No principle at all

I have fun doing a regular weekly article at HPCWire that covers some of the same topics we cover here, only with more of an emphasis on supercomputing. I usually don’t publish items that are substantially the same here and there. Today’s topic is important enough, however, that I think it’s worth making an exception to that rule.

Being successful—being a leader—takes courage. One of the most courageous things that the successful people I’ve worked with do is to know what principles are important to them and to take actions that support those principles.

Principally speaking

So, what’s a principle? We’ve all got things that we’re good at, and particular aspects of our professions that we care about (architecture, languages, and so on). Principles are more fundamental - they underpin our decisions and guide our actions every day. Things like honesty, integrity, and so on.

One of the most fundamental steps you can take to setting the stage for your own successful career is to know what your principles are, and to be prepared to stick with them. Like all really good platitudes, this one hides some whopping difficulties.

First you have to figure out what’s important to you. This is not always easy because it involves some deep thinking that most of us don’t have a lot of practice with. But let’s say for the sake of discussion that honesty is a principle you care about.

Principles are only opinions until you act on them

What does it mean that you care about honesty? In other words, have you thought about how you behave every day and what that says about your belief in the principle of honesty? Have you thought about situations that might challenge this principle, and how you want to react if you find yourself in any of those situations?

This kind of advance planning is the key to having meaningful principles. The odds are very good that situations challenging your core values aren’t going to arise very often. When they do arise they are probably going to be emotionally charged situations in which you’ll have to make a snap decision. If you don’t do some planning ahead of time, the odds of your making a decision you’ll be happy with upon reflection later are pretty low.

How not to do it

Shortly after I began my career I was asked to participate on a task force in Washington DC. My six-week temporary duty turned, by week-to-week and month-to-month extensions, to nearly a year of time away from home. I was on the team responsible for evaluating one aspect of a large, distributed project. My team completed this task and produced it’s written opinion. Before we could move on, however, the management team called a meeting with our little team and told us they were unhappy with our conclusions. We were invited to change our opinion to more closely match the answer they were expecting to see, and we were also told that if we didn’t everyone (not just our team) might have to start the entire task force process over again.

This was a direct challenge to my honesty and integrity. Our team had made a determination as to the technical value of the particular aspect of the project we were evaluating. The team I was on was fairly inexperienced, and mostly young. None of us had thought about what values and principles we held, or what we would do if ever faced with a situation that challenged them. What we did know was that we didn’t want to be responsible for everyone else having to start over, and we knew we all wanted to go home.

And so it was just easier to make the change rather than fight. In fact, I don’t recall that we even looked at it as a fight. We had two options, and we selected the less painful one.

An unrehearsed principle is no principle at all

With the benefit of more experience and perfect hindsight, I recognize this as an act of cowardice by the managers in question. I also recognize it as a seriously flawed response on my part to an assault on what I hold now as core principles. I made the decision quickly in crisis mode only thinking of moving on and going home.

How did this mistake get made? I was unrehearsed, and unprepared. Here’s what I suggest to help you avoid making the mistake that I made: develop a list of your top two or three or five principles. Once you have that list, rehearse situations that challenge those principles in your mind. Plan how you want to respond, and analyze what damage a different response will do, not just to those around you, but to who you are and to how you see yourself.