Principles don't change, methods do
A leadership workshop made me realize most of us confuse the two. Here is the difference.
I ran a workshop recently on being an engineering manager and being a good leader. One question kept catching people off guard: what is your philosophy for your team? Most of them had never written it down. I had not either, and that surprised me, because we all carry one. We just rarely stop to name it.
There is a quote I have mangled a few times: "Principles don't change. Methods do." The more I sit with it, the more I think it is the right frame for almost everything in leadership.
Principles are who you are. They are what you value and what you will not trade away, even on the day it would be easier to. They are the pillars. You build your whole philosophy on top of them, and you lean on them when the day gets hard and the easy answer is the wrong one.
Methods are how you deliver those principles into the world. They are the tools and the style, the way you open a 1:1, the way you handle a difficult conversation, the way you run a stand-up. Methods have to move. A message that lands today may fall flat tomorrow. A message that bounces off one person may be exactly what another person needed to hear. Teams sit at different stages, people are in different places, and society keeps shifting underneath all of it. The way I was coached at 25 would not work on a 25-year-old today, and the way I was coached then already looked strange to people ten years older than me. That is not a problem. That is just how methods behave.
The mistake, and I have made it, is holding a method as if it were a principle. When a method stops working, you have to change it, not defend it. When a principle is the thing under pressure, you hold the line no matter what it costs you.
So here is the exercise. Define your principles, and know them well enough to say them out loud in three sentences or less. Then look hard at your methods. Iterate the ones that are not landing anymore, keep the ones that still do, and expect that whole set to change across your career. If your methods look the same in ten years, you probably stopped paying attention.