Personal Operating Principles Discovery
Derive how you lead by forcing your values down to three, then plotting your work style
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 88%
Before you can manage a team or build a company, you have to understand yourself. This framework crystallizes your personal operating principles by forcing a long list of values down to your core three (with the story behind each), then plotting your work-style tendencies on introvert/extrovert and task/people axes. The intersection becomes an articulated belief system that guides how you lead.
Origin
Claire Hughes Johnson's method from her book Scaling People, drawing on standard values-elicitation exercises and work-style assessments (Myers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram) synthesized into a self-awareness practice for leaders.
Core principles
- 01Management starts with you, not the team, the company, or the product
- 02Self-awareness is what builds mutual awareness
- 03The story behind a value is what makes it real and durable
- 04There is no judgment between values; different values make people effective for different reasons
- 05Your default tendencies plus your values combine into an almost belief-system-level operating style
How to run it
- 1
Force your values down from a menu
Take a published list of 70-80 values and narrow to 10, then 5, then force yourself to only 3 that matter most.
Pro tip Do it in dialogue with someone who knows you well so you have to explain why you cling to each one under pressure.
Watch out Skipping the forced reduction leaves you with a vague long list that doesn't actually guide decisions.
- 2
Surface the story behind each value
For each surviving value, identify the formative experience that made it so important to you. That story is the proof the value is real.
Pro tip Documenting 'here are my three top values and here's why' moves you into genuine self-discovery.
Watch out A value with no story behind it may be aspirational rather than truly yours.
- 3
Assess your work-style tendencies
Take work-style assessments (Myers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram) and treat the results as data, not verdicts.
Pro tip Claire takes all of them because it's just more data; most reduce to two axes anyway.
- 4
Plot yourself on the two axes
Locate yourself on introvert-extrovert and task-oriented vs people-oriented. E.g. extroverted + task = a director 'get it done' type; extroverted + people = charismatic vision-seller.
Pro tip The quadrant plus your top-three values reveals the ways you operate that make up who you are as a leader.
In the wild
A manager Claire worked with (called Eli in the book) held transparency as a paramount value, to the point of telling his team everything even before plans were finished. At an offsite he shared the story: as a child of seven or eight, his mother grew sick and no one told him what was happening until a stepfather took him to lunch to say she was gone. That formative experience explained and cemented the value.
→ Understanding the story behind the value made his behavior legible and manageable, and modeled the self-discovery the framework aims for.
Common mistakes
Thinking management starts with the team or the product
Leaders, especially founders, assume it starts with the product or the team, but skipping the work on yourself undermines the mutual awareness everything else depends on.
Listing values without narrowing or grounding them in a story
A broad, ungrounded list of values gives no real guidance; the forcing function to three plus the origin story is what makes them operative.
Is it for you?
Best for
New leaders and founders who have never explicitly articulated how and why they lead
Not ideal for
Anyone seeking a quick tactical fix; this is introspective work that assumes time and honesty
From the transcript
“self-awareness to build Mutual awareness is actually the most fundamental thing you need to crack”
“if you take a list of values and you say okay if I had to pick 10 of these that matter to me then if…”
“you usually have a story behind that value”
“are you more tasked if you kind of picture a horizontal and a vertical are you more task or people oriented”
From the episode
Lessons from scaling Stripe
Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe)