As I’ve described earlier, West Point and the Army made deliberate decisions to move from a culture of compliance to a culture of commitment, from measuring who could survive to investing in who could lead.

That is a culture turnaround. It is one of the most transparent examples I know of what large-scale culture change requires, because the institution kept records, the stakes were clear, and the evidence of transformation is verifiable across generations.

The Decision to Change

The change did not happen quickly, and it did not happen because someone wrote a new mission statement. It happened because a series of leaders, each in their time, made the decision to hold the institutions to a different standard and then made the smaller decisions, day after day, that reinforced the new direction.

This is the part that most leaders miss when they think about culture turnarounds. They focus on the public announcement, the new list of values, and the offsite where the new direction gets introduced. All of this has a place, perhaps, but none of it is in any way sufficient. Culture does not change because it is declared to have changed. It changes because enough people in positions of influence make consistent decisions over a long enough period that the effect of the decisions becomes the new normal.

Sustained Leadership Over Time

The West Point transformation held because each superintendent and commandant who inherited the institution understood that the direction was not theirs to reverse. They could shape it, develop it, apply it in new circumstances, but the commitment to a culture of development rather than a culture of compliance was the organizing principle they were expected to uphold. Culture change does not stick when individual leaders treat it as someone else’s responsibility. It sticks when every leader in the organization understands that their daily decisions are actively shaping it.

A Clear Azimuth for the Institution

The second element that made the transformation durable was clarity of direction. The end state was a defined, shared commitment: West Point and the Army will produce leaders worth following. Not just leaders who survived the experience, but leaders who had been genuinely developed for what leadership demands in the culture of commitment. Every policy, every practice, every norm was eventually measured to that azimuth. Those that fit were reinforced. Those that did not were changed.

This is what Set the Azimuth means in practice at the institutional level.

The azimuth is not a slogan. It is a reference set of directional boundaries that adaptive leaders use to evaluate decisions. When you have this understanding of “True North”, the question of what to do in ambiguous situations becomes much less ambiguous, because you can determine whether a decision supports the mission and moves the organization toward the end state or away from it. And you apply the test to every decision, every day.

Honest Assessment as a Prerequisite

You cannot change what you will not measure, and you cannot measure what you will not look at honestly. The Army and West Point’s transformation required the institutions to confront questions that its existing culture had previously made it easier to avoid. For example, if in the summer of 1970, four in ten of the cadets admitted to the Academy were not going to make it, either the institution was selecting the wrong people or its development process was wrong.

Choosing to examine the second possibility seriously is an act of institutional courage that is rarer than it should be. Most organizations, when confronted with evidence that something is not working, look for an external explanation before they look for an internal one. West Point’s willingness to ask whether the failure rate reflected a failure of development rather than a failure of the individuals being developed was the beginning of everything else that followed.

The Army’s stark realization in the 1970s that the volunteer Army would not attract and retain the Soldiers we needed to defend the Nation unless we created a much higher level of resourcing, training, and leader development was equally pivotal.

The lesson for us as leaders is straightforward in concept and difficult in practice. Honest assessment means being willing to learn things about yourself and your organization that are uncomfortable and then doing something with what you learn. The After-Action Review is built on this principle. So is every other effective feedback system. What makes them work is not the structure of the conversation but the genuine willingness of leaders to hear what they would rather not hear and act on that knowledge.

The Role of Patience

Culture change in any large organization is measured in years, not quarters. The leaders who succeeded in moving West Point from one cultural model to another did not do so by announcing changes and expecting the culture to follow. They did it by making different decisions, consistently, over a long enough period that those decisions became the new normal.

The leaders who struggle most with culture change are typically the ones who are impatient with the timeline and mistake the absence of rapid results for evidence that the approach is wrong. Culture does not move quickly, and it does not move in a straight line. There will be periods where the old culture reasserts itself, where the progress feels slower than the effort warrants, where the people who are most invested in the change grow discouraged. The All-In adaptive leader’s job in those periods is to stay true to the azimuth, reinforce the behaviors that the culture requires, and trust that the accumulation of consistent decisions is doing its work even when the evidence is not yet visible.

The Deepest Change Is in the People

The most important outcome of the Army and West Point transformations was not a better-designed institution on paper in either case. It was that the people inside the institution changed. Cadets who entered a culture oriented toward their development behaved differently from cadets who entered a culture oriented toward filtering them out. They supported one another differently. They engaged with difficulty differently. They emerged as officers with a different relationship to the people they would eventually lead. And it worked, and still does.

This is the principle that the entire Q2 series has been building toward. The Level Five Culture of Commitment is not an abstract destination. It is a practical outcome, and its most concrete expression is in the behavior of the people who have been shaped by it. The goal of culture change is not a more coherent strategy or a more efficient organization, though those things often follow. The goal is inspiring people who act differently because they are part of a culture that expects and develops something different from them.

What This Means for Q3

That brings us to the question of how. Defining the destination is not the same as knowing how to get there. Beginning next week, we go deep on the Big 6 Leadership Principles®, the core leadership practices that, done consistently and over time, build the culture we have been describing all year. We start with Principle 1: Set the Azimuth. Because before anything else can work, the leader has to be clear about where the organization is going and why.

The Big 6 are not a checklist. They are a set of principles that interact with one another, reinforce one another, and collectively create the conditions for a Level Five culture to develop. Understanding what they are is the beginning. The harder, more valuable work is in learning how to apply them consistently in the real circumstances of your organization.

That is what the rest of this year is for.

I’d love to hear what element of the West Point story resonated most with what you are dealing with in your own organization. Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!