A Man Got to Have a Code (Leading with Honour III)
To be a leader in the 21st Century is to find your loyalties divided, values stretched and morals challenged.
Any organisation or business takes on a life of its own: it asks more of us every day, pulling us in directions we weren’t expecting through the currents of our colleagues, our customers, our competitors and society at large.
Systems take us to places in our lives and ourselves we would never have expected.
The temptations of money and the pressures of power lead us to make decisions we never thought we would have made.
And at the same time our love of family, sense of ourselves, and the meaningful projects we may have outside of our jobs also pull on our attention and our hearts.
Sometimes it feels like forces beyond our control are sweeping us away.
In a simpler world, noticing what a ‘good employee’ or a ‘good leader’ does and then doing it was a reasonable way to plot our way through the world of work.
But the world isn’t as simple as it used to be.
Conflicting messages about what a ‘good employee’ or ‘good leader’ do are everywhere, and how do I square them with the messages of what a ‘good father’, ‘good brother’, ‘good son’ and ‘good friend’ would do?
In complexity, we have to take more responsibility, define the things we believe in and then do them as well as we can.
To lead with honour is to do that: to hold the tiller of our boat firmly and skilfully, guiding it through the rapids, even while the currents shift and the storms come in.
This matters every day, but more than that: all of us will face the moments when this is vital.
Moments when we have to make decisions about how things will go and who we are.
Moments when we are asked to compromise ourselves: sometimes explicitly asked, sometimes implicitly pressured.
How will we respond?
The Honourless Corporate Disasters
When the Mohamed Al-Fayed story broke on the BBC earlier this year, it wasn’t that a man could abuse his power that shocked me the most.
It wasn’t the stories of the women involved that caught me off guard.
What shook me to my core were all the people who knew.
The people who weren’t victims and who stood by as these things happened.
Lawyers who persuaded victims to step back or sat next to one victim as she lied to deny the testimony of another.
Senior PAs who sent the junior ones to his suite of rooms.
A doctor who performed intrusive sexual health checks for (obviously) no honourable reason.
People who weren’t willing to get sued in order to expose what was going on.
Security guards who ushered women into rooms with Al-Fayed.
One part of me says: what happened to them? How could they have such little courage, such little honour?
And yet I know: because all of us have done some version of that at some time.
All of us have been crueller to someone than we would like in order to fit in.
All of us have gossiped, or done something to get ahead, even though we would hope no one would do that to us.
All of us have acquiesced to the status quo, even though we hated it.
All of us have said or done things that leave us sleeping poorly, failing to find inner peace with our behaviour.
Most people aren’t bad people.
But we all sometimes do bad things.
Mostly it doesn’t start with a big thing; it starts with a little thing.
I’ve heard the story of Enron told like that: that no one set out to create the scandal. Many people just made small compromises of their integrity, over and over again.
Until the whole company was built on fraud.
I suspect that’s what happened with Al-Fayed: the first time a woman went to his room, you didn’t know what was happening. You just assumed it was a normal, innocent thing.
Maybe after that first time, but maybe only after the second or third time, you realised something was up. But he’s a powerful guy – you could probably lose your job for speaking up. And maybe be refused jobs anywhere similar – he has influence.
And maybe you’re wrong, you tell yourself. Or maybe she likes it.
Then your psychology kicks in: no one wants to believe they are a terrible person. Our minds come up with reasons that we aren’t a bad person: reasons why it’s the right thing to do to let this continue. And we believe them: we all do this, all the time. Malcolm Gladwell outlines this way of rationalising as ‘Default to Truth’ in his memorable book, Talking to Strangers. There’s a little more about it in this article.
Someone having a lengthy extramarital affair must rationalise it away in the same way: I’ll tell them soon. I just haven’t found the right time.
As the betrayal continues.
One small step at a time.
Until a whole life is built on fraud.
In the end, something comes out: the affair is discovered, or a national broadcaster releases a documentary.
And in those moments, I’m glad I’m not that person who has let their mind rationalise away their behaviour over months or years of abuse or betrayal. Because when a worldview breaks, it can be painful.
The developmental psychologist Jennifer Garvey Berger’s work focuses on developing worldviews that are more fit for complexity. With each step, we have to let go of our old worldview – the mental model we use to understand the world – and rewrite it as a better approximation of reality.
