Chapter 5:
Managing Your Brand
You should read a book on marketing and selling services.
Most of us who consider ourselves scientists or technologists shudder at the thought of sales and marketing. The very idea brings up images of car salesmen, snake oil salesmen, and telemarketing, and the small person in our heads says, “I’m not in sales!”
Oh, but you are. It turns out that as a technologist you and, say, a contractor who wants to remodel your house, are selling the same thing: a service. And if you are going to lead others, or even just have a successful career as a technical team member, you’ve got to learn to sell your service.
Services are different from products in several ways that make service customers very uncomfortable. If you can understand these differences and manage them with respect to Your Brand and your services, then you will be miles ahead of your peers and well on your way to becoming recognized as a leader.
Services are different from products in that they are intangible and unwarrantable. If you are buying a product (some thing, like a car), you can experience it. You can smell it and touch it. You can check out the product before you buy it, and know ahead of time that it is right for you and your needs. Products are tangible, and being able to have a personal connection with a product reduces the consumer’s fears before the sale.
A service, on the other hand, is intangible. You cannot touch, taste, smell, or feel the competence or trustworthiness of any of the contracting services you are evaluating to remodel your home. You also, for the most part, cannot meaningfully provide or receive a warranty on services, and this is the source of the fear.
When you buy a product—say, a car—you have some built-in expectations about quality and the time before a major mechanical failure. But we also have lots of everyday experience with products that tell us that, as physical artifacts, failures will sometimes occur sooner than expected. We can intellectualize the reality that of one million widgets even if only 1% of them have problems there will be 10,000 failures. We expect over a lifetime of consuming stuff to buy one of the 10,000 things with problems from time to time. We accept this risk because experience tells us that the risk is small, and because the manufacturer’s warranty will protect us if we are unlucky.
Not so with a service. We have a lot of experience with services, and most of that experience is bad. flown on a commercial airline lately? Been to a fast-food burger joint? Rented a movie from a large commercial chain? These places employ low-cost labor to keep consumer costs low, and it shows. The service that they provide, sometimes in support of delivering their product, which may be on the whole good, is terrible. The stakes on these daily services are pretty low. Even if getting your burger is painful, the pain only lasts a few minutes and the burger is still good. We can overlook the irritation that the brief transaction causes and we will return. Obviously burger businesses know this about us as well, because after half a century they haven’t elevated their employee profile.
But when it comes to the larger services, when high dollars are invested, most of us have very little experience and a whole lot of fear that we’ll end up getting bad service and not being able to do anything about it. The contractor may provide a warranty on his workmanship when he remodels your house, but do you really want to have to rely on the warranty? Can you do without your kitchen for another six months while he fixes his mistakes from the first six months? Do you really want him trying to fix them: what if he fails again? The warranty on a service is really not very effective, so consumers have fear. And in the face of fear consumers do something really interesting: they don’t seek to buy the best service. They seek to buy the service with the smallest chance of failure. And here is where you can make magic for yourself.
Big companies recognize that in order to entice customers to their service they have to manage the consumer’s fear of failure. One of the most powerful ways to do this is to have a brand. Consumers will buy the brand-name service, even if it is more expensive and lower quality than unknown competitors, to minimize the risk of failure.
I am not Scotch Tape®
True! But you are providing a service in your company, organization, or troop.
As a technologist, when you are hired into a group it is to fill a gap in skills or to meet a specific need of the group. These skills are your service. Your competence, professionalism, timeliness, attitude, and record of success are the intangible assets of your service, and for the most part whoever hires you has only your word (and maybe the word of a few references) that you have represented them faithfully. Your boss has a warranty—he can dismiss you if you cannot deliver—but does not really want to take this route. It damages him in that his bosses see him as having failed, and in most modern organizations, especially governments, it is very difficult to fire anyone for pretty much anything less than arson or murder.
To your boss, then, you are a service.
To lead and to be seen as a leader you must reduce your consumer’s (your company’s, your boss’s, your coworkers’) fear of failure, of buying the wrong service. Do this the same way big companies do: build and manage a brand. Brand You.
