Prudence

What Prudence means in leadership

Your boss asks when the client can have the new service. Friday would sound impressive, and you would be the person who made it happen. Before offering that date, you ask the team to work through the remaining tasks. It would take two weekends they had not agreed to give. You propose a smaller first delivery and a later date for the rest. Your boss calls the first plan ambitious. You now know whose Saturdays were making it so.

The team’s estimate changes what you are willing to promise. You examine scope, available time and alternatives while the decision is still open. Asking after announcing the date would leave colleagues choosing between disappointing you and absorbing the cost. Their information deserves more influence than that.

Prudence gives…

A considered commitment lets people organize their work and protects trust in what the group can deliver. It also keeps the person making the promise answerable for the resources it assumes, including time that belongs to other people.

Finding the balance

Make a commitment people can act on, with room for uncertainty and an honest account of who supplies the time.

In ordinary life

A request made upward

Explain the capacity a proposal needs before its date becomes a promise.

A smaller first step

Offer a useful part of the work when the full request exceeds the available time.

Nearby virtues, different work

Courage

Courage may be needed to disappoint the boss; Prudence establishes why the proposed commitment needs to change.

Justice

Justice asks what others are owed. Prudence considers the consequences and feasibility of the course you propose.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Impressive ambition is a counterfeit of Prudence when a confident deadline hides the work it transfers to others. A considered proposal makes those assumptions available for examination.

How to cultivate Prudence

• Ask the people doing the work before announcing the commitment.
• Consider a different scope, sequence or date rather than treating extra effort as the only option.
• State what remains uncertain and when you will review it.

Try it today

Choose a small commitment you control. List the time it requires from you and anyone else. Check an assumption with the person concerned before offering their effort, and revise the scope if necessary.

Questions worth returning to

• Whose time makes this proposal look impressive?
• Can the people affected genuinely change the commitment before I make it?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. His purpose is simply a foresight of the consequences of his energies connected with those of the things about him, a foresight used to direct his movements from day to day.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Eight: Aims in Education; 1. The Nature of an Aim.

   Dewey connects an end to the means that make it possible. A delivery date needs an account of the work and time through which it could be met.

2. But if each views the consequences of his own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes into account the consequences of their behavior upon himself, then there is a common mind; a common intent in behavior.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Three: Education as Direction; 1. The Environment as Directive.

   Cooperation requires seeing how one person’s actions bear on another’s. A proposed schedule must include the work its promises create.

3. Reasoning shows that if the idea be adopted, certain consequences follow.

   John Dewey, How We Think
   CHAPTER SIX; THE ANALYSIS OF A COMPLETE ACT OF THOUGHT

   Dewey asks that consequences enter deliberation. The proposed deadline becomes more credible when the team’s estimate changes it before a promise is made.

4. Such acts of generosity are not to be so highly esteemed as those which are performed with judgment, deliberation, and mature consideration.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   BOOK I MORAL GOODNESS; section 49

   Cicero distinguishes considered generosity from an unexamined impulse. An offer can be more responsible when its conditions have been thought through.

5. I would not push you to any rashness, but I am very anxious that you do your utmost, short of rashness, to keep Bragg from getting off to help Johnston against Grant.

   Abraham Lincoln, The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Volume Six
   TELEGRAM TO GENERAL W. S. ROSECRANS.; WASHINGTON, May 28, 1863.; section I

   Lincoln’s wartime instruction holds urgency and the limit against rashness together. The decision requires both a purpose and a considered scope.

6. Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Summary. In determining the place of thinking in experience we first

   The passage makes foresight part of responsible action. A proposal’s appeal cannot settle whether the people doing the work can carry its demands.

7. He must give form to things vague, things latent, to mere tendencies.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP; XXV NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION Leaders or Bosses?

   Follett describes a leader making a developing purpose intelligible. Prudence adds the examination that lets a proposal take workable form.

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