Simon Sinek shares how Navy SEALs choose medium performers they trust over high performers they don't, because low-trust stars damage team cohesion. Most businesses measure performance obsessively but barely track trust. The best leaders are often medium performers who earn their team's confidence.
Chapters
I had the opportunity to work with the Navy SEALs, and within the Navy SEALs, there's actually a more elite group within the SEALs that's much harder to get into. You have to be a SEAL for, like, five years before you even can get into this even more elite group. And I asked the director of training for this group, you know, how do you choose who gets into this more elite group within your own. Within your own culture? And he drew an XY axis. He drew a graph for me.
And on the vertical axis you wrote performance, and on the horizontal axis you wrote trust. The way they define performance is how good are you at your job? Right? Your skill set? The way they define trust is what kind of person are you? And the way they put it is, I may trust you with my money, I may trust you with my life, but do I trust you with my money and my wife? Right? So.
So clearly, nobody wants the low performer of low trust. Clearly. Clearly, everybody wants the high performer of high trust in their team. Clearly, what they learned is that a high performer of low trust is actually a toxic team member, and they would rather have a medium performer of high trust. Sometimes a low performer of high trust. It's a relative scale over the high performer of low trust. And this is one of the highest performing organizations on the planet. And they put huge credence in the trustworthiness and the character of the team member over their simple performance metrics. In business, we're the opposite. We have a million metrics to measure someone's performance, and we have negligible to no metrics to measure someone's trust. And so you may have a selfish, driven, toxic team member who, if they're high performing, what do we do? We promote them. And sometimes you get to the point where leadership knows that this person is toxic, and you say, you know, you probably should do something about this. You maybe want to remove them from the team. And they say the same thing. They're like, yeah, I know. Their performance is so good. You are literally just waiting for something to collapse. Meaning either other people will leave or the culture will start to crack, or there's a scandal or that person will leave because they get a better job offer. They're not loyal. So they may be your highest performer, but they're not loyal. What the seals learn is sometimes these medium performers of high trust are your.
Best natural leaders. The irony is, if you go to any team, it's actually really easy to find these toxic team members. That's the irony. Even though we don't formally measure it go to any team and ask them who the asshole is, and they'll all point to the same person.
And that's an opportunity to coach them. I don't believe in firing them. I believe in coaching them. We let people go when they're proved to be uncoachable. And by the way, if you go to that same team, you say, who do you trust more than anybody else? Who's got your back no matter what? Who's always there to help you? They'll probably also point to the same person who might be your best natural leader. And they may not be your best individual performer.