This chapter has a variety of techniques and skills that successful leaders employ in creating and managing their brand. Many of these ideas flow naturally from the tenets of the Enlightened Leadership Philosophy, and so 75% of managing your brand will come for free after you internalize this philosophy. You’ll have to work for the rest of them, but it’s well worth the effort. A few minutes spent each day thinking about your decisions and behavior in the context of their impact on Brand You will go a long way toward growing and improving that brand.
Some of the tips in this chapter are pithy and worn almost to the point of meaninglessness. I encourage you to look underneath the catch phrase and think about what it means. If you find one of the tips isn’t clicking with you today, review it tomorrow when your perspective may be a little different. I also encourage you to review these periodically, to keep them at the top of your unconscious, where they can do a lot of good for you.
Be apart
Building a brand—a name for quality work that your organization can count on when a job needs to be done—also means positioning that brand relative to the other brands in your organization.
Oh yes, there are other brands. The best people in your organization are building and managing their own brands (even if they don’t think about it in those terms), and they are your competition. What you need to do is position yourself relative to the other brands (people) competing for your customers’ (bosses’) attention. You have to be Super Cola to someone else’s SoSo Cola.
There are a couple of points to make here. First, it doesn’t make sense to be Super Cola to someone else’s Super Cola. If there is already a Super Cola, then introducing another Super Cola isn’t likely to create much interest. You might create a cheaper Super Cola knock off and compete on price, but do you really want to be the person who does the same work as someone else for less money?
You need to look around at your peers and at the people in the closest management layers to you, and understand what their brand is. Those who perform at the bottom or middle of pack aren’t really managing a brand that you want to compete against. They are positioned like generic toilet paper: they’ll get the job done, and they’re cheap enough to buy without waiting for a sale. But you don’t shop for generic toilet paper for the confidence you have in the brand (not least because if it were a brand, it wouldn’t be generic). You shop for it on price, and you are willing to accept a less than optimal comfort to save $0.40 on a pack of four rolls. You also plan to drop it for the best brand as soon as your finances improve.
In terms of brands, you have to study the top performers. Who are the “go to” folks? The ones always pitching the toughest clients, or always being asked to give tours to large corporate donors and 3-star generals. The odds are fairly good as you study each of these performers you’ll see that they are different from one another and different from the lower performers around them. One is funny and dresses casually but smartly. One is serious, highly organized, and very conservative. One is interested in sports and uses that as a way to bond with upper management and customers. One plays golf. One dresses appallingly but always, always, manages to pull failing projects out of the fire. One is crusty, and one is super nice.
Know what the other leaders in your organization are doing, and decide where you fit in. Make this your brand.
In my case, my peers are all fairly serious people but not actively managing their brands. They keep their heads down, dress conservatively, speak when spoken to, and are very serious and focused most of the time. I need to manage my brand in such a way that it stands apart from this competition.
The way I stand apart is to draw upon the strengths of my personal style. I am younger than my peers. I dress fairly casually, but always appropriately for the situation. For example, I never wear ties. As a result I have to try a little harder to look dressed up when we are receiving important visitors, and I stand out visually from my peers. I use humor, extensively, to keep the mood light when I attend meetings. I always take care of business, and behave with the appropriate amount of respect for others, but when something funny happens, I laugh. And when something funny doesn’t happen for a while, I say something funny. Of course, I’m not paid to be funny, and if you are reading this book the odds are fairly good that you aren’t either. It’s enjoyable in my case because I’m good at my job. But be careful, because funny is not good if you aren’t really good at your job. I also take special care with each and every atom I commit to paper. I never write a careless e-mail or a sloppy report. Even my drafts look fairly complete.
All of this is by design. My brand is relaxed excellence. I routinely deliver what I promise and always in a way that looks relaxed on the outside, even if on the inside I am only two dangling participles away from a stroke. The result of my “relaxed excellence branding” is that I get the job done, and the boss usually likes having me around to keep everyone else grounded.
The drawback of branding is that you will no longer fit in with the crowd. If you aren’t comfortable not fitting in, you won’t be comfortable managing yourself in this way. I have spent my life not fitting in (I gave new meaning to the phrase “socially awkward” in high school), and so for me finding a way to make this an actual advantage instead of an opportunity to be stuffed into the nearest locker has been a nice turn around. Every other male at my work wears a tie on important occasions. I don’t, and I’m comfortable with it. The only way you’ll be comfortable standing out is if you can find some aspect of yourself that you’re really happy with and build a brand around that.
