One Day in the Oklahoma City Jail...(In-Business Magazine - May 2004)

A jail is the last place you’d expect to be a bastion of good character, especially one that housed the likes of the Oklahoma City bomber and his accomplice.

But my visit to the Oklahoma City Jail early this year changed my thinking about character and the way we can all manage people for good and see massive improvement.

I met troopers and Sheriff’s deputies bragging and beaming about the great leaps they’ve made in prison culture in the last five years. I saw prisoners laughing good naturedly with officers, taking classes, improving themselves and showing respect to each other. It was a bit like a 13 storey YMCA camp with big locks.

WORTHWHILE AT LAST
Lieutenant Bobby Carson told me, ‘In the last 5 years we have come 50 years. I’ve been in law enforcement 23 years and I can at last say I am doing something worthwhile with my life.’

CHAINED TO THE TAPS
The Warden, Major Clifford Uranga told me the history, ‘Back in ‘98/99 we were beside ourselves with some 40 or so juveniles we were housing at the time and with them beatin’ on each other, beatin’ on the jail and beatin’ on us we got so we had to chain them to the taps when they showered.

I appealed to Chaplain Argyl Dick to find us some help and to find it fast. He discovered the Character Training Institute just down the road from us – it had been there all the time but we’d missed it. Anyways we started to work with it and in a short time we had those rival gang members eating at tables with cutlery, talking to each other by their first name and calling us “Sir” and “Ma’am”. That turned our facility around and we started running with the program. Now five years later there’s not a trooper or an inmate who would want to turn the clock back.’

SO HOW DO THEY DO IT?
They certainly do more than I can tell you in one small article. However the program can be summed up like this.

Character has at least 49 synonyms and each one is an actionable, doable, noticeable behaviour. Imagine the lift in productivity and satisfaction if all of your people exhibited only these four qualities for the next month…
> Attentiveness ( showing the worth of a person or task by giving my undivided concentration)
> Initiative (recognising and doing what needs to be done before I am asked to do it)
> Joyfulness (maintaining a positive attitude even when faced with unpleasant conditions)
> Decisiveness (the ability to recognize key factors and finalise difficult decisions)

Pause a moment and picture it. Tell me if you don’t get a picture of sheer bliss, and we have only got you thinking about 4 of them. There are 45 to go!

FAIR WARNING
You can’t dump it on your people or use the program to manipulate an outcome. You have to come at it with a commitment to help them be successful – and managers have to be the first to accept what John D Rockefeller used to say, ‘Our cup will truly run over, only after we have sealed the character cracks.’

IT’S NO SECRET: WE NEED A REVIVAL OF CHARACTER AND VALUES
From the Prime Minister to football code executives and talk back radio hosts, people of all walks of life are bewailing the fact that society has lost its grip on values, ethics and character.

They are all saying, ‘Why doesn’t someone do something?’

Now you can.

In the ‘Fox-Proof Chook House program, we run management seminars to teach leaders how to create a culture of character organically, and permanently. We also distribute monthly magazines emphasizing each quality, we teach managers to give recognition and encouragement for specific qualities.

It’s not an instant cure. It’s a way of being.

It is possible to change a culture and make it stick out like a lighthouse in a storm.

ONE TIP:
Start with this: In your daily dealings with people, find ways to compliment their character, rather than their action. A waiter who runs to change a dropped piece of cutlery could be acknowledged for her alertness – eye to eye, rather than just being thanked for the knife. A PA who finishes a report early could be recognized for his punctuality or resourcefulness rather than just being thanked for the ‘good job.’

If they can do it in a jail…