A leadership lesson from Kemi Badenoch
In February, Kemi Badenoch took her MPs and their aides off to an away day in Buckinghamshire and sat Sir Alex Younger down in front of them. He ran MI6 for six years and died in June. He wasn't there because he was a Tory. He was there to talk about what power actually costs you.
According to Badenoch, his warning went something like this: "Once you are in government, there is no time to construct first principles." Work out how you think before the crises turn up, or you spend the whole job reacting to them one at a time.
At the weekend, first day of Tory conference, she published her answer. It's called The Right Way, and it's 95 pages of principles first and policy later, deliberately modelled on Thatcher's The Right Approach from October 1976.
You don't have to like her politics to see what she's doing. I'm no Kemi fanboy and there's plenty I don't agree with. However, she's doing the thing nearly every new leader skips, whether they're running a country or a team of three, which is working out what she actually stands for while the pressure's off.
Because once it's on, it's too late. Ask Keir Starmer.
The management lesson: A clear why buys you a lot of patience. Your team will swallow a decision they hate if they understand why you made it. If they can't see the reason, every unpopular call just looks like a whim, and after a few of those they stop giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Has she actually done it?
I went into The Right Way expecting to be a bit sniffy. At last year's conference her principles came as a list. Personal responsibility, free enterprise, family, freedom of speech. Four nouns. You could put them on a mug.
There's a study I use a lot on this. Researchers at MIT compared the official values of 500-odd companies with what 1.2 million employees actually said it was like to work there. No correlation. None. For a few of them, collaboration being one, it actually ran the wrong way.
What does work is pretty boring I'm afraid, and it's one of the best-replicated findings in behavioural science. Across 94 studies, people who decided in advance "when X happens, I do Y" followed through at far higher rates than people who just meant to do better. You decide in the calm so you're not making it up in the moment, which is basically Younger's point with a meta-analysis attached.
This time it's mostly decisions, which surprised me. Before any new regulation, a minister has to say what would happen without it. Half of every pound saved goes on the deficit, so no promising tax cuts she can't pay for. That's a principle that costs her something.
None of it's been tested yet, though. Writing it in opposition is the easy bit. Whether it's worth anything won't be known until sticking to one of these rules loses her a vote.
The management lesson: A principle only counts if it tells you what to do when it's inconvenient. "I value honesty" doesn't. "When someone brings me bad news, I thank them before I ask a single question" does.
What managers can take from this
Do it before you need it. Younger's warning works just as well for your first month as a manager as it does for a new government. Once the problems start landing you'll be too busy reacting to think straight.
Decisions, not adjectives. "When I see work that's not up to standard, I say something that day." If a line could sit on a company values poster, it isn't doing anything, so rewrite it.
Your own words, kept rough. Copying someone else's list does nothing, and polishing it turns it into a performance. It's for you first.
Reopen it before the hard stuff. The big conversation, the new hire, the promotion. The ones that work get read and scribbled on, ideally the night before you need them.
So when drawing these up, make sure they're a "when this happens, I do that".
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Arran Russell
Founder, Set The Tone
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Ps: I get every manager on my programmes to build one of these. If you want the template we use, reply "principles" and I'll send it over.
