this is jocko podcast number 244 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening and also joining me tonight is mike cirelli and george randall and if you haven’t listened to when mike came on the podcast for the first time go listen to that it was number 134 mike was in task unit bruiser in the battle of ramadi and after that he did another nine combat deployments and he is part of our leadership consultancy echelon front where he also heads up our talent acquisition firm which is called ef overwatch mike welcome back and also george randall is an army vet came up through the ranks from enlisted to officer which i guess we all have that in common and then left the army for the corporate world where he eventually became a talent acquisition executive that sounds impressive always keeping a focus on recruiting veterans and coaching them through the transition to civilian life now there’s all kinds of things we could talk about um but today we’re going to focus on well it’s been one of the focuses that we’ve had for several years at echelon front and it’s a focus that you guys have taken and absolutely run with and that is talent it is finding recruiting acquiring and retaining the best people obviously all those things are a subset of leadership but it’s a subset that both of you have been focused on and it’s a subset that gets left out a lot and people ignore it and mike you you you started df overwatch and you guys got so possessed by this that you guys have just written a book and the book is called the talent war and you’ve done a great job of covering you know this topic in the book and i want to jump into it i’m going to do something right now that might be considered lame i don’t know i’m not 100 sure but i’m going to start with a quote from the book but the quote that i’m gonna start with from the book is a quote from me because i wrote the forward so maybe that’s lame but here it is leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield and the most important thing in business and in life it is leadership that sets the example it is leadership that makes decisions it is leadership that unifies a team around a common goal and it is leadership that takes care of the team and gets the mission done but one of the most important roles of the leader is often overlooked the responsibility of building the team in the first place the leader is responsible for training equipping and directing a team but before any of that is possible the leader must recruit screen and acquire the right people for the team and that’s a little bit from the forward and then it jumps into this book that you guys wrote uh before we jump into it at what point did you start thinking that that we need to write about this that we need to do something about this were you thinking about this as as you stood up ef overwatch as you guys started banging your heads together and moving forward with this mike at what point did you start looking at at hey we need to start telling people about talent and how they need to handle it as leaders you know i love how you just said it it’s a subset of leadership it absolutely is and you just said it’s one of the most overlooked parts is before you even step out of on a venture you got to formulate the team and that’s hard and really uh you know george and i nerd out on this where other people are talking about you know jiu-jitsu we’re talking about time acquisition um and if anyone calls me a nerd i’ll gladly provide my address you can come have a conversation with me no i’m joking um so the amount of companies we run into that reach out to us and say hey we need help and you know we’re very genuine we we want to see our clients succeed that’s that’s our primary goal we also want to see our candidates uh you know prosper in those positions positions that we place them in but um they are at a loss for what the correct steps are and as we looked at it sort of out of frustration of wanting to help them and them not always following our guidance we during our conversations we talked about a lot about the special operations community and how it’s taken them decades to create a world class talent acquisition process do they call it something different it’s not hiring we call it assessment and uh and selection so one day i you know usually how i carry out my ideas i was probably watching tv and something came in my head i picked up the phone called george and said hey we should write a book on this and he said okay and then we started researching it you know we didn’t think uh all the way through it you know most my ideas are half-baked and you know we we found somebody to assist us through the process because neither of us had written a book um i knew uh two guys that wrote a book i didn’t reach out to him which was probably the biggest mistake and we’re learning a lot of that um the hard way uh but this journey has been awesome and it’s actually solidified and changed some of the views we have on talent going through this process and all the interviews so george how did you two link up what was funny i was actually listening to podcast 134 yeah and so i’m listening to this and then he you all mentioned ef overwatch in austin i’m like you got to be kidding me so i reached out to mike on linkedin and i said hey you know what we need some world-class leaders where i work you know and he wrote back within minutes and the next thing you know we’re at breakfast at kirby lane in austin and you know it was like wow i found my counterpart i got somebody who thinks about talent like i do and it rapidly took off from there um you know ultimately leading to the wedding which at some point we might talk about i didn’t marry george let’s just there was no wedding i’ll let him continue he asked i was already spoken for so um but yeah and and and we just really started to think okay how do we pair up my 20 years in town acquisition in his 20 years in special operations and and there was just so much synergy there in an instant um and we were fortunate to see it and take off with it yeah you know from when when mike originally started talking to me and and leif about you know doing something with talent acquisition for people it was such a no-brainer because all these companies we work with we got to work with the company we spend two days with them and at the end you know what they say they say we would really love to have a couple people with your backgrounds or you know do you know where we can find people we were getting we heard that for years and years and years where can we get people that have this mindset this leadership skill set where do we find them and you know life and i would kind of shrug ourselves as well you can try and hire vets or whatever and then when mike got on board and you know i just said hey we can actually do this because your background with vetted and it was it was just such an obvious answer to help the clients that we have at echelon front be able to get good people and on top of that take veterans that are coming out that have been institutionalized because i don’t know of a better way to describe it because i know i was damn sure institutionalized you know i spent my entire adult life in the field teams had no idea i tell people people will be like well you know when you started teaching leadership like how did you know it was going to work in the civilian world i didn’t i didn’t the first time i sat down with the ceo and was talking to him i had no idea that almost never mind almost that that line for line the leadership that we taught to seals was the exact same leadership that was needed in a company or in a team and