Level Five Associates

The Army gave me three words early in my career that I have never let go of: Be, Know, Do.

Know and Do can be trained. Be cannot. Be comes first, and it sets the ceiling on the other two.

People do not learn your values from a poster on the wall. They learn them from watching what you tolerate, what you reward, and what you refuse.

That is where leadership teams get stuck. They want to roll out their values like a product launch. You cannot roll out a value. You can only live it until people believe you, or fail to live it until they stop listening to anything else you say.

Here is the test: can you point to something profitable, convenient, or comfortable that your organization turned down because a value would not allow it?

If the room goes quiet when you ask that question, you've got words on a wall instead of a value that actually supports your azimuth.

Here's an article that walks you through how I pressure-test Values live with leadership teams using the Mirror Test I use to hold myself accountable.

I also explain why every leader needs a written Personal Leadership Philosophy and include a link to the full training on how to build one for yourself and your team.

You can read the article here: 👉 https://robertmixon.substack.com/p/set-the-azimuth-part-three-values

Before you check it out, I'd love to hear about one Value your organization claims that has truly ruled out a tempting choice, and one that maybe has not yet.

Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

I have carried a scene from Alice in Wonderland with me for years.

Alice reaches a fork in the road and asks the Cheshire Cat which way she should go. He tells her it depends on where she wants to get to. She says she doesn't much care. He tells her, then, that it doesn't much matter which way she goes.

I watch that exchange play out in real organizations more often than I can count.

A team is busy. Everyone is moving. There is energy in the building and activity on every calendar.

Ask a simple question, where are we all trying to get to, and you will get four different answers from four capable people who each believe they are pulling in the same direction.

They are not lost because they lack skill. They are lost because no one Set the Azimuth.

Motion feels like progress. A busy organization looks healthy from the outside.
But motion without a shared bearing is just expensive drift. I have sat with exhausted leadership teams who were proud of how hard they were working, only to find that no two of them could write down the same mission when asked to do it separately.

The first of the Big 6 Leadership Principles® exists for exactly this reason. Before you can lead people anywhere, you have to know where you are going, and so do they.

I'd love to hear how you would answer the question of where your team is trying to get to, without checking the website first. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Link to the full article is in the comments.

Enjoy the journey!

Years ago, commanding in a war exercise, I made a decision I have never forgotten.

I attacked the enemy's strength instead of his weakness. It was the wrong call, and we lost. When it was over, I stood in front of my team and said the only honest thing there was to say.

"I let you down."

I have told that story for a long time as a lesson about owning failure. But there is a second lesson inside it I have come to think matters just as much.

My team executed my plan exactly as I directed. Skilled, disciplined, precise. And that was the problem.

They followed the order instead of the Intent, because I had never made the Intent clear enough for anyone to question the order against it. If they had truly understood the End State we were driving toward, someone might have looked at my plan and said, "Sir, that does not get us where you said we needed to go."

Mission tells your team who you are and what you do. Intent tells them what success looks like and why it matters.

Most leaders skip this part because they believe outlining the plan is the same as communicating the Intent. It is not.

A plan tells people what to do. Intent tells people what you are trying to accomplish, so when the plan meets reality, and it always does, they can adapt without waiting to be told.

A team that knows the Intent can change the plan and still win.

A link to the article is in the comments.

I'd love to hear how clearly your team could restate your organization's End State right now. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

Someone finishes a sentence. Your response is already loaded, sometimes before they're even done talking.

That habit feels like quick thinking. It's usually something else: listening to respond instead of listening to understand.

The two skills look identical from across a conference table. They are not the same thing.

There's a simple fix I've taught leaders for years. Before you respond to anything, hold a deliberate two-second pause. Count it out: one, one-thousand, two, one-thousand.

It will feel excruciating the first few times. That discomfort is the whole point. If two seconds of silence feels unbearable, that tells you something about how rarely silence gets used at all.

I'd love to hear about a time a brief pause changed how a conversation went, for better or worse. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Link to the full article is in the comments.

Enjoy the journey!

In the early 1970s, roughly four in ten cadets entering West Point would not graduate.

That attrition rate was not an accident. It was, in many respects, by design. The institution had been built around pressure and endurance, around the belief that the point of the experience was to find out who could survive it.

A series of leaders made a decision to change that. Not through a new mission statement. Not through an offsite where a new direction got introduced. Through a sustained commitment, reinforced by smaller decisions made day after day, until the accumulated weight of those decisions became the new normal.

By the time my son attended West Point, the graduation rate had climbed to around 80 percent, on par with the best universities in the country. The mission had not softened. The standards had not dropped. What changed was the institution's fundamental relationship with the people inside it.

That is what a culture turnaround actually looks like. And the lessons in it apply directly to every organization trying to make a similar shift today.

Three things made the West Point transformation durable. Sustained leadership over time, where each leader who inherited the institution understood the direction was not theirs to reverse. A clear azimuth, where every policy and practice was measured against a single defined standard. And honest assessment, the willingness to ask whether a 40 percent failure rate reflected a failure of development rather than a failure of the individuals being developed. That kind of institutional courage is rarer than it should be.

This week I go deeper on the remaining elements of the West Point turnaround and what they mean for leaders trying to build this kind of culture in their own organizations. It also sets up what is coming next, where we go deep on the Big 6 Leadership Principles and how to apply them in the real circumstances of your organization.

You can read the full article here: https://robertmixon.substack.com/p/04c4c053-d2a0-4f24-9fa8-29908d940b2b

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 or on my Substack, and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

At the beginning of this year, I asked a question that I have been hearing from leaders more than any other: given everything happening right now, what does effective leadership actually look like?

Not in theory. In practice. In the world we are all operating in today.

The erosion of institutional trust. Political and social polarization finding its way into organizations. The behavioral aftershocks of the pandemic. The arrival of AI and what it means for how people work. A workforce with fundamentally different expectations than the one most leadership models were built for.

None of those conditions have gone away. They are not a difficult season to get through. They are the operating environment. They are what leaders walk into every day.

Over the past twelve weeks we have worked through that question together, and the answer keeps pointing to the same place. All-In Adaptive Leadership and the Level Five Culture of Commitment. Not because it is the trending concept. Because it is the only organizational model that actually works in the world we are all living in right now.

When trust erodes at the institutional level, the organizations that retain the loyalty of their people are the ones where the culture itself is trustworthy. When the workforce has shifted in what it is willing to accept, compliance-based models break down. When AI is changing the nature of work, the leaders who navigate that transition most effectively are not the ones with the best technology. They are the ones with the strongest culture. Technology cannot make judgment calls that require values. It cannot build trust. It cannot create the psychological safety where organizations learn and adapt. Those qualities require All-In adaptive leaders, and they always will.

This week I go deeper on the most common mistakes leaders make trying to build this kind of culture, and what separates the organizations that actually get there from the ones that plateau just short of it. The link is in the comments.

I'd love to hear which of these forces has shown up most directly in your own organization this year. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Read my latest article entitled Why All-In Adaptive Leadership Matters Now. The link is in the comments.

Enjoy the journey!