Level Five Associates

In the spring of 2020, Patrick McBrayer was the CEO of a medical device company with a workforce that had gone home, a supply chain under pressure, and an industry landscape changing by the week.

The pandemic was not a problem you could solve with a good quarter or a clever strategy. It was the kind of sustained, compounding disruption that tests not just a company's operational capabilities but its fundamental character.

What Patrick told me afterward was that their ability to navigate those years came down to one thing more than anything else: the culture they had built before the crisis arrived.

That distinction matters more than most leaders realize. Operational preparedness and organizational resilience are not the same thing. Contingency plans matter. Financial reserves matter. But a company can have excellent plans and still come apart when the pressure is sustained long enough, because plans do not build trust. And trust is what organizations run on when everything else is uncertain.

ACell had been working within the Level Five framework for years before the pandemic hit. They had invested in belonging, in psychological safety, in mutual accountability, and in a clear organizational azimuth their people genuinely understood and believed in. None of that prevented the disruption. What it did was give the organization the internal resources to respond without losing its footing.

ACell navigated those years and was acquired by a larger company during that same period, a strong outcome by any measure. The real credit belongs to the leaders throughout that organization who, when the pressure was highest, acted like the people their culture had developed them to be.

The crisis did not form them. It revealed them.

In this week's Adaptive Leadership Insights article, I walk through the specific leader behaviors that build organizational resilience, and why resilience is not constructed in crisis moments but in the ordinary ones that come before them. The link is in the comments.

I'd love to hear how you have seen culture affect an organization's ability to get through a genuinely hard stretch. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

I almost cut this line from The Power of Being All In because it felt too simple.

"Our leaders must be engaged and committed to building trust within and among their teams, not just between themselves and each person who reports to them."

Most leaders never make that distinction. They think about trust as one relationship at a time. Leader to employee. Keep your word, show up, give credit where it belongs, and people learn they can rely on you. That part most leaders already do well.

Here's the problem. I can have a deeply trusting relationship with every person on a team of ten and still have ten separate relationships that never connect into anything bigger. Take me out of the room and the whole thing falls apart, because I was the structure holding it together.

Real teams need trust between the leader and each person, trust between teammates working side by side, and trust in the team as a whole, the kind where someone outside the team says "give it to them, they'll get it done" without naming a single person.

That third kind is the one almost nobody builds on purpose.

I wrote about how to build all three this week. I'd love to hear which one, trust between you and your people, trust within your team, or trust among your team as a whole, you'd say is weakest right now. Let's talk about it in the comments.

Enjoy the journey!

When my son attended West Point, the attrition rate had fallen to less than 20 percent. When I was a cadet, it was over 40.

The mission had not softened. The standards had not dropped. What changed was the institution's fundamental relationship with the people inside it.

West Point stopped trying to identify who could withstand being broken down and started investing in developing leaders from the ground up. That shift took years. But what came out on the other side was an institution where cadets felt genuinely invested in, not simply tested to see if they deserved to be there.

That is what belonging actually looks like. Not comfort. Not the removal of challenge. Investment.

Here is what makes this so urgent right now: recent research shows that only one in four employees reports feeling genuinely connected to their organizational culture.

One in four.

The informal interactions that once generated that connectedness almost automatically, the shared spaces, the hallway conversations, the daily proximity, those are largely gone for millions of workers. Leaders can no longer assume connectedness exists. They have to build it deliberately, or it simply will not be there.

This week I go deeper on what building belonging actually requires in today's hybrid and dispersed work environments, including a specific tool called Power Questions that any leader can put to work immediately. The link is in the comments.

I'd love to hear where you see belonging working inside your organization, and where you see it quietly breaking down. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

A young technician was finishing up his last repair of the day when his manager stopped to ask what he had gotten done.

He could have said he fixed nine cars. That would have been accurate.

Instead he said, "I made nine families' lives safer today."

Same job. Same outcome. Completely different relationship to the work.

That is what a Level Five Culture of Commitment looks like from the inside. Not a policy. Not a compliance system. A team member who is genuinely all in because someone took the time to help him understand why his work mattered.

Here is the sobering reality: research shows that only about 30 percent of employees are truly all in at work. That means 70 percent are somewhere in the middle or checked out entirely. The organizations that close that gap do not do it by accident. They do it through deliberate, sustained leadership that earns buy-in every single day.

In this week's article I walk through what the Level Five Culture of Commitment actually looks like in practice, and the specific leadership behaviors that separate organizations that sustain it from those that plateau just short of it. The link is in the comments.

I'd love to hear where you think your organization sits on that five-level scale right now. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!