An Ethos For Excellence

Fundamentally one of the things that all leaders do, is to build and sustain their organisation’s culture. Often this happens by default but should happen by design. Leaders should be consciously aware of the culture they want and seek to lead in a way that fosters, builds and sustains that culture.

Culture and Ethos Are Not The Same Thing

An ethos is a guiding spirit and therefore a description of what we aspire to. Culture is simply the sum of collective behaviours in a team or organisation. Ideally our ethos and culture should be indivisible but without leadership there is often a variance.

In any tightly knit organisation that has a unique role, purpose and identity, culture is two-edged. It can be a tremendous strength in fostering the behaviours that lead to success but it can also allow and even encourage behaviours that are profoundly unhelpful and dangerous to the organisation. In every instance where we can point to a failure of culture, what we are actually highlighting is a symptom of poor and inadequate leadership.

Culture is Critical

The selection process for Special Forces units deliberately aims to attract individuals who are entrepreneurial, comfortable with risk and who tend to view rules as guidelines rather than imperatives. If successful these individuals are acclaimed, marked out with unique symbols of an elite status and in the SAS put to work under the motto, ‘Who Dares Wins’. These facts gather together exactly the sorts of extraordinary individuals capable of delivering the SF mission but also an environment with the ingredients in place for a potentially dangerous and misaligned culture to emerge.

Culture is critical to operational performance because it is the atmosphere in which everything else takes place. If the atmosphere supports and enables the behaviours that lead to success then all is well but if the atmosphere is toxic, it becomes both a barrier to performance and an existential risk to the mission and the organisation.

Understanding the Behaviours Needed to Flourish

The UK Special Forces ethos, entitled the ‘Unrelenting Pursuit of Excellence’, is an explicit guide to the critical behaviours the organisation needs to flourish. It is a guide to the behaviours we most prize. However, it is useless unless it is understood. Knowing the words is not enough; each member of the group needs to understand why those words matter and what they mean in terms of day-to-day action and behaviour. Creating that understanding is primarily an action for leaders, who at every level must be able to talk about and illustrate the ethos. It is not self-evident why any of these qualities should be in our ethos or prized above others. Why is humility a part of our written ethos and not courage for example? Leaders must know this and teach this, and like any critical message it must be repeated frequently. Too often in our past the ethos has been allowed to become little more than a poster on a wall.

The following summary is a primer on the SF ethos, a guide to leaders and a handrail to action, not just within the military but for any business or organisation that aspires to the pursuit of excellence.

“The Unrelenting Pursuit of Excellence”

This is the title of the SF ethos because it provides an overarching guide to all our actions. Unrelenting pursuit, because the work will never be done. This is both a process and a mindset. To always be moving forward, comfortable and embracing of evolution, adaptation, innovation and change. This is a challenge and not a given because, like any professional bureaucratic institution with a long-history, there is a tendency to become comfortable with the status quo or the way we have always done things. Excellence is not a search for perfection. Most UKSF soldiers are generalists – multi-sports athletes who deliver mission success by bringing many skills together. They rarely have the luxury of time to dedicate to a single skill to the exclusion of all else. Excellence, then, should be set in the context of mission success and the ability to adapt, overcome and make do. It is for everyone, and for leaders particularly, to define what excellence means in any specific context.

• Self-Discipline

A goal without a plan is meaningless. If the goal is the unrelenting pursuit of excellence, then the process is about the consistent application of habits and winning behaviours. We often talk about this in terms of doing the basics well. Basics done well, with relentless consistency is a recipe for excellence.  Consistency is difficult because it demands repetition, often of actions which are burdensome, boring or have little or no short-term reward. Most people can meet a standard occasionally, very few have the ability to do it with consistency. Very little of the selection process is a test of skills, it is mostly a test of attitude. Does the candidate have the self-discipline to keep turning up and applying the correct standard to everything they do – even when they are not being watched? Self-discipline is the application of effort over time and an unwillingness to compromise standards. It helps answer the question, how do we pursue excellence?

Where discipline has to be enforced it is a tremendous waste of everybody’s time.

• Classless

To be classless, and to think and act in a classless way, is to avoid falling into the trap of looking down on others. Any characteristic can be used to diminish the status of others. It could be race, religion, sex or cap-badge. The tenant is in our ethos because it acts as a guardrail against doing this. Tight knit organisations with an exclusive membership in part define themselves by what they are not. The danger is this creates arrogance and a disdain for everyone else who is not in this category. Arrogance from wherever it is derived, prevents effective collaborative, relationships and partnerships with others and creates a barrier to learning, that is essential to the pursuit of excellence. How can you learn if you are not open to the fact that others – even very different others, have something to teach you?

• Humility & Humour

Humility is the antidote to arrogance and the essential characteristic necessary to pursue excellence. You cannot pursue excellence unless you are constantly willing to learn and adapt. Learning requires a mindset that you still have things to learn and that others might have something to teach you. The risk of being marked out as special – with the symbols of unique berets and stable belts is that we become self-regarding and dismissive of others, caught up too much in what we think we are rather than what we have yet to become.  Humility is what allows us to take risks – because the nature of risk is the possibility of failure. It is only in humility that we can embrace this as a path to growth and mastery because we are able to focus on what we have yet to gain, rather than what we might lose.

Humour is a buffer to stress, helps prevent us taking ourselves too seriously and helps bring positive energy and enthusiasm to any situation, which is a combination which optimises performance. To be good humoured does not mean you have to be a comedian. It does mean that you are able to laugh and remain cheerful where others might become cynical, morose or self-pitying. Humour demands of each individual that you bring and maintain this attitude to everything you do and foster it in those around you.

Concluding thoughts

An ethos is a guiding spirit. In reality that spirit depends on every one of us, in the choices that we make and in the attitude we bring to everything we do. This begins with self-knowledge and the discipline and willingness to lead ourselves. Reinforcing this and guiding that spirit is an act of leadership, so it is upon on all leaders at every level in the organisation to guard the values in our ethos but also to pass them on and reinforce them.

They are not self-evident; they must be taught and to teach them, leaders must talk about them. To be able to communicate not just what they are but why they are and to connect that with stories from a rich past that illuminate when we have lived up to our expectations and when we have fallen short.

Get in touch to talk about how to codify and weave your ethos into the DNA of your business.