Episode 013: Extreme Ownership And How It Applies To Your Fleets

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined again by Steve Saltzgiver, Jeff Jenkins.

How's it going?

Very good.

I'm doing pretty well today.

Good to be here.

Yeah. Today we're talking about Extreme Ownership. All right, so a few weeks ago you heard Jeff and I talking about our favorite books, some of the books that we've read that really made an impact on us. And we had talked about Extreme Ownership and how we wanted to do a deeper dive into this book specifically. So today is that day. We're bringing it forward. So Jeff, give us a little bit of background. Where were you when you first heard this book? What's the book about? Who's it written by? Tell us the deets, man.

Well, so the book is written by a guy named Jocko Willink. Jocko's an ex-military.

Not just ex-military.

Oh, he's—

Retired Navy SEAL.

Yeah, he's a badass. Let's just put it that way. So he'd break me with his pinky.

He'd talk like this while he did it.

He would, and he wouldn't give any expression. His face would just be very stoic. So he's just the guy that you would think is a Navy SEAL, that's Jocko. He's just a total badass when you see him. But I mean, it's been years and years since I read the book and since I found out about it. And I've always been one that's very big on this, even though I didn't really know it was called Extreme Ownership back at the time. I've always thought about the fact that if you are going to work or if you're anything, if you're going to do something right, you take ownership of that. If it's something you do that's messed up, you make a mistake, you take ownership. If you do something great, right, you may take ownership. If you've got a team, you take ownership together. But it's just really, you know, it's owning everything that either you do or those that you're around are doing as well when it comes to being a leader. But it resonates because in today's environment, everyone thinks about CYA and what you can do to cover your ass or what you can do to not be under the spotlight or not to take blame for things that go wrong. And there's usually a lot of finger-pointing that goes around. So because that's a lot of the world we live in, it resonated with me that, hey, here's something where someone's explaining about, hey, you know, the buck stops with you and you need to own up to whatever is happening.

Yeah, because nobody wants to be at fault, right?

Right.

Nobody wants to take blame. Nobody wants to take responsibility. It just leads to a lot of dysfunction. I mean, shoot, you can look at DC, right? And you've got two sides just pointing the finger at each other and it's always somebody else's fault, right? It's those people out in Arizona. It's those people out in Georgia. It's those people, right? It's always them. And I always liked this idea when I read it. Like, it was just totally— you can't blame anybody else for your problems, right? Like, you have to take responsibility for yourself and everything that's in your— he talked about it like the theater of war, right? Your area of operations. What's your AO, right? And taking ownership of that area and recognizing what role you had to play in it.

Well, and it's not even— it doesn't even have to be exclusive to your area of operation, right? I mean, you can still take ownership of areas outside of your purview. It doesn't have to be something, right? Because you can influence what goes on around you. True. You can have a heavy influence on that. So especially when you're working together as a team, whether it's with your family or your friends or your co-workers or whoever it is, right? You, you can still have an effect on pretty much everything that you, you view, you see what's going on. Even if, you know, I'm in sales and marketing, but if something's going on in accounting and I recognize something's going on accounting, if I just ignore it, well, guess what?

Well, that's their problem. I don't have to worry about that, right? Hold on a second, we're all on the same ship here.

Yeah, I mean, and that's the point, right? It doesn't have to be just what is my responsibility. This doesn't have to be sales and marketing. It's anything that I can view and see and can touch.

Right. And because you know about it, you're ultimately responsible for that knowledge now and sharing that knowledge and sharing your opinion and your perspective. And, you know, if you don't speak up and, you know, you see a car wreck about to happen and you don't speak up to try to avoid the car wreck, are you just as liable as the person who caused the car wreck? Yeah. Right. You didn't do anything to stop it. Right. I really liked with Extreme Ownership just that whole principle of like, hey, The buck stops with me, right? You know, now I'm the leader of the company, and so there's not really a lot of— I can't really point my finger at anybody else. But it very much, you know, changed my perspective on, well, I can't point my finger down either, right? Like, I can't say, well, it's just my people, you know, like, I've got— I'm gonna go complain about so-and-so, and they're in sales, and they're doing a terrible job, or, you know, somebody in product just isn't pulling their weight. Well, man, whose fault is that? That's mine, right? And it took some humility, and, you know, like, this book helped me appreciate and learn that fact. And you know what? Who's the fool who keeps them employed, right? Who's the one who hired them in the first place, right? And, you know, there wasn't anybody else to blame. When you think about that, there's only one person to turn back to and say, hey, guess whose fault it really is? It's mine, right? Who didn't have the conversation they needed to because they're too chicken or they don't want to, and enter the danger and have a hard conversation, as uncomfortable as that makes them, well, that's me, right? I have to do that. I have to take that on and take that ownership. I can't wait for somebody else to do it for me.

