Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Four-Star General: Leadership Tactics from Battlefields to Boardrooms | General Stanley McChrystal

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

What does leadership look like in the middle of a war zone—one of the most dynamic, agile, and consequential environments on the planet? General Stanley McChrystal knows intimately what it���s like – and is committed to teaching his hard-earned leadership insights to others. Heading up the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), he led the U.S. military’s most elite special ops teams against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and from there was commissioned to command the war on terror in Afghanistan.That mission in itself is treacherous… and General McChrystal also crashed head-on with a political controversy – one that led to the end of his military career but opened the door to teaching leadership at Yale university, authoring multiple bestsellers, founding the McChrystal Group (his well-known management consulting company) and even being portrayed by none other than Brad Pitt in the movie War Machine.What General McChrystal teaches isn’t about battlefield maps and tactics, it’s about building a team that’s informed, committed and focused. And even when the mission isn’t immediately successful, it’s about teaching the importance of risk, failure, and ultimately marching forward.It's a fascinating discussion, rich with gems and insights. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. As a leader, what you learn first is the core of it is self-discipline. If you're not out there doing a lot

and failing a good percentage of the time, it means we're not doing enough. And although people sometimes worry, if I don't have my hand on every chess piece that we're going to lose, I would argue, if you have your hand on every chess piece, you will lose. Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. By trade and training, a high-performance psychologist. And I am absolutely thrilled and honored to welcome one of the United States'

most accomplished and well-known military leaders, General Stanley McChrystal. So what does leadership look like in the middle of a war zone? One of the most dynamic and agile and consequential environments on the planet. General McChrystal knows. He knows it intimately, what it's like, and he has been committed to teaching his hard-earned leadership insights to others. And that's really what this conversation is about. Heading up the Joint Special Operations Command, he led the U.S. military's most elite spec ops teams against

al-Qaeda in Iraq, and from there was commissioned to command the war on terror in Afghanistan. While that mission in and of itself is treacherous, General Stanley McChrystal also crashed head-on with a political controversy, one that led to the end of his military career. But it opened the door to teaching leadership at Yale University, authoring multiple bestsellers, founding the McChrystal Group, his well-known management consulting company, and even being portrayed by none other than Brad Pitt in the movie War Machine. So after 34 years of service, General McChrystal retired as a four-star general, the highest rank currently achievable in the U.S. Army. So how does a highly touted leader like him manage the stress and sometimes fear in some of the world's most elite operators and teams? As you'll hear today, General McChrystal calls it shared consciousness and empowered execution. These two principles, he says, are the groundwork

for guiding any organization from the war room to the boardroom to successfully carrying out any mission in your life. And you may be surprised to find that his famously tough general's approach to leadership is less about barking orders on a battlefield and more about, believe it or not, gardening. It's a fascinating discussion that we had. It's rich with gems and insights. And so with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with General Stanley McChrystal. General McChrystal, Stan, I am so excited to have you

in this conversation and your body work is incredible. And I mean, hopefully what we're going to do is cover a lot of unlocks for our community because you've been at this for a long time and you've got a deep discernment and real exercises that you've been through that allow the insights that you've experienced to be actionable and real. So I just want to start first by saying I'm honored to have the conversation with you. And I just want to check in. Like, how are you doing? I'm doing really well, Mike.

Thanks for asking. And I've been looking forward to this conversation. Oh, awesome. OK, so you've led in highly complex and volatile environments, and you've also written about it more than most people ever will. So on leadership and management and on teams, on risk, and these are topics that are tier zero when it comes to military and business and sport, and those organizations that are constantly trying to understand and integrate these practices that you've come to understand in their teams.

So we could start in so many different directions, but I thought we'd start in two of your foundational ideas, which is shared consciousness and empowered execution. Can you just set the stage for our community on those two concepts, shared consciousness and empowered execution? Yeah, Mike, you started right at the core of what I think is most important. So thanks for that. Shared consciousness and empowered execution are very carefully chosen terms, and they were chosen after the fact. And what I mean is I lived a life in the military and a series of leadership experiences that I went through and reacted to and adapted with, and then only studied afterward. And I studied them and I wrote them afterward, and we actually

coined the term shared consciousness and empowered execution sometime after when we actually experienced creating that. But I give you a background. It really came from when I was commanding our counter-terrorist forces called Joint Special Operations Command. That's the United States' most elite special operating forces focused at things like hostage rescue, precision raids, counter hijacking. So it's a demographic of very experienced professionals, all specially selected, exquisitely trained. The organization is lavishly resourced. And so very high standards of execution are expected of it. And I grew up in the organization most of my career, but then in the fall of 2003, became its commanding general. And that intersected with a

moment for that command when we were graduating from the first 22 years of our history where we had done some great things, but fairly narrow in scope and time. And we suddenly were faced with a new problem, and it happened to be in Iraq. And it was in the face of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was an emerging terrorist group led by a young Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. What it did was it presented a bigger, more complex, constantly changing challenge than we had ever faced before. It wasn't a discrete event, a hostage crisis that you get a solution to or a single target. It was a campaign that we waged for years against this constantly morphing and constantly growing threat. And what it forced us to do was instead of being a series of highly trained but siloed organizations like Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, the Rangers, and then other participants like the

Central Intelligence Agency and FBI, instead of us coming together for a very short amount of time in a discrete execution, we had to wage this long-term campaign in which collaboration across those organizations was essential. Before, we used to think of it as a nice to do if you do it occasionally, but the reality is you don't commit yourself as an organization to that. And we found that to compete in this battle we were waging, a lethal battle, we had to completely change how we operated. At the core of that was to have a shared mission, a single understanding of what we were trying to do. And that required us to have what we ultimately call shared consciousness. That's understanding contextually what is happening. We used to say in our meetings that the goal was to have every person understand everything

all the time. Now that's impossible. But the reality was, instead of just understanding my role or my unit's mission or my goals, I had to understand the wider context of what we were trying to do so that as I applied my actions, it fit within the context of that larger strategy and situation. And that way, instead of me just doing what I'm told, I'm not on the assembly line just waiting for the appliance to come down and I put on the part that I'm assigned. Instead, I'm part of building this appliance, so I have to understand what's happening everywhere all the time.

And so it required a level of sharing of information that we'd never done before, because we were very hesitant in that world, and a curiosity, I would say an individual curiosity and an organizational curiosity to understand what's happening outside my lane, on the other side of the wall, because ultimately it affects me. And the analogy I would use for the organization is you're keeping your eye on the scoreboard of the game, not on your personal statistics, your batting average or yards, because they only matter within the context of whether we're affecting the overall campaign. So the shared consciousness was core, and it was very foreign to us. In fact, it's not very common in the military, or in fact, I would argue in many

other organizations. But it was central enabler. Now, the product from that was empowered execution. And sometimes people say, well, that's just decentralized authority to act. Well, it's more than that. If we say I decentralized authority for you to do something and then I hope you'll go do it, that's fine. But in reality, for you to act effectively, you have to have that contextual understanding from shared consciousness to know what to do and to know when to do it. And so instead of people waiting to be told what to do, we provide them the shared consciousness and then we empower them with both the expectation that they act, but also the contextual understanding that they can act effectively. And those two fit together. Now they're easy to brief. It's easy for us to talk about in the conversation today. It's devilishly hard to achieve inside organizations, but when

you do, it unlocks great potential. Okay. Quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people. It takes the right tools, the right information at the right time.

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slash deal for two full months for free. Terms and conditions apply. Finding Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals, on a demanding day certainly, I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David Protein Bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put him on the spot.

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I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value, and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash findingmastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Let's jump right back into the conversation. Yeah, it's great clarity in the way that you just described it.

And I love that you're nodding of how complicated it can be, especially in complex environments. And those two words, I know you understand with great depth, complex and complexity. So let me just dial this down one more level. Is that something that people, and there's some, it's the orthogonal tension between concepts that make something difficult to get at, like empowerment and accountability. People want empowerment. They want to know that what they're seeing and feeling that they can implement and do something to take action towards the shared goal, right? And so, but don't always necessarily want the accountability. So you're working to enable empowerment. How do you hold decisions and actions and those actors accountable when there's a mistake? And of course,

you celebrate the successes, but how do you do the accountability bit? Yeah, you really need to frame this because if you think of a typical organization shape, think of a pyramid-shaped hierarchy. There's most senior leaders, then it goes down. And the goal is always to push empowered execution, authority to act as low as you can. Not always to the very lowest level, but as low as you can. I used to tell people to decentralize until you're uncomfortable and then go one more level. Now, the great question would be asked, not by people at the top, but by leaders in the middle. And I would say, I want you to push down authority to act in expectation. And they'd say, well, if I push that down, am I still responsible for the outcomes?

And they're really asking for the failures. If I let my subordinates make a decision and they fail, am I responsible? And my answer was yes. And they go, well, that's not fair. And I said, maybe so, but it's not my problem. Because here's how I want you to think about it. That's not my problem. Okay, good. The goal is that your responsibility is to prepare those subordinates as best you can, both with training, with confidence, by picking the right subordinates, with the right information to set up the environment that maximizes the probability that they will be successful. And you are going to be responsible for their successes and their failures. And it took a while for a lot of middle of the organization leaders to begin to feel

comfortable with that. The more junior people, when they got authority, it wasn't uniform, but many of them grabbed it and they felt pretty good. They needed to have confidence that they really had that authority, but they were pretty good about grabbing it. But then the question comes down to what about failure? Because there's going to be a percentage of failure. And in our counterterrorism command, our failure rate was about 30%. And that means you go on an operation where you don't accomplish your mission.

And sometimes that means you suffer casualties, people who are killed or wounded on our side. And so failure carries a price. And so you have to figure out how you want to deal with that. And the tradition, the cultural habit in our unit when I took over was to avoid risk. And at first I thought they're avoiding risk because they don't have the nerve or the courage. And that was absolutely unfair. That wasn't the case. What they didn't want to do was fail in a mission. They didn't want to have to get in front of me or other leaders and say, you gave us a mission, we failed. So they would try to mitigate risk to zero. And when you try to mitigate risk to zero

and you try to get a backup to the backup and all, what it means is you don't do very much, if anything. Yeah, it's too slow. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Become incapacitated in so many ways. So I had to push the organization to a higher level of failure rate. I said, if you're not out there doing a lot and failing a good percentage of the time, it means we're not doing enough, which then means that how the command digests failure is important. We had a daily video teleconference with the whole command.

And so if you were a subordinate leader and you failed last night and you're reporting that you failed, you're looking at me on video and you're saying, well, boss, we went out, we did this and we failed. Now, how I respond matters to you. But we had about 7,500 people on that video teleconference every day. It really matters to those other 7,499. Because if I get angry, if I look disappointed, if I respond badly, they are not going to want to take a chance tomorrow

because they don't want to be you tomorrow. I love this right now because this is the mark of a great leader. In sport, I think there's a window after an athlete makes a mistake that we have about three to six seconds, maybe where we make or break the relationship between coach and athlete, where we set the stage and the tone for the tolerance for going for it or playing it safe. And it's a simple little eye roll or head nod. And it happens that fast. Hopefully they don't look over to the sidelines, right? That's the hope that they're just task focused. But so your response, I love that you're talking about this, that your response actually is setting the culture for innovation, for creativity, for risk-taking, or for low tolerance for mistake-making. And so many organizations I've been part of like fail fast, fail forward, fail

often, and it's total BS. They're saying that because it's popular and the spirit of it is right, but the tolerance is so marginalized that it actually never really takes place. And people are terrified. That's right. And when you describe between a coach and a player, sometimes that can be very personal. The coach can put their arm on the shoulder. But we're now in a distributed environment. Most of my command was distributed. So I would get these reports virtually and over a video teleconference link.

And my response was over a video teleconference link. And my response was over a video teleconference link. So I couldn't put my hand on their shoulder and say, I had to learn to respond in a way that communicated to them my continued confidence in them. I love that. So let's dig right underneath the surface um it sounds like you recognize that we need to work more horizontally that's the team's team of teams right there's a horizontal shared information um that the consciousness that is shared there okay and then you also recognize that we need to go for it a bit more that that we have to raise the threshold for mistakes and failures, which in the military consequence or in the consequential environment of military in the theater of war is a radical position that you're taking. And so those are the two variables

that you're working from. How would you work from the inside out? Because you don't want failures and mistakes, right? Like nobody really wants them, but you're encouraging the go for it. So how would you work from the inside? How would you work on your psychology, your emotional regulation, your arousal regulation so that when you got information that was unfortunate, let's say, that you were able to stay the course for the philosophical mission that you were on, which is to enable people to go for it. Were there any best practices that you were using so that you could be calm and clear and regulate your emotions?

Yeah. I think the first is understand that we use the term that we lead by example. And people say, well, I'm going to go out and lead by example. Well, the reality is you are always leading by example. 24-7, people are watching everything you do. And so not just those moments when you brushed your hair and stood straight and tried to be as charismatic as you can, but they're watching you when you're acting like a fool as well. And so I had to learn that at the core of leadership is self-discipline. And in the modern environment where we are so distributed and doing so many things virtually, it's even got some additional nuances. Because if you are briefing me about something,

whether it's a failure or not, and I am multitasking while you do it, or my mic is off but I'm turning and talking to somebody, I'm signaling not only to you but to everybody else on there that what you're doing isn't that important to me. If I get visibly angry when you do something, again, it creates this ripple. And in a big organization where people see you, but they don't see you a lot, a single action like that is exaggerated. You know, you may not, you think, well, I just got mad for 30 seconds, so that's no big deal. But for people who don't know you or more junior in the organization, they remember that and they ratchet its importance up. So I learned that tremendous self-discipline,

particularly on camera, but also in person when you're out moving around, because a four-star general meets a private, and you may meet 250 privates a day. They meet one four-star general in their entire career. And so they will write home that night, I met General X. And they're either going to say, he's a great guy or he's not. And so every one of those just snapshot moment interactions becomes very, very important to that individual, but also important to your ability to communicate with the organization. So as a leader, what you learn first is the core of it is self-discipline. And that is deciding what you are trying to communicate to people, because part of it is self-discipline. And that is deciding what you are trying to communicate to people, because part of it is through your body language and verbiage. And part of it is through other ways, the example of your behaviors. Stan, so self-discipline, let's see if we can unpack this

a little bit. Is it the discipline to stay true to the first principles that you're operating from? Or is that how you're thinking about discipline? To stay committed to the first principles, like going for it, clear communication, creating space for honest dialogue. Those would be a handful of first principles that I'm hearing. And of course, shared consciousness that we spoke about earlier. So is that what the discipline is? Well, at the core it is. It is accepting candor and being candid, being absolutely truthful, integrity, all the things that you think are important and we all list them and we say we believe in them. It is, do you really do it? How do you treat people in a constant basis?

That's the discipline to know what we should do, but don't uniformly do it. How much of you would, and I'm going to bristle even when I ask you this question, because I'll explain my context to the bristling in just a moment, but you're human and there are consequences in your environment. And somebody says, I failed. And you're in front of the thousands of people that you just mentioned. Did you have to fake it? Did you have to fake your self-discipline? Were you boiling inside? And if that's the case, how would people trust you if they knew that you were faking it? And if that's the case, how would you manage that later? Yeah. I mean, every leader is off a certain percentage of the time and a certain percentage of every day, you don't act the way

you'd like to act. You treat somebody wrong, you do something, you lose your temper. The key is that that doesn't become the new normal. One of the most famous generals of all time had this volcanic temper, and it would just explode. But we don't associate George Washington with temper tantrums. But in reality, he was this seething personality that held it in check most of the time. And when people saw him, and I think those that gave me credit, maybe more than I deserved, would say that, yeah, I know you were mad, but you maintained your self-control in that moment. There were several things like, if I get angry, I will clinch my jaw and people who know me well will see it. Or when we do this

big video teleconference, if somebody's briefing and I took my glasses off and I would wipe my face, the chat rooms that were of everybody on would just go wild. They'd say, uh-oh, the old man's unhappy. Boom, boom, boom. Sometimes I just need to wipe my face. It's your poker tell, right? Yeah, of course. But the reality is they know that that's not being deceptive. That's controlling because it's not helpful to throw attention. People people can know when you're disappointed or angry. You don't have to scream at them to do that. The most powerful leaders I've ever seen and dealt with would just look at me and then go, Stan, I'm disappointed.

And that would crush me. If they had screamed at me, I'd kind of discount them. And so I think it's the issue is self-control and it's never perfect. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday. What you put in your body matters.

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And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to felixgray.com and use the code findingmastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X G-R-A-Y.com and use the code findingmastery20 at felixgray.com for 20% off. And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. Okay, so let's say somebody wants to cry and they're really feeling something, you know, and it's a really hard conversation that they're having and their body temperature heats up, their chest and breathing changes a little bit. They feel the tension in their neck muscles. They feel it behind their jaw. Have you ever cried by the way, Stan? I have.

Okay. And then they feel it behind their eyes and then they're just doing everything they can to hold it in, to look a certain way, to not look whatever, fill in the blank. Okay. That psychic and emotional tension is so costly that it's not, it's not the letting go and actually being in a vulnerable state where later that night people talk about being exhausted. It's not the letting go. It's the holding back to look a certain way and present a certain way that has such a cost to our energy system. So I'm wondering, how did you manage your emotional self in a VUCA environment with real consequences, sometimes having a bad day and getting information that is difficult to hear? How did you manage yourself after?

How did you take care of yourself? Yeah. Let me start first with last time I cried, I was hosting a beer party at my house and the keg went dry and that broke me up pretty bad. But your question is absolutely true. And I'm going to give it both ways because there are times when you are very emotional. Either you are hearing something you don't want to hear from people or you're in that moment and you try to control it. And I don't run off when I'm by myself and sob. It's just, it's not my release mechanism. My release mechanism usually was to go work out and I would go to a gym or I'd go out and run. The worst moments of my life when I got really crushing things, as quickly as I could, I

would go out to run. Because to me, that was a chance. I run alone and it allowed me to burn off some of that energy you can think and do it. Now, but I switch it because often, particularly when you're a leader, you'll be talking to somebody and you will be creating that feeling in them and you know you are. And you are doing it intentionally because you are just looking them in the eye and you're, you know, maybe you're firing them, maybe you are correcting them for something. And in the military environment where stoicism is prized, what I found is you don't

encourage them to break down and cry. You don't say it's okay and then hug them because they will never forgive you that moment. What I mean is you've let them, you've caused them to be vulnerable in front of you. They're superior. And if you suddenly do the hug thing, their sense of self-respect will be damaged forever. So what I found is you create that meeting in them. You know it. They know it. The best thing to do is to limit the length of that and say, OK.

I'll talk. We'll talk later. Move out. And it allows them to move out. Keep a measure of self-control and self-restraint. You know that they're crushed when they walk out, but it's almost an unwritten thing that I am not going to cause or let you put yourself in the situation in front of your boss or your boss's boss that will embarrass you later. You know, I think at first pass, I would say, okay, there's two things that are happening for me right now. Cause I want to get to your vision of empathetic leadership and empathetic culture setting. And so at first, if I didn't know that you valued empathy, I would say, Ooh, like, okay, let me let's, let's double click here.

And listen at work, whether it's military sport business it's not therapy this is not the place for psychotherapy that's not how this works the relationship between two people the invisible handshake or sometimes explicit handshake is we have a shared mission and you have a role and i have a role one is not more important than the other. We need each other and we need to also be there for each other. And so I think that what I just heard you do, the approach is actually highly empathetic, is that you're understanding and embracing the internal condition and the downstream consequence of letting go in front of a superior could be one of the worst things that happen in the structure of the military. Might be in the moment incredibly healing, wonderfully freeing, create great space for a person to know that they're okay. But you're saying because of the context of that decision and the context of, I'm sorry, the context of the environment that you both are operating in, it's not the right call. And that is, would you say that's empathy?

I do because I think I understand the wider view of how they want to have their relationship with me, how their persona, their pride over time. And so we both know that they are hurting, but we both know that if they suddenly show this tremendous vulnerability that goes well on talk shows, that it changes their view of themselves. It undermines it. Now, it doesn't mean that I don't know that if they go through something, they're going to be upset. I got that. We both know that. We don't have to say that. And so what we don't have to do is put them in a uncharacteristic situation. Because if I'm sobbing in my boss's arms after one bad situation, the next day when he looks at me and he asks me if I can

do a tough mission, et cetera, the relationship is impacted by that previous interaction. What if you flipped it? What if you flipped it and you said that there is incredible courage to be honest with emotions? And we know, as a psychologist okay we know that when you can name an emotion and you can express an emotion you actually um relieve it you you you don't have to keep it you know bottled up and there's no downstream like naming it and expressing it is actually a way to decrease the intensity of it so is, okay, that's just good science. But you're saying contextually that could never really work. It would be difficult, particularly in the part of the military that I was in, where

a person's pride and persona and the group norms were such. Similarly, let's say we're about to go out on an operation. And I would go out on operations, you know, pretty frequently with the guys. And if somebody looked at me and they go, hey, boss, you scared? Now, I can look at him and I can joke and I can smile and say, oh, yeah, terrified. And that's fine. If I look at him and I got that quivering lip and I go, yeah, that's not fine because that undermines their confidence. That undermines this shared agreement. We're all scared,

but the shared agreement is we're not going to all break down into a quivering puddle on the floor because it requires you to stand up. So you have to understand the moment and the culture. Yeah, I totally get that. And you've been in the amphitheater, both politically, both of war. And so I do not say this with disrespect, but if you were to do a self-scout and you were to look at yourself and do an analysis, do you feel like because you've operated in these stoic environments, which isn't quite exactly accurate, it's like non-emotional, non-reactive environments, maybe is the way to think about it, that you've numbed or haven't exploited the range of your emotional health? Or would you say, no, I feel like I'm really in

touch, Mike. I know how to work with my emotions really well. Yeah, it's a fair question. And the answer is, I don't know. I certainly feel emotions. I feel, you know, joy. I feel fear. I feel, you know, love, sadness, all those kinds of things. I don't demonstrate them as openly as some people do. And sometimes I do. I mean, you know, but the reality is I am more apt to control my emotions if I can. I try to control my emotions, at least the expression of them, because I don't think it's always helpful to be overly expressive, particularly when you become in leadership positions and more senior leadership positions. What you think is a small expression of your emotion, again, is exaggerated. It's the dinosaur's tail. You turn your head, but your tail turns around and it creates all kinds of

reactions. So I do think that leaders have got to be cognizant of the impact of what they do, how they act, what they say. Now, does that make me the marble man like Robert E. Lee or somebody who's, you know, so controlled that I'm not effective? Sometimes it may do that. But I wouldn't claim that. I don't think it's all the time. Okay. So let's slight pivot and stay with this discipline idea, because I love where you're going with this. When you are acting in a disciplined way, and you are very disciplined, so you're not having to act a certain way, but when you're in the action of having or demonstrating self-discipline, how do you speak to yourself? Because if I have it right, you're working with information that's difficult. Maybe it's like not what you wanted, but you're

staying the course on your first principles and you're going to be disciplined in not, which means to not be emotionally volatile. So how do you speak to yourself during those moments? Generally, I coach myself pretty well on, if you said on a daily basis, because at a certain time late in the day, I literally critique myself in my mind on all those points in the day when I wasn't the person I should have been. And I've got a wife who reminds me when I'm not the person I should have been, which is more often than I'd like. But the reality is I do. I get introspective about

that. And I beat myself up pretty hard about not being. And I'm always comparing it to the person that I have decided that I want to be. You know, the values, the first principles and whatnot, the level of self-discipline, the execution and whatnot. So I think that when I am in a situation where you've got options to be very emotional and petty or something that I don't want to be or be something different. If my mind's working right, it's constantly reminding me to say, that and says, nope, I'm going to lose my temper with this person or about this thing. And that's typically when I fail my self-discipline. It is not with what I do in my life about lying, cheating, stealing, or something. It is about my reaction to somebody who frustrates me. And when I take the high road and I bottle it up and

I walk away or I say less, I'm happy. When I don't, then typically I walk away and I go, I didn't do that very well. So let's just play with a ratio um speaking to yourself well meaning like you've got your back it's a there's a positive productive nature in the way you're coaching yourself as opposed to the critical judgmental harsh how would you ferret that out in a percentage throughout a normal day is it like an 80 20 80 on the productive, or is it more like flipped around the other way? Well, I would challenge that. I would say it's all productive if it makes me act better. And so whether I am chiding myself or whether I'm – I don't spend a lot of time patting myself on the back saying what a great guy I am.

I mean, I like myself. Don't get me wrong. But I don't walk around going, Stan, good one, well done. I spend more time going, A, you didn't do that very well. But I don't have self-loathing over that. I just have this absolute belief that I can be better than that. That's almost the refrain in my mind. I'll do something that, that doesn't, I'll go, I, I can be better than that. So you work from high standards or clarity of standards, meaning the person that you want to be that, that is clear to you. Is that correct? Yes. And then you're constantly working to, to get as close as you possibly can to that,

but it doesn't sound like you're, you're, you're like getting in it where you feel small. It's like, no, no, no, you can do better now. Come on now. Like, okay. So all this happens for all of us when we are fatigued, it's really hard to be our very best. And so I always think about positions of leadership like yours, that the old model that people were getting four hours of sleep and they're like, I'm the one, come on, you know, harden up, let's go. You don't need sleep. That's for whatever. What do you mean you need water? You don't need water. You know, like that type of old school way of thinking about internal resources. How do you, this is a two-parter, how do you think about sleep and recovery and how good are you at living aligned with best practices for recovery?

Yeah. Now I'm pretty good. During the war, I had a period of years where I slept four hours a night because that was our routine, my routine. But what works for me is as much of a disciplined routine as possible. And they seem like small things, but I work out every day. If I don't work out, I am not as nice a person as if I do. I mean, you could track it and the data would support it. If I don't work out, then I am just more difficult with myself and with others. If I don't eat the way that works for me, I eat one meal a day. But if I eat early in the day, then I'm not comfortable. I don't perform well. I eat only dinner at night. And if I eat early in the day, then I'm not comfortable. I don't perform well.

I eat only dinner at night. And if I stick to that routine, I am a better person. I'm more centered or whatever we want to call it. I sleep much more now than I used to. I go to bed as early as I can, you know, sometimes shamefully early. But because I found that, as you described, I am not at my best when I'm tired. I am shorter with people. I am less precise on things. And so what I try to do is prevent myself from getting in that location or that position. And that's why the routine is so important to me that getting a certain amount of sleep,

eating in my rhythm, working out, those all keep me within the best range for me. Yeah, so we think about that front-loading the training, like getting ahead of it so that you are resource rich as opposed to operating, you know, depleted. If we could just maybe think about how you articulate what it feels like when you're at your best, what is unique to you, uniquely your understanding of what it's like when you're at your best? How do you describe that? Yeah, I think when I'm at my best, I am

thinking long-term. And so everything I am doing, I am thinking about something, how it will play out over time, whether an organization that I'm leading and I'm giving guidance, I'm thinking about what the impact of everything I say is going to be over time. I think that I am resolute in my commitment to decisions and directions that I'm going. And I don't mean inflexible here, but I mean once I've got the way I want to go. I don't waver on that. I've made a decision. I am going to do this and we are going to go to that. And I stick to that. And I think I'm at my best. I am going to do this and we are going to go to that. And I stick to that.

And I think I'm at my best. I don't revisit. I don't keep going back and say, should I be doing this? No, if I've decided to do it, unless new information comes, I'm going to do that. And I think that I am a good partner, a good friend to people to serve with, and someone that they can count on. I am dependable. And so when I'm at my best, all of those things come together. That's really cool. So in this clarity of thinking, so when you're thinking long term, do you fundamentally operate from a, and I'll be binary here, an optimistic framework or a pessimistic framework? Oh, I think I'm an optimist from that standpoint because they once said that farmers are the

greatest optimists because they plant with the expectation they'll be able to harvest. And I think that way. I'm 69 years old and I'm still working full time and I'm still doing things for the long term because I believe that, one, I like it, but I believe that there's going to be benefit from that. And so I think that, you know, I may worry about certain things, but generally I have a very confident, optimistic view of where I'm going and the people I care about. And now one final word from our sponsors.

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are you an extroverted thinker or are you an introverted thinker? Do you write and think privately? Do you gather information from other people and talk it out and work it out real time? Like, how do you, I know that you said you run. So I'm thinking that that was a good time for you to think. But I don't want to make an assumption. Are you more an extroverted or an introverted thinker? Yeah, I am probably more of an introverted thinker, but I don't, I'm not very far on that scale because I will do a lot of thinking about something. I do like to write things down.

I like to sort of wrap myself around it. But ultimately, before I make a decision, and I think it's sometimes just to reassure myself, I will go and gather the inputs of others. Now, part of that is to get their views so I can make sure that I've got a complete data set before I decide. But the other part is, I believe if you don't bring people into it, you don't get their level of support. And so I'm a great believer in that. And so I do spend a lot of time on that. I do tend to make decisions quickly though. So maybe that's a level of patience. That's really interesting because decisiveness and inclusion of other people's ideas and their points of view and what like those can be at odds sometimes as well. And so that was one of the questions I have for you is like, how do you act with speed, but also make sure that you're bringing people along?

And I don't know if there's an easy answer there or if you have a process that would support that. And I think maybe you just hinted at it, is that I have an idea of where I want to go and then I go gather some information, points of view. I start to share my ideas. Maybe they're informing what I do, but I'm sharing my ideas with them. And then I move quickly.

Is that kind of the formula? Yeah, that's very accurate for the way I react. And then you're a great writer. So do you find that a default of writing ideas down is meaningful for you? It always helps me refine my thinking. I will think I think something and I will start to write it out and I will find when I have continued to reshape it, that my thinking gets refined in the writing process. It's almost like that process causes me to think more. And I find that very valuable. Yeah, it's a forcing function. Like what word or phrase am I inserting here to make, yeah. And so now one more level of this thinking bit here,

considering the interconnected nature of modern challenges, how do you get a big picture about how the landscape is currently operating? Yeah, on any single given issue, I try to remain or retain as much of a general understanding of the environment all the time. So try to marinate in the general information so that when a decision comes up, it's not out of context. It's not something completely new and different. If one of those comes up, I've got to take some time, educate myself so that I know something about it before I do.

Otherwise, if it's a decision made within this ecosystem I've been operating in, you only probably need a little bit of new information. And your intuition gets much, much better because you've been operating in there and suddenly something comes up and you start to say, what should I do about that? You're not going to be far off because you speak the language, you've got a cultural understanding of what's occurring. And in those situations, I'll find I often make very rapid decisions, sometimes faster than I should. But I'm a believer that most of those decisions are better made quickly because they're either correctable because they're not life or death. But also, when you dog paddle in circles agonizing over

decision, you very rarely improve it. And so I think it's sometimes better just to make one and get moving. Is it a crisis for you when you have to make a slow decision or, um, because you don't have enough information, is that a crisis state for you? Or like, maybe do you have an example where you, you had to make a quick decision. You didn't have enough information.

You couldn't pull people along. Um, and I'm going in two different directions, whether it's a slow decision or fast decision. But when you weren't able to use your strength, which is introverted thinking for the most part. Do you have an example of one of those two? Well, I mean, in war, you're always operating with much less information than you would like. And so there's this tendency to keep asking for more intelligence to get more clarity before you make the information. My personality type doesn't

agonize over that. I get as much information as is available. I make the decision and I don't agonize over it after the fact. It's pretty funny. My wife and I are very different in that way in that I will think about a decision before we make it but once I make it I don't worry about it at all even if the decision turns out to be completely wrong I don't I don't beat myself up I don't anything I said I made a decision and it either worked or didn't work my wife will make a decision and then she'll start saying oh I don't know if I made the right decision you know you made. Don't worry about it. And I think that's just a personality trait in people. I think we're all slightly different. Yeah, there is a healthy bit of research around

those two types, people that require and like a lot of information and those that are more decisive. There's a preference, if you will, between those two approaches to decision-making. It sounds like you're very clearly decisive and you move on. And it doesn't sound like you have some sort of weird pride or ego that you don't reevaluate, course correct, if you're afforded the time and luxury to make a second decision? No, very rarely have I had a decision where I agonized for tremendous amounts of time. I've had a couple of big ones in my life where I spent time making it. But it was funny, as soon as I made the decision, I knew if I'd made the right one. For some reason, it just told me. It was a time back when I was a lieutenant colonel in the Army, and I had two choices.

I could either stay in the division I was in, take a high staff job, which was the best for my career, or I could go back to serving the Rangers again. And I was agonizing over it because I was getting all this advice on both sides. And then this Ranger noncommissioned officer came to see me, and he congratulated me on my decision to go back to the Rangers. And I said, well, actually I haven't made the decision yet, Nick, I'm still thinking about it. And he looked at me, he said, sir, but what about the boys? And I mean, instantaneously I go, you're right. I made the decision. And I, the second I made it, I knew it was completely right for me.

And I never, you know, even if it turned out everything, my career not worked, et cetera, I just wouldn't second guess it because I knew it was right for me. Decisions and points of view, you know, in small rooms that are, let's say, non-consequential to a country, that's one thing to have your point of view. And, but you are at the top of the food chain when it comes to decisions and influence about how our military was going to use the might of its full force. And so I'm wondering if, if it's okay to ask you, you know, you've had over a decade where you had some controversy. I, this is, I'm sure you've had many more controversies

than this, but, but I wanted, I wanted to, you know, the, the, the one controversy where, um, I want, I want some guidance on maybe what you've learned from speaking your truth when it is at odds with leadership. And so navigating the tensions that can emerge between decision makers and chain of command when you're at odds with it. And this was going back to 2010 when you had a point of view that was different or conflicting with the president and vice president. Yeah, that is the hardest single decision-making process I've been involved in. It wasn't the hardest decision, but the process was. And just to remind anyone who may not be aware of it, the decision,

I was sent to Afghanistan to take over and I was told to do a survey and see what we needed to do and then come back with recommendations on the strategy for the way ahead. And the war was already unpopular and we were already losing to the Taliban. So it was a lot of problems. And I went over there not thinking that we needed more troops. I felt we just needed to change the way we operated. But I did this big analysis for almost two months, 60 days with the staff and came to two conclusions. One, we needed to change the way we were operating fundamentally and we needed to ask for 40,000 more troops. And I knew that asking for more troops was going to be supremely unpopular back in DC. And I was completely aware of that. But we did the analysis,

we ran computer simulations, we did all this kind of stuff and concluded that just changing the way we operated wouldn't do it. You had to have a bridging force for a period of time. So we did the analysis and then I said, all right, well, if that's the answer and I believe that we are right, that's what I'm going to do. Now, when we articulated that up, our estimation was right. It wasn't popular. And so we went through this series of video teleconferences from afar as we go through this process with the National Security Council, the president, the vice president, whatnot. And there was immense pressure to back off on the recommendation, to cut it back and whatnot. And I knew that that would be very popular.

But I was in this position because I knew that the analysis that I believed was that if we wanted to have a significant probability of success, we actually needed to do this. And so I knew that that was the answer that I believed was the right one. But here's the really hard part. You're not sure it's the right one. I was asking for additional troops, but people wanted to look at me and said, are you sure this is going to work? And I say, no, I'm sure that it has a higher probability than the alternative. I can't guarantee you it's going to work. And so you start to question yourself. You say, well, if it's not a high enough additional probability, should I just kind of go along with what I know. I chose not to. I chose

to push. And I don't regret that. If I got it right, it got you fired. Is that correct? Is that too much to say? It caused part of the tension. What actually, well, when I say I resigned, but yeah, that's a way of saying it, was a reporter embedded with us. And he wrote a critical article that said that we were dismissive of the, particularly the vice president at the time. And so this negative article came out. And so I accepted responsibility for that. I didn't think the article was fair, but I accepted responsibility, offered my resignation. The president accepted it. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding

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too important to leave to chance. Yeah, that's not fired. That is like, yeah. So I take that back to be inflammatory. But when I read about your story, I was like, damn, I love that. Whether it, you know, led to your resignation or not, I'm looking for counsel. And I think a lot of people are on guidance on when you have a position of influence, how do you maintain an effective working relationship with senior stakeholders when you are seeing it differently? And that's the counsel I'm looking for.

And I don't know if there's a one-liner that you can provide, but how would you shape that tension? Yeah, I want to throw, I think it's very true. I want to throw a reality on top of that. And that is a little bit of the imposter syndrome. We get very senior, but at some point, even when you get senior, you're the new person at that level. So I become a four- star and suddenly I find myself in the Oval Office in the White House. And people ask you direct questions about something and there is a clear pressure to go along with the consensus, to agree with something. And I don't know if you're familiar with C.S. Lewis's famous essay, The Inner Ring, and it talks about this desire we all have to be in the inner circle, to be accepted, to be in the in crowd, to be

in the club. And we are willing often to laugh at jokes that are at the expense of other people we know we shouldn't or to do things. And I think getting into the halls of power is very much that way. You're a brand new senior person. They suddenly bring you into the halls of power is very much that way. You're a brand new senior person. They suddenly bring you into the coach's office or to the president's office, and they say, this is this way. Don't you think? And of course, the easy thing is to go, oh, hell yeah, and give them a thumbs up. But you don't think. Wouldn't you agree that it's that first little half sentence that you know the setup is coming? And so it is that self-awareness and that courage to be able to go, wait a minute, that's not what I think.

This is not, if I had time to think about it, this is not the way I would answer. But it's hard. And I try to warn everybody who is, even though they've been in a job for years and years, when they get to a new rarefied level, they suddenly get in the C-suite and there are new pressures, new environment. And it is disorienting at first. And so it's a challenge. I would imagine that in the Oval Office, the president almost never hears no, because that's his home turf. Once you get in there, all the forces around you are to say something that is pleasing to the people in that room. Oh, God, that is like, ugh. What a problem for really leading.

And you don't get prepared for that. We're all taught our business as a psychiatrist or as a soldier or as whatever. And we may be a complete expert. We're really not schooled in that because it's hard to school someone in that phenomenon. So you wouldn't know this. I'm going to, if you're, if you'll accept it, I'd love to send you a book I just wrote. And it squares up with this concept that you just described. And I think it's one of the great constrictors of one's potential is this excessive

chronic fear we have of the opinions of others. And if we're not careful we are living living life um to fit in and to belong as opposed to be about the first principles and put them into action and just for fun we i called it faux po fear of people's opinions and um i i think that that conforming contorting that um that shape-shifting that takes place in positions of power with people that have power whatever that might be legitimate power or it might be perceived power that you've given them but that need to fit in and belong is one of the culprits to being authentically you and to knowing what you're capable of. And so I'd love to send it to you. It's a pretty short read.

I'd love to read it. I would add on top of that, in today's environment, things like social media and the spotlight causes people to do and say things they don't really think just because they're concerned about the reaction. A hundred percent. So what keeps you up at night? What are the things that bang around in your head and your heart that like you worry about?

Now that you're on the other side of, you know, guiding our president, what are some of the things that keep you up at night? Most of mine centers on one now, and that's dysfunction in our nation. And when I talk about dysfunction, I really talk about two things. There's the political polarization, which parallels the decades before the Civil War much more closely than I wish it did.

And then not just the polarization, but now the dysfunction of our decision-making bodies, our inability to do those things, to pass laws, to make decisions, to execute things that largely should be in the routine. ought to operate for most things and big policy issues. I completely understand the political discussions. But we are suffering from those two things and they are interrelated. And they worry me because I saw dysfunction in Iraq. I saw dysfunction in Afghanistan. And when the society isn't functioning, you can't have a good ending. There's got to be some cataclysmic pay or payback for that, you know, moment in which things are calls to account and you've got to ultimately deal with it. And I worry we're not in a good place right now. Yeah. I second that. Yeah, I can feel the tension from, you know, the street level. And, um, I mean, if I was to give our country

a grade when it comes to this, it's, it's pretty poor and the divide is rich, um, in intention and hostility and disagreement and poor listening. And yeah, I don't, I have no potential solutions other than to work with individuals to help an individual become more aware so that they can have self-discipline, so they can act in alignment with their first principles. And the self-awareness bit is where I point to. And the best practices that I know for self-awareness are meditation, journaling, and conversations with people of wisdom. Do you have any type of contemplative, meditative mindfulness practice that you've deployed for you? It probably wouldn't fall in. I do two things, though. I a lot and I like to sit, my wife and I have these two chairs,

we sit in our living room and we read a lot. And I, I, that allows me just sort of read a lot of history, nonfiction, not a lot of fiction. And I take that in and then I write and I've written four books and I'm working on another now. And I find that, that doing that is both a release and a, uh, a form of counseling for me. Yeah. You know, it's a feedback loop. There you go. Yeah. That's really for clarity. It's a forcing function. It sounds like for clarity. And the second thing I, uh, keeps me up at night is um people are tired like the the speed um of the world is legit but the internal resources to be able to manage that speed and complexity is wanting we where do we learn how to build a sense of calm how to manage our emotions how to

speak to ourselves well you know Those are all psychological skills and people are exhausted right now. They're not replenishing and they're not training themselves to deal with high stress environments, which we're operating in. Can you paint what you would imagine the future of leadership? And then we'll turn home base here and I'll thank you again for your time. But can you paint the future of leadership? Not with confidence. Because if I think of the environment, I can't see it slowing down. I can't see it getting less complex. I do think some tools like AI may help you do a lot of things more easily, but most of those won't take you away from the core tasks that the leader has to do. I worry that the environment will become so

unforgiving, both in a business sense and in a political sense and in a calling for, you know, take the leader's head off because, you know, this didn't happen, that it will cause leaders to be almost fatalistic. They will take a job and they will think, well, nobody can possibly succeed, so I will just try to do this for a little while and then, you know, I will go off into the sunset either with a severance package or whatever. That's not the kind of leadership that I think we really want. I think we want people to enter leadership jobs with an idea that they are going to stay long enough to reap what they sow,

that they will be building something for the long haul. And it's difficult to see that, many examples now now or in the near future at least so I'm afraid that it's just gonna get it'd be like hockey lines you know they go out and they play two or three minutes because they're going hard and then the leader you'll throw a leader in and we'll keep them for a little while and boom get me another leader and I don't think that that's optimal. Yeah, I think we're moving clearly from the extraction model, from the next person up model to the unlocking. And the untapped resource that people have within them has been left unexamined

for the most part. We apply stress and pressure and we say next person up, figure it out, or we're moving on. It feels to me like the next, you know, I thought where maybe you would point would be the empathetic gardener of approach of leadership that you might go to. And I think that that tone of empathetic gardening feels right to me. There's an organic nature, there's a cultivation, there's an understanding of the conditions for thriving, both external and internal. And, um, yeah, I, I love the idea that you, you point to about the gardening and I know that's an old idea for you.

You wrote it back in 2015. Um, to me, it feels even more relevant now. I think it is. I think it's more correct, but I struggle to get people to adopt it. And so there are some who have, but it takes a bit of self-confidence. Can you explain for folks that aren't familiar with the Gardner metaphor that you've outlined, can you explain that for folks? I think traditionally, we've trained people to be chess masters.

And that is, you want the CEO or the leader of an organization to micromanage the chess pieces. And if they are competent enough, they will do it well enough to succeed against an enemy or a challenge. I don't think that works anymore because I think things are too fast, too complex, and therefore no single person can do that, even though we like to maintain the illusion that you can. And instead, what I think the leader's got to do is step back and take what I call the gardening approach. And I got this from watching my mother, who was an avid gardener. And really what the gardener does is the gardener creates an ecosystem or an environment in which plants do which plants do. And they can do something that we can't do. And so the gardener really, it's less egocentric. The gardener is less focused on making each decision,

but the gardener is completely engaged because the gardener is creating that environment in which that can happen. We talked at the beginning of the conversation about shared consciousness and empowered execution. The gardener creates that environment, but then the actual execution is done by people inside the organization that now have been given the opportunity to leverage their potential. It takes some time to create and it takes discipline to maintain that.

But the reality is it is much more adaptable. In my mind, it's much more effective even in the very near term. And although people sometimes worry, if I don't have my hand on every chess piece that we're going to lose, I would argue if you have your hand on every chess piece, you will lose. I love it. General McChrystal, Stan, thank you for sharing your insights and your hard-earned understanding of what it takes to lead from the front, to lead horizontally, to be able to be part of teams that are agile and dynamic, and painting the idea of where we might be able to become better when it comes to organizational structure.

Just a little bit more of a gardener, less of a chess master, a bit more empathy. And thank you for bringing me and us inside of how you work from the inside out. It takes courage to do and great clarity. And you pass through both of those gates eloquently. So I just want to say thank you for sharing both in writing form and in this conversation. Well, it was a real pleasure, Mike. Thank you so much.

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