Leadership from the inside out: write the rules you already live by

A pattern I see often: the strategy is clear, the deck is good, the leadership team has signed up, and the organisation still hesitates. Not openly. Projects start a little slower than planned. Managers wait to see who gets funded. The people closest to the customer keep doing what they did last year, just in case.

They are not being obstructive. They are watching you. Before they commit their own energy, they want to know whether the person at the top will behave in a way that matches what the plan says. If the strategy asks for speed and you sit on every decision, they believe the behaviour. If it asks for candour and you punish bad news, they believe the behaviour. People follow what they can observe, not what they are told.

So my claim in this article is practical. Strategy sticks when it echoes the leader’s core, and the way to make that echo audible is to write down your personal operating rules, then test them honestly against where the organisation is going next. Leaders who do this close the say–do gap that quietly taxes every plan. Leaders who skip it keep buying change programmes to fix a problem that starts with them.

This goes one layer deeper than the chapter on leadership from the inside out. The chapter makes the case for character. This part is about the working mechanism.

Four layers from core to horizon

I use a simple chain. Beliefs are what you hold to be true about people, work and risk. Values are what you have decided matters most when those beliefs collide. Personal rules are the specific behaviours you commit to because of those values. Decisions are where the rules meet a real trade-off, and they are the only layer anyone else can see.

The focus area asks us to align beliefs, values and personal rules with the organisation’s next horizon. Most leaders work on the first two and skip the third. They can tell you they value transparency. They cannot tell you what transparency obliges them to do on a Thursday afternoon when the numbers are bad. That missing middle layer is why values so often end up as wallpaper, a point I return to in the core values of winning teams.

A personal rule has three properties. It is a behaviour, not an adjective. Someone else could check whether you kept it. And it costs you something to keep. “I value people” is not a rule. “I do not cancel a one-to-one with a direct report to make room for an internal meeting” is a rule. It is checkable, and in a busy week it hurts.

Internal clarity matters here. Tasha Eurich’s research defines internal self-awareness as how clearly you see your own values, passions, aspirations and reactions, and links it to higher job satisfaction and lower stress. You cannot write a rule from a value you have never named. If you have not yet done the outside-in work of finding out how you land, start with self and team awareness. Rules written without that data tend to describe the leader you would like to be.

The say–do gap has a price

It is tempting to treat word–deed consistency as a moral nicety. The research says it is closer to a line on the P&L.

Tony Simons, writing in Harvard Business Review in 2002, described a survey of more than 6,500 employees at 76 Holiday Inn hotels in the United States and Canada. Employees rated how closely their managers’ words and actions were aligned, which Simons calls behavioural integrity, using statements such as whether the manager delivers on promises. Hotels where employees strongly believed their managers followed through were substantially more profitable. Simons reports that a one-eighth point improvement on the five-point scale could be expected to increase a hotel’s profitability by 2.5% of revenues, which in that study meant more than $250,000 a year per hotel. No other single aspect of manager behaviour measured had as large an impact on profits.

Those are hotel managers, not chief executives. I do not think the effect gets smaller as you go up. It gets amplified, because every layer below you is reading your consistency to decide how much of their own to offer. When people believe the person at the top means it, they spend their discretionary effort on the plan. When they do not, they spend it on hedging. That is why the gap between saying and doing is the fastest way to lose the trust I describe in earning trust.

The purpose gap at the top

There is a second gap, and it sits between you and the people furthest from the boardroom.

McKinsey surveyed 1,021 US employees in August 2020. It found that 70 percent said their sense of purpose is largely defined by work. Yet while 85 percent of executives and upper management said they were living their purpose at work, only 15 percent of frontline managers and frontline employees agreed. Frontline colleagues were three times less likely than leaders to say they could see a connection between their daily work and the organisation’s purpose.

Read that as a CEO and the lesson is uncomfortable. Your own sense that the work is meaningful tells you almost nothing about how it feels two layers down. The same article found that people who had the chance to reflect on their own purpose, and how it connects to the company’s, were nearly three times more likely to feel their purpose was fulfilled at work. It also warns that leaders who approach purpose with inconsistency or hypocrisy are likely to do more harm than good. Inside-out leadership does not mean imposing your purpose on everyone else. It means being clear enough about yours that other people can see where theirs connects, and consistent enough that they believe it.

Rewrite the rules for the next horizon

Here is the part most leaders miss. The rules that made you successful were written for the last horizon. A founder’s rule such as “I review every customer proposal” is a sign of care at 40 people and a bottleneck at 400. The value underneath, care for the customer, is still sound. The rule that expresses it has expired.

