EntreLeadership - #384: The Toxicity of Ego with Jocko Willink

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

If your idea of leadership is being the top dog, barking orders, micromanaging your team, and putting yourself first, retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink says you’ve got a big problem on your hands—your ego. And the irony is, when your ego is in charge, you are not at all. Tune in as Jocko explains why letting your ego drive your decision-making is so dangerous and shares simple strategies to keep it in check.   entreleadership.com/podcast Jocko Willink's website Leadership Strategy and Tactics by Jocko Willink Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink Leadership Growth Assessment Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   As an Amazon Associate EntreLeadership earns from qualifying purchases.   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leadership is just taking people from here to there. Well, that just sounds like a cakewalk, doesn't it? Wrong, right? It's because it's never that easy, because every step along that path from here to there, there's going to be blockers, hurdles, obstacles that you have to overcome as a leader. And these things come in all different shapes and sizes, and they also change over time.

But here's the deal. There's one enemy that never changes, and you never stop having to conquer yourself. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host Alex Jed, and today we have a conversation with Jocko Willing. Jocko is a leader that has become a regular on this podcast and a friend of our team. He's a retired Navy SEAL and the co-founder of Echelon Front, and his book, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, is an absolute masterclass in the practical fundamentals of leading well. But at the core of every practice, habit, and mindset that Jocko teaches is an idea that if you don't conquer your ego, it will conquer you.

You know, I was very lucky in the fact that in my career, I worked for some guys that had big, massive egos. And you wouldn't think that that would be lucky, but it's very lucky because you get to see what drives them and you get to see the impact. and you get to see the impact that it has on the rest of the team. And so your ego is something that's constantly there. And look, as you know from the book, the dichotomy of leadership that I wrote, that I'm not saying you shouldn't have an ego. And we all have ego. And ego can be a very positive thing.

It's what drives you to work hard. It's what drives you to want to win. But when you start letting your ego drive your decision-making process, and you start making decisions that satisfy your ego instead of helping out the team and helping out your subordinates and helping out the people above you in the chain of command. When you allow those things to happen, you're going to start to go backwards

and you're going to end up in a bad position. So you absolutely have to keep your ego in check. You have to be looking out for other people, looking out for the team, looking out for the mission, and put yourself at the bottom of that list. And I think one of the topics that you really highlighted that for me, I realize like,

okay, man, you really have to remove your ego to achieve this is that topic of detachment. So I'd love for you to dive into where you became aware, because it's almost like it's like this six sense thing that lots of people aren't even aware of. So tell us a little bit about where you became aware of this as a strategy and then what it actually is, Jocko. So I hate to make it sound like one moment in time

I was enlightened and I figured it all out because that's absolutely not true and I'm still in the process of moving forward and trying to figure it out. That being said, as I talk about in the book, leadership strategy and tactics. I was in my first SEAL platoon. I'm a new guy. And not only I'm a new guy, I'm the most junior ranking guy. And on top of that, I'm the youngest guy. So I have absolutely no reason to be speaking. Being a new guy in a SEAL platoon, you keep your mouth shut,

you do what you're told. You're trying to learn, right? You're trying to learn. You're trying to figure things out. We had been going through our pre-deployment workup, so doing land war, and doing urban combat and doing close quarters combat and jungle training. And we'd been through all those blocks of training. So I was progressing down the path of being a good seal. And we went on one trip where we were going to clear oil rigs, big oil rigs in southern California off the coast. You know, in case we're overseas and an oil rig gets taken over by bad guys, we can go take

it back. So we're training for that mission. And we start off small just by how we're going to get on to the oil rig. once we've practiced getting onto the oil rig, then we start actually moving through the oil rig. And oil rigs are these crazy complex structures. And as you come up from the ocean, once you get on board the oil rig,

it's actually called the oil platform, when you come up the platform and you come up the stairs, you eventually get to this big giant deck, this big giant floor of the oil platform. It's called the cellar deck, for whatever reason, that's what it's called. And it's a big,

massive, big massive area. And we only have 16 guys in a seal platoon. So as the first couple guys get to that seller deck, they make this tactical call of flood, which means, hey, it's a big area. We need everyone. Everyone in the platoon come up the stairs. And as we all in the platoon come up the stairs, we all fall into our standard positions, which is all of us standing like a skirmish line looking at this seller deck. So you've got 16. guys, all 16 of us seals and the seal platoon, we're all standing there, staring at the potential targets and the cellar decks covered with equipment and gear and mechanical objects. So it's a very cluttered thing and there's all the possibility of all kinds of places

for bad guys to hide. And so I'm standing there looking down the sights of my weapon, scanning for targets. And, you know, 10 seconds go by and then 15 seconds go by. And now I'm waiting. Now 20 seconds have gone by. And I'm waiting for one of the leaders in my seal platoon to make some kind of a decision to make a call on what to do next. I'm standing there doing my job scanning for targets and another 10 seconds and another 20 seconds go by, which seems like ages. And so finally I say to myself, you know what, I got to see what's happening. So we're all standing in that skirmish line. We're all tracking all their weapons. I take a step back. I step back, maybe a foot, maybe 18 inches at the most. I look to my left. I look to my right.

and as I look, I see that every other guy in my ISIL platoon is still staring down their weapons, staring down the sights of their weapons, scanning for targets. And as you can imagine, when you're staring down the sight of your weapon, your field of view is not very wide. You can't really see a lot of what is happening. Well, as I stepped back and looked around, I saw that every single guy was staring down their weapon, including my platoon commander, including my platoon chief, including my platoon assistant commander,

including my platoon leading petty officer. So all the people that should have been making a decision were staring down the sights of their weapons. So it's pretty obvious once I step back what we needed to do. So I summoned up all the courage I could to open my mouth as a new guy. And I said, hold left, clear right,

which was a standard call, nothing spectacular, no incredible tactical genius here. it's a standard call. I said, hold left, clear right. And after I said that, I kind of braced for, you know, someone to yell at me and say, hey, shut up, new guy. But instead, they all actually did what they were supposed to do, which is repeat the call down the line. Everyone said, hold left, clear right, hold left, clear right, hold left, clear right. And then they actually did it. The guys that were on the left side held and the guys that were on the right side started to move through.

And then we continued on with the rest of the clearance. And we got to the end of the clearance. And we got into a little huddle to do a debrief. And we got into the huddle to debrief. Once again, I kind of braced for impact because I figured I was about to get smacked around for being a new guy with a loud mouth. And instead, one of the senior guys in the platoon says, hey, Jocko, good call on the cellar deck.

And I was a little taking it back. And as I'm sitting there thinking about it. I feel pretty good about it. And I think to myself, wait a second, why is it that I'm the most junior guy in this platoon and I have the least experience and I'm the youngest guy? And yet I was somehow able to figure out what to do when these senior individuals that have been in the SEAL teams infinitely longer than me, they didn't know what to do. Why is that?

And I figured out it was because I took a step back and I detached from the situation. and I looked around and everything became really obvious. So that was when I first kind of realized it. Now, I didn't translate this into this kind of principle of leadership that I eventually became. But what happened is now I'm on a land warfare training operations before the war. So I'm on another training operation and targets pop up and we're shooting at the targets. And once again, instead of me focusing on the targets, I started focusing, taking a step back and looking around, moving my head, focusing on the bigger picture.