Yeah, you say that, and I was thinking of an organization I worked for where the manager always complained about people that weren't pulling their weight. And yet that person was the one that hired all the people that weren't pulling their weight. And everybody used to criticize him saying, well, Hire better people, you know.

I mean, or get rid of the ones you have, you know.

I mean, that was the whole point.

Or spend the time training and developing those.

Exactly.

And have them be accountable instead of spending all the time complaining and whining about it, right? Like, have a productive conversation instead.

Yeah. What can you do in trucking? You know, this whole Buck Stops Here— it's funny because you look at like just the different segments in trucking. So customer service, which calls the customer and books the loads, and then you've got operations or the dispatchers, which gets the loads for the trucks, or the load planners, any yada yada. But there's just been so many times, because I've been at several different trucking companies, where, you know, there's a load that fails and it doesn't get there on time, and you go to customer service and you say, what happened with this load? Well, I don't know, the driver didn't get there on time. Why? Well, I don't know, you'd have to go talk to the dispatcher. Okay, but what did you do to make sure that load was going to deliver on time? Well, I put it in the system, it should be good. Well, no, no, hold on a sec. You didn't track that load. You knew this load was hot. It was something that needed to get there on time. Why didn't you go out and look and see what the driver's progress was? Why didn't you call the driver and see where they were? Why didn't you, you know, I'm saying, why didn't you track it? That's with you. Well, but how am I supposed to know it's their driver? Well, but you got to take ownership of that load. If that load is important, you're going to follow it from cradle to grave. Then you go over to the dispatcher and you talk to the dispatcher about it. Did your driver have hours to run this load before they ever got it? Well, I don't know. Why don't you know? It was your driver. And if they had the hours, why didn't he get there on time? Did you not talk to him about how critical it was, about what, you know, the route would be, about, you know, traffic, weather, whatever the case may be? Go over to the load planner. Load planner, why did you plan this load on this driver who didn't have the hours or wasn't close enough? Or, you know what I'm saying? Because all, all three of those—

everyone had a hand in it.

They had a hand in it.

But when you go and you ask, the typical response is It was their fault. It was their fault. It was their fault. It wasn't my fault, which is totally not true because everybody could have had some control over that and taken that ownership of that load and made sure that it was able to deliver on time.

Right. I think that with the buck stops here, I always like to think of the buck stops everywhere, right? No matter what the situation is, there's some part that you played in that situation that you could have done differently, that you should have done differently, that you could have taken ownership of. And I always think about some of the disagreements that I've had the pleasure of mediating here at RTA. I get two people, a leader and a report, they're talking to me in their office. And it's always the finger-pointing where they're doing the cross-armed finger-pointing. "Well, it's their fault for doing that." And I'm like, "OK, well, what was your part of this? What was your part in this? How could you have handled that differently? We just had a conversation this morning. How could you have done— what would you have done differently looking back on that?" You know, and having the humility to recognize that, okay, no matter what happened, like, I wasn't perfect, right? There was no such thing as a perfect response. I am wrong. What was my part of being wrong? And what do I need to learn and do differently next time? If I'm not willing to take ownership, then I'm not willing to learn and I'm not willing to improve and change and become different. If instead I always say, well, look, I'm just not wrong. Well, then how could you ever improve? How could you ever change how you're going to approach it? I guess we're just resigned to always having the same problem because you're not willing to change.

You know, I've always said too, this kind of starts young, you know, and it's not just the workplace.

Yeah.