It won’t be easy for all of you, but a properly managed brand can launch you on your way to being recognized as an enlightened leader.
Completing your brand
If you want someone to recognize you, they have to know what you look like. The same is true of your work. If you want people to recognize your work and associate it with you (as part of your brand), they have to know which traits to identify with you. This means choosing a personal style and sticking with it.
A personal style?
Your personal style is the collection of quirks, templates, signatures, and fonts that signify something as being created by your hand. There are all kinds of things that will contribute to creating a personal style. We’ll talk about a few in just a moment.
The key to making a personal style work in support of having your work recognized and reliably attributed to you is not to change it very often. You can, and should, adapt your style over time to reflect changes in your personality, brand, and position in your company. But these changes should, for the most part, be evolutionary, so that people have time to attribute the new look to you before you change it again.
Your professional name
No, I’m not going to suggest that you change your name from Chuck Rudolphski to Rock Boulder. But I am going to suggest that you adopt and consistently use a form of your name to be your professional name.
Your professional name is the name you use to sign everything you do in your professional life: e-mails, papers, letters, and presentations. Everything.
In my case, my professional name is “John E. West”. I use this name in my e-mail signature and on everything I produce. When I need to sign things a little more casually, as with many short e-mails, I will close with “john” or my initials “jw”, but my full professional name is always right below in my signature. I don’t use “John West” professionally, only “John E. West.”
In most cases your choice of professional name with be fairly obvious. Usually it’s just your full name. In some cases, however, people are known casually by a name that’s not their first name. For example, Rupert Charles Boxington may be known to everyone as Charles Boxington, the Rupert having been dropped in grade school. In this case it is probably not wise to adopt Rupert C. Boxington as your professional name, as most people don’t know that your name is actually “Rupert”. R. Charles Boxington, however, would be a good choice.
One little note on the above. You might have noticed that I sometimes close more casual notes and e-mail with my lowercase initials, “jw.” That’s not “JW”—by design. As part of my personal style, I use the lower case without periods.
Document style
As we’ve already discussed in an earlier chapter, you’ll be producing a lot of written material in your career. That material can also be an expression of your personal style, and so become a part of your actively managed brand.
The extent to which you can personalize your documents depends in large degree upon your workplace. Some organizations are very flexible with things like font choice and size, margins, paper used, and so on. Some are not. In my particular case, my workplace is fairly flexible, and I have a lot of freedom in selecting a visual style for my documents.
I usually differentiate my written documents by following the basics of good publication design. Even though I’m only following the basics, any attention to graphic design in most technical publications qualifies as unusual, and so people notice a little extra spit and polish on my documents. I do things like narrow the width of my text from the Microsoft Word default to something more readable, like 4 or 5 inches. On longer reports, I use running heads and pull quotes to help guide the readers on their journey through my prose. I try to use open types for the body copy and for heads and subheads I select a complementary font from a different family: sans serif for heads if the body copy is serif, for example. I use ligatures if the typeface supports them, and often use old-style numbers (numbers that have ascenders and descenders rather than just staying strictly above the baseline like capital letters).
Everything I do has as its first purpose increasing readability. But my second purpose—establishing a personal style—is also served, and as a result my work is usually attributed correctly to me.
Presentation style
The same principles apply for presentations as for documents. Here, however, you really have a chance to stand out if you take the time to produce high-quality presentation graphics.
One of the biggest ways that you can adopt a personal presentation style that is part of your brand and that your audience will truly appreciate is to stop using the default templates and fonts in PowerPoint. Go cold turkey!
PowerPoint templates typically default to a Times New Roman font at very large point sizes. The trouble is that most projectors are relatively low resolution and Windows (up to Windows 2000 anyway) does a truly terrible job of rendering antialiased text. The result is all those thin lines and bracketed serifs get rendered as jagged, ugly chunks of pixels and the whole thing looks as if you didn’t spend any time on the appearance at all. If you are using PowerPoint on a Windows machine, choose a sans-serif font for your slides (Arial and Helvetica are simple choices, and common; you won’t win any design awards, but you will have a presentation that will stand being moved from computer to computer).
