September 2024

Getting Real and Getting Better: How the Navy's call to action inspires driving a culture of excellence within an organization

By Jason Motes

"That's the way we've always done it."

Those seven words can cripple a team and an organization in unimaginable ways for many complex and nuanced reasons. We have all heard the old saying, "If it's not broken, don't fix it." But why is it an "old saying?" Well, it's because it's exactly that: old! It's tired. It's broken, and if we've learned anything from organizational crises over the last thirty years and more, it simply doesn't work.

Sure, some things just shouldn't be "fixed." Coca-Cola, for example, has produced a winning formula for decades. So has McDonald's. Their products are not broken by any means. But this is not about a time-tested fan-favorite beverage or burger. This is about changing the mindset within an organization to improve and sustain organizational success. And it starts everywhere within an organization; top, bottom, in between.

Whether for-profit or non-profit, organizations have cultures regardless of their mission. Some cultures are deliberately established, some take shape over time, and many are shaped through their leaders' culmination of positive and negative attributes. When the latter happens, culture can tend to shift with new faces. However, it doesn't matter how it takes shape; recognizing that organizational culture is established is the first step to progress.

Great organizations do great, not good, things. In Jim Collins' book, ‘Good To Great,' he offers countless examples of how the most successful organizations have driven cultures of excellence by doing extraordinary things. The U.S. Navy has an exceptionally powerful culture. It's a time-tested and respected one. Despite its performance, it perpetually seeks to improve outcomes and, in January of 2022, adopted its ‘Get Real, Get Better' mantra as a call to action that starts with one's mindset—a mindset that is inquisitive, always learning, and seeking improvement.

By establishing Get Real, Get Better, The Navy provides us as leaders with an example of an organization doing the extraordinary, leading in a deliberate movement to improve upon an already winning formula. The Navy zeroed in on this concept because it knows that a perpetual state of self-evaluation and honest reflection, coupled with a growth mindset, leads to long-term sustainment of innovation, success, and dominance.

Getting real and getting better requires recognizing that even world-class organizations still have performance variability. As applied within an organization, getting real and getting better goes beyond its people, cultures, and processes. Because anything and everything is on the table for improvement, it requires a top-down, bottom-up commitment to an approach that holistically considers every decision, every situation, and every performance deliverable as a legitimate opportunity area for improvement, regardless of how good it is—A complete and total shift in mindset.

What if your organization adopted a similar mantra? What are the types of behaviors and attributes required of its people? First, it requires courage. Courage to challenge, highlight, and speak up, regardless of one's position. It can be grossly unpopular to look at something that works and say publicly, "This can be even better." Second, it requires acting with urgency. When you realize you have a problem, whether one that leads to red or one that you can make even greener, you become a part of the problem when you don't act urgently. Third, it requires persistence. Getting real and getting better requires you to take a step back, evaluate all the factors, analyze them, create solutions, implement them, and then consistently reevaluate them. This can be a short process, and it can also be a long process. Doing it correctly will require persistence to go the distance because it will inevitably take what may feel like an insurmountable amount of effort to get it done.

But it's never done, and that leads to my last point. It takes acknowledgment that the process is enduring. Even after solutions are implemented, they and their effect are subject to further evaluation and analysis because they must be. The end goal isn't necessarily that there is one. Instead, habitually breaking things to make them better, more effective, and more successful is more aligned to an end state than anything else. It's "forever" because room for improvement is, in fact, "forever."

Whether leading a small team, a large team, or an entire organization, it's foolish to believe there's no room for improvement. One of the most powerful things I learned in my MBA program was always to be ahead of the curve—ahead of the competition and never put my organization in a position where it was reading bad things about it in the news. Great leaders create great news by embracing the red, performing surgery on it, and not waiting around to read about what happened afterward. They don't promote environments where they create negative news; they promote ones where red is seen as an opportunity to grow and get better.

Can you imagine working for an organization or leader that believed in and promoted the "it's always been that way" mentality where the standards that the phrase embodies are exemplified? An organization by which challenging the status quo is viewed as problematic. As a leader, I challenge you in that the moment you realize you're in that type of environment, you either roll up your sleeves, act with courage, get the help needed, and boldly challenge and change the behavior, or you find a different environment where the "it's always been that way" mentality would never be tolerated.

Why? Because it's our job as leaders, regardless of position or community, to exemplify the continuous process of improvement that the Navy's ‘Get Real, Get Better' mantra underscores. It's far beyond what is required to drive the culture of excellence that we all expect, deserve, and frankly need to work within. Good change takes time and requires the mindset and understanding that it never ends. Kara Lawson, the Head Women's Basketball Coach at Duke University, coined a phrase to "Handle hard better." It's on each organization's leadership to do so, too. Get real and get better. Perpetually.