as soon as i realized that i said oh we’ve we’ve got something very special here because we had distilled it down and it made so much sense and had been tested as soon as it got out in the civilian sector same thing so when mike started saying hey we could actually help the military folks and help the civilian companies i mean this is just a win-win across the board right you know you gotta you’ve got both sides of the equation that absolutely benefit from doing this math and it doesn’t get any better than that um so so to actually now jump into the book a little bit uh kickstart kicks this off in chapter one you can’t see talent a navy seal instructor told dr josh cotton tell me about josh cotton before i continue so josh is our uh our counterpart help with uh write the book josh and i connected through multiple multiple uh contacts so josh’s story is interesting um you know you think we’re nerds josh is the uh the ultimate nerd and i give him a crap for that uh he loves data he’s an industrial organizational psychologist well when he was finishing his doctorate he worked with the navy out of millington and eventually uh a contract came along which was offered to him to work with the navy seals to assess how they assess and select talent into their community so he also worked with a little bit with the marsaak community the the arms army uh special operations or special forces community and he gained experience that most you know doctors i o clinical psychologist don’t receive and then he took what he found based off assessing high performance which arguably the special operations community is a bunch of high performers and how do you apply that to a business setting and it resonated extremely well so as he stepped out of that contract he stepped into the fortune 500 right now you know he’s the director of talent assessments for a major fortune 500 company throughout the the organization and so his you know he’s looking at all this data uh at performers at different levels of the organization and that’s where he came into the book you know what that reminds me of so um at some point i was talking to one of the guys that worked at buds as a civilian contractor as what’s what’s the real word for an athletic trainer is it just called an athletic trainer is that what it is is that the job especially someone that looks at your sprained ankle or whatever is that what it is echo charles trainer yeah trainer so i was talking to one of those guys and he was talking about patella femoral syndrome so patellofemoral syndrome is this thing that you can get and it’s where your your your patella uh somehow rubs against your your femur or your patellar tendon rubs against your femur and it gets sore and swollen right and he said you know in the civilian world at a football team at a baseball team at a college football team whatever he says you might see a case of patella femoral syndrome you might see three in a season he said i see seven cases of patella femoral syndrome a day at buds so what i’m saying is you take this doctor that’s used to looking at what whatever the assessment of some civilian organization we’re gonna assess some candidates and you know see what see where they’re at and see where that mentally and see where that psychologically and you have to wait for months and months to see how they actually perform when do they get put under pressure at buds it’s like oh here you go here’s a here’s 180 people that are about to get the biggest mental stress of their life in the next four weeks and you get to look at that’s that’s free that’s an amazing way to get to get experience and that’s what happened with these guys that would were athletic trainers and it was a couple different approaches that guys would have some guys would they would leave like a pro sports team and and come to buds and they would never want to leave because they were so so much help or they’d come and get all that experience and then they’d go to a team because you know after you’ve seen hundreds of cases of patella femoral syndrome and itb issues and whatever all those little injuries that they deal with all the time they show up at a baseball team they can identify things so much easier than anybody else it could and so that’s what it sounds like this this uh dr cotton is and to take it one step further following that experience he created something completely based off special operations and how we classify you know high performers it’s called the elite performance indicator the epi and he developed that personal assessment tool which is now used by businesses and and what we’re going to be using sort of is our index as just one of many assessments of our candidates for the ef overwatch candidates that come to us from the military legit yeah all right so now that we’ve got dr josh cotton we know about him and so i’ll take it from the top you can’t see talent a navy seal instructor told told dr josh cotton it’s not the biggest guy or the strongest or the fastest you have to trust the process the process will reveal who has the potential to become a seal dr cotton was working with the navy seal community to improve their assessment and selection process to that end he had been asking all the instructors what do you look for in recruits he had received a lot of insightful answers people who don’t quit team players who step up and lead resiliency people who are calm under pressure problem solvers this was the first instructor who had taken the question literally but it was a good answer because you can’t inherently see talent not in somebody’s physical appearance and especially not on their resume now we go into this uh little case study which is interesting about this is uh people ask me you know like who’s gonna make you you think that guy’s gonna make it i’d say i have no idea because you can’t tell in fact there was a guy who’s a captain and a great guy and he had never signed anyone off and said this guy’s gonna make it and and and he eventually he got this candidate through whatever relationships he had this candidate came out this guy was like a multi-linguist really diverse background seemed like he had a bunch of bunch of experience highly educated and he signed off on the guy and this the one guy he signed off on to be an officer in the seal teams and the guy quit and he said i’ll never sign off and he interviewed him the whole nine yards like i was a captain in the seal teams signed off on the guy he quit he said i’ll never sign off on anyone again now let’s be honest it doesn’t start that way when it was 25 year old jocko you’re like hey that guy as you watch all the candidate lines up you’re like he played football in a d1 school he’s gonna make it or hey that kid that did uh speech and debate he’s gonna be gone within the first two weeks dude and like you say life humbles you you slowly learn you don’t know you don’t even have to go to 25 year old your jocko you can go to 19 years old as i’m watching guys that were infinitely better qualified and you know athletically more talented than me and i’m watching him quit and i was like okay i guess there’s no telling who’s going to get through this program and uh speaking of which this is where you get to uh going back to the book mike embarrassly learned this lesson firsthand when he was a student at going through naval special warfare underwater demolition seal training buds mike was a prior enlisted recon marine and by the way i’m talking about mike mike sorely sitting right here mike was a prior enlisted recon marine one of the marine corps special operation capable forces which later became an official part of the special