Sometimes, she says, this takes place because something happens in our lives that means we can’t believe our previous worldview any more: something breaks it.
This can be a rush of insight and excitement as we see the world more clearly.
But for a security guard at Harrods who stood by as woman after woman was assaulted on his watch, it won’t feel like that.
For a husband or wife who has betrayed the person they promised not to betray over and over and over again, there won’t be excitement.
For that kind of person, I expect the breaking of the worldview is tragic.
Once you know what you have done, once your worldview that ‘I’ll tell him soon,’ or ‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ or ‘Maybe she likes it’ is broken.
Suddenly, the ways your psychology has rationalised it are shown up for the fraud they are and everything looks different: and it is much more effective worldview; a much better approximation of reality.
Then all that’s left is that you have become the kind of person you always swore you’d never be. And you can’t believe you didn’t see it before.
Where is the peace in that?
Where is your honour?
All of us will have worldviews that break, times we see that we have behaved in ways we regret, although hopefully not with that level of tragedy. When that happens, we only really have two honourable moves.
First, a promise: never again.
Then, action: how can I make amends?
To make amends is meaningful for other people involved. But also for you: to move back to a life of honour.
To move towards a place where, at the end of your life, you can look back and be at peace with yourself.
Everyone who perpetrates disasters or lets them happen will have good reasons: a job to be lost, fear for safety or of what others will think.
Sometimes even life or death: it can be a powerful reflection to consider the soldiers in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union: the ones who switched on the gas chambers or facilitated the Gulag atrocities. Were they all evil people, or did they, perhaps, simply move towards those horrific actions one step at a time? Gradually dehumanising the people they did it to, gradually increasing their justification, gradually normalising more and more extreme behaviour?
Perhaps they knew what they were doing was bad, but said, ‘If I don’t do this, it won’t help the person: someone else will end up doing it to them.’
Perhaps they thought, ‘If I don’t do this, I’ll be where they are. I’ll be killed.’
And the question we might ask ourselves is: are there some things that are worth dying for?
Or, in the modern workplace, are there some things that are worth laying down our sense of safety and security for?
Would I rather keep this job, or be able to look myself in the eye and know I did everything I could about what this terrible man is doing to these women?
Will You Let This Happen or Will You Do the Hard Thing That Is Right?
To come through a corporate career – in business, in government, in a charity – with our honour intact is no mean feat.
In every sector, the forces of systems, power, customs, ‘how things are done’ and more pull at us.
Most of us, hopefully, won’t find ourselves asked the kinds of questions that Al-Fayed’s staff were forced to ask themselves.
But we will all be stretched by the systems we operate in.
All of us will have to answer questions like: will you let this happen? Will you acquiesce or even help it along? Or will you do that hard thing that is right?
Are you willing to do this? Or are you willing to not do it even if it means compromising who you really are?
I hope that you will never have something break your worldview to find you’ve become the kind of person you always swore you’d never be.
I hope to God that I won’t, either.
But I’m realistic: I can’t guarantee I won’t.
I’m a human in the currents of the world.
Great forces are at play.
But I know there are things we can do to hold onto the tiller of the boat and steer it through the rapids more skilfully, remaining more at peace with ourselves, even as the outcomes we want may sometimes drift away from us.
There are things we can do to prepare ourselves for when the world challenges us, tempts us, or asks us to compromise who we are.
And the stories we love can give us the clues.
A Man Got to Have a Code
‘A man got to have a code.’
Those words are spoken by Omar Little (played by Michael K Williams) to Bunk (played by Wendell Pierce) in the iconic 2000s television show, The Wire. In fact, they are spoken both ways between those two characters in different parts of the series.
Omar is one of the most iconic characters in a show full of iconic characters. He holds my affection (and many other people’s) throughout his time on the show, despite his extensive violence and crime. And that is quite something in a show famous for its shades of grey: where almost no one remains likeable the whole way through.
And yet, Omar does.
Because Omar is a man of honour.