And once again, I realized I could figure out what to do before anyone else could. And that has eventually led me to sitting here having a conversation with someone and I can see that they're starting to get emotional about something, whether it's a plan that we disagree on or whether it's an idea for how to go forward that they're passionate about. And I realize, wait a second, if I take a step back mentally, and pay attention to their emotions, and then I can actually direct my emotions properly to de-escalate the situation, maneuver a little bit,

get them calm down. And I realize that this idea of detaching, it applies to everything that you do. And look, when you're talking to your kids and you've got a four-year-old kid that's doing something that they shouldn't be doing, and it's really easy to get frustrated to get mad, but if you take a step back and say,

wait a second, this is a four-year-old. What did I do? Why did I, how did I put them in a position where they're doing this? What do they not understand? How can I actually explain to them instead of just getting angry? So every situation that you get in as a human, if you can take a step back, if you can detach from your emotions, you're most likely going to make a better decision. Now, when I speak to companies, I always ask the question in front of a big, you know,

crowd of 500 people or 1,000 people, I'll say, who here has ever made a great decision when they were emotional? No one's hands go up. Of course not. So you've got to detach not only from the chaos of the situation, but you've also got to detach from your own emotions, detach from your ego, as we talked about earlier, so that you can make the best decision for the situation, not based on emotions, not based on your ego, but based on what is actually happening. And that's why detachment is the first kind of, it was the first brick that I put in the foundation that led me down the path to being a better leader. Man, that's so powerful. As I was reading that section of the book, literally that exact same day, I had a call with a business owner. She's down in Georgia, I think,

and she called me and she said, Alex, I need to talk because I had made a change to one of our processes recently. And one of my core leaders that's been with us for a long time, she's super loyal. It's a great relationship. I thought we were on great terms. She came into my office today for what I thought was a standard meeting and she just blew up, she said. She just lost it. And she said, Alex, before I knew it, it's like, I didn't even know what happened. I was blowing up to. And I got caught up in this whirlwind and then before I know it, we're both crying. And then before I know, we're both yelling at each other and we're at each other's throats and giving each other ultimatums. And she's like, 30 minutes went by. And I just blinked and I was

like, what the heck just happened? And she was like, I don't know how to avoid from doing that again because we have a follow-up meeting next week. And I don't want to go there again. I think that this relates so much to what you're talking about. Can you teach us a little bit on what maybe would have been a proper course of action in that situation and then how to handle that moving forward? So yes, and this is one of the most common questions that I get when people hear me talking about detaching is, okay, great, we get it. We know what you want. I know what you want me to do. How do I actually go about doing that?

And the very first thing that you have to do is you have to learn to recognize what I call red flags. These are warning signals that you are getting emotional. So maybe it's that when someone comes into your office and they start barking at you and now you clench your fists, you feel yourself biting down, you're gritting your teeth together, or maybe you're raising your voice as you respond to them. All these are really nice physiological warning signs, red flags, alerts that you are starting to get emotional. So what do you do then? So what I want to do, and this is I recommend this. And the only reason I recommend this is because this is how I. learned. This is what made me realize that detaching was a good thing. Literally, physically,

take a step back. Just like when I told that first story, take a step back. It changes your perspective. It gives you a little space between this person. It makes you pause for a moment. You know, you're not going to say anything. The first thing to do is take a step back. Once you take a step back, this is a strange thing to say, but I actually, want to, I tell people, lift up your chin a little bit. Lift up your chin a little bit. This is a weird thing to say, but think about it from this perspective. If you're going to get in a fight with somebody, what do you do?

If you're going to get in a fight with somebody, you tuck your chin down and you put your hands up and you're ready to fight. I want you to do the opposite of that. I want you to step back and I want you to put your hands down and I want you to lift your chin and you're basically opening yourself up. You're saying, yep, okay, there's some emotion going on here. I'm going to accept that it's no problem. I'm not going to get in a combative mode.

The next thing I want you to do is very simply. I want you to nod at the person. You're nodding to them to tell them, hey, I'm listening. I understand what you're saying. I got it. I got it. It makes sense. And then the final thing is being in the SEAL teams and being in the military in general,

when you talk on a radio, everyone is listening. So when you're talking on a radio, sure, you might be talking to the 10 people on your team, but there's a hundred other people in Tactical Operations Center. Everyone's listening. So you get very self-conscious, or you should be very self-conscious, about how you sound when you're on the radio.

And nobody wants to sound like they're panicked on a radio. For two reasons. Number one, because nobody wants to sound panicked. And number two, because if you panic and you sound panic, the rest of your team is going to hear that and they're going to do the same thing. They're going to start to panic as well. My habit was whenever I was going to talk on the radio, I was going to come across like the calmest, smoothest operator anyone had ever heard. So instead of getting all the radio and saying, I need everyone to get building 54 now. No, now we've got everyone freaking out.

Instead, I'm going to come up. I'm going to take a breath. That's the key point here. I'm going to take a breath and the next words that come out of my mouse is going to be, hey, this is Jocko. We need everyone in building 54 now. And everyone says, okay, well, sounds like Jocko's got a grip on this. Let's get over there.

That's how we are going to detach. Those are some physical things you can do. And look, you're going to get better at it over time. Everyone gets better at it. You can say, oh, I'm starting to feel a little heated. Cool. I'm just going to relax here, take a moment. So all this being said,

you can go too far with this. And I also have this in the book as well. It's another technique. And I call it reflect and diminish. Because, Alex, if you come into me and you say, this is ridiculous, the supplies didn't show up, the department didn't do their job, this is, this is horrible. And I say to you, hey, calm down, Alex.

You need to calm down. What that does is immediately, you don't calm down at all. You actually get more angry that I don't understand. And what's even worse, I've just put myself on the opposing side of you. Because you're mad because you didn't get the support you needed. I'm telling you to calm down. I obviously don't get it. So now we're not even looking for a solution.

You're mad at, you're not just mad at the supply department now. You're mad at me because I don't get it. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to reflect some of your anger, but I'm going to diminish it a little bit. So when you come in and say, the supply department didn't get me the gear this is ridiculous we can't start the job i say oh you gotta be kidding me how much gear are you missing right now so i said enough i showed enough anger that you realize i'm on your side but then i actually say well how much gear do you need because i'm starting

to move us towards a solution which if i form an antagonistic relationship with you in the moment and all of a sudden you're mad at me we're not forming a solution we're not even heading down the path to find a solution. But if I unify with you, if I reflect some of your emotions, but I de-escalate them, then we can start moving together towards a solution. So, yes, you've got to be able to detach, but this doesn't mean that you show no emotions and you're a robot because believe me, you will just escalate everyone that's mad around you. And if you don't believe me, try it with your significant other when he or she is mad about

something. When something goes wrong, when the water heater breaks, and they come in, all the water heater breaks, and you say, you need to calm down. See how that works out for you. That's right. It's crazy. As you were talking about this and talking about how we need to slow down and sometimes we just need to pause, my mind, like, immediately went to the person that I've seen do this most effectively is our CEO, Dave Ramsey. And I have literally seen him in a conversation, take a pause that it's like for almost a second, it's like, oh my gosh, like, did he just fall asleep? Like what just happened? And he takes this long pause. But what's crazy is I recognize myself in that situation, in that meeting, suddenly the next words that come out of his mouth, I have so much more

trust in and so much more confidence in. So when we actually have that presence of mind and that awareness to detach like that, what does it do to the power dynamic of the room? What is happening there whenever you actually take that step, Jocko. When you see a leader that can take stressful situations and instead of doing an immediate emotional reaction, either losing their temper or getting angry, whatever the case may be, everybody in the room, their respect for that person goes down.

Their respect for the person goes down. But when they get hit with some kind of a situation and they say, take a pause, they listen. And I'll give you one more thing. Here's another little thing that I do. And I don't know if Dave does this. or not, but when you come in, if Alex comes into me and says, you know, the supplies didn't show up, this is totally ridiculous.

Not only we're going to take a little pause, give you a nod, say, I know what you're saying, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm not going to make a statement about the situation because I don't really understand the situation yet. I'm actually going to ask you a question. I'm going to say something like I did, which is, okay, I got it, Alex. That's definitely not good. But how much are we missing right now? How much gear do you need?

So I'm going to ask a question back. And now, in order to answer the question, you have to kind of get a grip of yourself. And I'm trying to de-escalate the whole situation. But to answer your question, you already answered your question. When your CEO, when Dave stands up and somebody asks him a challenging question or proposes some big challenge that the team is facing, and he takes a second to give a good answer, as you said, you go, hmm, he's going to get this figured out. I trust his answer.

My respect for him goes up. If he just blurts out an answer and then has to backtrack for another minute and then find himself away around to another and eventually he might get to the right answer, but it took him a while. Just set yourself upright. Take a second. Think about it. Nod.

Explain that you, you know, show them that you understand and then formulate a good answer. It seems like part of what's required to be able to do this effectively is to kind of remove your personal identity from the work or the project. or the task. Is that right? Like, do you have to essentially make sure that you're not taking any attack or any criticism or anything like that as an attack on your identity? 100%. I mean, it's weird that I would have to put in this book, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, a section that is actually called Don't Take It Personal. And I list the things out that you shouldn't take personal. Don't take the criticism personal. Don't take that someone doesn't

like your plan personally. Don't take that someone doesn't like the way you set up the situation. Don't take those things personal. Don't take those things personally. And by the way, what makes you take them personally is it's an attack on your ego. It hurts your ego when someone says, hey, this plan isn't any good. I'm the one that thought of this plan. What are you talking about? You don't know?

No. Well, what don't you like about the plan? What do you think we could do differently? How do you think we could do it better? Because what I'm looking for is not to use my plan. I'm looking to use the best plan. And if you work for me, Alex, but you come up with a better plan with me, that's great. I'm happy.

Let's use your plan. Sounds perfect to me. Let's go forward. So yes, don't take things personally. And I got another section of the book where I talk about if there's someone that you don't respect, that you don't like, that you don't think deserves one iota of respect from you. And they come in and they give you some criticism. How do you handle it? What do you do?

And the answer is you look at him and you say, all right. Hey, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. and then you truly listen to what they had to say, and you try and figure out if there's something that you could improve there. Because if you just throw away the baby with the bathwater and someone comes in and gives you a piece of feedback, look, that's a human being.

That's their judgment. Why don't they, you know, if you sat there and listened to me, give a briefing, and afterwards you came up and said, hey, Jocko, I think you spent a little bit too much time on this topic. And my reaction is to say, well, Alex, what do you know about talking about these topics? You know what I mean? Like, that's not good if I say, but if I say, okay, okay, Alex, I appreciate it. Thank you. Is there another area that you think I could have spent

more time on? And then you, maybe you give me an answer. Maybe you don't have a good answer. Maybe I assess and say, you know what, that's one person's opinion. I need to pay attention and see if anybody else gives me that feedback. But the worst thing you can do is just say, ah, you know, I don't respect Alex, so I'm not going to listen to anything he says. And even worse, get offensive with Alex and say, if I wanted your opinion, I'd ask for it, right? Now you're. Now you're not. You're you're never going to give me any advice again. You're never going to try and improve me. And that's not good. I want to get better. I want to do better. Man, so much of this and honestly, so much of what you wrote about in extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership as well,

seems like it's just teaching us to sometimes suppress our natural impulses and just like say, like, don't react out of emotion, suppress the ego a little bit. Every time that I try to take that stuff and put it into action, Jocko, like, I just find myself at the end of the day with all of this pent-up aggression. Like, I just want to go punch something. So I'd be curious to know, like, what do you do? Because it's like all that energy has to go somewhere. And I believe that tactically, it's the right thing to do. And at the same time, if you don't have somewhere to vent or somewhere to get rid of all that extra energy and negative thoughts and crud that's going through your head, it's probably going to become a really toxic place. So how do you get that aggression out?

Look, the fact of the matter is, what I'm trying to do and where I'm putting my energy is winning. It's winning. So if you and I have a clash and you want to use plan A and I want to use plan B, well, yes, I am going to, if your plan is even, even if you, if I'm the boss and you're the subordinate and you come with a plan and you say, oh, we need to use plan B. If your plan is pretty decent and it's going to get the job done, I'm going to say yes. I'm going to put my ego in check. It's no factor.

It creates no negative energy whatsoever. I'm actually happy that you are able to come up with a good plan and we're going to go extra cute that thing, you're going to have real ownership of it. That doesn't cause any negative attitude in my head at all because you know what I'm doing? I'm strategically winning. I'm giving you ownership. We're moving in the right direction. We're going to do better as a team because I'm not wasting one iota of energy on being in conflict with you. We're a team. You got a plan that's good enough. Let's go execute it. No problem. So I don't waste a lot of time. I don't have a bunch of pent-up bangor because I think it's because my ego is in check.

And look, you're not always going to have the best ideas. And there's going to be some people. You know, there's another section in the book. It's subordinate your ego. Yeah. You know, that is one heck of a title, by the way. Golly. It is one heck of a title.

And it's such an easy way to win. And if you and I, let's say you and I are peers, right? Let's say you and I are peers and we're working together and we're working on a project. And look, Dave is the boss man. And Dave's looking at us go, hey, here's what I want you guys to get done. And I say, well, I think we should use my plan. And you say, no, we should use my plan. And we can go back and forth and butt heads all day on that.

Now, look, the reality is we will waste all kinds of time and all kinds of energy. And finally, we have to go back to this way. We have to go back to Dave and said, well, I want to do this way. And Alex wants to do this way. Please make a decision for us. Right. That's an embarrassment. That's embarrassing to have to do that.

I would much rather say, you know what? Hey, Alex, I want to do it my way. And you say, oh, I think my way's better. I say, okay, you know what? Subordinate my ego. And I say, you know what, Alex sounds good. You take lead on this, no problem. And now your mind is now open when I say, hey, can we make this adjustment here?

Can we make this adjustment over here? You're like, yeah, because it's your plan. You want your plan to be successful. I have no problem doing that. That doesn't give me any negative feelings at all. It actually makes me feel good because we're going to win. I think one of the best illustrations I've heard on this principle was the comparison that you did of, I think his name was Delta Charlie, or at least that's the name he used in the book, and the previous platoon commander. So could you lay out those differences and how that played out?

Yeah, I mean, again, my career was so lucky in so many ways. And one of the ways that it was so lucky was that I had a boss that was not good. He was an inexperienced guy, and he had a little insecurity about that. And to make up for his insecurity, he was kind of a tyrant with us. And it was his way or the highway. We always had to use his plan, regardless. He didn't take any input from anybody. And it was pretty bad. And we actually had a mutiny.

We actually had a mutiny inside of my seal platoon. And we went to our commanding officer, so we went to my boss's boss and said, hey, we don't want to work for this guy. So the guy got fired and a new guy came in to take his place. And they brought the new guy that came in to take his place was kind of a legendary seal. I mean, we all knew his name. We all had heard of him before. I'd never met him before, but I had absolutely heard of him.

His reputation was stellar. And I kind of figured they were sending this guy in there to whip these mutineers into shape, you know, put a guy in there with a big stick. Well, when we first met the guy, he was just the most humble guy that I could have imagined. The previous platoon commander that got fired, we were his men. It was his platoon. He was in charge of us. And so this guy checks in and basically the first meeting we have with the guy, he says,

hey, everyone, you know, I'm Delta Charlie and I just want to say, I heard about what happened. Hey, we'll get through it. And I'm just looking forward to working with you guys. And that word that you noted, that I noted as well, even as a young kid, He said, I'm looking forward to working with you guys. And that right away set a totally different tone. His humility, his attitude, and right away, and this guy was extremely experienced. He'd been in the SEAL teams for probably 17 years at this point.

I'd been in for two years. You know, this guy had way more experience than any of us. And when it came time to plan training missions, the very first training missions we planned under him, he said, hey, here's the mission you guys come up with the plan. And of course, we'd present the plan to him, and he'd make some adjustments to him, but they were only adjustments that were needed because our plans weren't that great, because we weren't experienced. So he would use that to educate us.

But imagine the ownership that we had of those plans. Imagine how much we wanted our plans to succeed, as opposed to when we had this guy that was forcing plans down our throat, when something would go wrong, we'd kind of shrug our shoulders and say, oh, the boss man didn't think of this, did he? And so we became infinitely more successful as a platoon because this, experienced guy was humble and gave us ownership. So that was incredible lessons. And I don't know if I would have realized how impactful ego is because it was really, it was the platoon commander that got

fired. It was his ego that drove him to want to be the boss and give the orders and make up the plans. It was his ego that was driving it. And I knew it, you know, because that's what we told our commanding officer. This guy doesn't take any input. But I really realized it when we all turned against that guy. But then when the new platoon commander came in and he was so humble and all of us just wanted more than anything just to make him look good, just to not disappoint him. And the fact that I saw that contrast between ego and humility, you know, Delta Charlie became the guy that I forever to this day, try and emulate his attitude and his humility. And it's just a huge impact and it's counterintuitive because everyone thinks, oh, the leader is the one that's standing up on the podium, that's banging his

fist, that's barking out orders. That's the stereotypical image of a leader. And look, are there times where you have to step up and get vocal? Absolutely. Are there times in my career where I had to step up and bark some things to get something to happen? Yes, there are. There are very rare times. most of the time the leader is the one that is humble that people are looking at and he can give, I could give a head nod. I could give a head nod to one of my guys. They would know exactly what I needed him to do and they would go do it. Not based on barking orders, but based on our relationship that we had and based on the fact

that they understood what it was we were trying to do. So all someone of my platoon would need to see me is look at him and give him a head nod and they knew what that meant and they would go execute. Yeah. That's what you want. And that comes from relationships and relationships are built on trust. And trust is built on humility. Well, it's crazy because I think it's possible for us to look at that failed commander and what he was doing and say, well, that was extreme ownership.

He was doing everything. He was taking it all on his shoulders. And he was saying, my plan. I own this thing. Sounds like you're saying that's a mistake. That's not extreme ownership. Well, that's why there's the book called The Dicotomy. of leadership because even extreme ownership you can take too far. And if you take so much ownership

that you don't give ownership to anyone else on the team, well, then your team isn't going to have ownership. They're not going to take ownership. It's not going to be their plan. It's not going to be their mission. And how do you prevent that? And how do you, you know, one of the most common questions I get asked from the people that I do leadership consulting with is how do I get other people to take ownership? Well, you actually give them ownership. You don't. You don't. You don't. force a plan down their throat people don't like the way that tastes and they will throw it up you force it down their throat so instead you put them in the kitchen you let them cook the plan and then they'll taste that thing it'll taste great and look if it's not exactly what you want

it's not exactly the flavor that you wanted but it accomplishes the mission it's great it's a great deal they got what they wanted they did a great job doing it it satisfied the mission itself So we're good. So, yeah, you can take ownership too far. Now, I also get this question of, you know, Hey, Jocco, I understand the idea of extreme ownership. And I get it and everything. But, you know, what do I do when something goes wrong and it's, you know,

and it's actually not my fault? What do I do then? And I said, wait a second. You're saying you're in charge of a project? Yeah. And someone on the project makes a mistake? Yeah. And you don't think that's your fault?

No, no, no. because, you know, I wasn't there when it happened or it was a guy that's five layers below me in the chain of command. That's obviously not my fault. And these people are obviously missing the entire idea of extreme ownership. Because if I'm the platoon commander and five levels of rank below me in the chain of command, one of the machine gunners shoots his machine gun in the wrong direction, that is absolutely my fault as a platoon commander a hundred percent why because it means i didn't train that guy properly it means i didn't screen him properly it means i didn't educate him on the importance of his field of fire

so that he knew that he was shooting in the right direction it means i didn't talk with his fire team leader and his squad leader and make sure that he had the instructions that he needed all those things are my fault they're not just lip service they are truly my fault And what this means is, look, if I say, hey, machine gunter made a mistake, not my problem. Okay, well, who fixes the problem then? Who fixes the problem? The machine, it's not like the machine gunner wanted to make a mistake. He doesn't know what to do.

So if the machine gunner makes a mistake and you go, that's his fault. What changes? No, when I take ownership of it, I say, okay, bud, here's what's what's you need to think about before you shoot your weapon. Here's what you need to know about your field of fire. Hey, fire team leader, here's what you need to brief your guys on. Hey, squad leader, here's what you need to make sure the team understands. And now everyone is taking ownership of that problem, and that's when the problems get solved. Man, I feel like the small business owner parallels there are huge.

And a lot of times we see it come up and we'll get it on a coaching call with someone, and they will complain for 45 minutes about this team member. And then the way you shut down all that complaining is you just say, well, remind me again, who hired that person, who let that person in the door? And it's like, so either you have a hiring process problem or a training problem, but it's your problem. Who selected that person, who hired that person, who trained that person, who train that person and who's keeping that person on board.

That's right. Answer me that. Oh, yeah, that's right. It's you. Same thing, you know, I'll work with companies and I'll get the person that complains for 20 minutes about, you know, the department head. And I'll say, oh, who does the department head work for? Oh, he works for the SVP. Who's the SVP work for?

Oh, yeah, it works for you. Guess who's fault this is? This is your fault. Get it solved. Can you speak to specifically in Delta Charlie's situation, the level of detachment that he had and the way that he had removed his ego from the situation and the fact that he wasn't all wrapped up and insecure like the previous guy was, what did that do for his strategic perspective and his ability to plan

and to think about where the team was actually going and to think holistically about the objective? Yeah. So when the previous, we'll just call him the bad platoon commander, when he was coming up with the plan and then forcing the plan down on the, to us, well, then he had to look down at us the whole time to make sure that we were doing what it is that he wanted us do. He was looking down and in. Whereas Delta Charlie, he would let us come up with a plan. So now he's allowing us to formulate that plan. And sure, he's going to check on it. But instead of having to stare down and in, he's looking up and he's looking out.

He's not micromanage. He's looking up and he's saying, what is the next move we're going to make? And then when we finally would come to him with the plan, he would have a better understanding. He'd be at more altitude. He would be de facto detached from the plan. And when you're de facto detached from the plan and somebody presents it to you, you're going to see holes that the people that were staring at it at point blank range, they didn't see. I'm going to venture to guess that sometimes, you know, you present something to Dave, something that you've spent, you know, hours, if not days, if not.

not weeks on, saying, okay, this is a new program we're going to do. You and your team, you all go through it and you figure it out. Here's a new podcast series we're going to do. Here's a new form of coaching we're going to present. And you bring it to Dave, who hasn't looked at it. He doesn't, he doesn't know anything about it yet. You sit down, you brief on it. He goes, hey, I really like the plan, but let's not forget about this over here. And when he does it, you go, how does he see that? Exactly. It's like, it's this crazy combination. You're like, this guy is Superman CEO because he's simultaneously living at 18 months ahead of the business, planning what we're doing 18 months, and then he can zero in on like a comma in a workbook. And it's like,

how does he see that? But it's exactly what you're saying. He wasn't in the workbook as it was being created. And the idea, you know, writing books, writing workbooks is a great example of that. As you know, once you write it and then you edit it and then you edit it one more time and you go, look, this thing is perfect. You can't see, you can't see the little things anymore. You're going to miss them. As soon as you hand it to someone else with a different set of eyes, that's a great form of detachment.

They're not in it. So they look at it and go, oh, yeah, you missed this comma here. Oh, by the way, on the cover page, you spelled the title of the book wrong. You might want to fix that. Those are the things that you can actually miss. So that's a great example. And, you know, I call that stand back and be the tactical genius because you can see so much more when you take a step back, when you don't get in the weeds in the planning, and you allow other

people to come up with a plan, when they come and present it to you, you're going to see those commas, you're going to see those misspellings, you're going to see those holes in the plan. And look, you're not doing this so you can appear to be superior. You're doing this because then the plan will be better. Then the workbook will be better. That's what you're doing it for, not to look good. You're doing it because you want the team to win. As you're talking about that, I'm kind of thinking about kind of the other section of your book where you

talk about decentralizing command. And I just know, I've seen this in my career, but also the business owners that we work with where it's like you are self-aware of the fact that you are the bottleneck on your business or you are the bottleneck on this project and you are looking down and you are looking in. And the transition of looking down and looking in to looking out and looking up and not being that bottleneck, that feels like a really hard transition. So can you walk us through some of the initial steps that leaders need to take to start to. move towards out and up. Number one, if you don't have three people on your team that you know of by name that aren't ready to do your job as good as you or better than you tomorrow, you got a

problem. You got a problem. In combat, it's a real straightforward case. Hey, what if I get shot? Someone's going to need to step up. But in business world, hey, what if I'm sick? What if I'm not on that client call? What if my computer goes down during a, web call and someone else need to step up and take over. So out of the gate, if you think about that, from that perspective, other people need to be trained. Well, how do you get those other people trained? You get those other people trained by allowing them to step up and do the things that you

normally do or at least do their own job without you holding their hands and micromanaging them. So that should be your goal. That should be your goal. A thing that confuses people when I initially say it to them is I say, if you want to be in charge of everything, your goal should be to be in charge of nothing. To be in charge of nothing. When we would roll out on a combat operation, the smoothest combat operations that we would go out, I'd be the ground force commander, meaning I'm in charge of everyone on the ground. The only thing I would say during the entire operation is when we got to where we were going,

we got to our target building, we'd roll up in our Humvees and I would say execute, execute, execute. And after that, after those three words, I wouldn't say another word because everybody on the team knew exactly what to do, knew exactly where to go. If they had problems, they deal with those problems. If things weren't going to plan, they'd make adjustments based on what the overall mission was. they complete the whole operation, get back in the vehicles, we'd leave, we'd get back. Think about the power of that. Because look, when I say all I'd say was execute, execute, execute, execute, let me tell you what's really happening.

I say execute, execute, execute. They start that portion of the mission. What am I doing? I'm communicating with the aircraft overhead. I'm tracking enemy movement in the area. I'm coordinating with other forces for when we move through their parts of the battle space. I'm monitoring any other friendly force operations that are taking. place. I'm making sure that the road going back to our base isn't being set up on by the enemy.

I'm doing all these things. I'm able to look up and out because my team is handling what's going on. So every day that you are doing the job that someone below you in the chain of command is doing, you're wrong. Now look, does that mean if you're working for me, Alex, and I task you with a mission and you start getting off course that I don't get down there and say, all right, Alex, hey, look, come on over here. Let's go. Let's bring this in. Let's make this. adjustment, let's move in this course over here, I'll go down there and make adjustments, you know, if I have to. As soon as I get done making adjustments and you're back on course, cool, I'm going to be right back out of there. I'm going to be right back looking up and out instead.

And look, if Alex is a problem child, which I know could be suspect at this point, if you're having real problems, I might be side by side with you for more extended amount of time. I might micromanage you for a while to make sure that you understand what the expectations are, what the standards are, to make sure I see how you're thinking. Because if you're making decisions that don't make sense, I want to understand what is leading you to make those decisions. What is it that you don't understand? What can I help you understand so that you can make the right decisions without me being there? And then as you start making decisions correctly, I'm going to start giving you a little bit more room. I'm going to start giving you a little bit more responsibility.

You continue in the right direction. You continue doing well. I'm going to give you more room. and eventually I can not micromanage you anymore, and I can send you out there on your own to get after it. So, yes, not raising people up below you to where they can take your job is one of the biggest mistakes. And just to tie this back together to the beginning of this conversation, one of the things that makes us do that is our ego. And it's really, I think, two parts of it.

One part is, I like being the guy with the power. Every time when Alex comes to me and says, hey Jocko this is the problem what should we do and I got to say well young Alex here's what you do here's how you make this happen right that's a problem that's my ego the other part of it is you know Alex just let me do it I'm better at you than this I might not say those ways hey Alex just just let me do this you know I've been doing this for a long time you look I just I need to do this the guy how insulting that is to you Alex if you're working for me and I'm coming down there saying hey I'll just do it that means I don't have confidence in you that means I don't believe

that you can do it and look at If I don't think you're capable of the job and I don't think you're capable of stepping up and growing, I don't really want you here. The reason you're here, Alex, is because I want you to take my job. I want you to be able to do everything I can do better than me. That's my goal. So here's this project. Start working on it.

If you run into some problems, hit me up. I'm not going to be the easy button. I'm not just going to answer anything you want, but I'll guide you in the right direction. And then you look at me and go, wow, Jocko trust me. I want to do a good job for Jocco. I trust Jocko. That's how we end up with a relationship, and that's how we end up with a winning team. I talked to a guy in construction the other day, and I think he was running like a $25 or a $30 million business, and he was still spending, I think, like, 90% of his time out in the field doing the work.

He was executing. And I realized that maybe there was a little bit of ego in there, and there was a little bit of exactly what you're saying, like, I just want to do it because it's faster and I've figured this out. But there was also a part of it that he just took great joy in doing the thing. right? He took great joy in executing. So how do you balance the need to work on the business while simultaneously recognizing that like, well, this is kind of why I got in in the first place was to do the thing and to provide the service. What are your thoughts there? If you've got to occasionally get your hands dirty because it makes you feel good, that's great. We all fall into that trap. We all, you know, most of us are doing something that we really like doing. You know, when I was in the SEAL

teams, I talked about, hey, when you're in a leadership position, you shouldn't be shooting your gun because you should be looking around. Does that mean I never shot my gun? Oh, no. When the chance was there, I always shot my gun. But that wasn't my primary mission. And you have to realize that I realized, just like this construction guy, needs to realize. Every time that he's doing that, there's some other part of the business that he's letting

everyone down. He's letting the entire team down. Not only is he not training them, not only are they not getting the experience, but he's not looking at the, you know, what's the next job, going to be where can he build a relationship what can he make happen that will move the company forward and look this is where sometimes you end up with good partnerships because if he brings on a partner that doesn't like to get dirty or you know maybe he hires a you know a C.O that doesn't like to get dirty and he says hey listen CO I'm the CEO but I'm going to be down there getting after it

sometimes I'm going to spend some time on the job site what I need you to do is do what you're good at build these relationships with the clients figure out what the most important you know know, link in our supply chain is, figure out what we need to focus on as far as getting better. And then you end up with a good complimentary situation where you're both kind of doing what you're good at. But I think the key thing is when you're in that situation, you've got to recognize that you are hurting the team by doing that. You're not allowing the team to grow.

You're not allowing the team to develop. And even worse, you're not looking at the strategic view to figure out what's the big picture on progress for the whole team. There was a section in the book, and you actually referenced it a little bit already, but when you talk about the subtlety of leadership, teach us a little bit about how that actually plays in and how it played into your leadership style

because on face value, knowing your books, knowing especially your podcasts and stuff like that, you don't seem like a subtle guy, but it sounds like your leadership is a lot more subtle than when we're doing conversations like this. What we want to do as a leader is you want to lead with the minimum force required, right? Which is a term that's used to,

if I'm going to go detain someone, if I'm a police officer, it's using law enforcement. If you're a law enforcement officer and you're going to arrest somebody, you want to do it with the minimum force required, right? You don't want to shoot them, right? If they're unarmed and they're not, you know, fighting back, you say, hey, get down on the ground.

That's your first step. And hopefully they listen to that. If they don't, then you might have to get closer to them and raise your voice, right? as a leader, we don't want to go straight to lethality out of the gate. If I can give someone a suggestion and it moves them in the right direction and they go and get done what I need them to get done, that's infinitely better than me barking in order at someone and telling them to go do something because I said so now.

I don't want to do that and that person doesn't want to get treated like that. So as often as you can, you lead as subtly as possible. You use the minimum force required. And like I said earlier, when you have a good relationship with people, you know, even in my business right now, we'll go do a live event somewhere. And, you know, my operations director has been with us for five years

and she's great, but I can look at her from across the room and give her a head nod, and she'll go and, you know, start turning on the projectors because she knows that that means I'm getting ready to start or that kind of relationship,

that's good, that's what you want. And that's the extreme version of subtle leadership. I'm just going to give you a look and you already know what I'm thinking. And if you're moving in the wrong direction, I don't say, hey Alex that's ridiculous no I say hey Alex why are you going to go that way and now I'm

just making you think about it and look if the answer is obvious you're going to figure out the answer right you work for me that means you went through the hiring process that means you got some brains in your head so when I say hey Alex why are you doing it that way you say well well you know I think this will get us results the fastest okay it's going to get us results the fastest is the quality going to be there that that we want and you go well I mean obviously it's not going to be as good okay what do you you think that'll do to our follow-on business? Do you think that would be good for our follow-on business? No, it probably wouldn't be. So what do you think was actually going to be better for us? Do you think

we should do it the fastest way or do you think we should try and put some time and effort into it, make it high quality so we get a really good reputation? And you say, yeah, you know, that's what we should do. Oh, okay, that sounds like a good plan. Right? All of a sudden, it's you. So yes, you want to be as subtle as possible. Look, are there times where subtlety doesn't work? Absolutely. You know, you want to escalate through the conversation. You know, you don't start off by jumping down someone's throat. You start off as subtle as you can, and then you escalate from there. You get more and more direct until you get to a point where I'm saying, Alex, here's where their shortfalls are, here's what you've done wrong, here's what's going to

happen if you continue to do these things wrong, right? No uncertain terms. But it seems like, again, especially for leadership-minded individuals, people that maybe spent, a long time aspiring and desiring to play that role of leader. If you're going to play the role of subtle leader, the thing you have to sacrifice is your ego, it seems like. Yeah, unless you can convince yourself, it doesn't take much convincing if you just understand the fact that the more subtle you are with your leadership, the better relationships you will generally have with your team. And the stronger relationships you have with your team, the better the team's going to be. And the better the team's going to be, the better their performance is going to be. And the better their performance

is going to be, the better the results are. What is it that makes the seal teams? The seal teams have a great reputation. What is it that makes them special? What is it, what is it that makes a seal platoon? Because there's bad seal platoons. What's the difference between a good seal platoon and a bad seal platoon? It's very simple and very straightforward. And it's 100% accurate. A good seal platoon has good relationships inside the platoon. A bad seal platoon has bad relationships. So, you know, when I bark orders and when I treat people with a battle axe all the time, we're not building relationships. I'm not building relationships. It's not a good team. When I lead subtly and I take feedback and I accept their input and I actually act on their input and we have a conversation about

things instead of a one way, it's a two way conversation. Instead of a one way conversation, we're actually going to be better. So if you can understand that, because what you want to do is win, that should help your ego get over that hurdle. What are you trying to do? You're trying to win. That's what you're trying to do.

There's nothing that feels better to the ego than winning. And the more subtle you are, and the better relationships you have, the more you're going to win. Seems like this is related to that idea of investing in the long game and playing the long game with regard to your relationship.

with your leadership, with your decisions. Is that right? Yes. And I was at one of our events and someone asked me, how often should I be thinking strategically? And my answer was, you should be thinking strategically all the time. You should be thinking about the long game all the time. Tell me what part of your life is making short-term decisions good. There's no part. It doesn't help our health. It doesn't help our finances. It doesn't help our business. It doesn't help our business. It doesn't help our relationship. It doesn't help in any way, shape, or form. The only thing it helps is our short-term gratification.

It'll make you feel good. It'll make me feel good. If I'm mad at Alex, it'll make me feel good for 20 minutes. If I go in there and yell and scream at you and throw the report that you gave me onto your desk and say that it's a piece of junk, that'll make me feel good for 15 minutes. And then long-term, I've heard our relationship. I've heard our team.

I've heard our outlook. I didn't teach you anything. By the way, now when I try and go teach you something, you don't even want to listen to me. So the short-term gratification is the enemy, and you've got to watch out for you. You've got to think strategic and long-term with every decision that you make and everything that you do in your business and in your life. There's a guy that I've talked to for a while now that he owns a business of electricians,

and I would say he probably isn't playing the long game all the time because his retention rate is really, really bad. And he literally has just kind of thrown up his hands, and he just says retention, retention in this industry just isn't very good. And these guys, a lot of times are a bunch of knuckleheads, is what he says, essentially. And so he's like, I'm not going to invest a bunch of time, energy resources, because they've already established the pattern that they're going to leave, and I'll just bring in new ones. And so he's constantly retraining people. Like, we meet once a month, and it's like constantly, he's always having to hire and retrain and hire and retrain. And he never

moves the business forward, but he kind of just has resigned to that being the case. And it has almost, hamstring his ability to think about the long game. How do you get out of that cycle or how do you start to move out of that so you're not just playing the short game whenever there are some circumstantial things that it's like these seem like blockers, Jocko? Take ownership of the situation. I mean, this is a classic example. As long as these guys leaving is the fault of the industry, the fault of the knuckleheads,

the fault of the economy, as long as it's everyone else's fault, guess what? what he's going to change. He's not going to change anything. He's going to always have the same problem. The minute that he says to himself, okay, people are leaving because of me. This is my fault. I've set up my business in such a way. I treat them in such a way. The opportunities I present are not there for them. I am doing something wrong. And I need to fix that. And who knows what it could be? I don't know what he's paying these guys. I don't know what opportunities for growth they have. I don't know what kind of relationship he has with them. Look, when it comes to compensation,

look, in the Navy, you can't pay anyone more money. I mean, if you work for me, Alex, in the Navy, and you do a superb job, I can't give you a bonus. I can't give you an hourly raise. Now, look, every three years, I can get you a promotion. And you know what a promotion amounts to in the Navy? It amounts to like 400, 300, 200, 200 bucks a month. This isn't life-changing money.

So how did I, reward guys in the Navy, how did I compensate them for excellence? Well, it was actually pretty simple and pretty straightforward. What I gave them was freedom. What I gave them was autonomy. What I gave them was control over their own fate, which is the most precious thing in the world. So when someone comes to work for me, Alex, if you start working for me tomorrow, you don't get to do whatever you want day one, day six, day 12, but you're going to see that there's a pathway to get there. Because I don't know you. I don't trust you. I don't know what your knowledge is. I don't know what you can and can't do. I don't know what kind of decision-making processes you use to decide what

you're going to do. So we're going to start off with a little bit of a tight hold on you. We're going to have the reins pretty tight. But the opportunity is going to be there for me to loosen those rains. And almost as quick as I can, I'm going to show you, hey, the rains are going to get loosened. And you're going to have more control. And you're going to look around at some other people that have been with me for a while and you're going to go, it seems like this guy over here's doing whatever he wants. And I'm going to go, oh yeah, he can do whatever he wants. He knows what his mission is. He knows what our mission is. He knows what our strategy is. And he does it right all the time. I don't even need to talk to him. The only thing I need to say to him is thank you an awesome

job. So again, the reason this is coming into my mind because you're bringing people to your team and they're leaving. Why are they leaving? Sure, they might be leaving because of money. Maybe there's better opportunities out there. Well, okay, how do we make ourselves more competitive with pay? That's something we got to look at. But equally powerful is how are we treating people? Are we giving them control over their own fate? Well, these guys, I'm having to train them, so I don't owe them anything. Okay, then guess what they owe you? They don't owe you anything either. You got to treat people with respect. You got to listen to what they have to say. You got to trust them so that they trust you. You know, there was a saying in the SEAL teams, take care of

your gear and your gear will take care of you. And we talked about our parachutes that way. We talked about our weapons that way. And we talked about our dive gear that way. I talk about people that way. If you take care of people, they're going to take care of you. And by the way, when they leave, when a guy says, hey, I got a better offer across the street, you know what you say? You say, hey, I'm sorry, I can't compete with that right now.

I'm going to make some adjustments. I wish you luck over there. I hope it goes awesome. Let me know if there's anything I can do for you in the future. And what does that do? That guy's going to always have that pull in the back of his head. Is that, hey, that business is paying more. They're paying him more.

Guess what? Maybe they're paying too much. Maybe they're going out of business. And in six months and 18 months, this guy's coming back saying, hey, it didn't work out over there. I appreciate, you know, that you train me well, and I'm here ready to go to work. That's long game thinking. Short game thinking is, oh, you're just a knucklehead. I trained you, now you're leaving. Wrong answer. Play the long game. Invest in people.

Take care of people. Build relationships. It's actually very interesting to me. And I would love to know more about this individual's business because if you're taking people that haven't, you know, and you're training them, new guys for lack of a better way. I think the thought process for him is it's a very like you just leave for the next best offer industry. He says they're playing short term thinking. And so they're just playing lily pad, which whoever can offer more money essentially. And if you know that, if you know that and you can't capitalize on the fact that, hey, you want to go have a transactional relationship with Fred over across the street, I'm not going to stop you, but I'll tell you what I'm trying to build here. I'm not trying to build a bunch of people that I pay by the hour and when it's time to leave, they leave. I actually want a team here, a team that's going to stick together, a team that's going to build a reputation. Why not do that? Instead of shrugging your shoulders, and you're going to and saying it's the industry and it's the people and it's the knuckleheads. I can guarantee this.

I can guarantee this. There's someone else, maybe not an exact mirror competitor to him, but I guarantee there's someone that is a similar business that doesn't have this problem, that won't have anybody leave that has people saying, hey boss, you can cut my pay right now. I got it. No problem. I know we're not getting much work right now.

I know it's COVID. I know there's some cost cutting going on. Cut my cost first. Don't worry about it. I'll spend a little time with my family. I'm here for you. I guarantee you that there is a equivalent company doing that. And you know what?

I work with companies like that all the time. That's right. I work with companies that go through massive, you know, cost cutting and slashes. And you know what? Sometimes they do have to let people go. Every business goes through that. How do you do it? What's your attitude?

Are you building a team? Are you paying employees? Make that choice. Well, that's one of the things that I've noticed in the, season is that it's almost like there's this contrast between the business owners that are taking ownership and those that aren't. And as long as they're blaming the industry or the economy or the pandemic or anything like that, it's like there is no opportunity for creative problem solving. It just went out the window because you can't creatively solve the economy. But the people that are

saying like, okay, well, there is a solution to this. And the fact that we haven't found it yet is my fault. and suddenly you open up creative thought and you say, okay, now there's actually hope, there's actually possibility for moving forward. A hundred percent. And by the way, this is a deep cutting attitude because you might have to go and look in the mirror and say to yourself, this business model that I built, that I spent four years, eight years, 10 years, 12 years building needs to be adjusted. I wasn't 100% right.

And even though it's worked all this time, and I've been winning, and I'm a winner, I'm not winning right now. What do I need to change? That's the difference between winning and losing. That's the difference between winning and losing. Ashland Front, I have a consulting company. We canceled 37 events in four days,

37 events in four days when COVID hit. and millions of dollars worth of business. And I said to the team, I said, listen, we are going to start doing this stuff virtually. And look, right now everyone's doing everything virtually. We were a little bit ahead of it because I said, as soon as it happened, I said, we're going to start doing this stuff virtually. Call the clients, call every client and say, look, we're sorry that this is happening. We have a solution. And, you know, we would want to make sure we provide you the service that we were going to provide you.

so here we go let's make this happen we rescheduled almost every single one of those events we're totally back in the game we're long term now we're changing our business model i can tell you right now my travel which is totally ridiculous it has been totally ridiculous for the last well for the last 30 years my travel's been ridiculous i will be traveling less now because we actually have figured out that in many ways, doing virtual meetings on a website is in some ways more impactful than me going face to face. You know, when I go and speak to a thousand people, the people in the back of the room, they can't see me. Well, when I'm on a Zoom meeting, whether there's 2,000 people, everyone's seen me up close and personal. And by the way, they can ask me questions. They can put questions in

the chat box. I can respond. The schedule can be adjusted more easily. There's a lot of advantages to it. So with the team, with my team at Eshlam Front, I said, listen, here's what we could do right now. We could do a breath hold, and that's a sealed team term, right? I'm going to hold. We could hold our breath. We got a bunch of money in the bank. We can hold our breath until this thing is over and we can go back to work. I said, or we can go on the attack and we can fix these things. And that's exactly what we did. You know, I got, I got another business up in Maine. We make jujitsu geese. We make jujitsu geese.

It's a uniform for jiu-jitsu. It looks like a karate uniform, but it's a little heavier. COVID-19 hits. Every jujitsu gym in America shut down. Including I have a jiu-jitsu gym. We all shut down. The question wasn't, wait a second, how can we get people to buy geese now that they're doing jiu-jitsu?

People aren't buying geese. What are we going to do? Guess what people? do need right now. People need things to cover their face. Guess what we can make? Masks. In two days, we started making face coverings. And look, they weren't N95. And we actually had to hesitate for a moment. As if you were, depending on how close you were tracking all this stuff, I had a couple friends that were doctors and paramedics and medics from the military that gave me a heads up and said, hey, Jocko, you should start making some kind of mask.

because there's going to be a shortage. And I said, okay, I started looking into it with my business partner up there. And I said, hey, do you think we could make masks? And he said, well, you know, we could. And three or four days later, the government came out and said, masks don't do anything. They don't help.

Don't wear them. And I said, hey, you know what? Looks like they don't help. I'm not going to be a guy that's, you know, trying to sell something that doesn't help. Okay, so we turned off the idea. Three days later, the government's up. saying you should wear a mask. And then three days after that, New York and then a bunch of other

states said it's mandatory. California, it's mandatory to wear a mask. We turned that mask making on. We sold hundreds of thousands of masks. You know how many jih Tzu Kis we would have sold? Zero. That's right. No one's buying jihisugi's right now. I had to look at myself in the mirror and say, hey, the business plan that you have is not working right now. Not the market, not the pandemic, not people should train anyways. No, I'm wrong right now. Now, how do I make it right? And that's the attitude you have to have. We could spend an entire hour and a half on this topic specifically, I think. But there's another parallel here to one of the tactics you talk about in the book,

which is that iterative decision making, because it seems like that was one of the great challenges for people in this COVID situation, but also in the rebound from COVID is like the information. It's not like the government's wrapping up this 30-page document saying, here's all of the facts on COVID. No, it's so freaking confusing and everyone's losing their mind. And so it seems like one of the tactics that's so valuable in this situation is what you teach about iterative decision making. You are not going to have perfect information ever in any environment in your life. You're not going to know everything. So what you do is as information comes in, you assess the various information that you receive, and then you try and assess what is, what is most likely the direction that you should head.

And what I mean by that is you should make a guess. And no one wants to hear that. No one wants to hear a leader say, hey, make a guess. Because everyone thinks, oh, a leader should know exactly what to do and exactly how to do it. That's wrong. A leader can almost never know exactly what to do and exactly how to do it. So what you do is you assess the information and you say, okay, my best get, is that we should go in this direction over here.

And then what you do is you make the smallest possible decision to move you in that direction. Then you run a feedback loop. And you pay attention and you say, okay, what is the feedback saying? Does the feedback saying that this seem like a good guess and I'm moving in the right direction? And if it is, then you take another small step in that direction. And if that works out good, okay, and you get positive feedback,

you make another small step. At any time, you could receive information that you didn't expect and you say, oh, oh, actually looks like that was the wrong direction. Okay, let's reassess and let's move in a different direction. I was kind of known in the SEAL teams and really right now as being a very decisive person. And when people think of individuals that are decisive, they think of individuals that are making big, bold decisions. Well, the fact of the matter is a good leader isn't worried about making a big, bold decision.

they're going to make very small decisions. So if we're in a building and we start taking fire in the building, I don't say everyone out of the building attack to the north. No, I don't even know what we're going up against. What I'm going to say is, hey, two guys go to the roof and tell me what you see. That's a little tiny decision. Everyone thinks, you know, I'll go, hey, two guys get to the roof and tell me what you see. Everyone thinks I'm a super decisive guy.

It is a decision, but it's not a risky decision. There's almost no risk whatsoever. I send these two guys up. They take a look. They see that it's a giant number of enemy. Are we going to charge it them? No, we're going to call air support. We're going to move in the opposite direction.

If they see a small number of guys that we could take out, cool. We'll assault them. But we'll make those small decisions that will lead us in the right direction. The other thing that happens with this from a leadership perspective is people say, well, what do you do in a situation when bad things are happening. Look, you tell your troops the truth about what's happening. You tell them the truth. If you're going to have to furlough people, you say, listen, we're going to have to furlough people. Everyone likes to tell the truth when we're winning and profits are up and we've got to hire more people and we're growing. Everyone loves to talk about that.

No one likes to talk about it when we're not making money and we're going to have to furlough people. We're going to have to lay people off. No one wants to talk about that. The less you talk about it, the worse it gets. The longer you wait to tell people, the worse the news is. And the worst they're going to take it. And then people say, well, what do I do? How do I tell the truth when I don't know what's going to happen? And the answer is, you tell your team, I don't know what's going to happen. You say, listen, here's the information that we're receiving right now.

Here's some possibilities of how this could unfold. And here's some contingency plans that we're coming up with, depending on where this goes. And so the last thing you have to do is you have to have the courage, the humility to say, when the team is moving in the wrong direction, to say, hey, everyone,

I thought that that was the right way to go. It turns out some more information's coming to light. It was wrong. We need to actually go in an opposite direction. And that's fine. Having the courage to say, I was wrong, we need to go a different way. And I'll tell you,

I would love to see some of that from our government officials right now across the board of saying, hey, you know what? This looked a certain way two months ago. I made these decisions at the time. They seemed right. Right now, they don't make any sense or they make less sense. We're going to start moving in another direction. But you don't see anyone admitting that or you don't say anyone saying, hey, I made the best

decision I could with the information I had at the time. That information has changed. here's what's happening now. Here's the adjustments I'm making. That's right. One of the lines that Dave uses a lot, especially in this whole COVID situation, is he says, I reserve the right to get smarter as the situation unfolds. And that's exactly what you're saying. He's saying, I may change how we go. But the other thing I was thinking of is whenever everything really blew up and, like,

they canceled the NBA, and it started to become very aware to everyone that this isn't just a real thing elsewhere. This is a real thing here right now. we had a town hall meeting here, and Dave, he did a lot of the things that you've already talked about in this conversation. and he had like a very strategic pause at the beginning. We prayed. We're a faith-based organization. We prayed before it. And he prayed for wisdom to really be able to speak truth into the situation.

And then he proceeded to kind of set the narrative for the organization of this is what's going on. This is how we're going to make decisions. And by the way, I've been thinking about this for about two weeks because I've had this information for a while now. And so I've been running worst-case scenarios through my head. And he basically gave us the worst-case scenarios. Now, thankfully, it's not looking like we're going to get any of the worst-case scenarios.

Now, thankfully, it's not looking like we're going to get anywhere close to any of those, which is awesome. But what was crazy to me is the meeting ended and people clapped. And I was like, what the heck? He literally just had a meeting about worst case scenarios and people clapped. And I realized, like, I think what happened there is people were just grateful to be treated like adults. And it seems like that's so much of what you're talking about, Jock. It's 100%. He got up there and told the truth.

And the truth is he didn't know. The truth is he said, look, it could be this horrible situation, could be this other horrible situation. We hope and pray that it's going to be better than that, but this is what we're going to prepare for. He told the truth about what's happening, and that is what a good leader does. As opposed to getting up there, by the way, you want to just guarantee yourself to look stupid. Get up there and say, hey, this thing won't be a big deal. Don't worry about it. Or get up there and say, people don't even get how bad this is going to be.

it's going to be a nightmare. No matter what, it's Murphy's law. If you get up there and put a stake in the ground and you act like you know exactly what's going to happen, I joke about this, Alex. Do you know how often I have to admit that I'm wrong? How often, Jock? Almost never.

I almost never have to admit when I'm wrong. And the reason is I almost never get up and state something that, I don't fully understand and know is going to happen 100% as if I do. I never do that. I never get up there and say, hey, if we don't enter this market right now, we're never going to get in there. I don't get up there and say that.

I don't get up there and say, if we make this mistake, it's going to be catastrophic and we're going to lose all of our business. I don't get up there and say that. I don't tell a company, when I'm consulting a company, I don't say, hey, if you guys don't listen to me right now, it's going to be a nightmare for everything you do. No, I say, listen, here's what I see. Here's the way this could go.

So I talk about a leadership strategy and tactics. It's called don't dig in. If you dig into a position, you can't move anymore. And if I can't move anymore, that's when you get killed. Yeah, that's right. If I never claim that I'm absolutely right, then I never really have to say that I was wrong, which means I have ability to maneuver. Right.

And when I'm wrong, I'll be. the first person to admit that I'm wrong. My point is that there's so few things that I know with such authority that I can stand up in front of my team or in front of a business or in front of anyone and say, this is 100% right. I never feel comfortable doing that. I'll say, this is my opinion. This is what I think right now. And what's the thing you said? Dave says, I reserve the right to get smarter. That's right. That's my statement. I mean, I don't make that exact statement, but anybody that works with me knows that that's my broad perspective of life. I reserve the right to get smarter, change my mind, make adjustments to our plan.

I'm going to do that all the time. And what prevents people from doing that is their ego. They put their ego, their ego starts to play, and doesn't matter what facts come across, doesn't matter what time plays out, doesn't matter what science says. They're sticking with their initial guess. but they don't make it a guess. They make it their personal knowledge. Wrap their ego around it, and it serves up a disaster. That's right. It serves up a disaster. Well, folks, this is just a sample of what's in the book. Leadership strategy and tactics is the name of the book. One of the things that

I love about the way that you wrote this is it's so digestible. And I know the phrase I've heard you used is it's highly indexed. So it's crazy how I can think about like, okay, I'm going into this tough conversation with a team member or I'm about to really have to have a staff meeting where I'm going to have to deliver some tough information. And there's literally sections in the book that I can go to to understand how to handle those things. It's so powerful. And it also hits on the nuances of leadership that it's not like we can have this principle that applies to every situation 100%. You get into the nitty gritty details. I would recommend everyone get it. Everyone have it on your desk. I would also say it's a great book for you to give team members that are rising up in your

team because a lot of it is about leading within a team and that stuff is so effective. Jocko, I'm going to get out of the way and give it to you. I want you to talk directly to the small business owners and give them a final call to action out of this conversation. Look, leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. There is no doubt about that. It's been proven over and over again in business, in life, in combat, leadership is the most important thing. And what's awesome about leadership, so few people recognize. recognize this fact is that you can get better at it. Just like you can get better at shooting a basketball, just like you can get better at playing guitar, just like you can get better at swinging

a hammer on a construction site, all those things are skills that you can get better at. Well, leadership has strategies and tactics that you can learn, that you can get better at, that you can utilize, that will help you and your team go out there. and win. Well, Jocko, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for your investment. Thank you for your service to our country. We really appreciate you. Appreciate all that you guys do. It's this weird feeling looking Jocko Willink in the eyes whenever we do a conversation with him because I'm not sure that I ever get really more excited because I get to learn from this guy that is an absolute practitioner at the highest level of the things that I'm passionate about, personal growth and

leadership. And at the same time that I'm really excited, I'm also incredibly nervous because I just know the entire time I'm staring at a guy that could absolutely beat the tar out of me if he wanted to. But I think that the thing that's so cool about Jock Willink is that in the experiences that I've had with him, the person that he is on the microphone is the person that he is off the microphone. And he is a leader that truly believes that his greatest impact is not going to be just impressing you with his life, but rather in pouring into the lives of others. And that is really who he is. That is the mission that he is on. And it's so inspiring to see that that mission is making an impact on thousands, if not millions, around our country. So, Jocko, thank you for your service,

and thank you for being on this program so often. And here's the deal. We are of the belief here at Entree leadership, that when a leader decides to get better, everybody wins. And that's an incredible opportunity for you, the small business owner, but it's also an incredible responsibility because it means that the capacity of your organization is going to be limited by one thing, and that is you. And that's why our team created the leadership growth assessment, because we know that you cannot fix what you cannot see. And so this is really just a leadership look in the mirror where you tell us a little bit

your strengths, your weaknesses, where you're using your time, just all the basic stuff about where you're at currently. And then our team has created an assessment that provides you with some things you can work on, some things to be focused on, and even some resources to help you along the way. It's a really powerful tool. And so if you want to take advantage of the free leadership growth assessment, I want you to text the word leader growth to 33444. Again, that's the word leader growth, all one word, no spaces, to 33444, or just click the length that's in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25,

Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the length that's in the show notes. Don't forget to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm Alex Judd, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.