You know, I had a conversation with one of my grandsons one day about, you know, because when I grew up, I was taught to leave things better than I found them. Right. And just that same concept, like if I go in the bathroom, I make sure the sink's wiped off. Or, you know, the mirror didn't get dripped on. And, or if I see garbage on the floor, I pick it up, you know. Or if I see garbage in our work parking lot, I pick it up, you know, and just make things better. Take ownership for the whole surroundings that you have, your whole world. And that's a hard concept for some people nowadays. Yeah, to take that ownership.

Well, it's because it's fearful, right?

Yeah, they'll walk right by something that's obviously out of, out of kilter. They go, well, that's not my job, that's the That's janitor's job or that's Joe's job or, you know, and that's kind of the concept of extreme ownership, right? Of course, in a Navy SEAL environment, if you take that approach where it's not your job, people get killed.

Right, right. It's a much higher stakes.

Yeah, and so the standard is a lot higher, but you know, you kind of need to put yourself in that position, right? Because in our company, if you don't put yourself, we could be out of business.

Right.

Right, if something goes afoul here in the company.

Yeah, what's amazing to me too is like, because you, you said it even is outside of the workplace, and I look at sports. So after, after a team loses a game, you look at the athletes and you listen to the interviews that they take. How many of them take the ownership on themselves versus blame someone else? So a typical response is, well, we needed more productivity out of our bench, right? Well, hold on a sec, you needed more productivity at your bench, but you shot 35% from the field. The guy that you were guarding, you know, scored 40 points, right? So was it really your bench's problem, or was it the fact that you did a shitty job all night, right? You know what I'm saying? But that's how the world works, because as that athlete, you know, he's blaming his bench, but he's looking at, hey, I'm at the last year of my contract, I need to get paid, right? Or whatever the reason may end up being. It's like nobody wants to take ownership when things go bad. Everybody, when things go great, like that same team, they won that guy would've been talking about how great he was, right? Or the pass or the dunk or, you know, hardly ever going to applaud the rest of the team because everyone wants to, you know, be that hero. Everybody wants to look good. No one wants to look bad.

I think it takes a lot of effort. I mean, I think basic human nature is to, it's easy to cast blame.

Yeah.

Take the path of least resistance. Right. But to look inwardly and say, well, you know, I did have a stake in that. I had a part in that.

Well, I think it comes down to security, right? Like, how secure do you feel? And I think that's honestly what causes people not to take ownership, is they don't— they just feel insecure, right? They don't feel secure enough in who they are and their own self-worth to say, you know what, I can take that part of it and recognize where I need to improve, and it doesn't change my value as a human being to be wrong. And we're such in a society right now where you have to be right all the time, and if you're not right, then you're garbage. And that's just not healthy. It's not productive. And it creates situations like this where, you know, I always loved the story that Jocko tells at the beginning of the book where he talks about Extreme Ownership and how, you know, he's this platoon leader, although he might have been the squad leader at the time.

I think he was squad leader.

Yeah. And so he was running this whole SEAL unit and there was a friendly fire incident, right? And immediately all the brass wants to know, well, who's to blame? Whose neck is in the noose that we got to get rid of, right? Who's out? And they go through and he starts looking at the whole scenario and he's like, "Okay, I get it. I know where the blame needs to go." Right? And so he brings everybody in for a debrief and one of his guys stands up and says, "Well, it was my fault because I did this." He says, "Wrong. I appreciate you saying that, but wrong." Right? Somebody else says the same thing. Right? And it goes around and 5 or 6 people all take blame for what happened. And he says, "It was none of your fault. It was my fault. I'm the leader and I'm responsible for this." Right? It should have been my job to follow up and make sure that you did that. It was my job to make sure that you did your job, right? And making sure that as the leader, we're willing to take that on ourselves, even if it means we might get fired or we might lose our job or we might be seen as less than in the eyes of our team or employees. And being secure enough to recognize that, you know what, this is what it means to be a leader, is taking on the hard things. Right. And being the, you know, being the bad guy when it comes time to it.

Well, I don't know about you, but I've been in that position many times as a fleet manager. I've had to step up and take that blame. And it's not comfortable, but at least it's honest. Right. You know, and there's been a couple instances, you know, and I've probably mentioned some of these in the podcast where I had a whole fleet down in Pennsylvania because of natural gas trucks. That was my fault. We bought them. I mean, that was an initiative from the company, but I had to solve that problem. You know, I had dispatchers crying because I couldn't get trucks out the gate, you know? So we shut them all down, had a company, you know, we had to resolve that issue. But ultimately until I shut them down, and then of course the CEO wants to know why you shut them all down.

Right, right.

Well, because we got a problem. You know, I'm going to take total responsibility here and solve this problem.

I remember this is a few years ago, you know, we had rolled out a change to how we dealt with FIFO, right? And, you know, first in, first out in our inventory, in our fleet management program. And I remember we rolled this out and there was one scenario that caused a glitch in our markups, right, where you actually weren't marking up parts inventory. And for a for-profit fleet, that's a big deal. Right? Well, we didn't catch that one scenario. It was like one in, you know, 100 different scenarios that we tested. That one got through.

Right?

So it was a total fluke that it happened. But the fact is that it happened. Now, I will tell you is that 5, 6 years ago, my inclination would have been, well, who didn't do their job and who should have been testing that? And, you know, like, where is the blame going to fall? So, you know, that I can feel better about— because I wasn't doing the testing and I wasn't doing the release or anything like that, right? I was so far removed out of that process. And the natural leader's instinct is to go out and do that, right? We're gonna go find who's responsible and we're gonna yell at them and make them feel bad and feel terrible about themselves. But thankfully I'd read Extreme Ownership and it helped me realize that in that moment, yeah, we had a major issue. But whose fault was it? I couldn't go around the room and say, you know what, so-and-so QA guy, you didn't do your job. Programmer who wrote the bug in the first place, you didn't do your job. I couldn't go around and do that. I'd say, you know what, this is on me, guys. So guess who got to call the customer and explain the problem? It was me, right? And then who needed to go make it right? Well, I couldn't wait on somebody else to go make it right. I took that on and says, I need to make this right, right? And so I did some things, right? And I made it, smoothed it over the client. We fixed some things in our processes, right? And I made sure that all these things happen. The team rallied around that and said, you know what, this is also our fault. Like, they took on responsibility for themselves too, but I didn't put that on them, right? Like, I ran the interference and said, this is what we have to do. It's like, ultimately, guys, this is my problem, right? Here's what I'm going to change to make sure this doesn't happen again. What else do you guys have? What other ideas do you have to make sure we don't do this again? 'Cause this is a we problem and a me problem, not a you problem. And that's, in my mind, that was the epitome for me of extreme ownership coming to the forefront and living out what that meant and not letting the natural leader come out and say, oh, this is your fault, you're gone. You should feel terrible.

You have to be able to empower your people to do the right thing too. Let them control their world, essentially.

Give them extreme ownership of their—

Exactly. I mean, if they're dealing with a customer issue, You need to give them some latitude to deal with that issue.

Right.

Right. And let them solve that issue.

And not feel like if they make a mistake, guess who's going to come down on them, right?

That's right.

You got to create a safe space where they can feel like I can contribute without fear of reprisal or fear of retribution. Like I'm going to be okay and my boss has my back.

Right.

Because my boss is going to take ownership of this as well and realize that, you know what, I should have trained you better, that that probably wasn't the best solution to the problem you thought you needed to solve.

And your people probably had so much more respect for you because you didn't point that finger and say, whose fault is this? You took ownership yourself and said, let's just find the solution. My first ever board meeting in Texas, I went into it and I wasn't really supposed to say much because it's my first time. I've only been in the company for a few weeks. And I get in there and, you know, we're kind of going over what our game plan is with the board. And every, every question that was asked like there was either no answer or there was just some excuse given. So for example, well, what's, what's up with the rates? How come we can't get the rates up? Well, our customers just won't give us any more money. You know, I don't, we don't know what it is. Well, how come our maintenance cost per mile is X? Well, you know, we, we just got these old— I mean, there was an excuse for everything. And about halfway through it, right, I'm just sitting here listening and you can just see the board like they're just totally frustrated with the executive leadership team about what's being said. And so I just kind of look at them, I just say, well, you know what, you know, before our next board meeting, I'll go to every one of our customers and I'll try and get rate increases. And like, the other members of the executive team just kind of looked at me like, dude, what the hell?

What did you just promise?

What did you just do? Well, here's the deal. I mean, over, over 4 years, we raised our rates by 30% to our customers, and we didn't lose— we only lost one customer in that whole time by raising those rates. But the board Right? They look at you and they're just so much more appreciative when you actually are gonna take that ownership. And it comes with any boss, right? When you take that ownership and you find a way to fix the problem, hey, okay, I'm gonna own the fact that we don't have the right rates. So what am I gonna do to change that? So I've got a plan in place. This is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go talk to all the different customers. I'm gonna give 'em, you know, the data that supports that, hey, we're not getting paid our value, you know, whatever it ends up being. And then you go and you present that and at least you're doing your job, right? And then you gotta decide, do I drop that customer or I keep hauling for 'em? Based on the fact they're not paying me what I want to pay. But the dynamic of that whole board meeting changed from that point going forward because we stopped making excuses and started finding solutions and owning what our problems were.

I think that's the key too. He says that in the book, right? Is that a team that takes ownership for their problems solves their problems, right? When you stop making excuses and take ownership. I love this. You guys can't see this, but on Jeff's right bicep is a tattoo and it says "No excuses," right? Like, if you stop making excuses and start making results, like, that's when it changes, right? It's a mindset shift.

I have this thing I always keep in my notes about excuses. It was written in 1962. It's almost as old as me, I guess.

Not quite.

Yeah.

But any excuse for non-performance, however valid, softens character.

True.

You know, and then no matter how good or how valid the excuse, never changes performance.

True.

You know, and so, I mean, you think, that's, I've got a whole thing, I'll send this to you one day, but I mean, basically there's just no room for an excuse because no one cares in the long run and it doesn't solve anything.

Right.

It really just makes you feel better. That's it. You know, an excuse is an attempt to, um, convinced both himself and others that unsatisfactory performance is acceptable. That's all it is, you know. And, and so, I mean, that's a great reminder on your arm, I think, because we all need to, to get away from making excuses. That's what's wrong with a lot of the world nowadays, you know. Is everybody— oh, not my fault.

Well, it's not my fault. I can blame somebody else.

I can blame somebody else.

I can blame the environment. I can blame somebody else. Exactly. The excuse making is the exact opposite of ownership.

Exactly.

Like, nope, there's no excuse. I just didn't do it, right? Like, I didn't deliver or do what I said I would do.

And you have to be willing to put yourself on the line. Yeah, you know, I mean, if, if that's what it takes and you lose your job, you lose your job.

Well, and that's where I go back to that self-worth, right? Like, you have to have some more self-worth and integrity. You know, we talk about integrity as being whole, right? Like, you have to believe in yourself and who you are to recognize that, you know what, I'm not an excuse maker, I'm a results deliverer.

Right, right.

Like, that's who I am, and if I can't deliver those, this isn't the spot for me, right?

Yeah. So as a— I'm just gonna ask this question. So we're talking about excuses and people making them and then trying to get around them. So as a leader, when someone gives you an excuse, how do you address that, or how do you handle that, right, when you're trying to get them to have that ownership?

A lot of times it's just questions. It's like, okay, that's an interesting You know, like, I get that that happened. What could you have done differently? That's almost my first question is what could you have done differently that would have affected the outcome?

Right.

And just going through that exercise helps them understand, well, I'm going to take like an alternate universe approach to this and say, what if I had done this instead? What would have happened? Right. And it turns into a teaching moment. And usually they're going to be humble enough to recognize, okay, there is a different way, a different approach. 'Cause if they can't admit there was a different approach, then what they're doing is accepting this outcome was predestined and there was nothing I could do to change it. We were a train wreck happening at 5 miles an hour and we couldn't stop it.

I mean, some of it too, you have to have guardrails in place, standards in place.

Results, right? You have goals.

That keep people in line or in check. And if you have no standards, it's hard to uphold anything. When it comes to excuses or when it comes to ownership.

Yeah, well, that's always—

and it talks about standards in Extreme Ownership, the book. Yeah, making sure. And if you've ever read anything about the military, it's a complete case study on standards and on process, you know. So I think that's really a good lesson for companies to have, right? Let's make sure you have things in place.

