1) Do It Right
I believe in doing the job right the first time, even if takes longer. This belief makes sense if even the most minor mistakes cost lives or the tiniest change adds millions to the cost. The role of beliefs in leadership in safety-critical projects is literally life-or-death. When you're building things that you can't afford to let fail, you'd better believe in getting things right the first time.
2) Do It Fast
I believe that the sooner I get a prototype of our minimum viable product into the customer's workflow, the faster we can iterate toward the customer's perfect solution. When the customer says things like, "It's exactly what I asked for, but not what I wanted," you'll be thankful you're the kind of leader who favors speed over perfection. The key to customer satisfaction when nobody really knows what "perfection" even looks like is iteration. If you believe in speed and iteration, you'll succeed as an Agile leader. If you're a consummate perfectionist, you'll be chronically over budget with a lot of unhappy customers.
3) Do Both
I believe in using the right tool for the right job.
Yes, there is a way to complete tasks both correctly and quickly. You could use an agile methodology for the early prototyping stages of a safety-critical project, allowing room for failure without putting anyone at risk. Or, instead of handing over a minimum viable product to an actual customer, you could deliver it to a QA site and run a few iterations to perfect it.
Once you've decided which one of these statements best matches your beliefs, does that mean you can never change your mind? Of course not. In fact, there are advantages to adapting your beliefs to the job at hand. If you can identify when the role of beliefs in leadership is a toolkit rather than an ethical mandate, changing them makes you a more effective leader.
Beliefs as Morality
If you've honestly and thoroughly considered which beliefs are tools in the situational toolbox, then you should have some idea of which beliefs play a more constant, moralistic role in your leadership approach. When your moral urgency is aligned with your team, it motivates them to power through rough patches and maintain their drive to succeed.
Beliefs Determine Reality
"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." -William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
When your team is working late, why are they working late? Why are you? How can you all remain enthusiastic when the work has become a grind?
The ideal team plays what project manager Tom West called "Pinball": you win one game, you get to play another. Few teams are this motivated simply by the work itself. With your inspiration, they will play to win when they believe that winning matters far more than simply getting a paycheck.
Aligning Beliefs
You can't adapt your morality, or at the very least probably shouldn't — morality isn't a toolkit. This brings up the issue of alignment. If you're a leader in a religious institution or political organization that you don't actually believe in, you're either deceiving your teams to keep them motivated or they're going to see you as an outsider rather than an inspiring leader.
To motivate your team and yourself, it's important to align your beliefs with the mission. A leader must also have a moral framework to handle internecine conflict. Otherwise, teams might turn on each other and blame you.
To be a leader, you must inspire, and inspiration comes from the alignment of beliefs and actions.
