Transcript of a Simon Sinek talk comparing military and business leadership. Sinek argues that military culture makes leadership lessons clearer because stakes are higher; he emphasizes the primacy of human skills (trust, loyalty, brotherhood) over technical skills and performance metrics, and describes a two-axis evaluation used by Navy SEALs (performance vs. trust).
Chapters
The military is not different than business. It's not better or worse than business. The lessons are just much easier to see because the stakes are higher. In other words, everything is exaggerated. So the good is really good and the bad is really bad. And the impact of really good is obvious. And the impact of really bad is obvious. And so I find that it's a much easier place for me to study leadership and just because it's way exaggerated, right?
The other thing is.
It'S a deeply human culture because the stakes are life and death very often. And so in business, we have colleagues and co workers, they have brothers and sisters. It feels really different. When you hear military talk about each other, they use words like love.
Love. They talk about love of each other. They talk about brotherhood, they talk about sisterhood. The Marine Corps talks about the intangibles. In business, we think everything's rational, we think everything's calculated. And the stuff that's ooey gooey, we call those soft skills, right? They're human skills. There's nothing soft about them. There's hard skills and there's human skills, right? We downplay the stuff that is the fabric of business. We call it a company. It is literally a group of people. It is a company, and the people are more important. And you go to the highest levels, the highest performers in the military, whether you go to the seals or some of the other special operators, right? They'll talk about that. It's the human being that cannot be replicated. The human being is more important than the technology. In business, we think that technology is everything. They understand that greatness cannot be scaled, right? They talk about things like trust, not just performance, as reasons and ways to judge whether we should let someone on our team in business. We only want to see what your performance was, where else you worked, and what your performance was in your prior organization. We never ever consider trust. I'll show you something. So.
A good friend of mine who's a Navy SEAL showed me this shout out.
Rich Devini.
I asked him who becomes seals, like, how come seals are so great, right? He says, well, when we evaluate seals, we look at two axes, right? We look at performance and we look at trust. Performance is, how good are you at your job? Trust is your character the way they say it is. I may trust you with my life, but do I trust you with my money or my wife? Right? They're seals.
Nobody wants the person in the bottom left corner, the low performer of low trust. Of course, of course. Everybody wants the person in the top, right, The High performer of high trust. Of course, what they learned is that the person in the top left, the high performer of low trust, that's a toxic team member. 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. Right now think about how we do it in business. We have a million metrics for someone's trust performance and minimal to no metrics for someone's trustworthiness. Which means we keep promoting and celebrating high performers of low trust and we ourselves are building toxicity into our own teams and our own leadership. Here's the joke. Do you have any idea how easy it is to find a high performer of low trust? Go to any team and say who's the asshole? And they'll all point to the same person.
But we don't do that now. That person doesn't get fired. That person needs coaching. They have not been taught leadership. Maybe they were a great salesperson. That doesn't make them a great sales manager. We got to teach leadership. We can't just expect because you're good at your job, you're good at leading other people to do the job you used to do. If they're uncoachable, then you can let them go. Same goes for the low performer of high trust. We easy find those too. It's actually nothing to do with performance. Go to any team and say who do you trust more than anybody? Who's got your back no matter what? When the chips are down, you would turn to this person before anybody else. They will also alter point to the same person. They may or may not be a high performer, but they're probably your best natural leader and are a great team member. And if they're struggling performance, coach them. And if they're uncoachable, then we can maybe ask them to leave. But we don't ask. And yet the highest performing organizations on the planet consider trust more important than performance. In business, we don't.