operations community in 2006 and scout sniper in may of 2003 he was disstar discharged as a sergeant and commissioned as a naval officer and issued immediate orders to buds the marines had taught him how to lead a team and he foolishly and arrogantly believed that his natural that this naturally led to the ability to determine which candidates would make great seals and which candidates didn’t deserve to be there his six months in buds would be a brutal lesson in humility on how wrong he was in his ideas about evaluating candidates how could he be in a position to determine who would make great special operation soldier when he was competing for the very honor the other students were striving for in this class mike made the same classic mistake that every business leader or hr manager makes when they toss a resume into the trash because the candidate doesn’t have the exact education or industry experience required like most hiring managers today he judged a book by its cover that book was ryan job ryan didn’t look like a seal he was on the heavier side for a seal at least and nobody knew how he’d make it through the initial how he’d made it through the initial physical standards to even get into buds mike looked at ryan and he made a snap judgment this guy’s not gonna make it he thought mike wasn’t the only one who thought so the rest of the class and the seal instructors all thought ryan didn’t fit the mold of a seal since everybody expected ryan to quit the instructors decided to speed the process along they threw everything they could at ryan with within ethical and legal means of course interesting note you made there of course interesting of course it was within ethical and legal means buds is already among the most intensive physical and mental training a person can endure and it was even harder for ryan the instructors made him run extra miles and do more push-ups they forced to be cold-wet and sandy longer than the rest of the students by the end of hell week approximately two months into training the class had gone from 250 students down to 35 recruit after recruit rang the bell three times signifying a dor drop on request or in layman’s term they quit only 35 guys were left and mike was one of them he felt he was truly part of an elite organization a brotherhood as he looked down the line of the physical beast standing alongside him he was astonished a few candidates to his left stood none other than ryan jobe who was smiling mike and ryan both reported to seal team three they eventually deployed to ramadi iraq where they fought in the battle of ramadi in 2006 one of the fiercest battles of the global war on terror ryan performed as an automatic weapons machine gunner during his days in ramadi after months of fierce fighting ryan was critically wounded during a major operation in south central ramadi a contested area held by al-qaeda forces he was shot in the face by a sniper while laying down machine gun fire to cover a squad of seals closing on the enemy days after ryan was wounded doctors declared he would never recover his sight insult to injury he also lost his sense of smell and taste but it didn’t slow him down after his injury ryan displayed the same drive and resiliency he demonstrated during his days at buds he refused to quit or feel sorry for himself despite all the setbacks he finished his bachelor’s in business with a 4 0 gpa he ascended the 14 411 feet of mount rainier and he even shot a and killed a trophy bull elk all this without his sight smell or taste ryan underwent countless surgeries and rehabilitation in years after ramadi in 2009 only a few weeks after he found out he and his wife his high school sweetheart would be having a baby he aspirated and died during his 22nd surgery for his injuries he became what seals call the last fatality of the battle of ramadi he was the third seal from his task unit to die fellow seal mark lee was the first and the second michael monsoor who was awarded the medal of honor for jumping on a grenade to save two seals one of which was mike czarelli it’s hard for mike to believe now that he ever doubted ryan he was always waiting for a time to apologize and he found that time while they were in normality while they were in ramadi after mike apologized ryan said it’s okay everyone’s been misreading me all my life so i don’t know if there’s a better example of why we can’t judge a book by its cover than ryan and um you know it’s he ended up rolling into charlie platoon and tasking a bruiser and and he got some he got some personal love and encouragement from his platoon mates to make sure that he was uh gonna be an awesome seal and he was um but this is a a metaphor for what for what you guys see in the in the civilian sector with people looking at resumes and judging books by its cover same thing every day every day thousands upon thousands of resumes coming in managers like yeah this guy’s been in our competitor this person’s done a b and c they have all these experience yeah gotta hire them gotta hire them right away no process i just know it gut call when i whenever i’m talking to companies and i’ll yeah a common question is what you know what what question should you ask during an interview it’s a pretty common question or what assessment or what what should we do how should we screen and you know i’m always saying hey look try and put the person in in a position or a situation that’s as similar as they’re going to be working in because that’s the best way to assess if they’re going to be able to do it or not and it’s a similar thing that they’re doing now you know for years they trying to figure out who is going to make it through seal training and now what they do is they send them to what is i think it’s chicago they send them chicago and they go through a pre-training situation where what they do is basically freaking train really really hard and a bunch of people don’t make it through that but then they find that oh yeah more people that made it through that are going to make it through actual buds well it’s like is that not true i’ve got to look at the numbers i don’t think it was a substantial increase in the number that actually made it through buds but again we’ve got to go back and look at the data but it’s the same thing with dr cotton and we see this with people who build assessments we even it’s funny you brought up trainers for the screening for jsoc there were physical trainers that believed they could give you an 80 uh you know sort of answer on whether somebody was going to make it through the training or not everyone claims oh well my my personal assessment test will give you a 80 probability of whether the person will make it through the training and it’s all wrong that that’s what what’s the perfect question we need to answer an interview we hear that all the time there is no one perfect thing there’s no one perfect uh personal assessment you know some people like the hogan other people like the disc and what you’re not gonna find in this book is it’s not prescriptive it’s not gonna be like okay step one this is what you do step two these are the questions that you need to ask these are the personal assessments that you use it’s different for every company what it is you’ve you’ve got to identify your process what’s the process that works for you that results in statistically the most quality hires and that is a as you know that is a decade-long pursuit and it’s taking special operations they’re still redo they’re still constantly evolving the process 50 decades and they’re still evolving that process so yeah you know we hear it all the time and somebody says this is the