When Omar says the words above to Bunk from a jail in season 4, he senses that Bunk, a detective, is being swept by the current: Bunk’s values stretched, being asked and challenged by the complexity of his work to leave Omar to be found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit. And this is somewhat justifiable: there are many crimes Omar did commit and hasn’t been held to account for. And yet this one, he didn’t do. It is in his own interests to remind Bunk of this, using Bunk’s own words back to him to challenge the detective.
But, perhaps, it is also in Bunk’s interest. If he crosses the line here, helping a man be put in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, where might it end?
Omar knows something about honour: he knows it matters. And he has a code.
‘I mean, don’t get it twisted, I do some dirt too,’ he says to Bunk in season 1. ‘But I ain’t never put my gun on nobody who wasn’t in the game.’
Bunk replies: ‘A man must have a code.’
‘Oh, no doubt.’
Omar’s code is this: when someone is in the drug game, there are no rules. But to touch someone outside the game is something he would never do. That’s what keeps him at peace with himself in the midst of the kind of turbulent world that most of us can barely imagine.
The great honourable characters in many of our stories have this in common: they have a code. Mostly it is implicit, but occasionally explicit.
In The Walking Dead, long-standing character Carol Peletier says of Daryl Dixon: ‘Daryl has a code. The world needs men like that.’ Despite his appearance as a brazen, surly redneck, and in the face of the other characters not trusting Daryl, Carol knows she can count him.
Because she recognises that he has a code: that he won’t be swept along by the forces at play in their terrible post-apocalyptic world, where humans are becoming savages. And that means something for the audience, too, as we watch Daryl’s character develop over many years into the show’s surprising protagonist.
In the short term, Carol is proved right: Daryl had reunited with his brother, Merl, a bad influence on him, a man who caved to the forces of the pre-disaster world, let alone those in the show. But, faced with the decision of whether to rob a family with Merl, Daryl does the right thing. He listens to what he knows is right. He follows the code that Carol knows he has as he grows and stays strong even with everything he has to face.
David Gemmell’s greatest character, Druss the Legend, sets off on a quest to find a young woman abducted from his village. On his way, he meets a warrior who teaches him ‘the iron code’:
‘Never violate a woman, nor harm a child. Do not lie, cheat or steal. These things are for lesser men. Protect the weak against the evil strong. And never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the pursuit of evil.’
An uncompromising code in a world of violence: Druss is even warned not to take it as his own without thought. And yet he does, and it guides him: holding him back from the paths that his violence could have taken him down; allowing him to steer through a world of forces that wash away the honour of many others.
Towards the end of his life, Druss is filled with doubt.
‘I shall die soon,’ he says. ‘And what will I have achieved in my life? I have no sons nor daughters. No living kin... Few friends. They will say, “Here lies Druss. He killed many and birthed none”.’
‘They will say more than that," responds Virae, one of his companions in his final, seemingly hopeless battle. ‘They'll say, “Here lies Druss the Legend, who was never mean, petty nor needlessly cruel. Here was a man who never gave in, never compromised his ideals, never betrayed a friend, never despoiled a woman and never used his strength against the weak.” They'll say “He had no sons, but many a woman asleep with her babes slept more soundly for knowing Druss stood with the Drenai.”
That is only possible – in Druss’s world – because he had the code.
In Gemmell’s retelling of the siege of Troy, Andromache gives us a clue of the value of a code of honour in the face of the currents of the world as she says to Hekabe: ‘I may be stupid, as you say, to believe in honour and friendship and loyalty without price. But these are virtues to be cherished, for without them we are no more than beasts roaming the land.’
That is the power of the code: how do we hold ourselves to the higher parts of humanity, when the currents of our organisations and societies pull us towards the baser parts? How do we ensure we are far more than beasts roaming the corridors of our companies?
In probably the most famous line of any comic book ever, Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben says to Parker, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’
Parker, having been granted his special powers by the radioactive spider, is making money from wrestling. He has the opportunity to stop a robber who has stolen money from the wrestling promoter.
He lets the man run past even though he could easily have stopped him.
Not my job. Not my money. Not my problem.
This is my favourite example of what the mythologist Joseph Campbell calls the refusal of the call: it happens to all of us. We all have these little chances to stand up for what is right; even when it’s easier to do nothing, to make the small, ‘harmless’ compromise.
But will we find peace?
