John Walt

Are our actions and decisions driven by rules or identity?

One of the first things my mentor, Scott Dohner, shared with me was a concept he calls “The Rule Line” that he created while he was CEO of Superfeet. He could see that employees were focused on following the rules and staying out of trouble, but Scott wanted everyone to aim much higher than that. He realized that how they thought about rules was the problem so he needed to help his team move away from rule-based thinking and start to focus on the organization's vision, mission, and values.

The concept of The Rule Line is relatively simple, and it applies to our families and businesses, as well as, our spiritual lives. Every organization, community, and family has rules, and the longer the organization has been around, the more rules it probably has. Many of these rules are actual policies in the employee handbook, and others are just unofficial expectations. These rules tell people what behavior is acceptable. When people do things that are out of line, we tend to make rules to avoid that happening again in the future. Similarly, when employees underperform, we look for ways to hold them accountable in order to get better results. We implement quotas, deadlines, and logs. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with these types of rules. They are often necessary. Many organizations take it too far, but most workplaces have what we can call “common sense rules.”

The Rule Line

Below is the rule line diagram. At the bottom, you have the rule line, which represents all the things we tell people they should and shouldn’t do. If their behavior is below the line, then they are in trouble. On the top and bottom of the line, you have the gray zone; any behavior in this area is not necessarily a flagrant foul, but it is very close to officially breaking the rules. Anything in the white area above the rule line is considered acceptable behavior.

What happens over time is that people look at those rules and they start to ask themselves, will what I am doing get me in trouble? Will showing up a few minutes late get me in trouble? If I miss my deadline, will I get in trouble? Then they ask themselves, “What do I need to do to make sure I don’t get in trouble? Then, over time, they build their personal understanding of their job description around what will keep them from getting in trouble. Some people settle for the “gray zone,” others have to be in the white zone. The employees who stay in the white are usually looked at as all-stars. Her bosses will say things like, “She always does what is expected of her.”

The problem is, “What are our expectations?” Do we want rule followers or something more than that? Whenever I talk to truly great leaders, what I hear is that they want to unlock people's potential, not just get them to “do their job.” The same concept applies at home. How often do kids of all ages decide how to behave based on avoiding punishment? Do we want kids who grow up and know how to avoid getting in trouble or do we want them to live from identity and vision? Everywhere we look, we can see people who know how to follow the rules but are not fully alive and are not living out their potential.

The problem with rules-based leadership is that it focuses just on behavior. Behavior modification is not how to create change in a system or an individual person. But we focus on actions because that is all we can see. But actions are the results of deep beliefs that are shaped by our past and our experiences. The Iceberg Model below represents this relationship between behavior and beliefs. All we can see of other people is their actions and behaviors. Most leaders try to create change by addressing only people's behavior.

For instance, if someone was disrespectful to a co-worker, HR will write him up and have a conversation with him to make sure he is reminded of the rules. Likely, he will stop being disrespectful for a period of time after that, but has he really changed? No, most of the time we are just addressing behaviors through punishment and rules. To really change how someone behaves, we need to address the emotions and beliefs driving the behavior.

When it comes to kids, I have so often seen that punishment doesn’t really work. I find our kids will change their behavior for a little while, but it doesn’t create lasting change. If you are consistent and severe enough with your punishment, then they will probably remember and not violate that rule anymore. Punishment is sometimes needed; it's not ok for kids to hurt each other or be mean to people, but punishment alone won’t create real change in anybody. If you don’t believe me, then just look at the recidivism rates in our prison system. About 70% of people released from U.S. prisons are rearrested within five years.

Aspirational Identity

What we really want people to do, whether our employees or kids, is to constantly aim for their collective and personal potential. I call this the “Aspiration Identity.” What is the vision for your family or business? What values are foundational to everything you do? Who did God create each of you to be? Aspirational identity is the vision we have for who we personally and collectively can be.

We don’t want the people we lead to just avoid getting in trouble; we want people to be pursuing their true potential. Rules-based cultures lead people to decide how to behave in order to avoid getting in trouble. In identity-based cultures, people's behavior and decisions are driven by their personal identity and the organization's identity. Most of the time, we will all fall short of our aspirational identity, but even then, we are still so far above the rule line.

Most people, families, teams, and organizations do not have a clear picture of their aspirational identity. Where we lack identity, we will grasp for certainty by obeying the rules. The cost of unrealized potential in individuals and groups is immeasurable.