Yeah, well, you got to know why someone did something, right? That's why asking those questions is important. So they come back with an excuse and you're like, okay, why? What happened? Would you— you got to get to the root, right? Maybe they didn't understand. Maybe it was a communication issue. Maybe it wasn't a communication issue, right? But you're right, you got to ask questions. You got to probe and figure out what's going on. Because when someone comes to you with an issue, the first response shouldn't just be beat their ass. It should be let's find out what the issue is and let's solve the issue. And if that needs to come later on because of incompetence or whatever else, then you can just be addressed later on. Right.

And that's, you know, true. Sometimes it's you coach them up, coach them out. The idea is you coach them up first. You know, that shouldn't just be resort back to you're fired, right? We're not doing The Apprentice here. The idea is, okay, what would you have done differently? Like you said, well, walk me through your mindset. Walk me through your thinking process here, because there probably was a critical juncture where they veered left and you would have veered right but you have more information than they did, and they didn't have the clarity they needed to make the decision correctly. Right? And so sometimes just walking through that exercise, you're like, oh, okay, you know what? This isn't your fault at all. You know whose fault this is? It's mine again, because here we are and I didn't communicate clearly with you. Well, I think that's the expectation.

The point the book brings out too is the critical debriefing at the end of every issue, whether you're successful or you weren't. You need to go through with your team and say, okay, What could we have done different? How could we have optimized this or made a better decision than we did make, even if it didn't fail? Right. So I think that's something people have to think about is just taking the time to hold that meeting, that huddle.

Yeah.

Briefing.

And do the postmortem and do all that. Right. But do it from a place of being constructive and not finger-pointing. Right. We're not trying to assign blame or say, hey, you're fired today. All we're trying to do is find out, we're trying to fix processes and we're trying to identify, you know, where a lack of understanding or lack of education or something just needs to be improved. Right? And nobody's self-worth is in question here. We're trying to improve everybody. I think you create that and you create that sense of ownership that, you know what, you're right. I am responsible for my own fate and I'm responsible for my area. And people fix their own problems when they start taking ownership of their problems. So, uh, any last parting thoughts as we wrap up?

No, I think we pretty much beat this one up.

All right, anything from you, Jeff?

Um, no, unless you really want to go in and touch about no bad teams, only bad leaders.

I think we've hit that a little bit, but it's one of my favorite quotes from the book.

Here's what I want to dive into it just real quick. We don't have to spend a lot of time on it. But here's what I wanted to get at, because I just wanted to ask the question, right? Um, and the question is that that's not entirely true because you are going to have people that work for you that just aren't in it. They're not dedicated. They don't have the competency level, right? Those people are out there. It's just not a good fit for them, right? So as a leader trying not to be the bad leader, what's the process for those people, right? To either get them on board or get them gone, right? Because you actually have to build a great team. Great teams just don't form themselves.

True. You can have naturally talented teams.

You can.

Right. I love this story in the book, and it talked about this, you know, no bad teams, there's only bad leaders, right? And this is an Army principle they talked about in the Navy, but how they basically had these two crew leaders while they were doing the BUD/S training, which is the first 8 weeks of— it's like SEAL boot camp. They go through and they do their training and they break them into different teams. And they had a team that was just crushing. They had one team that was just— they were full of performers. They had a great leader and they were just winning every exercise. They had another team that was at the bottom of every exercise. They were totally polar opposites. And what they realized is that that leader was really struggling with this team. And anytime they talked to him, it was always, "Well, so-and-so's not doing this." There was a lot of blame, a lot of finger-pointing. So they swapped the leaders, right? They put the bad leader on the great team that was winning everything, and they put the great leader on the bad team, right? And I think, what did they do? The great leader on the bad team ended up going to number 1 or number 2?

Number 1.

Number 1. Okay, so they went all the way to number 1 with these bad players. Now, one of the things he had to do though is he got rid of one of the team members on that boat crew. And so, you know, the bad leaders tolerate, right? They preach all this stuff, but they tolerate bad behavior, whereas good leaders won't tolerate bad behavior. But they also preach and they love and they support and they coach until they realize, you know what, this person's just not going to make it, right? And they are going to hold back the rest of the team, but they're not going to shift responsibility and just blame everybody. They're going to say, you know what, that's my fault. We've got to do something with this. And so as long as I leave that person in this role, any problem that this team has in delivering the results is ultimately my problem because I'm allowing this to continue.

