Leadership Principle No. 1: Assume Everyone Is Trying to Do the Right Thing

By: Keegan Evans

My first commanding officer kept a fridge in his office. When a young Marine landed in trouble (broke a rule, lost a tool, or just did something generally dumb the way young Marines sometimes do) the CO didn't start with a chewing out. He would have the Marine stand at ease, pull a Coke out of the fridge, hand it across the desk, and say: tell me what happened.

He wasn't soft. He led the squadron on a combat deployment to Iraq in 2006. Our primary daytime mission was casualty evacuation (CASEVAC). His expectation was brilliance in the basics: choose excellence in everything, starting with the boring things, because that's how you earn the right to succeed when the complex, high-intensity operations come. He could hold both truths at the same time: the standards are non-negotiable, and the person in front of you deserves to be understood before they're judged.

That soda was a declaration. It said: I'm starting from the assumption that something happened, and I want to understand it. The behavior might be wrong. The intent rarely is.

That became Euda’s first leadership principle: assume everyone is trying to do the right thing.

The Slow Way to Learn It

I didn't always live this. As a young lieutenant, I consistently resented a group of senior captains who wanted me to stay in my lane. I was good at what I did, I knew it, and I read their pushback as jealousy. So I dismissed them. I didn't try to understand where they were coming from, what they'd learned, what they were trying to protect, or what experience had taught them that I hadn't learned yet.

Instead, I dug myself into a hole of defensiveness and resentment that took real time and real humility to climb out of. In Marine aviation, your callsign isn't a nickname you pick. It's given to you by the other pilots in the squadron, approved by the CO, and it usually reflects a particularly vulnerable or embarrassing event or quality. Mine was "Britches." As in, too big for his.

The same CO who handed young Marines a Coke before asking what happened is the one who gave me Britches. That callsign was earned. It's on a coffee mug on the shelf behind me, visible in every Zoom call. Every coaching session. I keep it there because it reminds me how I grow: by owning the moments I got it wrong, especially the ones where I assumed the worst about people who were, in their own way, trying to do the right thing too.

The Pattern I See in Every Team

Now I coach executives at scaling companies, and I see this play out constantly. A founder comes to me convinced that two senior leaders have an intractable personality conflict. The head of product and the head of revenue can't be in a room together. The tension is bleeding into their teams, slowing decisions, and putting the company's biggest initiative at risk.

So we slow down. I use a framework called GRPI (Goals, Roles, Process, Interpersonal Relationships) and work the problem backwards, starting upstream of the interpersonal friction. We found both leaders were terrified of the same things. Both felt overstretched. Both carried a quiet fear that if they personally dropped a ball, the company would suffer. The real issue was that company goals were too broad and role expectations too unclear. The ambiguity created overlap, the overlap created defensiveness, and the defensiveness looked like a personality problem. It wasn't.

One pattern I’ve seen from Marine helicopter squadrons to agile tech startups is that what looks personal is almost always structural. And you can only see it if you start from the assumption that both people are trying to do the right thing.

The Hardest Place to Practice It

The hardest place I practice this isn't the coaching room or the squadron. It's at home.

My twins are nine. When one of them is struggling and fighting me (“you don't know what it's like to be a kid” or “I'm never going to forgive you for this”) every instinct wants to correct the behavior. But I've learned that I'm at my best when I can drop into calm, reflect back what they must be feeling, and hold the line: I've got your back. I love you. You're doing your best. This is hard.

It doesn't always work immediately. Sometimes the angry arguments keep coming. But staying in that place — consistently, even when it's uncomfortable — creates the safety for them to come back and reconnect.

One of my kids, still upset after a blowup, found an opening and said to me: "Do you ever feel so angry but all you want is the comfort from the person you're angry with?"

Nine years old. And that's the whole principle in one sentence. The behavior was anger. The intent was connection.

The Doorway

Here's what this principle is not: naivety. The Marine who got the Coke still had a conversation about what went wrong and what needed to change. What assuming good intent does is open a doorway to understanding what's actually happening and where growth becomes possible.

Betting on people like this isn't just good for relationships. It's good business. When you start here, decisions stop queuing up, plans get sharper, and people collaborate instead of protecting turf.

Think about the person on your team who is frustrating you most right now. The one where you've already built a story about their motives. Before your next interaction, ask yourself one question: what are they trying to get right? What you find on the other side is almost always better than the story you've been telling yourself.