Policies are created for fairness and to prevent people from taking advantage of the company’s trust in them. What they are explicitly not designed to do is prevent sensible utilization of resources that the policy might seemingly disallow. This is why any good manager will approve exceptions to the policy-principle when you can clearly articulate the supplementary principle that warrants it.

Managers that tend to enforce policy without exception, only do so because they either do not understand the principles governing the policy (to understand where the policy helps and where it is likely to repeatedly fail to benefit teams it applies to) or feel a limited sense of autonomy. Of course another common failure state occurs within the multilayered dysfunctional org where the different layers between policy makers and policy enforcers can’t state the principles consistently.

We say yes to doing more in the future (including pushing what we’re already subscribed to), based on believing our own lie that there will somehow be more time available to us than the present; the reality is that the future becomes present quickly and time available remains constant; you can only fit in as many tasks then as you might reasonably be able to today. We say yes to doing these things not because we want to, but because it sounds nice to us and those we’re making these commitments to, and because it’s far easier than saying no—which is what we should really be doing, to make the space for what is truly important, today.

People often prioritize themselves when they assume the rewards are zero-sum. This is generally a mistake. If you’re an individual, you might try to hoard impact so only you can have it, but it is quite likely it takes four times as long to achieve when compared to working with just one additional person. Similarly, if you are a leader, you might try to build the largest team to demonstrate your ability to lead at scale, but take twice as long to achieve your goals because to get scale you traded off pace by incurring significant costs from coordination.

This myopic view is usually a defensive play after having witnessed a recent adverse event. For example: a peer advancing enough to feel like they may not be peers any more, someone taking credit for work that wasn’t theirs and benefiting from all the finite rewards, etc.

Even if these events are true (in many cases, we tell ourselves stories that are believable but untrue), I would resist the temptation to prioritize what is in one’s own interest and at the cost of the team or company. There are far more benefits to helping everyone you work with succeed: where you might normally have tried to keep a bigger slice of an existing pie for yourself, what if you instead made the pie bigger for everyone? Isn’t it more like that your slice of this bigger pie is already much bigger?

This is the general idea of Ship, Shipmates, Self, and it extends far beyond the navy. If you prioritize what is good for the ship, first and foremost, and then what might be good for your shipmates, it is likely your journey will yield you more benefit and fulfillment than if you only tried to prioritize yourself. This is hard to see in everyday metrics, but felt more easily on a longer time horizon. Paraphrasing @drgurner: A world that is generally focused about feeling good short-term creates exceptional rewards for the few that relentlessly pursue greatness long-term.

Seeing a colleague at Stripe set them up as their own background recently, I was reminded of the beautiful posters that Facebook teams plastered in gorgeous type on the physical walls in offices around the world. From Menlo Park to Mumbai, each of them offered visceral reminders of specific ideas that drove individuals on each team and how they wanted to show up every day as individuals and as a team. Whether it be choosing action over the alternative, to taking ownership of any of the company’s problems as one’s own (and doubly so if one’s own team might benefit from it), or blaming and fixing systems rather than point fingers on people; each statement and provocation was handcrafted by individuals that cared enough to walk in to the Analog Laboratory to print the start of a new conversation they wanted the company to have. Some more powerful then others, some gaining enough engagement and popularity to find themselves on everyone’s walls — a physical reincarnation of the original Facebook wall.

Now as I am trying to nurture culture with my team, I’m trying to put up my own metaphorical posters. What I’m finding is that physical walls make a much better surface for these than the virtual ones I now frequent.