The goal of every leader should be to continually drive the people and groups they lead back to their aspirational identity. In businesses, this looks like bringing people back to the mission, vision, and values of the organization and helping each person see their role in it. For families, it's continually coming back to the faith, vision, values, calling, and beliefs that guide the family. For individuals, it is seeing who God created them to be and calling that out of them.

We have all seen hundreds of movies about a character or team who start out as the underdog and then achieve great things when they choose to believe in themselves. I think we love those movies because we all want to believe that we are capable of so much more than we currently believe. This isn’t just something that happens in movies, I believe that we are all made for this transformation. The catalyst is always choosing to believe we can be more than we are right now. When people have a clear sense of their true identity, it invites them to live in alignment with that identity.

That's where we uncover the biggest problem of all, most companies have a mission, vision, and values, but nobody can remember what they are. Most families love each other well but haven’t clarified their values, vision, and calling. If we want to unlock potential we need to constantly drive people back to our aspirational identity and not just job descriptions, expectations, and rules. Rules-based organizations literally train people how to perform by encouraging them to stay in the white zone or maybe occasionally the gray zone when no one is looking.

The same concept works at home. Do you want your kids to just obey and become compliant, well-behaved people, or do you want more for them? We want much more for our kids. We use the Rule Line as a tool to remind us to consistently point our kids to their aspirational identity. I used to essentially tell my kids to obey the rules, don’t hit, don’t be mean, don’t take stuff…etc. I still want my kids to obey the rules, but now I use the rule line as a mental model to guide me back to the vision and values our family has. I will ask my boys what kind of man they want to be. They will say “a leader.” I will then ask, What kind of leader do you want to be? They usually say “a good leader.” Then I will ask, “How would a good leader act in this situation?” I often find myself and them drifting towards the rule line, “Do that again and you will lose a privilege.” Then I see them doing the math to decide if they care about getting in trouble or not. When I remember to speak to their identity, then everything changes almost instantly. Our conversations and conflicts go so much differently when they are brought back to their aspirational identity. But they have to have buy-in. I can’t just tell them what our mission, vision, and values are. We all have to agree that we want the same things.

What Scott realized is that we all need a clear picture of what we are actually aiming for and we need to go back to that picture over and over again until it changes how we think. Then we can become people who decide our actions based on the kind of person, family, or organization we want to be, not just the least that is expected of us.

Speaking to Identity Instead of Behavior.

Our true identity comes from God. Most of the time, we have trouble believing that we are loved, that He is with us, that He has a plan for our lives, and that we are wonderfully and uniquely made. Because we struggle to believe these things, we accidentally craft a false narrative about who we are, one that is shaped by shame, fear, insecurity, and doubt. We simply cannot see that we are created for more. As leaders, part of our responsibility is to call out the identity of the people around us.

I was not naturally good at calling out people's true identities. It used to be much easier for me to see people's faults and flaws than their identities. When Heather and I were dating, she heard me saying some things I observed about other people. I can’t remember what I was saying but she stopped me and said, “I can’t be with you if all you are going to see in people is their problems. I want to see the best in people and who God created them to be and call that out of them.” I listened to her because she was totally right. Ever since then, I have practiced seeing the best in everyone I can. I am no longer nearly as judgmental as I was then. I usually find myself getting very excited about what I can see about how God made someone.

This practice of speaking to identity is especially critical at home, in our most important leadership role. Recently, I was leaving town for a few days, and I told my eight-year-old son that he is a leader and, as the oldest, I am relying on him to help Heather out while I am gone. The whole time I was gone, he was so incredibly supportive and looking for ways to help out. We were shocked at all the things he was doing without even being asked. I called out his identity, and he lived up to it. Because I told him he was a leader, that was how he acted.

Heather and I try to do this with our kids all the time. I have seen the same thing happen with adults. I practice it with the people I love and with myself. Most people are shaped by a world that tells them they aren’t enough and teaches them that they can’t trust other people and have to look out for themselves. My job is to see myself and others the way God sees us and to call out that identity.

I think this is one of the fundamental teachings of Jesus. The Pharisees were obsessed with rules. Everywhere you looked, they used the rules to control people's behaviors in the name of making them more holy. Then Jesus came and grabbed a bunch of lowly guys and called out their identity. Those unrighteous, uneducated men became the leaders of the early church. At every turn, we see Jesus looking past the boundaries of rules and calling out who God created people to be.

Rules only work in mechanical systems. Sure, you can get people to behave with enough structure, but are we called to lead people into good behavior? Or are we called to invite people into transformation? Our lives, communities, families, and organizations are complex organic systems so identity is the only way to organize them, and it is the only way to help people find freedom.

- John Walt

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