Policies vs. Principles

I had a great conversation on Friday with Mark and Ian about how smaller companies often have almost no policy manuals and employees are often expected to "do the right thing." When companies grow, this tends to get supplanted by lengthly books that attempt to capture the right behaviors in detailed rules that capture every scenario.

A better approach would be to hold onto the culture of "doing the right thing." This could be augmented with a book that captures stories and anecdotes of right and wrong behaviors that can occur. In his series of books, Patrick Lencioni teaches concepts through the use of fables.

Teaching with stories has the distinct advantage of being memorable. Many studies show that we remember information and concepts much better when they are wrapped into stories.

Another advantage is that when resented with a clear set of rules, people will tend to change their behavior just enough to circumvent rather than break the rule. Often this is not completely intentional. They don't want to break the rule so they read it throughly and figure out how they can achieve BOTH their desired outcome AND obey the rule. We often refer to this as obeying the letter of the rule but not the spirit.

When expectations are principle based rather than rule based, people tend to act in such a way as to respect the principle, then formulate their own behavioral guidelines that fit the moment much better than any black-and-white rules written years earlier. We might even think of these principles as capturing the condensed "spirit of the rules," since that seems to be what we really want followed anyway.

In a sense, this method treats employees as intelligent people who, when given guidance and ownership over the outcome, can act in a principled way that also agilely adapts to new situations as they arise.


In his book Stirring It Up, Gary Hirshberg speaks often about how they used a few simples principles to guide then in their decision making while they created and grew Stonyfield Farms.

We can achieve some amazing things when we simply raise our expectations.