Principles: Leading Yourself First

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What are your principles? Have you given them much thought? In many organizations, especially law enforcement agencies, we don’t do a stellar job of training our first-line supervisors in leadership OR management. It is not fair to those who have been selected, but it is also not fair to the employees. You don’t want to get six months (or more) into a supervisory position only to discover that supervision is not something you want to do.

Training supervisors in many agencies is a little like being put into a dark room, not being familiar with where things were, and trying our best to turn on the light. Many new supervisors are faced with those challenges—some have even been told, “you’ll learn it on the job.” But what if we were able to utilize a principles-based leadership training system to help smooth that transition?

Leading through principles – and having the training, development, and organizational succession planning structure to support this effort -- is essential to giving everyone the tools to help navigate multiple (and novel) situations. The late Stephen R. Covey wrote the book Principle-Centered Leadership (1992) and it is excellent. He lays out his beliefs of principle-centered leadership, which begins with leading ourselves. 


Amin (2019), writing as an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, provides an excellent synopsis of principle-centered leadership: “…it casts a net of personal value ownership over the workplace environment. Principle-centered leadership works on the basis of natural principles and continues to build on these principles into the center of our lives, relationship with others, agreements and management processes. We become more organized, rooted, balanced and unified when our lives are centered…”

As we are able to better understand ourselves, our tendencies, and our core values, we can better communicate our expectations and our vision. By knowing ourselves first, we are also able to understand our role in the organization, what those above us are seeking from us, and how we can model, mentor, and guide those we supervise. Best of all, we by being comfortable first in our own skin, we can help develop and build up our colleagues to be the best leaders they can be.

 

Amin, S. (2019, June 5). Leading with principle-centered focus. Schriever Air Force Base. https://www.schriever.af.mil/News/Commentaries/Display/Article/1866798/leading-with-principle-centered-focus/

Covey, S. R. (1992). Principle centered leadership. Simon & Schuster.

 

Graphics: "Police Woman" by Just Us 3 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/?ref=openverse.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bruce-Millett-2/publication/229044794/figure/fig1/AS:669507286757397@1536634384685/The-Covey-Principle-Centered-Leadership-Model.png


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