By now you’ve written down your management principles or at least checked out this sample, so you’re developing a mental model of “what good looks like” with respect to how you operate everyday and how you expect your employees to operate and make decisions everyday.
Communicating out your mental model, building sync with your team, and consistently applying them to your everyday work are the next steps to make sure your principles don’t just become an afterthought. Just like the repetition required in hammering home your vision for the company every chance you get, look for every opportunity to embed your principles into your organization’s regular business practices. Here are a few strategies that work for us:
- Hiring - Review your management principles with candidates before you hire them. Evaluate their reaction, response and engagement as part of your decision-making. Work with your HR leader to ensure your principles are included in broader company hiring practices.
- Onboarding - Include your management principles, in writing, in your company’s onboarding materials for new employees on or before their start date.
- Exec Team Meetings - Include them (or the most relevant subset) in your weekly executive meeting agenda doc. [Sample Exec Team Agenda Doc]
- Company values - Incorporate them into your broader company values.
- Remind your team live when employing a management principle - If for example there is a spirited debate during a meeting over a specific decision and one of your management principles is ‘disagree and commit,’ remind your team in the moment of this principle. “That was a spirited debate with lots of good points made. We are going this direction and so per our management principles its now time to commit and all get on board with the decision.”
- 1:1 Meetings and Reviews - Consider if a direct report is performing above, below or at expectations with respect to your mgmt principles specifically. Call it out and praise them on specific points if warranted, and also provide constructive feedback often.
- Personal accountability - Periodically take time to reflect on your own role in the failings of your direct reports, or your broader team, to work in congruence with your management principles. One familiar trap we’ve experienced first-hand is setting management principles to be too aspirational and not living up to them ourselves. Your team will see right through that and follow suit.
References
Defining your management principles
A sample list of management principles
Sample Exec Team Agenda (Gdoc)
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