The second easy thing you can do is stop using the canned templates. They weren’t that good to begin with, and once each of them was used for the 4 millionth time they were absolutely mind-numbing. Take some time and build your own template. You can base it around your company logo, or the colors of your organization. Or download one from the web. There is a host of very inexpensive template kits that come prepackaged with fonts and background images and colors that all coordinate well and make an excellent statement about the speaker.
The extras
Those are the major elements of your personal style. You may work as part of a team that prescribes most of this stuff for you. What if you have no choice about document or presentation templates?
Not to worry, there are as many other elements to your personal style as you care to spend the time developing. Here are some of the elements I manage as part of my own personal style.
E-mail closing
I always close my emails with some variation on “Best wishes.” Sometimes it’s “best” or “all the best.” And I usually close with my initials only, always in lower case. Interestingly, not everyone agrees that this particular choice of closing makes a good first impression—though it has served me fairly well over the last decade your mileage may vary, so be sure to adapt to your situation and adopt the convention that suits you best.
In a bind
When I am producing a handout for a meeting or a physical document for review (something more significant than a one-page overview), I always bind it in a notebook or binder or report folder. Add a bit of polish and it will be noticed.
Let’s try that again, with feeling
As I mentioned earlier my brand is positioned as “relaxed excellence.” I am always on the lookout for new techniques and technologies that will make my performance look more relaxed or excellent (or both for that matter). For example, I carry my own RF remote for presentations. It will plug into any computer with a USB port and allow me to move back and forth between slides in a presentation without having to stalk back to the keyboard to press the space bar. This way I can move about a bit and interact with the audience without worrying about how I’ll get back to change to the next slide.
I also always take the time to rehearse in a new venue. I find out where the lights are and what settings I like best. I find the water and put some on the podium. I figure out where to stand so I don’t block the slides. And I figure out where the steps on the stage are so I don’t pitch head first into the audience.
Don’t do everything on your list: the 85-15 rule
I love this rule. The percentages aren’t scientific, but the point is that 85% of all the things you have to do in a year only contribute 15% to your overall success.
“Whoa! That’s a big number, and a lot of time wasted. Are you sure?” Yup! Early in your career the ratios are different. They are a little less skewed because you have far fewer tasks when you are first starting out and your sphere of influence is much smaller. As you advance, however, the ratio skews clearly in this direction.
I deal with hundreds of e-mails a week. There are meetings with my direct reports and with my supervisors’ reports, meetings with people in the VIP seats in my chain of command, and meetings with various staff in the center who need decisions made that cannot be delegated down the chain of command. Then there are the unscheduled meetings to deal with computer crashes, employees quitting or squabbling, Human Resources issues, and so on. Budget reviews and planning sessions. Employee performance reviews and goal setting. Facilities planning. Infrastructure planning. Strategic planning. Purchase-order approval. Time certification. Property management.
Ok, you get the idea. The farther you rise in an organization, the more you are responsible for a dazzling array of truly mundane tasks. These things need doing; they are the glue that holds organizations together. But it is very easy to spend all of your time simply caring for and feeding these tasks. It is also very unwise. To see why, consider an organization in which managers and leaders do only these things. Innovation and productivity would plummet, and the organization would eventually collapse upon itself under the weight of its own bureaucracy like some kind of giant corporate black hole.
These activities are time pirates. They come in, take part of your only nonrenewable resource, and in return give you nothing. If you don’t watch yourself, these little time pirates will steal all your productivity and creativity. Before you know it, a year has gone by and you haven’t created anything at all, only moved a pile of paper from one side of your desk to the other.
So, what do you do? Less.
But which less will make you a star and which will get you fired? That’s a little tougher. The answer is that it varies from organization to organization, and you’re just going to have to figure out by trial and error which things you can safely avoid altogether, which you can skip sometimes, and which you’ll just have to knuckle down and get done.