The power of this example of the refusal of the call lies in its tragedy. Later, Parker comes across the scene of a robbery, where his Uncle Ben has been hurt and – in the end – killed. By the man Parker could have stopped.
First, never again.
Second, how can I make amends?
From then on – implicitly at least – Parker has a code: to not stand by when he could have done something. To take his power and his responsibility.
Each of us in our lives has great power.
Even when we don’t feel like it, time after time we have choices about how the world will turn out. The future turns on tiny moments, microshifting towards heaven or hell. Will I tell the person who has dropped something from her pocket even though I’m in a rush, or will I let her realise she’s lost it later with great regret? Will I hand in £5 or keep it for myself? Will I hold my patience with my child or let the anger out?
Will I let this thing slide or will I take this call to adventure?
‘Will I betray my spouse again today?’
‘Will this woman be ushered into the room with Al-Fayed? Will this one?’
I Will Not Walk By
On Michael Trugman’s podcast, Mike’s Search for Meaning, as he and I talked about Leading With Honour, I tell a different Druss the Legend story.
Partway through a quest, Druss and his companions hear a scream coming from a wooded dell. Druss walks in to stop the robbery and torture of two people who have nothing to do with their quest.
His companions, against their better judgment, come to his aid in the end, but are furious with him. Their mission put at risk, and for what?
But Druss knows. His code tells him.
Protect the weak.
Never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into pursuit of evil.
To ‘not walk by’ is more important than any task to Druss, even as his companions explain how not completing their quest (which was put at risk by walking into the dell to face the unknown) could have caused death or tragedy for many more than two people.
But Druss knows something they don’t: he knows that the small compromises can lead anywhere.
He knows how important it is to not let things slip even an inch in the places that matter, because of the risks of what might follow.
He knows what, at the end of his life, honour gives him: it gives him peace and the knowledge that he did the right thing regardless of the outcomes.
The screams he walked by may be with him forever.
Walking into the dell was the right thing to do.
He knows that because of his code, and nothing about greater context changes that.
Some things are worth dying for.
Kwame Scruggs, a cultural mythologist and teacher, uses myth to connect with young people and adults.
Myths, he says, are false on the outside but true on the inside. They are stories that have never been but will always be. They aren’t just for putting children to sleep but for waking adults up.
And so, what can we take from these modern myths, to help ourselves wake up?
We can take our codes.
The Decision-Making Power of a Code
Jennifer Garvey Berger says that in today’s complex world our minds get ‘trapped by control’ because they evolved for simpler times, and that we run the risk of expending all our energy trying to control the uncontrollable; this lowers effectiveness and raises stress. When we are at risk of being trapped by control, we must look instead for ways to enable.
We might ask, ‘What can I enable?’ or ‘How can I create the conditions for good things to happen here?’
As we are washed along in the rapids of complexity and life, we can’t predict how things will go.
In a complex world, being sure of what to do in most situations is an impossibility for our mind.
And yet, like Druss or Omar or Daryl or Andromache, in the moment, most of us can feel when something is clearly right or clearly wrong. Especially if we train ourselves to do it.
So how, then, do we do that, so that can we live honourably?
How can we answer that powerful question about our lives and honour: what can I do so that, regardless of the outcome, I can be at peace with myself?
One way is to create a code.
A code will guide our decision-making when it is active: when we slow down and think about what to do: for Omar, do I pull the trigger or not?
And that active decision-making, as Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking Fast and Slow, will inform our intuition. And so a code can then guide us in the intuitive moments when there is no time to think: do I walk past the scream in the dell, or do I go down?
Your code likely won’t look like Omar’s or Druss’s – most of us (thankfully) operate in very different worlds to those two characters.
But we, too, can have a set of rules or principles. An iron code to live by; or a set of ideas to live into.
We can find things to guide us when we are faced with seemingly impossible choices: one part of us calling us on, perhaps, towards our overarching quest; another saying that being pulled off course to another task is the right thing to do.
These things can tell us why we feel uncomfortable and not at peace.
They can help us understand why we find someone’s behaviour unacceptable – or, worse, find our own behaviour unacceptable.
They can guide our decision-making when we need it most.
Here, below, are five ways to create a code to help you live and lead with honour in the face of a complex world.
