Leadership Principles: How Inspiration Pays Off

It's 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 Lyons, of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; Andrew Burke, 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 embarked on a process to articulate organization-wide 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.

Please select this link to read the complete article from MIT Sloan Management Review.