Level Five Associates

Level Five Associates We assist our clients in building cultures of excellence characterized by decentralization and empowerment.

We will assist our clients in building cultures of excellence characterized by decentralization and empowerment. Our vision is to utilize over eight collective decades of military and corporate lessons learned and experience to improve a company’s performance relative to profitability, market share, and team member satisfaction. We understand what it takes to implement change management and can as

sist our clients in the hard work to “turn the battleship”. We will accomplish this vision with a combination of keynote addresses to spark interest and passion, workshops and seminars to further develop our “Big Six Leadership” principles, leadership development programs, and assistance with strategic planning. Learn more about becoming a Level Five Leader by reading our blog here: http://www.levelfiveassociates.com/category/blog/

09/04/2026

Consistency is not a personality trait.

It's a daily choice most people never notice you making.

The leader who says one thing and does another loses something that is almost impossible to earn back.

The leader who walks the walk, even when nobody's counting, builds a team that trusts what they say because they've watched what they do.

The test is simple. Can you respect the person you see in the mirror?

Related reading: The Level 5 Culture: We're All In. Link in the comments.

I'd love to hear where consistency gets hardest for you as a leader. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

The first report you get on a problem is almost always incomplete, and sometimes flat wrong. That's not a communication ...
09/03/2026

The first report you get on a problem is almost always incomplete, and sometimes flat wrong. That's not a communication failure on your team's part. It's just how information moves under pressure.

The mistake most leaders make is reacting to that first report as if it were the final word, and punishing the person who brought it for getting it wrong. What you're punishing is speed, the very thing that made the warning useful in the first place. Do that once, even quietly, and you've taught your whole team to sit on bad news a little longer next time.

I'd love to hear about a time bad news reached you late because someone was afraid to bring it sooner.

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

The link to the full article is in the comments.

Enjoy the journey!

Lieutenant General Don Holder had a habit that looked like simple courtesy but wasn't.He went first to the junior Soldie...
09/02/2026

Lieutenant General Don Holder had a habit that looked like simple courtesy but wasn't.

He went first to the junior Soldiers. Asked questions. Took notes. Never interrupted. And he came away with something no briefing slide could give him: the ground truth about his command.

Most leaders file listening as a soft skill. I have come to see it as a strategic advantage, worth more in many ways than capital or talent.

Nick Morgan, author of Can You Hear Me?, found that people believe their messages are understood ninety percent of the time. The real number is fifty percent. Half of what we think we communicated never lands.

That is why Listen sits second among the Big 6 Leadership Principles®, right behind Set the Azimuth.

Check out the related reading from All-In Adaptive Leadership Insights, Listen: The Skill Nobody Teaches and Everybody Needs. Link in the comments.

I'd love to hear about a moment when a leader's listening, or the lack of it, changed what was understood. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

08/28/2026

Toxicity lives in the blame game.

One question signals you're about to get voted off the island. The other signals you're valued here, you're in the tribe. People are tribal creatures, and they read those signals constantly, usually faster than they can put words to what they just felt.

An All-In Adaptive Leader learns to ask the second question instead of the first, on purpose, every time something goes wrong, not just on the days it feels easy. What comes back is a team that stays open instead of defensive, and stays committed instead of careful.

Related reading from All-In Adaptive Leadership Insights: Psychological Safety: What Happens When Leaders Own the Failure. Link in the comments.

I'd love to hear which question tends to come out of your mouth first, before you've even thought about it, when something goes wrong on your team. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

A blank "Hello, my name is" sticker on a sweater, with nothing written in is how I think about the Nametag culture: the ...
08/27/2026

A blank "Hello, my name is" sticker on a sweater, with nothing written in is how I think about the Nametag culture: the bottom of five levels I have watched play out in organizations of every size. A loose collection of people connected by nothing more than a name tag and a paycheck.

Most leaders assume their culture is simply good or bad. It is more useful to think of it as a climb.