1) Define Your Values
Here’s one of my codes:
Courage, honour, vulnerability, truth.
When faced with a seemingly impossible decision, I can ask:
Where do courage, honour, vulnerability and truth take me here?
Or, what would courage, honour, vulnerability and truth have me do?
Or, when I’m full of self doubt, what would someone who was actually brave, honourable, vulnerable and honest do here?
I can choose these as the conditions that enable everything.
I can make them my rules to live by: first explicitly, as above, and then implicitly – training my intuition to notice when one choice helps me follow the code, and another takes me away.
And if, at the end of my life, I can say I lived a life of courage, honour, vulnerability and truth, will I be at peace with myself?
For me: yes. That sounds like a life well-lived. Although your code may be different.
We can check it by asking the reverse: A life of fear, dishonour, false invulnerability and lies? Well… the answer is clear.
Defining our values can be easier said than done.
It was an intuitive exercise that opened my eyes to these four, where more rational exercises (‘choose three values from this list’) had created a list but not one that touched my heart. Not one, really, that I would have believed in enough to make it my code.
But those rational exercises can be powerful too, if we put them to use. Find a list of values and choose the ones that resonate the most. Ask yourself: what are the qualities you most admire in others? What is the Higher Self I aspire to be actually like? What qualities define it?
Or, just: what values really matter to me? And then narrow it down. Aim for 3-5 (any more makes it a hard code to live by).
2) Define Your Shadow Values
Druss and Omar’s codes feel like this to me: a code defined by who I will definitively not be.
I will not lie, cheat or steal.
I will not harm anyone who is not in the game.
Sometimes, defining our values by what makes our skin crawl in others is easier than defining them by what we aspire to be, and it can be just as powerful as a code… if not even more so.
What are the things that you see in others, or have had done to you, for which you might make the vow: I will never do that to someone else.
I will not gossip about others behind their back.
I will not betray a friend.
I will not play politics.
I will not let ‘best practice’ make me compromise how I treat anyone.
Those behaviours are for lesser people.
What behaviours do you hate in other people? Use those to create the code that will let you live honourably, that will let you be at peace with who you have been.
It may seem inconceivable that you would become what you hate.
But it doesn’t start like that.
It starts with the small steps that become the great transgressions. The code will help protect you.
3) Protect Yourself From the Biggest Temptations
Druss’s code does something else, too. It specifies the challenges that his world is likely to throw at a man who is an expert in war and combat.
Omar’s code is the same: I operate in this world. If I step beyond this line, where will it end?
Both codes remind the characters that there are pebbles that could create a landslide that will end up with his equivalent of the Enron or Al-Fayed scandals.
You can do that, too. Here are two ways to do it:
First, ask yourself: what do people who have roles like me end up doing that I don’t like?
When a rockstar sleeps with someone who is not their wife while on tour it’s clear they haven’t thought about this. They’re away for a long time; alcohol is often involved; there are fans and power dynamics at play. To stay honourable: pay attention to the biggest temptations.
If you are someone who travels a lot for work, then that question may bring the same as the rockstars: people who have roles like me often end up having affairs.
But it may be other things: maybe people in roles like mine end up ‘employing their friends above better candidates’ or ‘letting meetings run on in a way that disrupts everyone’s day’ or ‘only listening to people more senior than them’ or ‘favouring more attractive people in their decision-making’.
What are the day-to-day challenges of your work, where a compromise to your values is most likely to happen?
Make them conscious and make them your code.
Another way to think about it is this:
What are the things that you will not do even if your boss or a senior colleague asks you to do them?
What are the things that someone with more positional power might ask of you that would be worth losing a relationship or even your job over?
Again, it may come more easily by thinking of the times in the past that you or other people have done something that you would never want to do, because they were asked to by a senior colleague.
The systems and power in organisations can take us down alleys we would never have expected to go down. And they are hard to resist: doing what we are told by people in positions of power is something that is trained into us.
Resisting it in the moment can be hard. The moments to resist can pass us by until later we realise we have compromised who we are.
That is why creating a code matters.
I will never present false data.
I will never cover up someone’s infidelity.
I will always blow the whistle.
I won’t hang anyone out to dry with senior leadership just to make myself look good.
Know these in advance.
