One foundation for great leaders is having and understanding their own leadership philosophy — a set of beliefs, values and personal rules related to the kind of leader they want to be.

This foundation will drive the workplace environment and climate of the team a leader leads, whether this is a four-person department or a multinational company with hundreds of thousands of employees.

A written personal leadership philosophy is an important differentiator between good leaders and great leaders.

A leadership philosophy is a set of beliefs and principles that strongly influences how you interpret reality and guides how you react to people, events and situations. Research has shown that consistent leadership behavior and actions require a clear personal leadership philosophy.

A written leadership philosophy also lets team members and others know what you expect, what you value and how you will act in any given situation. This helps to make your workplace environment less stressful and more productive, as well as keeping you on track and aligned with your core beliefs and values.

Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic in Japan, is known in that country as the “god of management” for his writings and speeches on leadership and management.  He wrote, “If you are a leader, you must have an ideology of leadership. If you lack an ideology, and attempt to decide everything on a case-by-case basis, you will never be capable of strong leadership.”

As you can tell, it is important that leaders gain clarity about their own leadership philosophy, style and behavior.

Some of the core values you may want to include in your personal leadership mindset philosophy could be: confidence, adaptability, focus on people development, having a realistic vision. The important thing is that the values must be your own — things you deeply believe in and care about. They cannot just be a list of positive attributes that you find in a book or online.

No matter what attributes and values you choose, however, trust overrides them all. Without trust, none of your other attributes and values matter. Trust is something you earn and maintain through your behaviors. It is not bestowed upon you by rank or title.

Confidence is another key element of a strong leadership mindset. It comes from knowing yourself, and understanding (and appreciating) your strengths and weaknesses.

It also comes from observing and analyzing how you make decisions, both good and bad. Not every decision will work out as you expect. That’s okay.

The key is to reflect back on how and why you made a particular decision to learn about your decision-making capabilities, tendencies, habits, and inclinations. This helps you grow as a leader and gives you greater confidence when you have to make judgment calls in areas where you may not be a technical subject matter expert.

This also enables you to de-personalize decisions, i.e. no more “I’ll go with Beth on this one.” Decisions should be made based on your determination of the facts and reality of the situation, not based on which person is presenting a proposed option.

It also allows you to create your own solutions from differing opinions that build on the strengths and ideas of each. Leveraging positive cognitive conflict (i.e. the opposing of two or more ideas) is one of the best ways of coming up with innovative solutions, and keeps negative personal conflict from getting in the way of good decision making.

By creating your own leadership mindset philosophy, and then identifying the behaviors that will help you implement these guiding principles, you will avoid the trap of deciding everything on a case-by-case basis. This results in consistency of leadership behavior; a benefit for both you and your team members.

No one leadership philosophy can be viable for everyone. Each leader faces different circumstances, brings different backgrounds to his or her leadership position, and leads widely different teams of people. You have to figure out what’s right for you; what’s true to you.