Chad Silverstein draws on military training and a Navy SEAL weekend to show how leaders prepare for crises. Anticipate what breaks: power outages, communication failures. Then drill your team repeatedly until they stay calm under pressure, which signals hope instead of panic.
Questions this video answers
Jim Gantt
About a week
Chapters
So I'm blessed to have someone who is a fellow builder on the build to lead band, Jim Gantt, who served our country in Afghanistan. And we were in a practice on a Friday morning, and I had asked him, you know, how did you do it? Like, how did you stay calm in the midst of fire? How did you. You know, I remember I spoke about a couple days ago where I went to this Navy SEAL weekend, and they put us in all the gear. They gave us, you know, these guns that had the pellets, and they put us through these exercises, and we were just all freaked out. We were. We're all shooting each other. Your heart starts pumping, you're trying to clear rooms. And they talk about how, like, these Navy SEALs and these. These incredible people who serve our country in the midst of a firefight can calmly pull out maps and be able to, like, do certain things in the midst of chaos. And I think being able to be a leader in a company is going to be much easier than being on the war front. But we're all fighting some sort of war, there's no question. And being able to lead your team through a tough time and being able to articulate and transmit hope and not fear when things aren't going so great, it's really easy for leaders to stand up in front of their company and rah, rah, when things are good and you're breaking records. It's another thing to be able to hit him with the truth about the reality of when you're in a slump and to be able to pull your team out of a slump and model the way that's the sign of a true leader. And I think if you're going to pivot and be able to face adversity, especially with the way things have changed in business today and the remote work and technology, you got to think outside the box. You got to be able to be prepared to fall hard and be able to pick yourself back up, reset, and go and be able to lead your team through that. Because if you're a leader, you're not just responsible for yourself. And, you know, thinking about staying ahead of the trends that you're currently in is an important thing. If you're a leader, being able to kind of look down the road and see what's coming so that you're not so surprised and then preload those responses so that when something happens, you're prepared and you're not sitting there dealing with something for the first time, having contingencies in place. What would happen if, you know, my in my company, our phones were the lifeline. So we had contingencies. If the phones go down, we do plan B, you know, and we had that. We had that backup plan because the power would go out. And I remember early on the power would go out and people would just stop and they stop working and they're all walking around. So, you know, sometimes the power could be out for a long time. There are times where I remember the power was out for a week, you know, during. During crazy storms. So you got to have a preloaded response for how you're going to be responding through the obstacles and the challenges that you're going to be faced with. And as a leader, it's your job to think about those things. Think about them now. And if you're a great leader, you'll think about that and put in time with your team and have them help you and put together some contingencies for the lifelines in your business so that if X happens, we shift to Y. And there's no substitute for practicing. There's no substitute for running the drill and acting as if, you know, it happened today and putting your team through that. I mean, this is why when you were a kid and they used to do tornado drills in school, they had you practice it because they didn't want it to be the first time when the tornado sounds went off that you'd go do the drill. Everyone always thought it was a drag that you had to go do it, but there's a reason why. So practice. And I remember Jim in the practice, he just. I asked him that question, how did you do it? And he looked at me and he said, we practice, we practice, we practice. We drilled, we drilled, we drilled. And then we drilled more and drilled more to the point where, you know, we were puking. I believe him, I believe him.
