The head of SEAL Team Six training explains why a high performer with low trust is worse for the team than a medium performer with high trust. Organizations measure performance easily but struggle to measure trustworthiness, yet promoting toxic high performers creates toxic leaders that damage the whole group.
Chapters
SEAL Team 6 is elite amongst the SEALs, right? You have to be in the regular SEALs for at least 5 years before you can even apply to be in SEAL Team 6. And I had the opportunity to sit down with the head of training for SEAL Team 6, and I asked him a very simple question: how do you choose who goes from the SEALs into SEAL Team 6? Because they're all high, high, high, high, high performers. And he pulls out a piece of paper and he draws, uh, an XY axis and on the vertical he writes the word performance, and on the horizontal he writes the word trust. And as he explained it to me, he says, everybody wants this person, the high performer of high trust. Obviously nobody wants this person, the low performer of low trust. Obviously what they have learned is that this person here, the high performer of low trust, is a toxic team member, and they would rather have a medium performer, sometimes even a low performer of high trust, over the high performer of low trust. We have a million metrics to measure someone's performance. That's how we usually define the meritocracy. But we have negligible to no metrics to measure somebody's trustworthiness. And if you keep promoting a toxic team member, eventually that toxic team member becomes a toxic leader, and now the impact is even greater. We have to do a better job as leaders of understanding the different skill sets that help the group rather than help themselves, because sometimes Sometimes your highest performing people are your worst team players, and sometimes your greatest team players are not your best individual performers, but they help the whole team rise.
