Welcome to the inaugural entry of our Leadership Excellence series. In this series, I’ll share personal insights and practical lessons on what it means to lead with integrity and purpose. It’s intended as a companion to the parallel series on the NASA TRL system and the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS).

While this series is heavily inspired by the teaching of the Thayer Leadership program, which I would highly recommend, I’ve scattered other inpriations and personal observations throughout.

Character

“Leadership is the capacity and will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence.” - Bernard Montgomery, British Field Marshal in WWI & WWII

Today, I invite you to explore a principle that has long resonated with me—character. In the Thayer programming, and in my own experience, character is the quiet force shaping every decision. As it is foundational to decision making, it foundational to leadership.

Just as observation of a phenomenon is the first step in technology development, developing character is the essential first step in nurturing leadership capacity. So what does that even mean?

First, think of people you believe to be persons of character. What do they do? What do they say? What do they believe? What do they value? Most importantly: do you trust that person?

Trust isn’t something that can be demanded, it must be earned through consistent, principled choices. I’ve witnessed teams thrive under leaders who stay true to their values: every decision reinforces trust and builds resilience.

At the heart of this is then clearly those values themselves.

“The value you add comes from the values you hold.” — John Adair

Our personal values serve as steadfast guideposts during times of uncertainty. As leaders we are called to live our values rather than merely articulating them, and when leaders align their actions with both personal and organizational principles, they create a cohesive and enduring culture of success.

In short: character is the sum of one’s values, their adherance to them, and the impact they have on those around them. By understanding, articulating, and being consistent in your values you build trust.

Personal Values

Embracing this means committing to a lifelong journey of self-improvement. This journey involves:

• Continuous self-reflection and honest assessment of ones own values
• Welcoming feedback that challenges our thinking
• Learning from missteps and turning failures into opportunities for growth
• Upholding ethical decision-making as a core commitment
• Pursuing ongoing personal and professional development

In moments of adversity, character shines. One prepares for this by building the muscles of character and leadership through daily practice. Write down, communicate, and share your values. Call on those close to you to call you out when you are not living up to them.

“The force of character is cummulative." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literally write them down, put them on notion or email them to people close to you, this is not a hypothetical exercise. It’s not easy to articulate something like a personal value, and it will take practice, edits, and iterations.

A Real Example

Values is a big word so this is going to be implemented in different ways for diffrent things. One concrete example is the concept of a Leadership Philosophy.

A leadership philosophy is a document published to the whole organization which describes how you view leadership in your own context. What you care about, what you believe to be true.

I’ve had some written and publicly posted version of this at all my jobs for many years, and as I experience new things will update it. I’ve multiple times had peers or subordinates call me out on not living up to items and every time it’s been the right thing.

This is the process, it’s a living document. Here’s mine as it stands today:

Leadership Philosophy

I run teams with a few guiding principles, and believe that documenting them, reflecting on them, and adjusting is beneficial to team health. If you ever see me acting contradictory to the following principles, call me out and let’s talk about it.

1. Value Autonomy and Trust: the best DS teams are comprised of bright capable technologists working in problem spaces they care about. I believe my role is to match highly capable people to those problem spaces (see 4) and do whatever it takes to get things out of their way. I will never view asking for help or making mistakes as a negative, and understand that DS is a high risk endeavor, most projects won’t work and that’s ok, we will learn from them all.
2. Strive for Async: the reality of our work is that it requires focused uninterrupted time, and that our team is distributed. Because of that we will strive for majority async communication and again high-trust environments. Writing and reading are key to this, as is discipline around what communication mediums to use when. Bias towards openness and transparency, and away from private synchronous mediums.
3. Context is King: our work will be successful if we can use the rich domain expertise available to us in conjunction with the data to create insights greater than the sum of parts. All of our decisions will have long term effects on people that don’t currently work here or use our products, so over document to allow those future peers the opportunity to share in the context we have and value.
4. Person-Work Fit: people do their best work on things they care about and are interested in. Take an active role in seeking out where that interest and care truly lie and work to align efforts as much as is possible. Work is work, and sometimes we have to do things because they’re needed, but aspire for that to be the exceptional cases.
5. Friendliness: people will generally do the work they’re required to do regardless, but people do their best work with people they want to work with. I think it’s important to always be polite, and further, to actively make an effort to be friendly, share jokes, have fun, and try to be a team that others want to work with.
6. Patience: when you feel that you have autonomy, you’re trusted, you have context, and you’re well fit to your work, it can feel like anything slowing you down is in your way and it’s easy to feel frustrated or slighted by that. I’ll strive to strike a healthy balance between aggressive pursuit of mission and respect and patience for the inevitable things that come up or peers with different priorities.

Conclusion

Character isn’t merely a trait: it’s the heartbeat of effective leadership.

In upcoming posts in this series, I’ll continue to go deeper into how effective leaders approach decision-making, foster innovation, and build resilient cultures for lasting success.