Leadership Principle Worksheet
This worksheet was designed to share how I align my experience with Amazon’s Leadership Principles. I’ve written down a couple of detailed examples from my experience that relate to each of Amazon’s Leadership Principles. Enjoy! Sandra Burns
Dive Deep: Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.
Example 1:
Situation: Projects sometimes go over deadlines costing time and money to fix.
Task: Figure out ways to keep projects on schedule.
Action: Whenever I take on a project I work the timeline backwards to see how much time I can a lot for each segment of the project. If I notice I am going over time allotted for a certain area, I tap into whomever I am working with on it to bring that to their awareness.
Result: I keep projects on time or provide early warnings for correction by involving who needs to be involved or getting answers from those needed to keep it going.
Example 2:
Situation: Spreadsheet or deadsheet?
Task: Look at the project timeline or spreadsheet and figure out ahead if it’s doable.
Action: At American Express they had a nice project plan that they sent to you in a spreadsheet. You could see due dates, who was on the project, the background of the project, why was it needed. All this information would help you in building the project.
Result: By having information ahead I can ask questions that may offer some help in the direction of understanding the project not only for me, but others, again bringing awareness to any foreseeable obstacles. Avoid scope creep.
Example 3:
Situation: Website, Instructional Design, projects.
Task: Dive Deep
Action: Whatever project I work on I have this simple QA I ask myself and others to start from whether info on the project is provided or not as these questions will come up at some point if not answered initially and they are: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, When?
Task: Simple right, well I dive a little deeper and list these things and under them I ask these 2nd level questions:
Who: Who is it for? Who does it help? Who will deploy it? Who will manage it? Who do I ask for more questions? Who decided we needed this?
What: What is it? What will it do? What is it for? What didn’t work before?
Where: Where is it? Where does it go? Where will it be seen?
Why: Why do you, they, we need it? Why are we doing this? Why now?
How: How will it be utilized? How does it work? How will this make a difference? How long should it take? How long should it be?
When: When does it needed to be implemented by? When will we know whatever we need to know? When will we get answers?
Result: Questions are the Answers to many issues on a project than can be avoided if only the questions are asked.
Sandra J. Burns, M.Ed. 