A Simon Sinek talk arguing that over-emphasizing measurable performance (sales, targets) while neglecting trust, values, and ethics produces toxic short-term results. He uses examples (Wells Fargo, drug pricing), an analogy from SEAL Team 6 contrasting performance vs. trust, and personal anecdotes to recommend measuring and rewarding values/behavior (coach high performers low in trust; develop low performers with high trust).
Chapters
I'm not anti numbers by any stretch of the imagination. And as I said before, you know, they, they have value. They, they, they, they are a metric of, of some sort of value that customers perceive in us if they're willing to, willing to buy from us. I think the problem with, the problem with bottom line is that it's just lopsided, which is we measure, we measure sales, we measure money because it's the easiest thing to measure, but it's much harder to measure the, the more ethereal stuff like trust, like love and, and values and how you achieve these things. And so organizations that only measure numbers and have a short term mentality are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. I mean, there's something called ethical fading, which is when we're obsessed with short term and we build our incentive structures to drive short term financial results, we accidentally incentivize people to do the wrong things. And the more explosive examples are things we've seen in the news, whether it's Wells Fargo opening fake accounts or drug companies, you know, raising the price of essential drugs 100%, 200%, 500%. It's nothing illegal about it. When they get dragged in front of Congress, they all say the same thing. We didn't break any laws. Correct. Nothing was illegal, but it's highly unethical. And, and so I'm, I'm just a great believer in just making sure that those things are, are more balanced. Here's the analogy. So I had the opportunity to work with Seal Team 6. Seal Team 6 are the elite of the elite. So you have to work on the regular seals for a bunch of years before you're even eligible to get into Seal Team 6. And I sat down with the head of training for Seal Team 6 and I asked him a very simple question, which is, how do you choose who gets on this team? Because they're all remarkable. They're all gorillas. I mean, they're all incredible. 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. So performance is, how good are you in the field? What's your skill set.
What are your numbers, did you hit your targets, etc.
And trust is, what kind of person are you? The way they put it is, I may trust you with my life, but do I trust you with my money or my wife? They're SEALs. Clearly nobody wants this person on their team. The low performer of low trust, obviously 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. And then if you look at business, and this is the highest performing organization on the planet right now, if you look at business, if 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. And there's a great irony in this, which is it's actually incredibly easy to identify these people. You just go to any team and ask them who the asshole is and they'll all point to the same person every time. And by the way, you can ask any team, you know which person always has your back, which person when the chips are down, you know they'll always be there for you, no matter what. They'll also all point to the same person. That person's your most gifted natural leader, but they may not be your best individual performer, but they're getting higher performance out of everybody else on the team. Now. I don't think that we should fire the high performer of low trust. We should coach the high performer low trust. I don't know what their story is, I don't know who their mentors were. I don't know how they got to where they got to. And the same with the low performer of high trust, which is, I want to coach their performance up as well, right? I don't want to just leave them there. The only time we ask people to exit our organization is they prove themselves to be uncoachable, then they're of no value because that means they perceive that there's no growth in performance or in themselves as human beings. But this idea of measuring performance only, and it goes for individuals, as it does for organizations, to measure individuals only and ignore ethical behavior, ignore values, can produce short term results. I mean, there were very bad organizations that do well in the short term, but it's not sustainable, it's not sustainable over time. And your ability to attract top talent, your ability to retain top talent, your ability to innovate, you can't innovate if, if, if people are afraid of getting fired because there's no experimentation, there's no opportunity to, to try Again.
Values. Values matter. And I like organizations that. That measure, reward, and incentivize values.
We get. We get the behavior we reward. I think it's funny when organizations say, you know, we incentivize performance, you cannot incentivize performance performance. As a result, you can only incentivize behavior. That's it. And I'll give you a real life example from my career. So when I was young, in my career, I worked for a big ad agency. And when we had a new business pitch, the pitches were done by the senior executives, and junior kids like me were just there in support. Well, it was December, and we had a huge pitch coming in January, and all the senior executives went on Christmas vacation, and I didn't. And so me and another junior person were told to prep the war room for when the execs get back so they can do the pitch. Well, prepping the war room means hang the research on the walls, which takes about an hour. So we had a week. So we decided to do the whole pitch ourselves. We combed through the research, we found an insight. We wrote the strategy, we wrote the whole pitch deck. And when the executives came back, we showed them the work that we had done. They loved it, and they used our pitch in the new business pitch, and we lost the business. We did not win the pitch. And my boss gave me a huge promotion. He actually moved me up two levels because he wasn't rewarding my outcome, he was rewarding my behavior. He liked that I took initiative, and he gave me a huge reward. And guess what? He got more of initiative. His expectation is, if I reward the kid to take initiative, eventually he'll do just fine for us. And I think we forget that we only reward results too often. And I think we need to do better at rewarding behavior because you get the behavior you reward.
