Fight for your culture so your team grows and wins

Culture change is not a slogan, a training session, or a motivational speech. It is the sum of thousands of micro-behaviors: which tools people use, which shortcuts they take, how they explain delays, and how they react to new expectations. It is what happens when leaders are not in the room.

Many organizations struggle because their teams resist change—not out of malice, but out of habit. The friction is subtle: half-used tools, delayed projects, and endless narratives of being “busy.” These patterns silently drain momentum.

One of the most reliable ways to break these patterns is through real talk and positive mental sword fights.

Foundations vs. Results

There are two fundamentally different kinds of progress in a team:

Foundations: the systems, processes, clarity, and structure that make consistent excellence possible. Results: the measurable improvements in retention, expansion, productivity, and revenue.

A team can dramatically improve foundations—better CRM structure, clearer playbooks, new tools—while seeing only modest improvements in results. This is normal. It’s like reforging the ground beneath a house. From the outside the house looks the same. But now it can support another floor.

That is the stage many teams find themselves in: strong foundations, but not yet the corresponding results. That transition from structure to performance is exactly where real talk becomes essential.

What a Positive Mental Sword Fight Is

A sword fight is not conflict. It is clarity.

It is a conversation where two people, aligned on the mission, remove vague excuses and get down to specifics. The intent is developmental. The tone is respectful. The process is rigorous.

It looks like this:

• Someone says,  “I can’t adopt this new tool, because it’s complicated and takes effort”

• You say, “It’s supposed to save you effort, can you show me exactly what takes extra effort?”

• Together, you uncover whether the constraint is real or narrative “resistance to change”

• You don't stop diving deep in a positive way until it is clear whether the "tool" has an issue that needs to be fixed or you are dealing with resistance to change.

When repeated enough times, this teaches people to pre-filter their own thinking. They stop inventing soft explanations. They start using tools consistently. They surface real blockers early. They grow.

Who You Fight For — and Who You Do Not

Sword fights only work with people who have the right core mindset:

• Low entitlement

• Willingness to face reality

• Openness to change

• Desire to do excellent work

People with this mindset improve quickly when engaged in real talk. They become allies and culture carriers.

But some people, usually a small percentage, bring chronic entitlement or deep resistance to structure. They pull against the system. They drain others. They create silent or not so silent dissent.

You should not invest your energy sword fighting endlessly with them. They eventually need to move out of the team or into contractor roles where their behavior cannot undermine culture.

Tools Become Culture Only When Usage Is Absolute

Tools like JAM and MAP are not suggestions. They are the operating system.

Full adoption produces:

• Faster onboarding

• Easier rollout of product changes

• Clearer client visibility

• Better risk detection

Partial adoption destroys all of this.

If one person does not use the MAP, and then product introduces a new step, you cannot scale the change. If someone refuses the JAM, you cannot accurately assess risk.

The standard is simple:

100 percent usage, 100 percent of accounts.

When a tool is used inconsistently, it is almost always a cultural problem, not a technical one. And the cure is real talk.

Concentrating Effort to Increase Velocity

Velocity drops when projects stretch across weeks due to fragmented attention. Tools get built but never finished. Reports get half constructed. Important growth work drags.

Concentrated, workshop-based work resets the pace:

• Three hours together moves a project forward more than three weeks of scattered effort.

• Two focused sessions can finalize a compensation plan or design a new product motion.

This is how leaders turn foundations into visible business results.

Dual Personas: Warm Mission, Sharp Standards

To shift culture, leaders must master two equally important modes:

Mission persona:

• Reinforces purpose and shared goals.

• Recognizes specific wins.

• Builds genuine connection.

Standards persona:

• Cuts through vague explanations.

• Insists on data and specifics.

• Holds the line on process.

When these two personas coexist, people feel both supported and accountable.

The Transformation

Over time, persistent positive mental sword fights produce visible changes:

• People bring problems with specific evidence.

• Excuses become rare and detailed rather than vague and emotional.

• Tool adoption becomes normal.

• Change rolls out faster.

• Productivity and retention rise.

Culture becomes self-reinforcing. High performers help reinforce standards. Weak performers self-select out. The team moves from heroic individual effort to a scalable operating system.

Real talk, done right, is not harsh. It is the most respectful form of leadership: refusing to let capable people stay stuck behind vague narratives, and insisting on the clarity that helps them grow.

That is the path from foundations to true excellence.

Best Practices for Using Positive Mental Sword Fights to Shift Culture

Separate foundations from results

• Foundations are the tools, processes, and clarity that enable good work.

• Results are hard metrics like retention, revenue, and productivity.

• Do not confuse “we are working hard” with actual performance improvement.

Define productivity in concrete terms

• Measure outputs such as campaigns per CSM, revenue per head, NRR, and GRR.

• Ignore high-level narratives about busyness unless they show up as measurable gains.

• Use a simple definition: more impact with the same or fewer people.

Treat culture as behavior plus systems

• Culture is what people consistently do when leaders are not in the room.

• It shows up in process adoption, consistency, openness to change, and response to data.

• A culture of “everyone does their own thing” cannot scale, regardless of individual talent.

Use positive mental sword fights as a leadership tool

• Sword fights are direct, specific, reality-based conversations about behavior and standards.

• They are fundamentally collaborative: two people aligned on a mission stripping away excuses.

• The stance is not adversarial; it is disciplined, honest, and focused on growth.

Go from general excuses to specific facts

• Do not accept vague explanations like “I’m too busy” or “there’s too much going on.”

• Ask for specifics: which accounts, which tasks, how many minutes, what is actually hard.

• Once specific, either fix real constraints or expose weak narratives.

Choose who to invest in

• Invest deeply in people with low entitlement, high openness, and willingness to grow.

• Promote these people, empower them, and use them to help scale the new culture.

• Do not drain energy on those with chronic entitlement or anti-process mindsets.

• People who consistently resist the system eventually need to move out of the organization.

Make tools non-optional and continuously improvable

• Tools like JAM and MAP should be used 100 percent of the time.

• The standard is: full adoption, looking for specific issues when something is broken.

• Low usage without complaints indicates a culture problem, not a tooling problem.

Anchor everything in clear “so what” outcomes

• Every project must map to increasing revenue/retention or saving meaningful time, quality-of-life or important data generation

• Ask explicitly: does this produce measurable impact? If not, rethink it.

Concentrate effort when building the business

• Day-to-day operations run on weekly cadences.

• Transformational projects move faster with concentrated workshops, not scattered effort.

• Compress work into structured deep work blocks to reduce calendar drag.

Lead with two personas

• Mission-driven persona: recognizes specific good behavior and reinforces purpose.

• Standards persona: has low tolerance for vague excuses and drives clarity.

• The combination creates a culture of honest accountability and shared ownership.