The Fifth Discipline

The Fifth Discipline shows you how to find joy at work again as an employee and improve your company’s productivity if you’re an employer by outlining the five values you must adopt to turn your workplace into a learning environment.

You might not remember it, but when you were a kid you loved learning. And you were great at it too. If you want to see why, just find a toddler and watch them as they touch, smell, and taste everything they see. They don’t care if they fall when walking or fail at anything else, they just get back up and try again.

Somewhere inside of you, that flame of curiousness is still alive. But you struggle to see it because your company, with its hierarchy, narrow job details, and incompetent managers, smothers this out.

Your limiting responsibilities is just one curiosity killer. Executives encourage a “just punch the clock” mentality by confining you to only a few tasks. This kills your engagement and severely inhibits the chances you’ll ever try to solve problems.

Another huge problem in the workplace is reactiveness. I worked for a company that was constantly putting out fires and it was exhausting and expensive. Even worse, there was no chance to plan and prepare for growth.

It’s just like that old story about how to cook a frog. You have to place the frog in normal temperature water then slowly turn up the heat. The frog doesn’t notice and gets cooked, just like your reactive company doesn’t notice growing problems before it’s too late.

Fortunately, you can beat all of these problems with the five disciplines, which you’ll discover next.

Old habits might be hard to break, but if you work at them every day, you can make new ones in no time. In your workplace, you’ll be tempted to go back to the old ways as you try to implement the five disciplines, but don’t give up and it will work. The first is personal mastery, which the company must promote to employees. In the author’s view, this means a commitment to learning and growth and consistently being your best. As each employee does this, they will find fulfillment again. Next comes examining and improving mental models, which are the filters through which we all see the world. All of your experiences, judgments, and assumptions make this up. Once you identify what they are, you can begin challenging the inefficient ones. Team learning is the third discipline. This piece works as employees learn to communicate well. Together, they ask questions, check their biases, and offer feedback. By thinking collectively, employees can accomplish more than each individual can. The fourth, which must build on…