number one question i ask that determines whether somebody’s going to work at the company or not and and if that works well you know we’re not here to judge yeah that’s great you know we get people coming to us all the time saying what are those questions and i kind of cut them off like do you know what success looks like in your company yeah they’re already starting down the interview path before they’ve determined what success looks like what they’re even looking for exactly what gaps do we have what are we trying to do here you know and you know when i was coaching veterans and and you know mike and i do this webinar and i said can any of you tell me a time where you’ve left the wire and didn’t clearly know what success looked like but you watch people walk into the hiring process all the time and they’re like okay here’s a list of objective requirements i want them to come from these companies okay let’s figure out the interview questions yeah like you have it literally backwards yeah so i guess this is going back to what i was originally starting to say that i got sidetracked on so when i ask companies or people ask me hey what’s the question you ask i always i always ask the group a question i’ll say who here has ever hired someone that did the best interview it was outstanding you thought this guy was a was a rock star you bring them on board in their total disaster and 100 of the time every single person will raise their hand because everyone has done that we this guy interviewed great super kill she was terrific in the interview all charismatic they do a great job in the interview and they’re duds when they show up to work and then i ask the the opposing question which is who here has look you needed to fill a seat you took a risk on somebody you weren’t really sure it would work out they got in there and they crushed it and same thing everyone raises their hand so it’s a it’s a common problem and it’s a common problem that we all have where we we think we know better than life yeah and i got to tell you um you know i’ve been doing this 20 plus years and you know i worked for a fortune 50 company in one year my team hired the team that i led hired 23 000 people in one year so i can say from a scale perspective that i’ve probably hired more people than most on the planet and i promise you i i’ve got to trust the process there’s no part of me that goes oh yeah i got that down i know that person yeah they’re going to rock it nope nope that process if you don’t have a process and if you haven’t defined success hiring will humble you yeah you know and you’ve got to approach it and you know one of the things that mike and i went to great lengths about in this book was no process is perfect and and it’s it you know and you know one of the big things when we were talking with josh was you know how do you know when you’re doing it wrong how do you get a feedback loop and and people just do hiring as something mechanical and they don’t think about this oh we got to go do this so it’s outsourced and your hr is just okay they’re turning the cranks man they’re they’re bringing people in the door they’re funneling through resumes yeah but even with my years of experience you know you know i’m always questioning myself what am i missing what am i missing did i get this right did i evaluate all the right traits for success in this role and you know i’m still gonna miss and i’ll get humbled by it real quick every time i think i’m confident murphy’s law comes around and and humbles me quick it’s an art it’s an art there’s a science behind it but ultimately much like you can study war in the united states and train for for a decade but until you step you know into the arena of war you really don’t hone that art and so you’re going to make mistakes that if you have a process when we see the bad hires happen is when people deviate from that process and they put a time limit on it and we’re not taking we’re not telling anyone that you’re going to take six months to interview somebody to hire for the job no we understand that it has to be within a reasonable uh timeline but you know and i know we’re probably going to get to this you can have the greatest you know world’s best talent acquisition process you can have a great process but if you don’t have your leadership foundation if it’s not solid within the organization you’re gonna become a revolving door for talent you’re gonna get great people in the company and and once they recognize that there’s bad leadership they’re gonna leave so funny enough this book and you know it’s a subset it’s an important part of leadership you actually have to start with your leadership foundation before you even start to build a good hiring process and that’s where a lot of people get it wrong well we’re lacking talent let’s just get good calendar good time will come in and again if you’re working for a bad leader that that person is going to leave what do we always say you you know you select a boss not a job yeah you select a great boss yeah you say something in here too it’s the same it’s the same thing that you’re saying we’ll get to it later but good if you’re hiring good people they don’t put up with knuckleheads you know they don’t they don’t want to work for a knucklehead so if you if you go out and you hire someone that’s awesome and you’re a knucklehead or your leadership is a bunch of knuckleheads they’re not going to stay there that’s just the way it works and the other thing is you know there’s you’re not just like combat you’re not going to eliminate all risk when you make a hire i mean there’s always going to be some level of risk there but what you can do if you set up the right process is mitigate that risk as much as humanly possible and then you end up in a much better situation uh getting back to the book because damn apparently we can all get sidetracked pretty quick i guess i can nerd out on talent too huh a little bit uh you go into this section what is talent at the most basic level talent equals high potential candidates the people most likely to become high performers talent is people like ryan jobe it is the individual who never gives up who performs in high pressure situations and who will win when others say it’s impossible talent drives the team forward and talent wins and i’m skipping forward which by the way if this book when i read it seems a little bit fragmented because i’m not reading the whole thing you have to buy the book to get all the information but i’m going to skip ahead here based on our research and interviews 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 ed 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 7-eleven joe de pinto 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 amazing individual his name is uh 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 uh 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 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 uh 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 uh 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 they’re 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 dirt bags 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 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 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 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 soldiers into the community seals it was just sort of this oral history passed down and 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 redesigned 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 free f 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 yule and he’s telling yule 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 mentioned earlier about when people come to you and ask what’s the best interview question the question back to him 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 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 and the different functions within the community it’s much like a seal the attributes that make a great seal are vastly different than the attributes for special operations direct support an intel officer or someone handling the logistics and we’ve gotten smarter about that over the years as well and what a lot of people don’t understand is we’re not only screening the green berets and the navy seals we’re also screening the people that provide the support to those organizations that ultimately come under our umbrella they’re being screened for specific attributes as well think about the attributes of a good point man versus a good breacher right it’s just like two guys in the same food but like you know that preacher attitude versus a point man attitude that’s even those guys are a little bit different and they kind of get picked when you show up at the team you know some little guy that’s sneaky point man some big freaking bruiser walking around breacher so let me let me throw this out you often see that a bachelor’s degree is a requirement and a lot of companies can’t articulate that yeah why why is that even a requirement you know i’m not saying it you know it does show somebody took the uh the the initiative to go complete their bachelor’s degree or a master’s and i understand that but uh he’s got a great story about when c plus plus programming came along uh and i’ll let him tell it yeah just embarrassing for the people that that were requesting uh a coder yeah i had uh it was actually python was the language that they were coding in and uh i had a senior engineer come to me and say hey george you gotta go find me somebody with five years of python experience i’m like well we can’t do that he’s like well why not i said it’s only been around three years you mind if we knocked that requirement back down to three but it’s scary that he was so wired to getting an objective level of experience that a didn’t relate to the job and was completely arbitrary and wasn’t timed any measure of success so yeah i mean we calibrated them really quickly we got somebody that had spent most of their you know the last few years doing python you know coding but you know working with that language uh but it it was shocking that it came from an engineer yeah you got to watch out for that one um going back to the book the importance of a talent mindset and this is this is sort of a thread that goes throughout the book a talent mindset is the deep belief that human capital is the single most important competitive advantage your company can have when a company has talent mindset assessing selecting and developing the best talent is a top priority a talent mindset not only accounts for hiring talented people but also includes the continual development and investment in that talent through their tenure in the organization so beyond just bringing people on board it’s continuing to grow them and make them better so we call the high potential when you’re going through the interview process to select new seals in when they graduate buds are they high performers they’re not yet they haven’t been proven they they passed the first gate that that gate is closed they are high potentials so even if you’re looking for a frontline trooper frontline employee or a brand new ceo when you bring them into the organization if you made that decision that they’re going to be part of the team even if that he’s been a prior ceo to another company he’s a high potential within that new organization he’s not proven yet so in order to turn that person from a high potential i mean this this is what we do for a living in national on front now you have to develop them and that takes a lot of time and effort and it never stops and if you want to turn that high potential into a high performer it’s again it’s it’s you have to pour in and invest in those people and that’s why special operations was sort of the the foundational organization we focused on in this book because they do it so well at the core of what you know makes special operations so special it’s their fundamental belief that people are everything and of course when we say people you’re also talking about leadership and then you know you look it’s one of the things we drive through in the book that talent mindset is that everything changes so rapidly today technology the economy markets companies your only true competitive advantage is talent and that’s what we’re trying to convey is that it isn’t the hardware in special operations it’s the people and and that’s how it’s got to be in corporate america and it’s got to be where you treat your human capital with the same rigor and the same focus that you you treat your financial capital and time and again mike and i see that you know of course revenue cures all people are focused on revenue they’re not focused on the human capital which is driving everything uh you get into this section chapter two what’s so wrong with traditional hiring practices george felt as if he’d won the lottery for a career through a highly selective veteran veteran hiring group he’d just been offered a position at one of the world’s largest big box retailers according to the company representative they were looking for driven leaders who know knew how to mentor lead and provide vision for people sounded like the perfect fit for george plus the job included good salary stock options and growth opportunity it was george’s first civilian job after nearly a decade of active duty service and we’d set him up to be able to go anywhere and do anything george accepted the job his very first day of orientation training and onboarding was like a punch in the gut nothing was about talent or leadership the position was none of the things they had advertised or told him they didn’t want a leader they wanted someone who’d fill vacant positions as quickly as possible with people who would adhere strictly to the rules they were looking for cogs and a machine not talent accordingly their recruiting teams were evaluated based on efficiency their speed of filling vacant roles and cost per hire to say was a bad fit it was a gross understatement nevertheless george soon proved himself to be a high performer and was promoted his new role still wasn’t a good fit fit so he applied for other positions within the company he felt he would be more suitable despite exceeding all his key performance indicators and being ranked in the top five percent of his divisional employees the company refused to move him he was succeeding in a leadership role that others struggled with so the company wanted to keep him there george made it 20 months before he quit he wasn’t the only one who had to leave quickly several peers who shared his talent mindset let also left within two years george and his peers had been able to transform and improve their small assigned corners of the company but as soon as they left everything reverted back to the status quo attrition went up and all the kpis went unmet george learned a lot of valuable lessons from that big box retailer primarily and what not to do which can be as important in knowing what to do it was a firsthand look at how broken traditional talent acquisition is the mistakes this organization made are the same ones we see companies make again and again and here they are lacking a talent mindset not understanding how hr should be structured to drive impact