The Most Surprising Thing I Learned from the Military

The military is one of the most human organizations you'll ever meet. And hugging is fine. Hugged more people in uniform than I've ever hugged in suits. Crying is fine. Cried with more people in uniform. I've been brought to tears by a commanding officer saying something on a stage. I've never been brought to tears by a CEO giving a speech of any kind, ever.

And you realize these organizations are human values based organizations. And, and the lessons are not unique to the military, but the lessons are exaggerated because the stakes are very often life and death, which is why it's so human. And so I'm always, I'm no longer surprised. But in the early days getting to know them, I was surprised how opposite it is that we think they are. Again, too many movies, right?

I was talking to the guy who was in charge of training for SEAL Team 6, the training director for SEAL Team 6. You have to be the regular SEALs before you're eligible to go into SEAL Team 6. Right? Okay, so it's the best elite, the best, Right? And so they're already badasses, but what makes them different? And so I asked him, how do you choose who gets on Seal Team 6? And he drew a line graph for me. He drew an X, Y axis, right? And on the vertical axis he said, this is performance. On the horizontal axis he said, this is trust. And the way they defined it is performance is how good are you at your job, right? Can you make the sale? Trust is, what kind of person are you? What's your character? Right? And he said, clearly nobody wants this person on their team, the low performer of low trust. Clearly. Yeah, clearly everybody wants this person on their team, the high performer of high trust. What we learned is that this person over here, the high performer of low trust, is a toxic team member. And we would rather have a medium performer of high trust, sometimes even a low performer of high trust. It's relative scale over the high performer of low trust. Right? Now, if you think about business, we have a million metrics to measure someone's performance. But how many metrics do we have to measure someone's character or trustworthiness? And so what we end up doing is we take toxic team members who are high performers and we keep promoting them because their numbers are great. We turn them into toxic leaders, right? Because they keep doing the same thing. Because it's gotten me this far. And, and that's how you break culture. And other people have seen it, how you break cultures, be rewarded. Exactly, exactly. And then they'll repeat the behavior that gets you A promotion. Right. Goes back to Dennis, who promoted me for my behavior. It's exactly right. And so I think one of the things we can do better in business is consider who the person is, not just their performance. Because there are some spectacularly fantastic leaders out there on a team who are not the single biggest individual performers themselves, but because they're great leaders, they get great performance of the people around them. We usually give those people nothing. We usually don't recognize them. By the way, it's very easy to find the high performer, low trust. Just go to any team and say, who's the asshole? Yeah.

They'll all point to the same. They all know, too. They'll all know. And by the way, I don't believe you should fire that person. I believe you should coach that person. If somebody has performance issues or behavioral issues, we coach them. And if they prove themselves to be uncoachable, then we will gladly send them to our competition. Right.

But the same goes for these medium performers of high trust and low performers of high trust. If you go to any team and say, who on your team always has your back when, like, when it hits the fan, like, you know that they're always going to be there for you, they'll also all point to the same person. They may not be your biggest individual performer, but I guarantee you the team performs at the level it does because that's. And we have to recognize those people and reward those people.