Effective leaders act on principles. Those principles may not always be explicit, but they are there. The moment we are looking at a management team, and at a workforce with a reasonable amount of turnover, the advantages of rendering explicit a set of essential, common leadership principles become obvious: they increase predictability, reliability, and self-control within the system.
Quite a few authors have proposed a set of leadership principles, first and foremost Peter Drucker. However, principles may impact an organisation substantially only under two conditions: They must be well chosen between those principles which represent the essence of the actual leadership culture, and those which cover the essence of what should be the case out of business necessity. And, second, the organisation’s structural framework must facilitate their application.
We support management teams in their choice and implementation of agile leadership principles, in order to achieve the switch from management by process to management by principle.
I believe all high-performance companies are led and managed by principles, not by process. (Lou Gerstner, ex CEO iBM)