It doesn’t mean the moments won’t sometimes slip by you: you might find yourself having broken your code.
But at least you’ll know you’ve broken it.
Then you won’t slip further next time, and further still the time after, until you wake up as someone you don’t recognise.
4) Leverage Your Guilt
Guilt can get a bad rap.
Yes, it can be a destructive feeling, riddling us with regret. But if you’re going to feel it, you might as well leverage it into a way to transform yourself into a person of honour.
As Brené Brown defines it, guilt is ‘I did bad’; as opposed to shame: ‘I am bad’.
Shame is a scourge of our times. Guilt can be a compass to the person we really want to be. The person we know we could be – can be in fact – on our best days.
A compass to a code.
Early on in my business – and I can see this conversation as clearly as if it was yesterday – I really messed up a conversation with a client. REALLY. MESSED. UP.
She and I had contracted for six coaching sessions over three months. And after three sessions, the transformation in the client was extraordinary.
It remains one of the starkest changes I’ve ever seen. One of those amazing stories where she even looked different. She sounded different. Because of the powerful work we had done.
It was one of the most powerful pieces of work I had done at that point.
It is still one of the most powerful pieces of work I’ve done.
And yet you won’t see a satisfied testimonial from that client, and she has never referred a friend or colleague to me, and we haven’t worked together again over the years as I have with other clients.
Because I really messed up a conversation.
You see, money had been tight for her when we had agreed the fee. And she had got what she wanted. After only half the work.
She had only paid half of the fee up front, and she wanted to stop halfway through.
This had never happened to me before. I didn’t know what to do. There was nothing about this in the Coaching Agreement we had.
And money was tight for me, too.
So I tried something. If I give myself credit, I did speak to her with courage and honesty. But not with skill. I tried to express what was happening for me. Essentially: we’ve done the work; it’s been amazing… you’ve got MORE than you could have imagined possible, more than I could have imagined possible. Why should I be financially penalised for that?
I said that, but not with skill.
The conversation ended with the client storming away from me: something which has never happened in a professional conversation for me before or since.
She sent me some more money.
And I can honestly say I have never been less happy to be paid money than in that moment.
It felt all wrong. I sent it back.
I knew something was up.
How we might say it now was: I hadn’t acted honourably.
I was not at peace with myself.
There are many lessons to be taken from that experience, but one of them was this: in my business, no amount of money is worth destroying a relationship.
I knew I would rather have had the relationship intact than the money she paid me; I’d rather have had the relationship intact than all the money that we had originally agreed. I would have wanted the testimonial, the referrals, yes. But more importantly: the relationship intact, with this person with whom I had been on an incredible journey.
From that was born a part of my code: I will never put money above relationships in my business. I will always choose long-term gain over short-term gain.
That code has served me well: guiding me in many moments, and leading clients and prospective clients to comment on how I do business.
It’s not easy: it sometimes creates more financial scarcity and struggle in the short term. But I’m at peace with that: because I know what it will create in the long term.
Our regrets can change us for the better if we look at them – really look at them – learn from them, and then say: never again.
It’s an act of real courage to do that, but it guides us to peace, to a life we can be proud of, to a life of honour.
5) Marinate In Your Mortality
We only get – as far as we know – this one, precious life.
One of the few things we can be certain of is that this life will end.
As I once heard the author Fred Kofman say, rather brutally: the best case is you die after your parents and before your children.
That’s the best case.
Many of us ignore our mortality.
But instead, we can sit with it. Marinate in it.
We can joy in it: in some ways, our knowledge of our impending death is what makes life precious.
The moments of connection, love, beauty and more take on new significance when we know that we won’t have them forever.
That there will never be enough time.
An honourable life can only be lived in the knowledge of this.
And the knowledge that, deep down, some things are more important than life.
The old myths of honour are full of this kind of sacrifice: people dying in aid of a cause that matters to them; a god, a nation, a love. Dying in aid of something greater than themselves.
Myths, as Kwame Scruggs said, are here to wake us up.
The tales of people laying down their lives in service of something greater than themselves are there to remind us that one of the most meaningful things we can do is make sacrifices for what is right.
Thankfully, most people in the 21st Century never have to think about laying down their lives.