Every team's only as good as its weakest link.

It's true.

You know, I mean, because that'll always hold you back. So you've got to do something about that.

And as a leader, so you either have to strengthen the link. It could be training, it could be, you know. But Jeff, to your question, right, which was what do you do when you get to that moment? When you've got somebody that just won't improve, right? Is that your question?

Yeah.

What do you do when they just, like, you've done everything you can?

Yeah.

Well, I think we've answered already, which is you have to get them off the team, right?

Well, they're dragging the boat.

They've got their aura on them.

Talked about the importance of attitude, which kind of ties into that. Some people just don't have the attitude.

And you assess for that, right? Now, I will tell you, I've never fired anybody for attitude problems, right?

That's hard to define.

You can't define attitude problems. And so, you know, for anybody on that, Boat. Jeff is shaking his head.

Ah, maybe.

But I'll tell you, you can't do it by attitude, right? You have to do it by defined behaviors, right? Attitude manifests, right? And we call that behavior, right? There's ways the attitude manifests, and that's through behavior. You can suppose that somebody has attitude, but with attitude, you're talking about intention. We're getting off on a whole nother topic here. James, let's put this on the topic board. But again, it comes back to what you preach isn't as important as what you tolerate. And if you're going to tolerate either substandard performance or bad behavior, then that's what— it's your lowest common denominator in the team. And so you, at that point, you owe it to the rest of the team members to get that person off the bus, as Jim Collins would say. Yep. Right. If you've done everything you can, now that's the thing is you don't just give up on people day one. You do try to do everything in your power and possible to make sure that people are given the tools they need to take ownership of their own lives and make the changes they need to. If they don't take that opportunity, again, this is where ownership comes in. That's on them. And now you as the owner also have to say, look, that's— I'm sorry, this just isn't working out. We've tried. This is what we have tried. I just don't think this is the right place for you, and I think you're gonna be a lot happier somewhere else, right? Now, in this case, that leader who kicked the SEAL off the SEAL Team, guess what? If you flunk out of BUD/S, you don't— you're not a SEAL, right? I mean, like, a lot of people, this is their life dream, is to become a SEAL. And so if you're not cutting it, that's a hard thing to do to somebody, and you know it. Yeah, but you also know that if you don't do it now, Right, and this is something this leader had to recognize. If he allowed this guy to get through BUD/S and become a SEAL, he would have been a liability on a real mission where there's real bullets and real lives at stake, and somebody would have died because he tolerated that, right? And because he let that go. And again, we always say we don't have lives at stake, but we do, right? It might not be lives, it might be livelihoods, it might not be bullets flying, but it's 80,000-pound trucks rolling down the highway. We've had, what, 2 fatalities in the last 2, 3 weeks here in Arizona, just here in the Phoenix metro area involving trucks. We don't know all the details behind them, but I can guarantee there's something behind the scenes happening there where somebody didn't do what they needed to and didn't take ownership of their operation the way they should have. That's an area for improvement.

Yeah.

So, all right. I think we've officially beat this one. This is a great book. My final thoughts are, if you haven't read this book, go out and read this book. Jocko and Leif, they are terrific. If you're an Audible person, this is definitely an Audible-worthy book because then you can listen to Leif and he talks like this and they talk about standing there knee deep in hand grenade pins. That's probably one of my favorite lines from the book. Right. And it's just awesome. But Read the book, listen to the Audible.

I think I'd like, you know, if you have a chance, you know, ping us. I'd like to hear from you if you have situations.

Yeah, that required Extreme Ownership.

Exactly.

Where Extreme Ownership has changed your life. Go watch the TED Talk. If you want to see Jocko, he's got TED Talks on YouTube. There's tons of them. You know, go watch some of those. They're definitely worth their time. So that's all for us today. We'll see you next week. Again, tag your friends. Let them know about the Fleet Success Show, colleagues in fleet and different ways that this can help them at Fleet Success. And we will see you next week.

That's the way the cookie crumbles.

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