9 Core Characteristics That Mark an Individual for Having High Potential – Jocko Willink

we have identified nine core characteristics that mark an individual as having high potential drive the unrelenting need for achievement and constant self-improvement resiliency the ability to persevere in the face of challenge and bounce back from setbacks adaptability the ability to adjust according to the situation learn new things innovate and try new methods humility self-confidence in one’s ability while understanding that there’s always room for improvement and that others experiences and knowledge are valuable integrity and in head and adherence to not only what is legal but also what is right effective intelligence the ability to apply one’s knowledge to real world scenarios team ability the ability to function as part of a team placing the success of the whole above the needs of the self curiosity a desire to explore the unknown and question the status quo in pursuit of better more effective solutions and the last one is emotional strength a positive attitude high empathy and control over one’s own emotions especially in chaotic and stressful situations these traits are heavily emphasized in special operations and explain why many veterans go on to accomplish incredible things in the business world after their military service for instance many companies including johnson and johnson with alex gorsky fedex with fred smith bridgewater david mccormick and 711 joe depinto to name a few are run by veterans these nine attributes are foundational to success no matter the industry so when you say based on our research and interviews is this stuff that doc dr cotton kind of put forward or where did you guys come up with these so it’s a combination of what dr cotton uh sort of his discovery and then we also went and we interviewed people that ran the assessment selection for these different communities marsoc the navy seals the green berets we worked with a uh amazing individual his name is brian decker he was a lieutenant colonel he was in charge of the special forces assessment and selection process and actually sort of revolutionized it really around the concept of the whole man concept and so each of these communities have a set of core attributes they’re looking for and it goes back really quickly you did make a point about people you know you hire somebody who interviews extremely well and they end up not working out and that’s what we call personality versus character what you did was you hired based off personality and likability and what is personality that’s really your external uh sort of uh show to the world where characters the the inner uh attributes that drive your behaviors yeah and we’ve all fallen for that it’s like you’re you’re uh you’re customer facing self versus your internal facing self exactly in in you know one of the things we talk about in the book is like the last thing you want to hire for and people get this you know this culture fit are they a culture fit and it sort of becomes this just ad hoc term they throw out but they don’t really understand and when people say culture fit a lot of times what they mean is do i like this person and what we talk about in the book is that some of the the most high performing seals that i served with and you serve with i didn’t like we were professionals and worked well together but when the job was done he went and hung out with his inner circle and i went along with mine but likability for professionals is not a requirement now if you guys just conflict and it creates a toxic culture that’s a different thing but the least important thing to me was likability if the individual performs and he can actually put his self needs aside or her self needs aside for the common good of the team that’s somebody that can be part of the culture as long as their values align with our culture ethical yeah i mean i think here’s the deal on that from my perspective if there’s someone that works hard and is there to support the team i like them you know like i i i don’t know anyone that has here’s here’s the interesting thing i know people that have good personalities and bad character they exist but i don’t know of anyone and so i might not like someone that has a good personality but you know and you you can think when i think of these people i just think of famous people right there’s all these famous people that they have these personalities and then they then all of a sudden the story breaks that they’re total dirtbags right and they’re whatever they’ve got the most heinous things going on in their personal lives so you’ve got that where someone has a good personality their their forward-facing personality is real positive but then behind closed doors they’re scumbags and but if you flip that over i can’t think of anybody that has a good character like they’re a good character but they’re a bad but they have a bad personality i don’t i don’t it’s hard for me to think about now is there someone that maybe has a has a a good character and they’re they’re maybe too direct or maybe they’re maybe they don’t talk a lot or you know whatever but but normally if they’ve got a if their egos in check if they’re there to support the team i mean i can’t yeah it’s pretty rare yeah how about a better way of putting it is there were people that were high performers that were just sort of socially awkward so maybe they were introverted or just like they were too direct right where it burned sometimes bridges you understood their personality but other people didn’t it back to the uh the attributes so brian decker is now the director of player development for the indianapolis colts and so took what he learned in special forces assessment selection he’s now applying it he’s been in the nfl he’s worked for for two teams for about six years when they revolutionized and and you know it pains me to say this but i can put my ego aside the special forces army special forces community was much further ahead in terms of creating a structured and professionalized assessment of how they select special forces uh soldiers into the community seals it was just sort of this oral history passed down and uh when i went over there as a guest instructor at their phase two which is their small unit training that’s when i was really exposed to their whole process and this thing called the whole man concept and the fact that they were looking for specific attributes so when they redesign their their assessment and selection they created tasks much like an interview process where they’re trying to elicit certain behaviors whether good or bad and that’s what they’re looking for and so that translates to companies it doesn’t matter you know what your interview process is or if you have written tests what you’re trying to elicit with every every question should have meaning behind it in an interview process and ultimately that question has to drive at behaviors that’s and people call this you know in the civilian world behavioral interviews they’re one of the best techniques if you do it well yeah the uh the german army as they were trying to get their their officers to step up and implement decentralized command and be able to make moves one of the things that i’ve read about they would do is they would give them here’s the rules that you have to follow for this training operation and the only way that they could actually successfully complete the mission would be to break the rules and so it was a test to see if they would break the rules in order to accomplish the mission and then there was and look even if you if you didn’t break the rules it didn’t necessarily mean that you were a bad person it just now we know more about you right now i know more about you and you know we got into some of this on uh when we’re up at gettysburg for for ef battlefield you know the fact that lee didn’t know his his two subordinates as well as he had before jackson died so he’s talking to ewell and he’s telling you all that he wants to do something but he doesn’t know him well he doesn’t know his personality well enough so when he tells you hey take that thing if you can’t take that hill if you can and yule goes over and says well i can’t he could have it just would have been a gut check and if he would have told jackson to take that hill jackson would have taken that hill so these are this idea behind setting up questions or situations or problems that you have to solve that reveal some part of your character is a very cool thing you know when you mention earlier about when people come to you and ask what’s the best interview question the question back to them is how are you screening for character it’s one of the things we go into this book is that most of those questions are about experience do you have this objective experience they’re not screening for character and so you know with the research that we did with dr josh cotton brought to us and when we figured these out you know our point is is that you know once you meet that simple experiential gate when you’ve got the basics you need to start screening for character and you go company by company by company and and i and i hate in some ways to say this because i see it all the time which is executives are almost the worst of this picking other executives and they don’t screen for character they’re looking for did you work at the competition how did you move the revenue how did you improve customer success how did you move a product along they don’t go down into character and i s i’ve sat in the interview after interview after interview and it and it’s all objective traits or you know basic subjective traits that don’t go deep into character and that’s what’s missing people will default to objective things because they’re measurable yeah they’re easy it’s it’s the easy button the subjective is what’s hard he talked about defining success you know one of the mistakes we see with companies too is they just have one interview process across the uh the organization you actually have to create talent profiles for each of the roles and functions and levels of and that’s why it takes a lot of time so what’s going to make a great engineer in a company is vastly different from what makes a great sales person so a lot of the times why companies don’t define success and they’re not good at the interview process is they haven’t take the time to create talent profiles for the different levels in the different functions within the community