But if we don’t have to sacrifice our lives, we may be given the opportunity to sacrifice money, a job, a promotion, status, relationships and more, in honour of something we believe in.
We can use the knowledge of our mortality to help us know when to do this.
We can ask ourselves: what makes a life well-lived?
What is so important to me that, in the end, if it had or hadn’t happened, I would not be at peace with myself?
One of the most powerful ways I have found to do this is to borrow an exercise I learned from David Treleaven, and ask my clients a question like this:
What would make you sad at the end of your life?
And what else? And what else?
We can then take that list and invert each point into a commitment to live into: a code that describes what I will and will not do.
I would be sad if I hadn’t done work I can be really proud of can become, I am a commitment to doing work I can be proud of.
I would be sad if I had been so busy I had missed moments of magic and joy with my family can become I am a commitment to noticing moments of magic and joy with my family, not being so busy I miss them.
I would be sad if I had let fear stop me from taking the steps I wanted to take can become I am a commitment to not letting fear stop me from taking the steps I want to take.
I would be sad if I hid my voice and didn’t speak up when it mattered can become I am a commitment to not hiding my voice and to speaking up when it matters.
I would be sad if I hadn’t been there for the people I love when they needed me can become I am a commitment to being there for the people I love when they need me.
I would be sad if I had missed important moments in my daughters’ lives can become I am a commitment to being there for the important moments in my daughters’ lives.
These commitments can become a powerful code. (The phrasing ‘I am a commitment to…’ is important, bringing the commitment into the present moment, manifesting it through a force of will, embodying it and inviting it into being.)
I am a commitment to doing work I can be proud of.
I am a commitment to noticing moments of magic and joy with my family, not being so busy I miss them.
I am a commitment to not letting fear stop me from taking the steps I want to take.
I am a commitment to not hiding my voice and to speaking up when it matters.
I am a commitment to being there for the people I love when they need me.
I am a commitment to being there for the important moments in my daughters’ lives.
Those are what comes up for me: yours will be different. They will be beautiful and meaningful: every person I’ve done this exercise with has created a code that has the power to touch them deeply and touch me deeply.
Now, when faced with challenges, I have a code. I can look at those commitments.
I can sit with them.
And I can ask, how much am I a commitment to these things today?
Or, when faced with a dilemma, I can ask: if I am a commitment to these things, then what do I do?
Our codes guide us in the most important moments
In the crucial moments – Druss when he hears the scream, Daryl when his brother returns and starts to lead him astray – our codes guide us.
I am full of gratitude for all the people out there who - even when it was hard - have drawn a line and said: I will not walk by this. All the whistles blown, complaints made, minds changed. But more than that: all the people in leadership positions who choose to do things the right way because it’s the right way to do things. Who do the hard things when faced with those moments of choice.
And that’s what I’d ask of you.
When you’re faced with it: the chance to make someone redundant in line with policy in a way that makes you sick; the opportunity to stab someone in the back for gain; the chance to lie to make a sale; the choice about whether to travel across the city for a friend when you’re tired; the choice about whether to miss the primary school nativity or be there; the decision to compromise integrity just that little bit more; the decision about whether it’s time to lay your job on the line to try to stop the next cycle of abuse of power.
When you’re faced with it, use your code to guide you.
It will take you beyond the rules and cultural norms and beyond what you are told to do by your boss. You are writing your own rules for a life of honour, creating your own unique recipe for a life well-lived. Your code will remind you that there are some things that you won’t do even if your boss asks you to or if everyone else is doing it.
As a leader, the decisions we make are many and we can never know which is for the best or which will lead us to the outcomes we are working towards.
We can never know when we are slipping that first inch towards our (hopefully smaller) version of the extramarital affair or Enron or the Al-Fayed scandal.
That’s the challenge of a complex workplace in a complex organisation in a complex world.
And so we need to look to success beyond success: to leading with honour as we skilfully navigate the minefields we face.
Create a code of honour so that you can navigate those moments with more skill.
You may even face the bigger moments: the moments when you really have to choose.
The kinds of moments staff at Enron or Harrods may have faced.
In the crucial moments, remember your code.
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Read the first blog in this series - Leading With Honour - here.
Read the second blog in the series - The Transformational Practice of Telling the Truth - here.