Stop Controlling People, Change the Culture

When I was stationed at RAF Lakenheath, I was lucky enough to get picked as a young staff sergeant for Atlantic Stripe, a USAFE conference for junior NCOs that started while Kaleth Wright, later the 18th Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, was the command chief there.

A lot of it was material we’d already covered in Airman Leadership School: types of leaders, types of motivation. That sounds annoying, and I expected it to be. But here’s the thing about ALS: you learn all of it, you graduate, and then a lot of it goes out the door the minute you’re back in the shop, for one reason or another. Hearing it a second time was different. I already knew the concepts. Now I could hold them up against my own organization and see where they were missing and where I could actually use them.

Near the end, there was a panel of chiefs from different branches, plus an Army sergeant major. I was glad he was there. I wanted the perspective of a branch where, if someone tells you to do something, you do it. We don’t really have that in the Air Force. We do, but not like the Army.

So I asked him: “How does the Army get soldiers to do things, no questions asked?”

His answer had two parts. The first was culture. If you’re a soldier, or a Marine for that matter, that’s the culture of the entire organization. People adapt to it, and the ones who don’t, don’t last long.

The second part was the advice, and it’s stuck with me for years: “Stop trying to control the people. Change the culture.”

It lined up with things I was already running into, in stress management classes and in real life. I can’t control people. So why was I trying? I could change the culture instead. What vibe did I want over my span of control? I’d only led small teams, so setting a culture was something I could actually do. For me, that meant holding people to deadlines and moving my attention to the work that mattered instead of micromanaging the work that didn’t. In my small little bubble, it was some of the most useful advice I’d ever gotten.

The research backs the sergeant major up. Psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci spent decades studying what makes people motivated, and found that people do their best work when three needs are met: they feel competent, they have some say in how they work, and they feel connected to the people around them.¹ Controlling environments wear all three down. Pressure, threats, and someone standing over your shoulder get compliance, but they drain the motivation that makes people good at their jobs.

Watching it happen

A few years later I PCS’d to Cannon Air Force Base, and I got to watch this play out in real life.

I’ll use his name, because he was one of the best commanders I’ve had the pleasure of working for: Lt Col Gregg Chilson took command shortly after I arrived. The existing culture was typical for an AFSOC base: buy stuff, don’t overcomplicate it, get stuff done. That wasn’t bad. It was good, actually. But as anyone who’s been stationed there knows, Cannon is a hard place to live. The nearest Target is two hours away. We had a Walmart, and that was about it.

Lt Col Chilson cleared a bunch of tables and junk out of a corner of the office. He found some couches and chairs, put up a TV with a Nintendo Switch, and turned that corner into what you’d see in somebody’s family room.

I thought it was going to backfire. Airmen were going to play Smash Bros instead of working, and this was going to be bad.

Nope. They played responsibly, during downtime. Then pictures went up around the room: the commander and his family, other airmen with their dogs and their significant others. The vibe of the squadron changed. It’s the coolest culture shift I’ve physically watched happen in my career. He never had to say “we’re a family.” We just were. The room said it, his attitude said it, and our attitude started to match his.

And we were effective. We had some of the most junior airmen I’ve ever seen in one squadron, plus a lot of cross-trainees who didn’t know a lick of contracting. I was the unit deployment manager, so I didn’t get much chance to teach, but I didn’t need to. They talked to each other. They figured things out the way your mom and dad did: they learned as they went, and more experienced folks jumped in when needed. Our airmen talked to each other and to their supervisors without guilt, because nothing about that place said “I know better than you.” Nobody felt stupid for asking.

Why it worked

Edgar Schein, who more or less founded the study of organizational culture, says leaders build culture mostly through what they actually do: what they pay attention to, how they react when things go wrong, what they model. Then they lock it in with smaller signals, and one of those signals, by name, is the design of physical space.² A family room in a contracting squadron is exactly that. Lt Col Chilson didn’t announce a culture. He built one you could walk into.

Daniel Coyle calls these signals belonging cues: small, constant signs that tell people you’re safe here, and you’re part of this.³ Pictures of your dog on the wall. The boss’s family next to yours. None of it is a policy, and all of it tells you how things work here.

And Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard explains what happened to our junior airmen. In teams where people believe they won’t be embarrassed or punished for speaking up, people ask more questions, admit more mistakes, and learn faster.⁴ That’s a squadron of cross-trainees getting good at contracting without anybody lecturing them.

I heard the sergeant major’s voice the whole time Lt Col Chilson was doing this. He didn’t control anyone. He changed the culture, and then his actions kept reinforcing it. What amazed me most was how fast it happened.

What it isn’t

This isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to handle people. We had an airman get the boot for disciplinary issues. We still held people accountable when it was warranted. We just never had a reason to walk on eggshells.

Edmondson makes the same point, and people forget this half of her work. Safety without standards doesn’t get you a high-performing team. It gets you a comfortable one. Standards without safety gets you an anxious one, where people hide problems instead of raising them. The teams that learn and perform have both.⁴ That family room didn’t lower the bar. It made it safe to tell the truth about where we were against it.

So, the question I’d ask any new supervisor, because it’s the one I had to ask myself: what is your space telling your people about how things work here?