Simon Sinek argues companies obsess over measurable performance while ignoring trust. SEAL Team 6 uses a two-axis chart to pick members, choosing medium performers with high trust over star performers with low trust. Most corporations promote toxic high-achievers because they never measure trustworthiness.
Chapters
The failing is we're looking for silver bullet. We're looking for the evaluation that gets everything. And the reality is there's multiple things we're evaluating. Usually what we're evaluating is the stuff that's easy to measure. Metrics. Right. We measure someone's output just because it's easy to measure. And just as an aside, this influenced heavily my thinking on the topic the Navy SEALs, which are not far from here in Coronado, within the Navy SEALs is a more elite group called SEAL Team 6, which many of us are familiar with. And I had the opportunity to spend some time with the head of training for Seal Team 6, and I asked him a very simple question, which is, how do you choose from the Navy Seals who goes to be on Seal Team 6? Because they're all amazing. And he drew a chart. He drew a graph, XY axis, and on the vertical axis he wrote the word performance. And on the horizontal axis, he wrote the word trust. And the way they define those terms, performance is defined as how good are you at your job? So I think most of us are familiar with that. And trust is defined what kind of person are you? What's your character? Right. Clearly, nobody wants this person, a low performer of low trust, on their team. Obviously, clearly everybody wants this person, the high performer of high trust, on their team. What they discovered is that this person over here, the high performer of low trust, is a toxic team member, and they would rather have a medium performer of high trust, sometimes even a low performer of high trust. It's a relative scale over the high performer of low trust. Now, if you look at it in a corporate context, we have a million metrics to measure someone's output, to measure performance, and we have negligible to no metrics to measure someone's character or trustworthiness. And so what we have is a lot of toxic team members whose output is so strong that we end up promoting them into being toxic leaders. And so it's not that measuring the performance or the output is wrong, that's totally fine. It's that it's unbalanced, so we need something to balance it off. So what are we adding to that?