At the top is a story a car dealer once told me. He asked a service technician what he had accomplished that day. The technician did not say he had fixed nine cars. He said, "Well, today I made nine families' lives safer." That is what it looks like when the blank gets filled in.

I'd love to hear which level you recognize most clearly in your own organization right now. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

Ernest Shackleton's ship froze into the ice in January 1915. For months, his crew held their discipline while the ice ca...
08/25/2026

Ernest Shackleton's ship froze into the ice in January 1915. For months, his crew held their discipline while the ice carried them, a little at a time, until they were 346 miles from where the ship had gone down.

No one felt that drift on any given day. It just accumulated.

Organizations drift the same way. The Azimuth you set in January is rarely the one you're living in October, and the shift never announces itself.

That's why I run a standing quarterly review, one that pressure tests Mission, Intent, Values, and Cultural Behaviors against real evidence instead of good intentions. In the article, I walk through how to run that review and share the Azimuth Review Scorecard I use to track the drift quarter over quarter.

Full article and the scorecard are linked in the comments.

I'd love to hear which of the four components you suspect has drifted the furthest in your own organization. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

08/24/2026

The intended message is only half the equation.

The other half is whether the other person heard what you think you said, and whether you heard what you think they said.

Early in my career, I gathered my Soldiers together, explained the mission, and asked the standard question.

"Okay, everybody got it?"

I got the nods and the "Yes, sirs" I was looking for.

Then they went out and did something completely different from what I thought we had discussed.

That gap baffled me until a commander finally asked, "Robert, did you get a back-brief?"

The military called it a confirmation brief.

I began using it constantly after that. You confirm that what you think you heard someone say is actually what they thought they said. It takes a little extra time, and it builds a level of clarity that almost never happens by accident.

That is one of the biggest differences I have found between military and corporate environments. In the corporate world, clarity is rarely the default. It only shows up when a leader insists on it or builds the process to sustain it.

Information is transmission. Communication is confirmation.

This week I go deeper on why this distinction matters more than ever. Link is in the comments.

I'd love to hear how your team builds confirmation into the way you communicate. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

08/21/2026

Setting your azimuth is the easy part.

Sticking with it is the discipline most leaders skip.

An azimuth drifts the moment conditions get uncomfortable and nobody is watching.

The Intent framework, End State, Key Tasks, Purpose, exist to catch that drift before it becomes the new direction.

Related reading this week: Setting the Azimuth: The Leader's Intent. Link in the comments.

I'd love to hear what tends to pull your team off azimuth first. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

Most leaders assume integrity gets easier as they rise. You finally have the authority to act on your values without ask...
08/20/2026

Most leaders assume integrity gets easier as they rise. You finally have the authority to act on your values without asking permission.

The opposite is true.

The higher you climb, the fewer people are left who'll ever challenge you. Your habits quietly become the standard everyone else follows, whether you've earned that or not.

A team doesn't learn its real standards from a policy manual. They learn them by watching what you do when the manual isn't in the room. When no one's checking. When no one would ever know.

That's the real test. Not the big, public decision everyone will ask you about later. The small, private one nobody will.

I'd love to hear about a moment someone held you accountable to a standard you hadn't fully lived up to yet. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

The link to the full article is in the comments.

Enjoy the journey!

A coral reef is one of the most beautiful structures in nature, and no one built it. It just happens, given the right co...
08/18/2026

A coral reef is one of the most beautiful structures in nature, and no one built it. It just happens, given the right conditions.

Most leaders assume culture works the same way: that it will assemble itself once the mission and values are written down clearly enough. It does assemble itself.

It just never assembles into the culture you needed. A committed culture exists only when leaders deliberately build it, and it decays the moment they stop paying attention.

New piece on Set the Azimuth is live, and the link is in the first comment below.

I'd love to hear about a behavior your culture rewards that no one ever wrote down. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

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