The Compounding Effect of a Self-Policing Culture
Everyone wants passive income, right? Mailbox money. You put in some work up front, lay the foundation to create cash flow, then kick back and reap the rewards.
In the world of leadership, there is a similar opportunity to build a self-sustaining, perpetual cycle of value: the self-policing culture.
It's not quite as easy as buying a house and collecting monthly rent checks, but if you're able to lay the proper foundation of people and values, and nurture the environment from there, the ripple effect can be game-changing. The real magic to a team that polices itself? It's way more powerful than anything you could have created on your own. It's the power of the Tribe.
This tribe can't be manufactured, though. The trick to creating a powerful culture like this is that there's a grassroots element to it. It can't be derived from top-down leadership style. You can't tell people to care.
Several years ago, I helped spearhead a leadership development initiative with the Atlanta Braves. We took about a dozen minor league players, and put them through a novel program that we created from scratch, intended to help them grow as people, teammates, and leaders. There were no cleats, or bats, or balls involved. This was about culture setting.
The key message I delivered to the group was that ultimately, it didn't matter what I said about our culture as a front office executive. It didn't really matter what their coaches or manager would say, either. At the end of the day, it was going to be their clubhouse. They would determine what they would accept from themselves and from their teammates. They would set the culture. They would be the culture.
This turned out to be an empowering message to a group of young alpha males. It helped frame their outlook to extend beyond their individual performances or careers. They realized they would have a significant impact in creating the next Braves championship culture (which, by the way, they did successfully).
This program left as much of a mark on me as it did them, and it helped open my eyes to the awesome power of the Tribe. How peer pressure, when properly channeled, can act like a cultural tidal wave, sweeping others up in the positive momentum or overwhelming the detractors by crashing down on them with great force, rendering them irrelevant.
Creating this kind of powerful, self-regulating culture requires the right combination of people and values, but it also requires some specific things from the leader(s):
Check your ego. It's not about you. That's actually the whole point: it's bigger than you.
You have to find a way to connect with each teammate on their level, not yours. Authenticity is key here. Capture their hearts first. Minds and bodies will follow.
Arguably the biggest key of all: the team needs to embrace ownership, not buy-in. Buy-in is agreeing to go along with someone else's vision. Ownership is helping to shape that vision.
If you're able to create that ownership culture, you'll need to maintain it by keeping your finger on the pulse. A culture is a living organism. You can't set it and forget it. It needs to evolve with your team as it grows or matures. This feedback doesn't need to be in the form of a quarterly employee engagement survey or a Q&A session. It can happen one-on-one (I argue it actually should), informally, and organically. But your people are your culture, so don't lose sight of that.
You'll notice that everything outlined above is geared toward essentially removing yourself from the equation as a leader. Set the course, but then lean on your team to lead, to grow, and to shape their own environment. If you can create something that resonates with people--that they genuinely care about and value--they'll want to protect it. Remember, the key here is it needs to mean something to them, not you. It's easier said than done, but if you're able to stand up a culture like this, in time it begins to run on autopilot. There is an ethos that is understood as the table stakes for being part of the team. We don't do things like that. This is how we do it. Get in line, or get out.
Two places where we commonly see this are the military and sports. The reason being, in my opinion, is that those two populations are often bonded by a common goal. It is understood that you're only as strong as your weakest link, and it's the responsibility of the Tribe to find a way to make that weak leak stronger, or replace it. Without that accountability in sports, you're probably going to lose. In the case of the military, someone could very well die.
It's harder to create this dynamic in the business world. The environment is much more manufactured and artificial. No matter how great an organization you have, how luxurious your office is, or how exemplary the employee benefits are, at the end of the day, for most people, it's just a job. It may be a great job, but if the paychecks stopped showing up, rest assured, so would the employees. This makes it much harder to create this self-regulating environment in a work setting. Even for an executive gifted with high EQ, it's a big ask to expect to be able to connect on a personal level and make a meaningful connection with hundreds of employees.
Which brings us back to your team. They're more important than you are in sustaining this. Identify the flag-bearers. The ones who will champion the culture. The ones to whom it means something special--the ones with skin in the game. Find that group--or better yet, develop it--and empower them to lead.
For one more example of the importance of ownership and motivation, let's look again to the military. As a general, which fighting force would you rather have under your command: an army that has voluntary enlisted to serve and fight, or one that has been drafted into service with criminal prosecution as the alternative? Which one do you think is going to fight harder? Your job as a leader is to convince as many soldiers as you can to enlist to join you in your cultural army. Then let them fight the fight.
Like the rent checks that keep showing up every month from that investment property you bought years ago, if you put in the work up front and make the right investment in your people, you can sit back and enjoy the outsized returns of a self-policing culture.