What do I avoid altogether? In my organization, there is a reporting process that is designed specifically for a kind of business that I don’t do. Most of the divisions where I work do some kind of reimbursable work. That is, they find a customer who wants some project done, and they do it for some fixed amount of money agreed upon up front; they are like consultants for their customers, and their business waxes and wanes from year to year and month to month within a year. As a result of all this waxing and waning, these divisions sometimes find themselves with either too much work and too few people or too many people and too little work. Neither situation is good, and so there is a whole reporting function that has evolved to spot these trends before they become problems and customers get unhappy or people have to be laid off. The trouble is that I do not do reimbursable work. I don’t regularly compete for my funding. I receive a steady funding line from a single customer to provide a service for thousands of computer users year in and year out. Although this reporting process isn’t designed for me and won’t ultimately do me any good, I am still expected, by the letter of the rule, to submit the same reports everyone else does. If I did, it would take about 40 hours a quarter. I don’t submit them. No one notices, because my organization doesn’t have any of these types of workload problems to manage. I have one less time pirate to deal with, and an extra 40 hours a quarter to do what I’m actually supposed to do: lead.
Other things I skip only sometimes, like meetings. For example, we have a meeting that happens once every two weeks and generally goes about three hours. Not a huge burden but they can become tiresome. I don’t feel comfortable abandoning them altogether because they represent an important opportunity for the members of the team to see one another (we are scattered over the country) and to make sure that broad policy decisions are taken with input from everyone. But from time to time I send someone else. It’s not necessary for me to be at all of them, just most of them. Sending someone else means that the organization is still represented, and on the off chance that something important is discussed I can still receive the information fast enough to act on it if necessary. Also, the person I send has a growth experience by getting to represent me with other senior leaders. With the newly recaptured time I get to do a little more strategic thinking than would otherwise be possible.
Some things though I just can’t get around: they need doing all the time. Even with these things, however, I (and you) should search for the items that need doing but that don’t necessarily need doing by me. These things can be delegated.
In my organization, for example, I never question my administrative assistant’s requests for supplies. I don’t want to get into the business of deciding who can have what pen and when the order needs to be placed, so I trust her judgment. This probably violates some rule somewhere that says I have to review tightly and personally approve all office-supply purchases. And as a result we probably occasionally spend $0.15 more on a pen than we could. But I think that the loss to the organization would be far greater if I allowed my time to be consumed by this completely meaningless decision. So I make an executive decision, and foist this time pirate off onto someone else where it will wreak less havoc.
I have made here an executive decision—a leadership decision—for the good of my organization. My performance, as rated by my chain of command, is great. But note: I made this decision. My organization and its leadership do not sanction my bending of this rule. It is possible, indeed it is likely, that over my career I will pick the wrong “less to do” at least once. I’ll either not do something that really did need doing, or delegate something I should have kept. When this happens, I will accept responsibility and hold only myself accountable for the trouble that results. There are two sides to leadership. The fun side is making decisions and making things happen. The unpleasant side is that you have to be willing to be accountable when you make a bad decision. You cannot be a leader without accepting both sides.
Once you start to rid yourself of these time pirates, make sure that you actually spend your recovered time on the business of leading. The trouble is that there are so many of these pirates running about that it’s easy to free yourself of one and then immediately turn around and spend your newly acquired time feeding another equally mundane task. Take care and only do real work with your hard-won newly recaptured time, or you’ll find yourself no better off than when you started.
Confidence, competence, and preparation
Confidence comes with competence, and competence comes with preparation. There is no shortcut for hard work.
This is true even for kings. King Ptolemy I of Egypt was well accustomed to being afforded the niceties of kingship. For example, if his royal majesty planned a trip in advance, workers would smooth the royal roads so as not to jostle the king’s person. Ptolemy became interested in the work Euclid was doing on geometry, but didn’t really want to wade through all the axioms, theorems, and proofs, so the king asked Euclid for a shortcut to learning geometry. Euclid answered Ptolemy’s request: “There is no royal road to geometry.”
You cannot build a lasting brand unless your product is of lasting quality, and no amount of work in developing a personal style will make up for the fact that your work isn’t good enough that people care who did it.
Remember that leadership starts with adherence to the principal principle: be great at what you do.
Curb your tongue
Office gossip is a nasty form of evil visited upon us by people who don’t have enough to do, often because they are strikingly ineffective, and so no one trusts them with real work.
