This is such an important concept. We don’t have to mistreat people to set them up for success. We have to teach them to expect to work hard and succeed as we show them respect and demonstrate that we care about them.

Formal “tough love" programs produce notoriously bad results. In my state of Michigan, “boot camp" programs for young people serve as alternatives to incarceration and can shorten prison sentences.

The programs emulate military basic training, though they don’t tend to be staffed by people who were ever instructors in military basic training programs. Many of them went through such programs, however, and believe that the bullying they experienced there is something everyone should go through.

These “boot camp" programs are notoriously violent and degrading. For a while, they used to tout their “success” rates, but now they mostly keep quiet, because they just aren’t very successful.

Programs like this were popular all over the United States for quite a while, based on the notion that military tough love is a great idea, even as the military itself in the United States was moving away from those training paradigms. We haven’t exactly implemented the Israeli cooperation model, but data has shown the Israelis do a better job at training than we do. The Israeli army does not scare the shit out of recruits. Israeli basic training instructors do not yell at or scream at recruits. They challenge them to excel and treat them like valued partners when they do.

The US military is moving slowly toward this model, struggling against an ingrained tradition of abusing recruits. Leadership is moving that way because data show the Israeli model of respect actually works better than our model. I mean, political questions about the State of Israel aside, and questions about valuing the military aside, every military professional in the world holds up common Israeli soldiers as among the best anywhere.

Those soldiers don’t need tough love to excel. Very few people probably do.