Several months ago, one of my executive leadership coaching clients started our session by venting his frustration about the state of politics in America. It is easy to share his frustration. As a resident of one of the “battleground” states in the upcoming election, I am overwhelmed by the volume of commercials and deeply disturbed by their universal lack of civility. Although I shared his feelings in general, I found myself surprised by the overarching conclusion he had drawn about the problem’s root cause. He stated emphatically, “The problem is principles!” When I asked him to elaborate, he said that he felt that in the name of principled leadership, politicians have become rigid and inflexible. “They are unwilling to cooperate, collaborate, or compromise.”

My client had hit a nerve, because I fundamentally believe that true leadership depends on living and leading from a base of strong principles. I knew that this topic mattered to him, and it was important to his personal leadership journey. I also knew that I was too invested in the topic to serve him at that moment, so I proposed coming back to this topic at a future meeting. I knew I needed to give this some additional thought and consideration before we could discuss it in a constructive manner.

I spent the next several weeks contemplating and researching the topic of principles and their role in leadership. I concluded that my initial reaction was correct, albeit incomplete. Principles aren’t the problem; labels are. More precisely, the problem is that we have confused true principles with the labels we use to describe them.

A principle is defined as “A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning. A rule or belief governing one’s personal behavior.” This definition reveals an important fact about principles. They are highly complex. They don’t work well as sound bites. Labels on the other hand are simple, and they fit perfectly into sound bites. It isn’t just the big labels like Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, religious affiliation . . . All the names we use to describe ourselves to others can create confusion and ultimately problems.

Labels are useful. They are our shortcut to make connections. They give us a way to quickly find commonalities with others.

Unfortunately, they are never exact fits. That is because many labels attempt to describe something that should be both deeply personal and highly complex. True principles don’t lend themselves to nice neat packages. The other challenge that labels create is that they are open to interpretation or confusion. One of my favorite examples of this is the principle of limited government. Politicians across the political spectrum try to lay claim to this principle, but they differ vastly on what it means.

Like everyone, I use labels all the time, but I have never agreed 100% with any political figure or party. I have never accepted all aspects of my church’s teachings at face value. I use the labels as a descriptor, but I try not to confuse them with the principles that drove me to adopt them to begin with. Over the years, I have come to embrace the differences I have with politicians I support, my political party, my church, and the causes I affiliate with, because those differences are important. They reflect the values and beliefs that define me and my principles. These differences have typically been subtle, and I have accepted them because I agree with the vast majority of the rest. In cases where the differences were material, I have worked to change them or gone against them.

That’s how principles work. They give us the rules and beliefs that help us govern our lives. When our rules are violated, we have to decide how to respond. If the violated rule or belief is unimportant, then we can accept it and move on. If the belief or rule governs something that has great value to us, we have to be willing to act. Labels don’t work that way, and they become problematic when they drive us to assess the rightness or wrongness of a decision not in terms of our beliefs and values. Often labels cause us to make decisions using others’ definitions based on their values and beliefs. We regularly see politicians making decisions in the name of principles when in reality they are trying to prove that they are staying true to someone else’s label.

Unfortunately, this behavior has implications that go far beyond gridlock and dysfunctional government. It can lead to tragedy. The rise of some of history’s worst despots were enabled by principled people who were corrupted by labels. Hitler’s pro-business and Stalin’s pro-worker credentials made them tolerable to people who should have opposed them, but the labels got in the way. They allowed otherwise good people to remain silent.

Words still matter. They mattered several weeks ago when I wrote a blog post about words that we weaken through overuse. “Principle” is a word that we weaken by misuse. Great leaders are principled leaders. They know what matters. They understand that values and beliefs define principles, and recognize that principles are complex and even messy. They recognize that making principled decisions is sometimes about choosing between right and wrong, but they also understand that the greatest challenges are not that simple. The greatest acts of principled leadership are often those where we are forced to choose between right and right or wrong and wrong. When we must violate one value to protect another, that is integrity, and that is the essence of principled leadership.

When my coaching client and I met several weeks later, we reopened the topic of principled leadership. Together we explored the nature of principles and how our labels corrupt them. He used the political examples as a lens through which to examine his leadership decisions. Like most of us, his greatest challenges didn’t come from those times when he led with principles. The biggest challenges came from the times when he confused principles with a label defined by someone else. We all have people in our lives who can create labels and definitions, but real leadership means using them to help us define our principles for ourselves.

How have principles enabled you to lead more powerfully? Tell us what you think.