THRIVE: My Guiding Leadership Principles
How I Used AI to Shape and Articulate My Leadership Philosophy
While taking Jules White's ChatGPT Advanced Data Analysis course, I was inspired to create an acronym to define my leadership style. Jules demonstrated how to develop the ACHIEVE framework using a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT, and it sparked in me the idea to apply a similar approach to articulate my overall leadership philosophy.
I believe it's essential for every person to be aware of their core values. Reflecting on one's leadership principles is equally crucial for a leader. For instance, I enjoy discussing their leadership styles when interviewing potential managers and leaders. Understanding their perspective on leadership helps me assess if they are a good fit for the company. These conversations provide insights into how they approach leadership, solve problems, and make decisions.
After reflecting on my leadership style and traits and working with my thought partner (Generative AI), we came up with THRIVE, a memorable acronym that effectively encapsulates my leadership philosophy. It showcases my ability to adapt my leadership style, inspire transformational change, drive efficient execution, foster innovation, provide a clear vision, and grant autonomy while empowering my team members to grow and succeed.
Let's explore my brand new THRIVE guiding leadership principles with examples inspired by my career as an Engineering Leader.
T – Transformational Leadership
Inspiring others through visionary leadership that drives both personal and organizational change, creating a culture of growth and empowerment.
As a transformational leader, you aim to inspire and motivate your team by painting a compelling future vision. You cultivate a shared sense of purpose, encouraging individuals to strive for excellence. This leadership style fosters innovation, team cohesion, and a high level of engagement, making it possible to navigate change successfully and bring about lasting positive transformation within the organization. Transformational leaders articulate a vision and purpose that motivates others and demonstrate character that embodies that purpose, inspiring people to follow them actively. This approach not only drives change but also inspires and motivates your team members, making them feel part of something bigger and more meaningful.
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
— Warren Bennis
Example: Recognizing the need to speed up delivery across the organization, you inspire your engineering team to migrate legacy applications to a new architecture, such as a modular domain-driven monolith or microservices. You share a compelling vision of improved scalability and agility, motivating the team to embrace the challenge. Through your enthusiasm and support, the team starts working on the migration and adopting a continuous innovation culture.
H – Holistic Adaptation
Adapting your leadership style to fit the company's culture, team dynamics, and the unique challenges at hand.
Holistic adaptation goes beyond the situational leadership theory; it focuses on your ability to read the room, understand the company's culture, understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team, and understand the external circumstances that may affect your approach. Whether the situation calls for more directive leadership or a hands-off approach, you adjust seamlessly, ensuring that your leadership style serves the immediate and long-term needs of the organization. This flexibility enhances your team's ability to succeed in varied environments, fostering resilience. This adaptability reassures your team members that you can navigate any situation, instilling confidence in your leadership.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
— Charles Darwin
Example: You manage a diverse team with varying experience levels. For less experienced engineers, you provide detailed guidance, regular support, and feedback. You offer autonomy for staff engineers, and team leads, trusting them to make the right technical decisions. When facing tight deadlines, you might take a more directive approach to ensure critical tasks are prioritized, whereas, during planning phases, you encourage open discussions and collaborative decision-making.
R – Rapid Execution
Driving swift and impeccable execution with an unyielding focus on speed, precision, and quality to consistently deliver outstanding results.
You prioritize efficiency and flawless execution, ensuring your team moves quickly without sacrificing quality. Rapid execution is about streamlining processes, eliminating bottlenecks, and fostering accountability, allowing your team to achieve ambitious goals within tight timelines. Your results-driven focus ensures your team stays competitive and consistently meets or exceeds expectations.
Strategy without execution is hallucination.
— Thomas Edison
Example: Under market pressure to ship new features more predictably, you identify the need to enhance the current project delivery process. Based on the Shape Up methodology, you introduce vital changes such as shaping, betting, and building in six-week cycles. Your focus on speed and precision enables the team to deliver features with predictability and exceptional quality, giving the company a competitive edge.
I – Innovative Mindset
Fostering a culture of innovation through a growth mindset, encouraging creativity, calculated risks, and continuous learning.
Innovation is vital to staying relevant and competitive. By maintaining an innovative mindset, you cultivate an environment where creative ideas and forward-thinking solutions are encouraged and expected. You push your team to challenge assumptions, embrace new technologies, and take calculated risks, knowing that the best ideas often come from experimentation. This mindset keeps your organization on the cutting edge and ready to adapt to emerging trends and challenges. By stressing the importance of an innovative mindset, you inspire your team members to think outside the box and stay ahead of the curve.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
— Steve Jobs
Example: To stay ahead in the software industry, you encourage your team to explore emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. You provide your team access to the latest cutting-edge AI tools and resources. You train them to use the latest Generative AI technologies in the market. You allocate time for innovation, where team members can experiment and present new ideas. That leads to developing unique features that significantly enhance user engagement and differentiate your product.
V – Vision and Autonomy
Providing a clear vision and strategic direction while empowering your team with the autonomy to innovate, take ownership, and excel.
A strong vision guides your team toward shared goals, offering clarity and purpose. However, you don't micromanage—instead, you trust your team to determine how to achieve these goals best. Balancing clear expectations with autonomy encourages creativity and ownership, empowering individuals to contribute their best work. This approach fosters a sense of responsibility and pride in the team's accomplishments.
Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
— George S. Patton
Example: You effectively communicate to your team your vision about the importance of observability and engineering metrics in ensuring system reliability and performance. You empower your team to select tools, create dashboards, and implement solutions they believe will best achieve this objective. By encouraging ownership and creativity, you trust your engineers to enhance observability and establish scalable, efficient monitoring systems aligned with the goal of operational excellence without micromanaging the process.
E – Empowerment
Building trust, nurturing development, and providing the tools and opportunities for your team to excel and grow as leaders.
Empowerment is central to your leadership philosophy. You believe in giving people the resources, trust, and opportunities they need to succeed. Whether through mentorship, professional development, or entrusting team members with leadership roles, you help them grow and reach their full potential. Empowering others increases their confidence and strengthens the organization by building future leaders who can drive the company forward.
The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
— Ralph Nader
Example: Your team includes senior engineers and tech leads who are already leaders. You invest in their growth by providing leadership development opportunities, such as advanced management training or strategic project leadership roles. You encourage them to mentor others and lead critical cross-team initiatives, enhancing their leadership skills. By trusting and supporting them, you help these leaders further excel, increasing their impact on the organization.
Your Turn
If you're a manager or leader (remember, you don't need the title to be a leader), I invite you to do the same exercise I did:
Write between a few statements describing your leadership philosophy.
Ask your favorite LLM tool to generate an acronym based on the statements.
Keep iterating and refining your acronyms and principles until you feel satisfied.
Here's the initial prompt I used for inspiration:
Generate a memorable acronym with principles for my leadership philosophy based on the following statements. Please rewrite these statements as needed:
Inspiring others through transformational leadership
Adapting my leadership style to fit the company and team
Achieving flawless execution and speedy delivery with quality
Providing clear expectations, vision, and autonomy
Approaching everything with a growth mindset and innovation
Final Thoughts
The THRIVE guiding principles or framework reflects my leadership with balance and purpose. Through Transformational Leadership, I inspire my team to embrace change and aim for excellence. Holistic adaptation allows me to adjust my leadership style to fit the company's unique needs, ensuring effectiveness. Rapid Execution keeps us focused on delivering high-quality results efficiently, while an Innovative Mindset ensures we stay competitive and forward-thinking. With Vision and Autonomy, I provide clear direction while empowering my team to take ownership. By Empowering others, I help them grow into future leaders.
By living these leadership principles, I create an environment where both my team and the organization can truly THRIVE.
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