having a butts and seats mentality participating in fear-based hiring and settling for mediocrity any one of these mistakes can spell disaster for an organization but the most destructive mistake is missing the talent mindset rough first tour out of the military huh it was it was and you know i’ve got a four-year-old my wife’s pregnant and i’m thinking okay i’ve had a great career the things that made me successful in the military they’re going to make me successful in the corporate world and i’m just fired up you know young don’t know what i don’t know and use one of those veteran firms and oh i landed a job you know what i i think is interesting about that is i bet that many people hear oh you’ve got a guy that’s been in the military for 10 years what he wants and what he expects this is someone that hasn’t been in the military what he wants what he expects is to be told what to do and then follow the protocol has been as you’re told and stay in your box and anyone that’s in the bed in the military knows that that’s not how the military operates at least that’s not how it should operate so you go into that position they think oh cool we’ve got a cog here that we that we can just count on to you know uh run the numbers whatever follow the daily program when in reality what does a military individual want to do wants to improve things wants to make things better wants to grow wants to get more efficient wants to wants to push and improve that’s what we want to do and all of a sudden you’re trapped in a situation where no don’t do that oh yeah it was i i’m sitting there and you walk in the first day and and i’m like what happened what did i miss how did i miss this you know the other thing they wanted rule followers you know this is a big box retailer we won’t we go to great lakes we do not name any of these companies but i walk in the door everybody would know this one and they’re expecting me to execute very specific rules i mean it they had more manuals for the same task than the united states army does it was it was phenomenal and that’s impressive that’s very impressive how you pull that off you want to know how to do something there’s a there’s a binder up there yeah and you know this is this is before everything’s you know on your ipads and on your computer and they wanted rule followers and immediately i knew that was wrong because to your point the one thing that i would add is you know military people coming out want to win they want to make a difference they want to make an impact and so when you’re looking at a company and you know you see this this big name and and i got to be honest another way i got humbled was those stock options looked really really good when i came out i’m like woohoo i’ve got equity i got something i would never get otherwise but they wanted rule followers and and so there was no there were no latitude you know what i work my commanders you know everybody i work with they give me my left and right limits but they also entrust me to make good solid decisions to take care of my people if i need to exceed that left and right limit and i communicate those things but i got here and it’s literally you’re in a really really small box and you you go from thinking that you’re going to be wildly successful and to be honest with you i was because i don’t care what you’re gonna throw at me i’m gonna figure it out and and i did but it was just missing so many things and veterans crave being able to make you were just making a difference in the service now you want to make a difference in the corporate world and you know i was kind of almost ashamed to come back tell my wife uh honey i think i made a mistake you know when she’s eight months pregnant that was not coming out of my mouth you know i was just like okay i got to figure this stuff out but yeah bad fit yeah and just to make sure i clarify this point to say that military people are we’re not saying that military people are not rule followers correct and look in the military you follow all kinds of roles from the way you cut your hair to the way you freaking wear your clothing like you follow rules but there’s there’s another level of this and as a leader the last thing i look as a leader i wanted people that followed rules and here’s the key point as long as the rules made sense and if the rules didn’t make sense i wanted my guys to come to me and say hey you know what jockle this thing that we’re supposed to be doing it doesn’t make any sense and here’s why i don’t want people that blindly follow rules that don’t make sense if there’s rules in place and there’s a good reason for them absolutely military guys are great military guys and men and women are great at taking a protocol and exercising that protocol and we have the discipline to and the mindset to get that done but what’s even more important than that is having the mind to look at a problem look at a situation look at a protocol and say wait a second we can make this better we can do this more efficiently that’s what that’s not only what we do but it’s what we want to do it’s what drives us because like you said we want to win yeah and you want to and you know and and mike and i try to do this with each other and you want to empower the people that work for you that you’re leading to do the very same thing to say hey you’ve got a good idea and i brought a phrase from the two of you the best idea wins you come up with an idea it makes sense you know it’s not illegal it’s not immoral it’s not unethical and it’s going to drive revenue or improve something hey let’s get after it let’s go do it i came up with an idea that i figured out in one year would do two million dollars in operating cost reduction and the answer was is it in the book like well no and neither is the two million dollars by the way and it was still no and and you know that’s kind of the environment where a military leader goes okay i’m not going to reach my potential here i’m not going to be able to do all the things that i want to do and and and you know it was challenged because you know i don’t want to quit anything but you sometimes have to make those hard decisions in your career to say yeah i could impact better somewhere else and i did this supports something that i tell people all the time that the most important compensation you can give a human being is freedom and autonomy and and and what that means is ownership ownership over your own destiny if people like that’s a classic example here you were you’re getting good money you had good stock options you’re crushing the job which means it’s not like it’s a tax on your mental power but none of that was compare and none of that none of that was had enough value to make you stay there exactly whereas if you would had autonomy and freedom and the ability to control your own fate and destiny you’d still be there right now we wouldn’t be having this conversation you’d be running the company yeah exactly and you know it’s spot on and um i came into a a company two years ago and then i can certainly name the company forcepoint uh which is a uh we’re owned by raytheon but a cyber security company and that’s what the ceo and the chro gave me at that company and what’s interesting is we we put an ethos a marker in the ground for the entire team it was teamwork ownership humility turned around the entire i mean we walked into a dumpster fire frankly is what we walked into and we were able to do great things but that value in that ownership that they gave me that i was able to give everybody on my team it’s everything and so when you come into those moments where compensation becomes an issue that value