I got this wrong for a long time.
I spent 12 years as a Navy SEAL. And when I came out of the Teams and started leading people in business, I coached them the way I had been coached. I told them to be more disciplined. I handed my team books on ownership and books on discipline. And all it did was leave me frustrated, because their behavior never changed.
So I had to ask myself a hard question. Why did it work in the Teams, and why wasn’t it working here?
Somebody built the machine
In the military, you have discipline or they discipline you. And that works. It works because somebody spent two hundred years building the machine that makes it work.
The rules were already written. The regulations were already written. The standards and the culture were handed to me on day one, and I never had to build a single piece of it.
So when I walked into a business and told people to be more disciplined, I was handing them the output of a system they didn’t have.
Now, discipline is real. I built a career on it, and I would never tell you it doesn’t matter. But discipline is a personal solution to an organizational problem. It works great on one person. It doesn’t scale to eighty people.
The environment is doing more than you think
A researcher named Thomas Gilbert wrote a book in 1978 called Human Competence. And what he found is that the environment a person works in explains more of the performance gap than anything inside the person.
That matched what I had lived. The men I served with were disciplined. And they were also standing inside a system that somebody had built for them.
So when a leader tells me, “My people just need more discipline,” I ask about the environment first. What are the standards? Can the team say them without looking at the wall? And what happens the first time somebody misses one?
Discipline is a personal solution to an organizational problem.
How casualness gets in
Nobody decides to become casual. No team in history ever held a Monday meeting and voted to lower the standard. Casualness slips in through exceptions.
The first time somebody walks into the morning meeting ten minutes late and nobody says a word, that becomes the new standard. The first job that goes out half done because the day was stacked becomes the new standard. The first “I’ll call him back tonight” that turns into next Thursday becomes a new standard too.
Because in leadership, we get what we allow.
And telling that team to be more disciplined won’t fix it. The exception already told them what the real standard is.
The leader’s job
That’s when I realized my job was to build the culture that produces discipline. So what does that look like in a building?
It looks like standards that every person on the team can say out loud. It looks like systems that run when the leader is in the room and when the leader is on vacation. And it looks like a leader who doesn’t walk past the first exception.
When a team is crystal clear on its standards, and the leader refuses to get casual with them, the team picks that up. And then they start holding each other to the same standard. That’s when you’ve built a culture that survives the ups and downs of any market.
That is the work we do for fifty-two weeks inside Lead Elite Academy. We teach your leaders how to build the system that produces discipline, so they can stop asking for it.
