When I think about how West Point has changed over the past several decades, one shift stands out above the rest. The Academy used to lean hard on negativity to shape cadets, including food denial as punishment and coercive techniques designed to wear down rather than build up promising young men and women.
That approach gave way to a different leader development culture that gained momentum in the 1980s, one much more focused on positivity in the Be, Know, Do model the Army embodies. I wrote about that model in Set the Azimuth, Part Three: Values, and its closing line is the one I keep returning to: “You represent what right looks like.”
I have thought about that phrase for years because of what it demands. It asks you to become the standard, day after day, until there is no difference between what you believe and what you do.
That kind of consistency matters more in organizations than most leaders realize.
Standards Only Become Culture Through Repetition
Every leader I have worked with can write some form of a values statement. Far fewer can tell you how those values show up on a Tuesday afternoon on the plant floor. The gap between the two is closed by repeated behaviors that bring the values to life.
You have to codify the standard, then you have to “walk the talk” again and again until it stops being policy and becomes habit. There is no substitute for that repetition. Habits are what survive when no one is watching and nothing is being graded. Without that repetition, a value stays a sentence in the handbook. It is just a belief.
This is what Cultural Behaviors mean as the fourth component of Set the Azimuth. Mission tells us where we are going, and Intent demonstrates what winning looks like and why. Values tell us what we believe in. Cultural Behaviors are the behaviors we exhibit, the ones that bring the values into the reality of how we do things.
One of my favorite examples is from a company that defined its value of Respect as the behavior “we do things on time.” Valuing other people’s time shows respect, and it turns a belief into a standard of behavior.
West Point built its Be, Know, Do approach to leader development the same way, through years of repeated, deliberate choices by its leadership, reinforced with positivity.
How to Correct Without Breaking the Standard
One of the deliberate habits in a strong culture is correction. In the Level Five Culture of Commitment I describe, difficult conversations happen privately, not in front of the group.
Public correction teaches an audience to fear the standard rather than own it. People start managing how things look instead of managing whether they are meeting the bar. Private correction keeps the conversation about the standard itself, not about humiliation, and that is the only version of correction that changes behavior going forward.
Recognition works the opposite way. Deliberately recognizing people in front of their peers when they exceed the standard builds a Culture of Commitment. One client company I wrote about in When Corporate Values Mean Something puts the whole process into a single line: “praise publicly and admonish privately.”
Repetition turns behaviors into habits, and recognition shared across a team is what a world-class culture is built on. It is this process that transforms good teams into great teams.
I’d love to hear about a standard in your organization that only became real once you stopped talking about it and started repeating it and rewarding it. Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.
Enjoy the journey!
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