#22: Tenets

Tenets are at the core of #Amazon culture. We expect every team to have them. Though I had drafted and used tenets in the past, but had not seen them being used effectively. While we use leadership principles (like ownership, earn trust, invent and simplify) in everyday conversations, I found limited usage of tenets. As a result, I had never dived deep into ‘Why’ they were there or how to raise the bar on writing them.

So what are tenets? The standard definition is that it is a guiding principle or belief that helps teams align and bring everyone into an agreement around critical questions.

The perspective I understood recently is that Tenets are a tool to reduce the *bandwidth of a team’s leadership that goes in taking decisions*. There are some decisions or tradeoffs where you can codify so that if any team member faces that choice in their daily work, they can take those decisions themselves basis the tenets. They know that if they go to any leader in the org - the decision will remain the same. Reading tenets of any team should give you an understanding of what the team stands for, what is important to them, and how they make decisions.

It is difficult to write tenets. You have to think about scenarios where a team goes or may go to their leaders asking them to take a decision. Then, identify if you can standardize some of these decisions and then codify them into tenets. Tenets need not remain constant. As the team finds some questions or decisions which come up repeatedly, they should update their tenets. Tenets should also be memorable such that all team members remember them easily. And for everyone to remember them, their number should be 5 - 7 per team.