Amazon’s Leadership Principles

Best Practices for Developing Effective LPs

1. Identify the behaviors of role model leaders in your organization today. Interviews and surveys can uncover specific leadership skills from your best leaders. Seek to capture and distill these into principles. Usually, what makes a company successful is what it does differently. Try to figure out what those are during the exercise.
2. Balance what your leaders do well and exhibit today vs what they need to do going forward. Strive to have your list of LPs reflect a balance between what you do well today and what you need to start doing well tomorrow. The right balance will inform what kinds of new leaders you need to hire and how to develop your leaders going forward. It is appropriate for some LPs to be aspirational, but you must be mindful of the change management process required to make them a reality.
3. Your LPs must be a minimum set of characteristics that you will use to evaluate new and current leaders at your company. One of the most vital ways that Amazon’s principles are reinforced is that they are the criteria used to assess candidates in the Bar Raiser hiring process, plus performance management and leadership development.
4. Necessary and Sufficient. A list that is necessary and sufficient is best. Don’t boil the ocean– you can always add more later. A shorter list that is carefully crafted and will endure for the next ten years is better than a long list where several fade from relevance. There is no right number. Start with between five and ten. You can always add more later.
5. Put on Your Branding Hat. Make the name of each LP quirky or unique to your company to make it resonate. For example, if you have an LP about teamwork, don’t call it “Teamwork.” Instead, come up with a name or phrase that is catchy and reflects your culture, like “Be a Good Wingman,” “Got Your Back,” or “No ‘I’ in Team.”
6. Carefully Crafted Descriptors. After each LP, write two or three sentences to describe the principle concisely. As you do this, picture a new leader entering your company and consider whether your description is specific enough to enable you to evaluate them based on their past work. Writing the descriptors is hard, and it will take many drafts. The CEO and their executive team must devote considerable time to this effort.  Jeff and the S-team worked on the first ten LPs for nearly a year before they were finalized. This edit and revision is time well spent and will show in the final product.
7. Decision-making. They must be *The* lens through which leaders in your company think, make decisions, and act. When you (C-Level leaders) are not in the room, the team can fall back on the LPs to make decisions.
8. Reinforce your LPs with processes. Good intentions don’t work; mechanisms and processes do. You must weave your LPs into every core operating process.
9. Teaching and talking about your LPs is a continuous process. As Jeff once said, “…if you are tired of talking about the LPs, you aren’t doing it often enough.”
10. Everyone is a leader. Effective LPs aren’t just for the C-Suite or managers; they apply to everyone in your organization in a salaried role.
11. Hiring & Performance Management. Do your LPs capture the leadership qualities you want in a new hire? Are these the criteria you would rely on to coach and develop your team members? If other (non-technical or job-related) criteria are not captured in your list of LPs, you need to add them or remove them from the hiring process.
12.  Healthy tension(s) are OK. For example, Dive Deep and Think Big have some natural tension, which is expected. Ensure you are prepared to explain how these tensions play out.