at if your team already lives in Gmail and Docs: Business Starter is listed at $7 per user per month, Standard at $14 and Plus at $22, billed monthly in US dollars, with 16 percent off for an annual commitment, and the site is separately running a limited-time discount on the first three months. (workspace.google.com/pricing) A pinned Doc in a shared Drive folder does the job.

One category is deliberately unpriced here. The employee-handbook and standard-procedure platforms are the natural home for a document like this, and Trainual is the best known of them for small teams, but as of today its pricing page lists “Get a demo” against every tier and publishes no figure at all. (trainual.com/pricing) I cannot tell you what it costs, so I am not going to guess at it.

What to do with the prompt this article came from

The Leadership Philosophy Definer prompt at BusinessPrompter.com handles the articulation half of this, turning rough material into language you can actually say to a team. Two things are worth knowing before you click. It is filed under Personal Development and written for an individual leader defining their own guiding principles, rather than for the team-escalation exercise above, and it is a Pro prompt behind an upgrade.

If you do use it, feed it your ten rulings rather than a blank page. Every generated leadership philosophy that reads like corporate wallpaper reads that way because it was produced from a blank page, and a blank page can only return the unopposable species. The rulings are the part the model cannot know and cannot invent, and they are the part that makes the output yours.

What this does not settle

It does not tell you whether your rulings were any good. The reversal test is a test of form. A consistently applied bad rule is still a bad rule, and now it is applied faster and by more people, which is worse rather than better.

It does not create agreement. Writing down that the date moves rather than the scope will not stop a client pushing, it stops your project manager having to guess what you would say. That is a smaller and more achievable thing.

And it is not a hiring filter. Reading your rules aloud in an interview tells a candidate how the place runs, which is genuinely useful to both of you, but it does not touch the parts of hiring that carry actual deadlines and actual penalties, which is a different problem entirely and one laid out in Hiring Process: Build It Backward From Day One.

Common questions about writing a leadership philosophy

What is the difference between a leadership philosophy and a list of company values?
A value is a quality you claim. A rule is a decision you have pre-made. The way to tell them apart is to write the opposite underneath: if nobody could sincerely hold the opposite position, you have written a value, and it will not help anyone decide anything. Both of the best known published examples contain a mix. Amazon’s list holds “Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves” alongside “There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense,” and only the second one could ever settle an argument.

How do I know whether a line in mine is doing any work?
Ask whether anyone in your business has ever lost an argument to it. A rule that has never cost anybody anything, never stopped a request, and never made a meeting shorter is not a rule that is operating. It is a sentence that is present. The most reliable source of working lines is not reflection, it is the record of what you actually decided the last ten times someone escalated something to you.

Should I copy the leadership philosophy of a company like Amazon or Netflix?
Copy the shape, not the content. Netflix’s keeper test, in which managers ask “if X wanted to leave, would I fight to keep them?” and part ways quickly when the answer is no, is a genuinely well-formed rule, and a six-person business would be unwise to adopt it as written, because at that size one person is a large share of delivery capacity, the owner is the entire appeal process, and the relationship continues outside work. Well-formed and correct for you are separate questions.

Where should the document live so people actually use it?
Wherever the question gets asked, which is almost never a wall. In practice that means pinned in the channel your team messages you in, placed in the first section of what a new hire reads in week one, and quoted in interviews. A free shared document handles all three. Notion’s Free plan is $0 per member per month, with Plus at $10 and Business at $20 on monthly billing, and Google Workspace Business Starter is listed at $7 per user per month, but neither makes the philosophy better than a document does. They only make it easier to find.

The leadership philosophies that actually run a business are slightly embarrassing to publish, because every line in one is a line somebody there has already lost an argument to. The comfortable lines, the ones that would look at home on a careers page, are precisely the ones you could delete tonight without a single person noticing they were gone.