that empowerment that ownership you give people they stick and in two years we had zero percent attrition wow is that you know what’s amazing though is that that’s a surprise to people yeah and and you know i’m kind of sitting back going how can that be so so much of a surprise that giving somebody ownership and trust and value is everything most important thing yeah the best form of compensation and the reason i’ve been able to tell that to clients at echelon front is i say look i had people that in the seal teams in the military and the navy if you’re doing the best job you know three times better than anyone else in your platoon i can’t give you a raise i can’t like i can give you a good evaluation and then in two years you’ll be uh eligible for promotion and then you’ll get an extra 270 a month no one’s doing 3x the work because of that but what can you give someone freedom and if you worked for me and you were squared away you pretty much did whatever you wanted to do and and i would just do nothing but provide cover fire for you if you weren’t squared away this is a totally different ball game you’re going to put in a box and you weren’t going to be able to maneuver at all because you’re doing things wrong so the best way to retain your talent is great leadership and it goes back to buford we just did yet battlefield gettysburg you know he operated within the spirit of the commander’s intent and actually deviated from what was the plan because he saw an opportunity i think what the marine corps calls it took authority on demand and made calls that ultimately made the uh the union army uh you know victorious over the uh the confederates you know you did say something about and we deal with this with ef overwatch is for some companies it’s a mental leap to hire a military leader into a senior management role when they’re coming fresh out of the military and it’s usually because those perceptions are shaped by what the movies 100 percent yeah walter you guys i mean you follow orders that it’s a hundred percent cogs in the wheel is is shaped by movies and we literally have that conversation you know especially during covid we’ve seen that a lot of organizations did not select the right leaders coming into the organization that were not able to innovate and adapt that were not able to handle the chaos could not remain calm and were unable or ill-equipped for uh for crisis and what we have to educate them about these men and women coming out is you know one they are generalists but generalists are much more powerful than specialists in fact one of the quotes from brian decker in this is that we’ve over specialized some of the roles in the private sector it’s no longer good enough that you’re an ear doctor you now have to be a left ear doctor and you know while i understand that that is a requirement for certain roles if it’s a very technical position yes technical skills are required but in general management roles which are usually your top leadership roles in the company generalists are more equipped to lead and this is why because they brought they draw from a broader base of experiences i mean you’ve been all around around the world in the military you’ve dealt with different cultures you’ve dealt with different problem sets you have this vast array of experiences where a lot of the uh the business leaders that have never left the united states uh do not and we’re finding that that that experience has not only prepared them but it’s the factor in a lot of these military leaders stepping into the roles the ones we place are being highly successful they’re performing when they step in of course there’s a learning curve but the learning agility for the the men and women that we place is extremely high that’s one of the things we’re screening for uh at ef overwatch is that yeah intel intellectual horsepower matters it does but once that gate’s closed uh the these people are placed and it’s it’s been uh phenomenal i mean you met some of the the the clients at ef battlefield they’re like best hire ever yeah the um the trainability you know if you’ve been in the military you know how to learn you start learning stuff out of the gate and you learn how to learn very well and so that’s why when someone comes with out the skill set in the civilian sector they can learn that skill set very quickly because they’ve been learning all these different skill sets for eight years 12 years 20 years 25 years that’s what we do in the militaries learn new stuff all the time going here a section called the cost of talent when companies lack a talent mindset it’s a common refrain cost creating a robust talent acquisition a management process is simply too costly they say what most companies don’t understand is the major cost is not money but time and devotion to creating a world class talent acquisition pipeline in the process you will actually save money in the long run as your attrition lowers and you consistently make better hires the special operations community has long understood that people are everything special operations soldiers go through three main stages assessment and selection training and combat and war and then you guys break this out so in special operations it’s called assessment and selection in business it’s called talent acquisition or the hiring process in special operations it’s called training in business it’s called talent management and leadership development and then in special operations called combat and war and in business it’s called business sales marketing production whatever it is that you’re doing it’s a a pretty good little um break out there of how similar these things really are go on in another section here many companies have a fundamental misalignment between upper leadership and hr where leadership says they want talent but hr is not set up to actually hire for talent in fact hr often doesn’t even know what talent looks like in the company there is no gold standard of talent instead hiring is mechanical order taking process based on objective requirements leadership gives hr a laundry list of what they want years of experience required skill set compensation range and hr goes out and fills the order to have effective talent acquisition your business leaders and hr department must be strategic partners the talent acquisition team must be students of the business understanding the organizations underlying goals and talent needed to achieve them since day one in my career joe dipinto told us and that’s the ceo of 7-eleven i’ve always had my chro linked at the hip and will continue to as joe has discovered to function strategically your hr department must be a part of the planning process for both talent acquisition and management hr should be involved in secession planning and gap analysis to assess select and develop talent in a strategic way you know we we found this i i you know i kind of knew it intuitively and i suspected it but when we did the research chief human resource officers are often paid one-third of their c-suite counterparts that’s where it starts could you imagine for a second that your your mechanics and your medics were paid a third of what you make because they’re not front line could you imagine what that would look like in special operation in any military unit and that’s where it starts and and hr is not you know a strategic function and you know i had the benefit of coming up with this mentor um and somebody who really empowered me and her name is tracy keough and she is the chro of hewlett-packard um and she’s just absolutely amazing we put this quote in the book because to this day it’s still it’s one of the