Bill George and his colleagues, after interviewing 125 leaders about how they developed, concluded that authentic leaders are made, not born, and that they work hard at self-awareness and ask for honest feedback. I would add one discipline to that: they rewrite their rules when the job changes, without abandoning the values.

Old rule	Why it worked	What the next horizon needs	Rewritten rule
I review every customer proposal	Quality and speed with a small team	Managers who own the customer	I review the top five accounts and coach the rest
I make the final call on every hire	Culture held while the team was small	Leaders who hire well without me	I interview for values; the hiring manager decides
I fix problems myself, fast	Credibility as the person who delivers	A team that solves without escalation	I ask two questions before I offer a solution
I never show doubt in public	Confidence in a fragile early stage	Candour about risk from the whole table	I name the biggest risk first in every update
I protect my team from the board	Loyalty that kept people focused	Executives who can face the board themselves	I bring one direct report to each board meeting

Notice what stays constant in each row. The value does not move. The behaviour does. That is the difference between growth and drift, and it is also the honest answer to the founder who says “but that is not who I am”. It may not be who you were. It is the person the organisation now needs you to practise being. The founder-to-CEO transition is largely this exercise, done under pressure.

Arguments

The case for

The commercial case rests on observation. People commit to what they can see the leader do, and the evidence on behavioural integrity suggests that consistency between words and actions is associated with real differences in profit. The purpose research points the same way from another angle: the gap between how leaders and frontline employees experience meaning at work is large, and it narrows when people can see the connection and reflect on it.

Writing rules down helps because it converts values into something checkable. You can ask your team whether you kept a rule. You cannot easily ask whether you were sufficiently courageous this month.

The case against

The strongest objection comes from Herminia Ibarra, whose Authenticity Paradox argues that a simplistic understanding of authenticity can hinder a leader’s growth and limit their impact. Leaders who define themselves by a fixed set of rules can use “this is who I am” to refuse the very behaviour a bigger role demands. On that view, writing down your rules risks freezing you.

A second objection is that organisations should run on systems, not on the personality of the person at the top. Strategy that depends on the leader’s inner life is fragile; it leaves with them. Better, the argument goes, to build processes that work regardless of who is in the chief executive role.

A third is that in some moments values are a luxury. In a cash crisis or a turnaround the job is triage, and a CEO agonising over whether a cut matches their personal rules may simply be slow.

When is the opposite true? When the organisation is genuinely mature, with strong governance and a deep bench, the leader’s personal rules matter less day to day. And when the leader is new in post, it is often wiser to learn the culture before publishing rules about it.

Where I stand

I take Ibarra’s warning seriously, which is exactly why I separate values from rules. Values should be stable. Rules should be rewritten whenever the horizon changes. That is the opposite of freezing. And I agree that systems matter, but systems are designed and enforced by people. If the leader breaks the rule the system encodes, the system loses.

In my seven-step coaching process, this work starts in Step 1, Vision, where we link your personal values with the organisation’s strategic horizon and agree what success looks like. It becomes visible in Step 4, Influence, where the rules shape how you lead through others. And it is tested in Step 6, Impact, where we track whether the behaviour changed and whether the organisation noticed. My condition is simple: if the rules do not show up in decisions within a month, they are a values statement in disguise, and we start again.

Try this

Write your personal operating rules. It takes an hour, and the first draft will be wrong, which is the point.

1. List the five decisions you made last month that cost you something. For each, write the value you were protecting.
2. Turn each value into a rule. One sentence, a behaviour, checkable by someone else. If it could appear on a corporate poster, rewrite it.
3. Test each rule against the next horizon. Ask: would this rule help or block the organisation we are trying to become in three years? Rewrite the ones that block.
4. Publish three. Choose the rules that most affect how other people work, and tell your leadership team what they can expect from you.
5. Ask for a monthly score. At the end of each month, ask two people where you kept the rules and where you broke them. Write down their words.

Then sit with these questions:

• Which of my current rules was written for a company we no longer are?
• What would the frontline say my real rules are, judged only by what they have seen me do?
• Where is the gap between what I say in town halls and what I do in budget meetings?
• Which rule would I break first under pressure, and what would it cost the organisation?

Where to go next

The rules you write here will be tested hardest when success makes them feel optional, which is the subject of the temptations of successful leaders. They also need a clear destination to align with, so if the horizon itself is fuzzy, start with transferring vision effectively. In this chapter, winning is an inside job covers the private preparation that keeps your rules intact when the room gets hot.

I learned in cycling that a rider’s private standards decide the race long before the public sees it, and I write about that on from elite sport to the boardroom. If you want to do this work one-to-one, read about executive coaching, or book a confidential 30-minute conversation and bring the decision that most tested your rules this quarter.