Before a military free fall jump, I packed my own parachute.
Think about that for a second. It was my own rig, packed by my own hands, and my own life was hanging underneath it. There is no stronger incentive on earth than that one. Nobody had to motivate me to pack it correctly.
And the Teams still would not let me jump on my own word.
I packed my main parachute. A rigger packed my reserve, every single time, and I never touched it once in 12 years. Then a buddy checked my work. And before I ever stepped onto that aircraft, a rigger checked it one more time.
So on every jump I ever made, three other people had their hands on that rig besides me. And that was for a man who had every reason in the world to get it right by himself.
The check is the system
Somewhere in your building there’s a good manager who believes a checklist is an insult to a professional. I’ve met him in every company I’ve worked with, and I understand him. He’s proud of his work, and he’s been doing it a long time.
So look at surgeons. A surgeon named Atul Gawande ran a study with the World Health Organization. It covered eight hospitals and almost eight thousand patients. And all they did was put a checklist in the operating room. Major complications dropped by more than a third, and deaths dropped by more than forty percent. They were the same surgeons with the same training and the same hands.
The check exists because every human being has a bad day on a long enough timeline. And the whole reason you build a system is so the bad day doesn’t cost anybody anything.
The four tests
When I first meet most leaders, they are tired. They’re tired because they are running their team on their presence. The leader walks in the room and everything tightens up. The leader takes two days off and things slide.
Presence does not scale, because you can only be in one room at a time. A system does scale. And a real system passes four tests.
One, everyone knows it. Ask anybody on that team how it works, and they can tell you. If the only person who can explain it is the manager, you have a manager who is doing everything alone.
Two, everyone does it. And I mean everyone. It can’t depend on somebody’s mood, and it can’t be a rule for the new people that the veterans get to skip. It also has to be simple enough for everybody to run. Complexity is the enemy of execution.
Three, it gets the result you built it for. It has been tested, and it has been proven.
Four, everyone protects it. When somebody drifts off it, their own teammates pull them back before the leader ever hears about it.
That fourth test is the one that separates elite teams. The day your people get there is the day your organization stops running on your presence.
I packed my own chute, and three other people still put hands on it before I jumped.
Run it on your own building
So let me give you a way to use this today. Pick one system in your company. I would pick the one you’re least sure about.
Then go ask five different people how they run it. Don’t correct them, and don’t coach the answer. Just listen.
If you hear five different answers, it failed test one. If three of them have built their own version, it failed test two. If nobody can tell you what result it’s supposed to produce, it failed test three. And if you are the only person who ever notices when it gets skipped, it failed test four.
What you hear in those five conversations will tell you more than another meeting about accountability.
Building systems that pass all four tests is the first month of Lead Elite Academy. Your leaders learn the tests, and then they build one with their own team.
