Navy SEALs Insights: Trust Over Performance for Effective Leadership (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I've worked with the Navy SEALs, and I asked them, how do you pick the guys that go on SEAL Team 6? Right? Because they're the best of the best of the best of the best. And they drew a graph for me. And on one side, they wrote the word performance, and on the other side, they wrote the word trust. The way they define the terms is performance on the battlefield and performance off the battlefield. So this is your skills. Did you make your quarterly earnings, whatever, however you want to translate it, right? Performance. It's traditional. This is, how are you off the battlefield? 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 and my wife? This is what they told me. Nobody wants this person, the low performer of low trust, of course. Of course, everybody wants this person, the high performer of high trust, of course. What they learned is that this person, the high performer of low trust, is a toxic leader and 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 this person. This is the highest performing organization on the planet, and this person is more important to them than this person. And the problem in business is we have lopsided metrics. We have a million and one metrics to measure someone's performance and negligible to no metrics to measure someone's trustworthiness. And so what we end up doing is promoting or bonusing toxicity in our businesses, which is bad for the long game, because it eventually destroys the whole organization. The irony is it's unbelievably easy to find these people. Go to any team and say, who's the asshole? They will all point to the same person. Equally, if you go to any team and say, who do you trust more than anybody else? Who's always got your back? And when the chips are down, they will be there with you. They will also all point to the same person. It's the best gifted natural leader who's creating an environment for everybody else to succeed, and they may not be your most individual highest performer. But that person, you better keep them on your team.