The 16 principles that define leadership at Judo Bank

There is an old saying in corporate governance (which is a Chinese proverb) that ‘the fish rots from the head’. If the leadership of any business or function — small or large — is not leading by example, then the organisation can build a tendency to mirror that behaviour and become dysfunctional. 

In startups this can prove fatal. People can ‘smell’ BS or a lack of authenticity long before it is clearly visible, and it undermines everything. We vowed that no matter how talented an executive was, there would be no place for them if they were not true to the values that we had established for Judo bank.

Our philosophy on leadership led us to develop the 16 principles that define leadership characteristics at Judo Bank. While we arguably developed these principles early in our evolution, we felt it important to clearly enunciate them so they acted as a reference for the leadership bench that we were seeking to build and a cornerstone of how they were evaluated. With the future very much in mind, these are the 16 principles: