The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 303: General Stanley McChrystal - The New Definition Of Leadership

Episode Date: March 24, 2019

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Episode #303 - General Stanley McChrystal Full Show Notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com A retired four-star general, Stan is the former commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Afghanistan and the former commander of the nation's premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).  In June 2009, the President of the United States and the Secretary General of NATO appointed him to be the Commander of US Forces Afghanistan and NATO ISAF. His command included more than 150,000 troops from 45 allied countries.  Notes:  There is a formulaic myth: Leadership is not what we think it is... "I thought it was just behaviors, but that's too simplistic." "Leadership is intensely contextual."  A great leader must adapt themselves to the situation. "There's not a style that's perfect for every situation."  Vince Lombardi coached differently based on the team he was coaching.  Coach K (from Duke) is known to be incredibly adaptable and that's why he's succeeded year after year. Important leadership qualities: Great listener -- Pay attention.  Marinate in what's happening. Have humility -- Think of the people you serve Why General McChrystal went to West Point: Dad, brothers, grandpa were all soldiers.  It's in the family. He wanted to be an Army Officer Stan struggled his senior year in high school.  He lived by himself, his mom had died. His Freshman year at West Point, he didn't take the school part seriously and got in trouble. He was almost kicked out of West Point. However, he got extremely high peer review ratings: His new tactical officer told him, "You're going to be a great officer" -- This was said based on how his peers had so much respect for him as a person.  That mentor reached him and made a significant impact on him.  "We all need someone like that." The power of a mentor/leader who believes in you: It's huge to have someone who mentally maps it out for you and believes in you.  Someone that takes time to get in your mind... To care about you.  It must be genuine, and when it is, it's powerful. Team of Teams:  It's hard to scale a lot of small team. It must be organically connected. The front line leader -- It's impactful to have a "front line obsession."  Be with your team.  Show them you care through your actions.  In order to fully understand the situation, you need to get out and see it for yourself. We often don't have the answers.  "You can't fake it.  The role of the leader has changed.  It used to be command and control.  A leader is more like a gardener now.  You must orchestrate the pieces of a team, and ensure they are well connected."  You want a well connected, curious organization. "If when you get on the ground the order we gave you is wrong, execute the order we should have given you." The leader must educate the team to make wise decisions from the front line if the leader is somewhere else.  The leader must trust the team to make the right decisions in that moment. "The leader still owns the outcome.  The reality is the team will do better if properly trained."  Create an organization of trust and speed.

You've really nailed it there, Ryan, because sometimes you're successful just because you're lucky. And sometimes you're a failure just because you're unlucky. And so your relative wealth or promotions or any kinds of things aren't always directly related to either how hard you worked or how good you work. And yet your character is something you can control. You can decide whether you're honest. You can decide whether you're loyal. and you can decide how you think about duty. You can decide about all the things that really matter,

and they can't be taken away from you. People like James Stockwell and John McCain taught us that even in horrific situations like the Annoe Hilton, if you can hold on to your character, you can hold on to that essence, which is you, and nobody can take it from you. This episode is once again brought you by Gusto. Gusto offers modern, easy payroll, benefits, and HR to small businesses across the country.

They were even named Best Online Payroll by PCMag. And as a listener of The Learning Leader Show, you'll get three months free when you run your first payroll. Sign up and give it a try at gusto.com slash leader. That's G-U-S-T-O.com slash leader. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. So I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. It is Mindful Monday.

Text learners to 44222 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Text learners to 44222. Now on to tonight's featured leader, and it's a big one for me. It's General Stanley McChrystal, a four-star general, former commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. and the former leader of J-Soc, Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military's most sensitive forces, including and credited Stan is, with the 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein. He's also a best-selling author of multiple books,

including Team of Teams and Most Recently, Leaders Myth vs Reality. He's a former Green Beret, known for his candor, innovative leadership, and going the distance, called, quote, one of America's greatest warriors by Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. A few of the topics that we got into. The importance of

peer ratings and why all businesses should do this. Then how to build a culture of trust and how that leads to speed. Then what happened the moment after he handed

his resignation letter to President Obama? And For any of us that deal with adversity, this was a phenomenal story. And then when is the right time to not follow the orders of the leader? We want deep here. This one is amazing. Ladies and gentlemen, my honor, General Stanley McChrystal. All right, General McChrystal, I've been looking forward to this one for many years.

And so I'm honored to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Well, first Ryan, please call me Stan. Okay. been looking forward to this as well because what you do is really would interest me. So, thanks for having me. Wow. Well, it means a lot to hear you say that. So you've, you've, I want to start in an area where my longtime listeners know that I love understanding the commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence. And the reason that this is really interesting for you, maybe different

than anybody else I've ever spoken to is because in your most recent work, leaders, myth versus reality, you, you write a lot about this and kind of the formulaic myth. that there may not be commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence. There's a lot more to it. And so maybe to get us started, could you share what you mean by that for those who have not read the book yet? Absolutely. We came out after we studied 13 leaders and had been thinking about leadership our

whole lives and trying to understand it. We came out with a conclusion that leadership is not what we think it is, and it never has been. And we really dialed in on three major. myths but the first one is probably the most obvious and we call out the formulaic myth and what that means is most of us were taught to be a leader there are certain behaviors or traits or natural gifts or any number of things and if you've got this checklist and if you have the self-discipline to follow it you're going to

be an effective leader and that that sort of makes sense I mean the military had a series of traits and values and we study biographies of great leaders, how they act. But you know, we found that's way too simple because in reality, what we find is leadership is intensely contextual. And so you have a leader who like Robert E. Lee, who is almost stereotypically perfect in those behaviors and things that we would associate with, an effective leader. And he loses to Sam Grant, who is not. And this plays out over and over again. And what we really find is there are traits and behaviors that are very helpful. But because all of it depends so much on the context of the situation and the followers,

in reality, we have the best leaders have to adapt themselves, often pretty significantly, in fact, dramatically to the situation at hand. So the, Stan, the person who's currently a mid-level manager who has been studying the, the, the traits and the qualities and the characteristics. And they've said, I need to develop these characteristics to propel myself in my career, to become a better leader for those who I'm serving. When they hear that, what advice would you give to them to say, here's what I would say. I know this is kind of big.

And so take as much time as you need, but here's what I would advise you to do or a manner in which to think to be as an effective as a leader as possible. Yeah, that is almost the most important question, Ryan. You know, if there was a series of things that you could just do and be guaranteed to be effective, it might be hard, but it would be very straightforward. And you just know, I can do this and therefore I'll be effective. But in reality, when someone asks me, what do I have to do to be effective as a leader in a certain situation. My response is a frustrating. Well, it depends.

And then they go, holy smoke, give me the answer to the question. And the answer is there's not an answer to the question that is not completely linked to the situation. If you do research on things like CEOs and CEOs who are very successful in a company, and so headhunters come and find them and they pick them up and they buy them away and they parachute them in another company, they have a lower probability of being successful. in their new company than hiring somebody inside or promoting someone inside that company. And you say, well, what happened? Did old Stan lose it? You know, he just doesn't have the same

fire he used to have? The answer is no, the context changed. You played a lot of football. If you think of great coaches and great moments, there's not a style that's perfect for every moment. There are times and teams that need to be kicked in the butt. They need to have a bare Bryant and West Texas crushing them. And then there are other times where you have to leave very different. And one of the things that struck me about reading biographies of Vince Lombardi is, although there were some commonalities to what he did, in fact, he coached at the high school college where he coached at West Point and then pros very differently. I mean, Paul Horning is not the kind of player. You know, he drinks a case of beer the night before a game. You lead him

differently than you lead a West Point cadet. And so the reality is, I think part of the genius of leadership, or I shouldn't, you don't even have to say genius, but the most important quality, I use the term empathy where, and I don't mean sympathy, but I mean you go into a situation and before you pull out your pad and you say, this is the solution here, start executing, you listen, you pay attention, you marinate in what is actually happening. And then you, you you lead in accordance with what's needed there. And often that that takes iterative trial and error. But it means that none of us are just walking around great generic leaders.

No sense. It makes sense, Stan. It reminds me of I talked to JJ Redick basketball player for the Sixers. And I said, why is Coach Kay, I mean, he sustained excellence. And his players sometimes stay for a year. And then he has all new players and he does it again. and again and again. And he said, I think his greatest attribute is his ability to adapt to the new guys that he has in.

And sometimes, if you look at them from year over year, their offense and defense and what they do, it's not even recognizable, the system in which they done, meaning he builds a system based on that personnel. He gets to know his guys. His players love them. And so I think he has great EQ as well. but then he understands how to adapt year after year, and that's the difference between him and the others who struggle and have moments where they're great,

and then they'll have down years. And they have this roller coaster style, whereas he's just kind of consistently improving, regardless of players. I think that's right. He understands each player is individually different. He's got to connect with him. He's got to understand him.

He's got to put them together in combinations that work. And because each is different, the combinations come out with a different set of strengths, and then he plays to that. And I think it's a certain humility on the part of Coach K that, you know, he doesn't automatically do what he did before. He does what he thinks is needed now. Yeah, I want to get into your story now. So you decide to go to West Point. And I love for you to share some of your process to make that.

decision. I would, gathering the fact, you know, I've done a ton of research and read your books and watched all the videos, I have an idea of this from a family perspective. But could you share some of what was going on in your life and why you decided to go to West Point out of high school? Yeah. And it's probably not as complex as it should have been. I was once asked by a junior high school girl after I left the service, you know, how many schools did I think about before I went to West Point and I said, just one. I just applied to one. And she looked at me and she goes, that doesn't seem very smart. Does it seem to you? I said, whoa. Tusha. And the reality was you sort of nailed it. My father was a soldier and my father's father was a soldier. My four brothers

were my sister married a West Point graduate. And so I was steeped in the idea that my father was the person I admired most. So I wanted to be like him. But then I wanted to be an army officer. And it's funny, some people, I went in 1972, there was a certain amount of the Corps that went there to be a cadet. That was sort of their goal to go to West Point. And they didn't intend to stay for a career and some of them clearly weren't really very interested in military life. I went entirely to be an infantry officer. My goal in life was to be an infantry officer in a unit. And West Point was just sort of a thing I, you know, if you went, that was a good place to go through. So I've, I've read that during your time at West Point, initially, you didn't do well.

It didn't go well. What happened at the beginning part of your career at West Point? Oh, this is going to be that kind of podcast, huh? I'm just curious. I think part of it is you have, well, no, I think part of it is we want to relate. and we've all had these moments. And so, yeah, I want to hear about the good and the bad. Yeah.

I mean, I went to West Point at a 17-year-old kid coming out of high school, and I'd had a fairly free high school period, meaning my senior year of high school, I lived alone. My mother had died about a year before, and there was a lot of family things, but I lived alone, and my brother had gone off to Vietnam and left me his brand-new, GB convertible and asked me would I keep it for him for my senior year. So, I mean, you put that together.

And so I had a, I live large my senior year of high school. And then I went to West Point, 17 still. And I didn't take the place very seriously because I wanted to be an infantryman and I'd say, if four years, I can hold my breath. And West Point was 170 years old when I got there. And they took themselves really seriously. And so first off, in terms of conduct, I got in trouble. In Beesparricks, I got what they call a slug.

And almost nobody ever gets a big punishment in beast barracks. And I got for being disrespectful to an upperclassman, me and another guy. And when I say disrespectful, disrespectful, what happened is he had caught us in the hallway, not doing what he thought we should be doing. And he yelled at us. And then he walked away. We turned each other and sort of done this. you know, kind of laughed at each other. And he had circled around and caught us doing that.

And so we called that disapprobation. And I didn't know what disapprobation meant at the time, but it was disrespect. So I got a slug. So at the very beginning of my plea or freshman year, I come in, I'm already sort of a criminal. And so I get slug three more times in my first about 14 months or 16 months in the academy. I almost get thrown out. I mean, I come this close on demerits because I just didn't take it seriously. I just, I wanted to be a free spirit and I didn't want me to be a free spirit. And then combined with that, although I'd gone to good high school, I had really terrible study habits and I wasn't good in math and I wasn't interested in math and the hard sciences. So my first two years, I also did terribly academically. So here I am a lousy academic

performance, a terrible conduct performance. And I make it through the first two years. And I never really thought about quitting because I still wanted to be an army officer, but I thought they might quit me. And so, you know, there's redemption. Well, sure. The one part that I think goes against this, that, and you know, obviously this is your story, and I've read about it, is though, you were able to garner a lot of respect from your peers. I've read that your peer reviews were incredibly positive, meaning despite the other things going on that may have almost got you thrown out. And the reason I bring this up is because it does relate to me to football.

Like there's nothing more, to me, there was no higher honor than being elected captain by my teammates. When we had an honest vote, an open vote with people's names on the top of the sheet, a paper and they write your name in there and you see that you got the most votes on the team. I mean, it's better than all the all states and scholarships. It's like my peers respect my work. They respect what I do. They look to me to lead. And I love that feeling.

And so I have to imagine as you kind of counter this kind of poor grades, getting in trouble a bit, yet the people that you hang out with the most have very high levels of respect. Could you talk about that? Yeah, and really there are probably three components at West Point to have a great performance. One is academics. Another is conduct, you know, discipline, and the third is peer ratings. And they do a very serious look at peer ratings. And so you're right.

On the first two I did very poorly. On the third, I did very well. And that was one of the things that made me not really think about quitting because people would say, you know, Stan, you're really struggling as a cadet, but you're. you're going to be a good army officer. And at the beginning of my junior year, we call it Cal year there, we got a new tactical officer. He came in and he'd been a special forces officer in Vietnam. And he sat down with me for my initial counseling. And he looked at me and he says, you're going to be a great cadet. You're going to be a great army officer. And I remember looking

and saying, have you got the wrong file? Do you know who this is? And then he proceeded to basically explain, almost like you just did, Ryan. He said, said, all of this stuff is sort of foolishness. If you can shape up to graduate and not get thrown out, the other part's going to matter more once you're an officer. And, you know, he was right. He was right long term, but he was even more right in the moment because what he did was he really reached into me, great EQ, and he said, A, there is no excuse for you not being much better here than you've been so far. So shape up, understand what's important and focus.

And it was one of those motivational moments. I'm still friends with it. Really? I was going to say, how now that as you've kind of shifted from the mentee to the mentor, what is that experience done to you? Because it obviously had a profound impact. You're still thinking about it many years later. So for the people who are managers and leaders here listening,

to realize the power, right? the power that you have of how you communicate with people that you're talking to a 20-ish-year-old guy who at the time, he thought you were going to be great and I assume he meant it and he believed it. I don't know if you could have ever predicted what you would have gone on to do. But how do you draw from that to now as you lead and mentor other people and understand the power of what you have to say to them? Yeah, I think it's exactly the term you said. It's the power. If you think about it, when a coach you had or a teacher or, in my case, a commander,

any time through my career, sort of stopped and spent a little while with me and either corrected something I was doing wrong or better, you know, maybe corrected and also pointed out strengths and said, listen, you have huge potential. You are doing great things here. Let me map this out mentally for you. You know, if someone just takes the time to get in somebody when you're young, somebody's mind and show one, I care about you. I'm paying attention. I think what you do and what you are going to be is important.

It's amazing the effect it has. And of course, it has to be genuine because it'll ring hollow over time. But it doesn't take that much time and it's the most fun part of the job. And particularly if somebody, even if they're not going to be great, but they're going to be okay, you can get down with them and you can really give them direction and motivate them. Let's fast forward a little bit because I first really dug into your work when I saw the book, Team of Teams. And there's a lot to your story and we'll get to some of it because we don't have enough time to get to all of it. Or maybe we'll have to have a couple rounds of this conversation. But some of the things that I picked up from from team of teams when it comes to really the the changing dynamics of war as well as how that then relates to, for lack of a better phrase, the boardroom or the business world.

And so there are a few points that maybe all surface and then lets you kind of run because you've studied this and written about it. But first of all, can you share what when you say team of teams, what? does that mean? Yeah, particularly in the military, but also in other places, we're pretty good at forming small teams. We know how to take a small group of people together. They can finish each other's sentence. They get tight bonds. They can be pretty proficient at what they do. The problem is that is very hard to scale. As soon as you try to scale it, you really can't have one big team because those dynamics don't stretch that far. Then you say, well, I'm going to have a bunch of small teams that'll be great. But if those small teams aren't organically connected effectively, then what you've

got is a bunch of small teams and you don't have a unified effort that produces any kind of real synergy. And we see companies, we see the military, we see all of these things struggle trying to go from the very small team, five to ten or to 20 people, up to connect to those. And so it is the requirement. How do you do that? How do you do that? to bring that together in today's environment? And so you're a retired, for those who don't know, a retired four-star general led J-Socque, that's Joint Special Operations Command, time in Afghanistan. And when I talked to Chris Fussell, a Navy SEAL who was your aide to camp, essentially your

chief of staff, he told this great story about how you were known for being the leader who had, I guess another phrase used by Chris Zook, another guest, an obsession with the front line, meaning that you wanted to actually get a sense of what was happening. And so I'm not a military guy. I put you guys in the highest regard. But from what I gathered, it's not normal for someone of your stature or your level in the military

to go to the places where you regularly went to the front lines. Can you share some of your thought process behind why you put yourself in that situation so frequently. Sure. And I wouldn't claim to be historically atypical because in war as recently as 100 years ago, generals and all had to be on the line because they had to see what was happening. What I found was there was this pull to be back at headquarters so that you could manage things at a high level, sort of corporate headquarters.

The problem is war was changing so fast, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the nature of it, the technology we were using and the nature of how our enemy was fighting, that if I'm in the headquarters, I fundamentally can't understand what's happening there out forward. So what I had to do was really twofold. You go out and you spend time close to the troops, one, because you've got to show them you're willing to accept. risk, you've got to show them that you care. I mean, there's standard leadership that we've all done. You walk the line in a factory. But the real reason I had to be out there, or the more important reason was, I didn't understand what we were doing it unless I got out there. And they were figuring it out as we went along. We were pumping new technology to them. We were doing all kinds of things. And I had to go out with them and learn from them. I couldn't come down and be,

you know, the person teaching everybody, because word changed too much. They were teaching me, and what I'm doing is pulling it together. How would you then, because now I know you work with leaders in the business world, when you talk about that aspect and that frontline obsession, how do you relate that to the person listening now who is that maybe someone who's leading leaders, a VP level or higher who has leaders who report to him or her and saying, Wait, so what are you saying I should do, General of Crystal? How can I apply this to my life and my business?

Yeah, I think we all, if you go almost back to the formulaic idea, if you've got these attributes, you're going to be a great leader. And therefore, you should have the answer to all the questions. And we almost think that we should. And so we get put in a leadership position at some level, and if people come to us for guidance, we ought to have it. If they come with a question, we ought to answer it and whatnot. But the reality is you often can't.

Now there's a temptation to fake it. There's a temptation to sort of make it up or bluff your way along and hope that they don't figure it out. But the reality is everybody's going through that. So I think the role of the leader has changed a bit. The role of the leader used to be someone who directed and commanded and controlled. But that started with several assumptions. One that you understood what you were doing essentially better than that. essentially better than everyone else.

And two, that information could come up to you, you could make decisions, provide guidance, and send that down quickly enough to be effective. And what we find is things are changing too fast and they're two different in places. You can't do that if you wanted to, even if you're a real smart person. So the analogy we use now is we think that the leader is more like a gardener. The role has changed. The role used to be command and control at the top of this pyramid hierarchy. Now what you do is you orchestrate the interaction of the pieces of your team.

You don't actually have to come up with the right answers to things. If you orchestrate your teams being well connected, if you create a curiosity both on your part but also on the organization's part to constantly be figuring it out. And then you're willing to delegate enough authority and leadership confidence in them, then they make decisions lower. And although it runs a little counter to what we thought our role was supposed to be, it's dramatically more effective is what I thought.

In fact, I think it's essential now. It makes me think of a quote that is pretty widely attributed, often posted online from you. quote, if when you get on the ground, the order we gave you is wrong, execute the order we should have given you. That quote, I could see potentially having bad things happen, right? Well, General McChrystal told us to do this. Well, he's not here and he's wrong. I'm not doing it. Or I am a manager at a business and my boss who lives in wherever, not here.

and he or she told me to do this, well, they're wrong. I'm not doing it. So I see there's a lot of risks there. So I'd love for you to share more of how to actually apply this successfully, both maybe on the battlefield and in the business world. Sure, because you really have to unpack that concept. And you grabbed a good one. The first one is, if I say that you're supposed to do the order we should have given you,

It sounds like a cop out. It sounds like I gave you an order, but you're responsible if my order's wrong and you've got to come up with the right order. And the answer is, heartily, that's true. I don't want people to slavishly do what I said because often what I said from hundreds of miles away isn't fully informed and therefore it's wrong. Now, it requires me to do two things. First, it requires me to educate and inform you in the big context. text of the situation, to understand the larger picture so you can fit what you are seeing in your particular task and area into that.

The second is it requires me not to pretend that I've given up responsibility. If I give you an order, but then I give you, you know, the instruction that you just quoted, I still own the outcome. I'm still responsible. If you use your best judgment, it's wrong. Now, then you go, wow, that's really frightening because my people are young or inexperienced. And that's true. But the reality is they will actually do better than you will from afar, poorly informed.

And they will feel like they've got co-ownership with you. If they do that, if they execute the order we should have given, they're not going to sit there and go well. You know, Stan gave a lousy order so we failed. Too bad. If they make a judgment call and it doesn't go well, they're much more. bought in. So what you have is a different level of engagement on the part of people. It's really a partnership. It's a partnership saying that I'm going to give you all the contextual understanding. I'm going to tell you what I think you ought to do. But because you've got the big picture,

keep an eye on what we're trying to do. And if what I said isn't right, do what it takes to accomplish what we said, the overall objective. I found in J-Soc in Iraq, and when I commanded that, it was essential you couldn't lead any other way. Is that is that normal now or no? I think again studied a lot of military that was not a part of it. I think of we give you an order and you execute the order, right? Unless it's just something absolutely insane like whatever, kill somebody that you shouldn't. You know, like you're with with but other than that it's like just I said to do it.

So do it. Is that how how unique or different is that even currently? to today because you know these guys, you still talk to them. How does that play? Well, I'll talk first in the military. And the answer is, there is a concept in the American military and some foreign military is called Mission Command. That means I give you a mission and then you figure out what it takes to do it as opposed

to be telling you how to do it. And so this nests pretty well with the idea of Mission Command. The problem is we don't always execute it. We sort of talk the theory of mission command and then we tell people how to, you know, do each little thing because a rules-based, you know, leadership model becomes safe. I see in both the military and I see in corporate cases where organizations with good intentions think, well, we really know what's best up here. So we are going to prescribe what we want people to do in a fair amount of detail, proscribe what they shouldn't do. and then they will execute well. There's a great story from April of 2017

when United Airlines had a very bad outcome when they overbooked a flight and they had to remove some passengers from flight. They ended up pulling this doctor off by his arms. I mean, they dragged him out. And there were, of course, cell phones taking videos. It was a very bad outcome. And the CEO came out last community knows

came out with a statement afterward, and says, our employees followed our procedures. And I thought, wow, that's not a very helpful statement. But then I studied it. And what he said was right. Actually, the rules-based procedures in place had never anticipated the nuances of that situation ever. And they told United Airlines employees what to do.

And they followed that sort of checklist. And the fact that it went really badly, could have been prevented by first telling people, we never want something stupid to happen. You have authority. Use common sense and step in. But we over and over, you see, we don't do that in all kinds of organizations. And partly it's because we lack trust in our subordinates or we're unwilling to display trust. We don't want to accept the risk of giving people freedom and then having a mistake.

And then I think insecure bosses sometimes have to be in charge. That makes me think of this notion of trust and the importance of trust and the speed of trust as one of the Coveys has talked about and written a great book about that I found that trust is character and competence as they reference in that book. And I've worked in trusting organizations and non-trusting organizations. and that's what I found to be the biggest difference is the ones where there's a lot of trust, where the leaders lead with trust, even if occasionally get burned. Lead with trust, things happen really fast. You can innovate, you can grow, you can make decisions, you can take care of your customers, you take care of fellow employees versus the ones where there's not much trust.

Everyone sits back. They all wait. They have to get 14 approvals. and then sometimes they get 13 and the 14th doesn't come and they just wasted a month. And so I'm guessing given all of your work in organizations, this thought of leading with trust has to be something that comes up a lot. And I found that the one, you just said it before, the leaders who have a lot of security in oneself, reflective, thoughtful people seem to be more trustworthy than those who are not.

Can you share maybe some of your experience? or that, whether it's battlefield or business world, from a trust perspective and the importance of it. Yeah, the first thing, and I learned this after I got out and dealt with businesses, trust decreases transaction costs. If you think about it, if you trusted, if you were a bank, for example, and you trusted that people weren't criminals, you wouldn't have to guard the bank. People come in. You wouldn't have to check IDs.

I mean, all the things that take time and just add costs. to things, transaction costs, just push it way up. That's true in every organization. In the Pentagon, for example, it's full of really good people trying to get a good outcome, but you described it. You got 14 levels of approval, your boss has got to approve it, and they want to get it just right. And so a simple action can sometimes be just frighteningly painful.

And the problem is there's no evil person in this. They're just all trying to make sure that they do due diligence. they do due diligence. The problem is you do due diligence long enough, the opportunity passes, or the risk is already, you know, come and bitten you. So you've got to have this balance between how much risk you accept and then how do you mitigate some of that. And some of that is in the trust. You develop trust bonds between people, and usually that's through interaction before and it can be, you can sort of extrapolate trust. If I trust you, I can tell somebody else I know well to trust you. Many times they will at least start with that. So you've got to

create that. But the other thing trust does is it starts to create this bond. If you call me at nine o'clock tonight and say, stand, I need to borrow some money. And I just say, got it. How much you need? Where do I send it? There's a different. bond between us after that. Now, you know, there's there's some risk in all of that, but it starts to build a sine you that goes not just between people, but between organizations. And so it becomes sort of magic. And so when Stephen Covey wrote the speed of trust, we used it in J-Soc because we kept talking about, we can only be fast if we don't have to do all the ntenoid things that normally slow us down. And we found that, you know, there's some bumps.

There are times when it causes problems, but the vast majority, the overwhelming amount, it just helps you. Yeah, I mean, I've worked for a boss who I wanted to make a hiring decision. I vividly remember, and I, and I'd actually verbally offered the candidate because my HR told me I could and we were ready to go. And he called and said, you can't offer that person. I said, it's too late. You know, I already did. You've got to trust my decision. And he said, you have not earned my trust yet.

He happened to be new. I was not. And I'll never forget it. And he ended up being the worst boss I've ever had. And I've had other bosses who just have, they lead with trust full support. And that makes me want to so badly perform at high levels for them because I value that so much. And that's a great marker for me to then lead with trust. Every once in a while I've been burned, of course, it happens to all of us, right?

You lead with it. And I found, though, that that's the best method moving forward for speech. for productivity. I mean, for everything as if you lead with that manner. But it does take being secure in oneself. I think the less secure leaders want to have this kind of power over you to say, like, no, you haven't bowed down to me yet, so you haven't earned my trust. And I think that's a big deal.

I want to transition a bit, Stan, because there's a, there's a, obviously, your story to most is pretty well known. And one of the parts of it that is that I think is, I think is, I, I guess a shame is the time when your time as a leader in the military ended, especially the way in which it did and the fact that you essentially had a reporter who was embedded with your team from Rolling Stone, and he writes an article that ends up costing or at least ending your career probably earlier than you'd wanted it to.

Can you share a little bit about what happened there? And maybe the moment you went into President Obama's office and had that conversation. I'm just, I'm curious to hear about that directly from you. Sure. We did, we had media interactions all the time so that we could build support for the war in Afghanistan, which wasn't very popular in the U.S. or Europe or anywhere. And so we felt like we had to do it. And we did a bunch of different media interview things and whatnot. And we had some embedded reporters. But when you think of embed, don't think of someone with us for weeks or something. the gentleman who did the Rolling Stone article was with us for a couple of days and then gone for a month and, you know, that sort of thing.

So episodic, he wrote a story that was supposed to be a puff piece about the command group. That's what we sort of expected. But he wrote an article that I thought was inaccurate in terms of the tone of it. It painted the group as sort of out of controller or locker roomish and not very respectful Vice President Biden and whatnot. And this was at a time when there was a fair amount of or a fair lack of trust between the military writ large and the Obama administration, which was just a little more than a year old. And so what you had was sort of two different cultures, neither side bad.

White House team wasn't a bad one, the military wasn't bad. But over a period of months, there had been this sort of building up of at least skepticism on the others because we had asked for more forces for Afghanistan, and that had created a fair amount of tension. And so things were not hostile, but there was attention there. And so when he wrote this article, it came out in June of 2010 and you know I was woken up at like two in the morning by my military assistant a colonel and he said you know I need to talk to you I said why he says well this article came out and I said well what's the problem that and it's not going to be a big deal he says it's really a problem so I got I went downstairs and I read the article and the title

was the runaway general well you know you sort of start with a title and you go from there and And I didn't think the article was a fair depiction, but you know, there wasn't much chance to do anything about it. I knew that it was already becoming a big news story back in the United States. I knew that people were getting excited about it. So I made some calls back to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the SACDF and talked. And then later that day, that was directed to fly back to the United States to meet with the president, with the SACDF and then the president. And the whole 17-hour flight back, you know, I knew that this story was gaining momentum because the media is starting to portray it as a civilian military divide.

And whether it was or not, it was getting that tone. And so I had prepared by resignation, not because I thought that we were doing anything wrong, but because the president was now faced with an ugly news story that came from my command, and I'm responsible. Whether I did something wrong or not, it doesn't matter. I'm responsible. And so I flew back, met with a SECF, and then was it directed to go over and meet with the president,

went in and met with the president who asked me, okay, what happened? And I frankly told him, I don't know. I don't know what in the story is accurate. I don't think that I know it's not a fair depiction of my team, but I haven't had time to do it. But, Mr. President, I told him, you know, I'm responsible. So here's my resignation. If you'd like to accept my resignation,

I'm completely good with that. If you want me to go back and keep serving, I'm completely good with that because right now what matters is the fight in Afghanistan that you had me responsible for. President Obama was incredibly professional, incredibly gracious. We talked just a little while and then they said, well, I've decided to accept a resignation. I said, great. Wow. And you go through that and walked out. And at that moment, you realized that at that point, I'd been in uniform as an officer for a little more than 34 years. I'd been four years before that at West Point.

I entered at 17. I was now 55, soon to be 56. And my entire world had changed because my identity, my whole life had been that of soldier. And now I wasn't. I've been gone a year, but I left the White House and drove back to where my wife was living in military quarters at Fort McNair in southeast D.C. And I entered the house and she is standing in the entryway, obviously wondering what would come of this big meeting. She's seeing the TV and whatnot. And she, I said, honey, it's over.

you know, career's over. And she had been an Army brat. She had been born in an Army hospital. She had married me right out of college. And so our lives had been intertwined with each other and with the Army for our whole lives. And now in an instant, her life had changed completely too. And the thing that I remember most vividly is she looked at me. She didn't get upset.

She didn't cry. She didn't scold me. She didn't do any of that stuff. She said, good. We've always been happy and will always be happy. And it was this extraordinary moment because what she was signaling to me is, one, I believe in you, but two, we're going to live our life going forward, not going backwards. And so from that day on, what I tell people when they ask, well, what's the lesson learned? And everyone's people say, is the lesson learned not to deal with reporters? I said, no.

You know, the vast majority of reporters are great, and every once in a while you're going to get a story that you don't think is fair. It just happens. The lesson is you're going to fail in life. You're going to fumble the football. You're going to lose the game. Your marriage is going to fall apart. You're going to go bankrupt. You're going to have some combination of failures in life.

And unless you are atypical, they're going to hurt, and they're going to hurt a lot. They're going to damage you. They're going to really assault sort of your. confidence in yourself as this did for me. But we made the decision. We didn't talk about it. We didn't sit down and say how we're going to be. She just modeled behavior. And I made the decision that I was going to live my life going forward in a way that would contradict negative things that people had read in that article. And they'd say, so if they met Stan McChrystal, they'd say, well, that doesn't seem like the guy I read me about the article. Or if they didn't even read

the article, they just saw, you know, tagline on the TV disgrace general, they would say, that doesn't seem like that. And then maybe more important, the people who had sort of bet their lives with me, they dedicated a lot of their career, they'd risked their lives on the battlefield, they'd done all these things. I wanted them to not feel like that they had made a mistake. I wanted them to say the guy that I thought I believed in is that it is that. It is that. that guy. This is not, this is incorrect. And I thought that was very important for me to keep faith with them. And I've tried to do that since. And I've been paid back in spades because just without exception, the people that believed in me continued to. They supported me more than I

ever even realized I deserve to be supported in every way. And so it's not, you know, it's an old saying that, you know, it's not how far you fall, it's how high you bounce. But it's so true. It's the idea that you can't dodge failure, but you can sure dodge being a failure. You write a lot about Plutarch. And Plutarch's question that he often asked was, what was his character? And that's the, I have a lot of notes, as you know here. But that's what I thought of as you're telling that story of, especially the way that you're able to respond.

And it also tells the listeners, like the most important decision you make your life is to have an awesome spouse, by the way. How important is that? Because she could have been the opposite. And I bet your life would be dramatically different now if she would have handled that differently. Right. You needed support at that time. You're this warrior, this general. But you still, you probably needed somebody at that time and nobody better than your spouse.

But it reminds me of like character. I mean, character is revealed when you get power and when great things happen. And it's also revealed when really bad things happen. And so, yeah, I'm just curious, like from a character perspective, you must think a lot about that. Yeah, you know, you've really nailed it there, Ryan, because sometimes you're successful just because you're lucky. and sometimes you're a failure just because you're unlucky. And so your relative wealth or promotions or any kinds of things aren't always directly related to either how hard you worked or how good you work.

And yet your character is something you can control. You can decide whether you're honest. You can decide whether you're loyal. You can decide how you think about duty. You can decide about all the things that really, matter and they can't be taken away from you. People like James Stockwell and John McCain taught us that even in horrific situations like the Annoe Hilton, if you can hold on to your character, you can hold on to that essence, which is you and nobody can take it from it. But if you allow it to be

less than you know it should be, I don't know how you look in the mirror. I don't know how you look at your, I've got two granddaughters now. I don't know how I'd look at my granddaughters. They could look at me and say, you know, Granddaddy, you failed at that and I'd go, yep, you're right. But if they looked at me and they'd say, Granddaddy, you lied. Granddaddy, you, you know, that would rip my guts out. And so I think if we think about character in a broad sense, it's the most important thing we can have and hold on to. I read that you had Diane Sawyer come speak to your class at Yale. You now teach at Yale, course is on leadership.

And one of the quotes she said during that talk, and if I mess this up, obviously correct me. But one of the quotes I heard she say, and this makes me think a little bit of character and maybe humility as well, is quote, people will forgive leaders for not being as good as they should be, but people won't forgive them for not being as good as they claim to be. How did that impact you when she said that to your class? Just hugely. I mean, I had never heard it worded so perfectly. It really resonated with young people trying to learn leadership.

And we're in an era right now where there's a lot of terms of branding or persona or all this kind of thing. And so what you're trying to do or what some people are trying to do is create this image of themselves. And sometimes they want to believe it, but they certainly want other people to believe it. and they go to great links to do that. But if it's not real, if it's not, you know, genuine, then we create this cynicism. As I say, people, they're fine if you go out and you do pretty well, but you don't win every game or you don't win every war, et cetera, because we kind of all know we're that too. But we really resented if somebody is a charlatan. But what's funny and what came out in the book, Leaders, is we all know that and feel that.

And yet we have this thirst, this hunger to find these perfect leaders. You know, there's this reality that we all, if you ask people, what do they want? They say, I want a humble leader, et cetera. But we elect and we follow narcissists. We often listen to people who we just sort of sense don't have the values. we want. This is across every span of endeavor because they might resonate with us, even though we may know that we're being a bit self-deceptive in the period. We'll follow someone who's a populist or will follow someone who's a zealot like Abu Shabbas, our kawi or whatever, taking us where we

don't really want to go because there's something about it that's seductive and powerful. And so when we talk about leadership, it's not all about leaders. It's about us as follows. too. We have responsibility. We have agency for for where things go and how they come out. You're right. One logical extension of this myth is for followers to practice reverse accountability or the process of holding leaders accountable. And I think of this as let's go to the corporate world. A leader making sure that the culture they're creating and forming is that which your people can speak truth to power and not face bad repercussions for that. When you wrote about that, I thought, that is that is it, man.

Like, that's so critical is where you can, you can have a process and a culture of reverse accountability for it. I'm just curious, like, if you could expand on that, whether it's military business world, either way, as far as the importance of that. It's utterly critical, but it's really, really hard. I had spent like eight years in the military, and then I went to the Ranger Regiment, and one of the battalions in the Ranger Regiment, I was a senior captain. And I had a fair amount of experience, but this unit was unlike any I'd been in before. It was very interesting.

There was a very strict chain of command in terms of rank and whatnot, but the standards of the organization were even more powerful than the rank structure. And what I mean is I got there as a new captain and I think I've been there just a couple of days. And a specialist, an E4, a corporal equivalent, who is four or five ranks below me, you know, came up to me and corrected me. I think I had my hands in my pockets or something like that. And he walked up to me, said, sir, we don't do that here. I never would have seen that in another kind of unit. one because people would have just been too intimidated to do it. But on the other hand, what we had there was a culture that said the standards apply to everyone.

And everyone is responsible for making sure that everyone else follows the standards. And so this young specialist was absolutely right. And I remember I was embarrassed when he did it. But I also said, guess what? I will never do that again. because I'm going to live to the standards that we all have here. And I think that truth to power, being, creating a place where not only to people feel comfortable doing it, but they feel like they have to do it.

Yeah. Responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. That's, if you can work to create a culture like that, I just find that be impactful. Well, Stan, I'm so appreciative of your time investment. I know you have so much going on. So thank you so much.

And I would love to do this again. And also obviously follow up and meet you in person next time. I would be honored to fly to whatever location you're at and do this again and maybe even tour Gettysburg as we talked about here. That would be just a massive thrill, man. We'll do both of those. Thank you. That's really neat. Well, where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online?

Yeah. I mean, there's stuff online. I don't spend a lot of time correcting my Wikipedia page or anything. I think the best thing to do is take a look at just the concepts of leadership. Not so much about Stan McChrystal. If you start with team of teams or leaders,

we profile 13 really interesting leaders, delve into one or two of them. Learn about Martin Luther King, Jr. In some detail. You know, I find that I know a little about a lot of leaders. And yet when I really jump into one like Margaret, That Thatcher or Martin Luther King or even Maximilian Robespierre, I get more nuanced. I suddenly start to make them real people and then it becomes instructive.

It's great. And some of the stuff I learned about Churchill from your book and the fact that he won the Nobel Prize because he's a great orator. He's a great writer. He's a great speaker and just the power of communication. There's so much there. I think that's the fascinating thing with studying people like Plutarch, like you and your team. It was really good stuff.

Well, General Stanley McChrystal, so honored to have you here on a Learning Leader show, and I absolutely would love to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man. Perfect, Ryan. Thanks. I'll read out. Thank you so much. All right. Wow, this one was one of those talks that was almost surreal as it was happening,

just to get to look into his. his general Stanley McChrystal's eyes as he's telling these stories and I found him to be such a kind and caring, thoughtful, curious, really smart person. I just loved everything about it. I think he's a prime example of what it means to be an excellent leader, both when things are going well and when things are not, especially how he handled the adversity aspects of his career and also the value of having an incredibly supportive spouse to be there for you when things don't go well as Stan talked about. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did. If so,

I would love it if you would spread the message to a friend or to tell them to download and subscribe to this podcast. Perhaps those who have never listened to one before, this could be a great place to start. And I really am so appreciative of you continuing to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. It means the world to me. Thank you so much. Talk with you next week. Can't wait. This episode is once again brought you by Gusto. Gusto offers modern, easy payroll, benefits, and HR to small businesses across the country. They were even named Best Online Payroll by PCMag. And as a listener of The Learning Leader Show, you'll get three months free when you run your first payroll.

sign up and give it a try at gusto.com slash leader. That's g-us-t-o.com slash leader. Thank you. Thank you so much. Take care. That was awesome. I'll let you and your team know when it goes out. I really appreciate you being here and doing this for me.

It was so cool, so cool. I really enjoyed it. You are so well prepared and thoughtful on the issue. It's, you know, really good. Thank you. That means a lot. I appreciate it. And like I said, I really, I mean, I look forward to,

to following up and getting together. Sounds great. Thank you, right. Uh-huh. Bye.