Gossip might be interesting and fun to spread, but the problem is that gossip is usually about someone, and it is usually unflattering. The central business of gossip is to speculate about a particular failing in someone who is not present to defend himself or herself. Remember that we all have failings. Some we recognize, and some we don’t, but it is almost universal that we wouldn’t want to think that everyone else was discussing them behind our backs.
If you are going to be an enlightened leader, you have to be out front. Your followers need to see qualities in you that they don’t have yet in themselves. In other words, you need to inspire. You cannot inspire from the top of the hill if you are behind the hill all the time whispering behind people’s backs.
When you see a failing, work privately with the person to help repair it, or ignore it if it isn’t related to the business at hand. In either case, keep it to yourself, and do not tolerate gossip in others.
… and your temper
You will be presented from time to time with the opportunity to really bury someone in public. Someone who deserves everything you have to say, and worse besides. Do not take that opportunity.
When you find yourself in a volatile situation and about to unload on someone, walk away. Clear your head, and then come back to the situation when you can remain calm and steer the conversation toward resolving the conflict, not cracking someone under the force of your rage.
You’ll feel better about yourself, anyone who witnesses your control will be inspired by your decision to stay on the high ground, and the target of your ire may even be silently grateful and be supportive of you in the future.
Do not ever burn a bridge in anger: you may need it one day to get home.
Keep your word
Keep your promises.
If you say you’ll have something done next week, do it. If that means you have to work all night and cancel a couple dates, then do that. When at all possible, endure any amount of personal inconvenience to keep your word. Then plan better next time to keep yourself from having to go to such great lengths.
Past performance is the greatest predictor of the reliability of your brand in the future. You can get everything else right in managing your brand and in creating your personal style. However, if you aren’t reliable, then your brand will be meaningless, because what people are looking for when they contract for a service is a promise that they aren’t making a mistake. In the face of the fear of making a decision that leads to failure, they will select the decision that leads to certain mediocre completion every time over the decision that may lead to a bang up victory. This is because the last option may also lead to a startling defeat, and people will suffer a great deal of inefficiency and borderline work to avoid an outright failure.
Your brand is meaningful only if you can be counted on to deliver what you promise. Keep your word.
Know your principles, and know what they mean
Speaking of principles, know what yours are, and stick with them.
Like all really good platitudes, this one hides some whopping huge difficulties.
The first difficulty lies in knowing what your principles are. This sounds straightforward, but I ask you: “what do you care about?” You probably don’t have an answer, so I’ll give you one to think about: honesty. Ok, so honesty is a principle you care about.
Now I’ll ask you: “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.
My principles are respect, integrity, honesty, and teamwork. I know what they are, and I’ve thought about what they mean. The thing about principles and values is that they are largely meaningless unless you have thought—ahead of time—about how you’re going to react when they are challenged. Let me show you what I mean.
An unrehearsed principle is not a principle at all
Shortly after I began my career I was asked to participate on a task force in Washington DC. I accepted on the basis of several stipulations about the length of the assignment, my duties, and so on that all turned out to be empty promises. My six-week temporary duty turned, by week-to-week and month-to-month extensions, to nearly a year of time away from home. Nearly everyone taking part was similarly misled, and the entire situation had become extraordinarily unpleasant around the eighth month of the six-week task.
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 principle of integrity. Our team had made a determination as to the technical value of the particular aspect of the project we were evaluating. In this case, however, our conclusion did not suit the action someone farther up the chain wanted to take, and rather than that person having the courage of his own convictions, he was trying to muscle us into changing our opinion. The little 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.
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 a core principle. I made the decision quickly in crisis mode only thinking of moving on and going home. This one decision is my most serious professional regret, and it follows me despite the successes (and failures) I’ve had since then.
How did this mistake get made? I was unrehearsed, and unprepared. You don’t have a principle until that principle is challenged and you respond appropriately. Think about your principles right now. 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.
My simple advice is not to compromise your principles. The short-term pain of hanging on to something you believe in is to be preferred to a lifetime of regret. Just be aware that the choice isn’t always easy, and isn’t always yours to make alone.
