Trust Vs. Performance

1 Nov 2024 · 1 min

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0:56

A short spoken piece (YouTube) in which Simon Sinek recounts an anecdote from SEAL Team 6 selection: leaders rank candidates on an XY axis of performance (vertical) versus trust (horizontal) and prefer high-trust mid/low performers over high-performing low-trust individuals. He argues businesses over-measure performance and under-measure trust, leading to promotion of toxic high-performers into toxic leaders.

Chapters

This is the highest performing organization on the planet. SEAL Team 6 are the elite of the elite. And I sat down with the head of training and I asked him a very simple question, which is, how do you choose who gets on this team? And he pulled out a piece of paper and he drew an XY axis for me. And on the vertical axis he wrote the word performance. And on the horizontal axis he wrote the word trust. Clearly, everybody wants this person on their team, the high performer of high trust. Obviously, what they learned 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 business, we have a million metrics to measure people's performance and we have negligible to no metrics to measure somebody's trustworthiness. And then we take toxic team members who are high performing and we promote them, and eventually they became toxic leaders.