reasons that i’ve stayed in my function for so long and she went to an executive meeting one day and they’re like hey you know tracy it’s good to have hr at the table she kind of snickered look backed at him and she is a very strong leader and she says we are the table and i was like you know what that’s that’s right and and that’s the theme throughout this book is that people are everything so when you start out de-prioritizing your chief human resources officer and you make this an administrative function or an operational function you know how do you ever expect to get the best talent and talents what’s driving your product talents what’s driving your service talents in front of your customers talent is driving your revenue that’s everything and then you sit there and you look at your revenue and your revenue is declining your attrition’s high your product’s not on time and you’re going gee i wonder what’s going on um and and it it takes mike and i about all of two seconds to see that and it’s unfortunate and one of the things that we really wanted to get across is you can really leverage hr in a strategic function and it makes all the difference to every single part of your business and the more of a talent mindset you have and the more that you empower human resources to be your strategic talent partner that revenue will come that product will be on time that service will be good it’s it’s not rocket science but it in some places it’s a brand new concept let’s go back to that cost so there’s there’s an old adage you can’t outspend a good hiring process yeah because the consequences of having a poor hiring process can sink a company one of the statistics we found is that for senior level executive positions the cost of a bad senior leader can be 213 percent of that individual’s annual salary so giving an example if they’re you have a 300 000 uh dollar salary uh ceo or executive uh that could cost the company as high as 639 000 that’s let’s say that’s a direct cost so what a lot of companies can’t track from attrition is really the the indirect costs in in that’s about two-thirds of the cost of attrition you can’t put a number on the damage to a culture that a senior leaguer can cause maybe for two years that impacts sales and that’s what’s very hard for a lot of companies because they can’t see it on their bottom line directly good ceos can come hang out at echelon front and go work with some clients and you’ll get to see that all the time a toxic leader a bad leader a leader with a negative attitude everyone below them either doesn’t perform well or leaves if they’re good and you know what it is the good people as we said earlier the good people leave the bad people stay there and don’t perform well that’s what happens under a bad leader it’s a total nightmare what’s the old uh i think henry ford is uh credited with this quote they were at a board meeting and they were talking about leadership development and somebody said hey what if we develop our people and they leave and henry ford looked at all of them said what if we don’t and they stay this is why leadership development matters so as you were reading that that that section right there you saw george and i getting like agitated we get we i mean this is how passionate we are of this subject so through echelon front i spoke with a hr group there was like 500 hr leaders uh from an area uh we did it was supposed to be an in-person conference covid so uh it was online but uh i had like 100 hr leaders reach out they were just fired up because i talked about the book i’m like you guys are the key to the success of every organization don’t let your leaders tell you otherwise so you know tracy keough and patty mccord you know patty mccord was the chro for netflix built a strong organization both these wait what’s netflix yeah both these ladies should be ceos of any fortune 500 company they just have a passion for talent acquisition in talent management or leadership development and i mean you look at tracy keough harvard educated cutter teeth in sales and marketing and was asked at one point during the career hey we’ve got a problem with you know hr uh can you go fix it of course the answer was no they said good you got it and she developed a passion um your hr leader has to be a business leader they have to and hr even though i love hr sometimes has become a dumping ground for average or mediocre performers and most often those hr leaders are just compliance leaders they’re not a strategic function so if your hr reports into legal it’s a compliance function if they report into finance it’s an overhead function but as tracy keogh will tell you if they report into the ceo and have a direct line and they’re involved in the talent strategy then there’s a chance in hell there’s a strategic function that is going to help build the organization into a world-class organization and so that’s where that misalignment between senior leaders in hr is killing a lot of organizations it goes back to the talent mindset yeah that’s a big that’s a big change actually it’s not even that big of a change it’s a little change that’ll have a huge impact you start getting people to really start to grow the or grow an organization properly with the right people that’s exactly what you’re talking about you go into this section here i’m skipping ahead this section here that i liked it’s it’s entitled fear-based hiring special operations community has become world-class model for potential based hiring which is the foundation of their assessment and selection process in contrast many companies instead of hiring the candidates with the most potential hire those candidates that inspire the least amount of fear this kind of fear-based hiring usually comes down to one of three fallacies number one red flags are more important than green flags number two leaders shouldn’t be outshined by their followers and number three somebody’s better than nobody you go on in traditional corporate hiring practices the objective has seemingly shift from higher the best to hire the familiar and safe people are more afraid of a bad hire than they are excited by a good hire you go on here fear-based hiring is dogmatic about objective requirements you guys already talked about this black and white criteria make it easy to say yes or no does this person have x years of industry experience does this person have y degree these criteria don’t matter nearly as much as you might think lieutenant colonel brian decker former commander of army special forces assessment selection told us when i arrived at my command anything easily measured was heavily weighted in the selection process the problem was it didn’t have a lot of predictive value the same is true in business just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s important and just because you can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not important the only question that truly matters is does this person have the potential to be a top performer don’t disregard red flags entirely but don’t obsess over them either in combat you don’t want to get shot but at the same time if your primary concern is not getting shot then you don’t go into battle if you make your hiring decision based on avoiding your worst case scenario you’ll never achieve your best case scenario it’s far more effective to look for green flags than for red flags oh people are scared uh you know and and and i don’t want to get too far down into the minutia but if you’re a manager and you’ve got an empty seat so many people that i’ve seen over 20 years are like i’m going to lose that seat if i don’t get it filled with somebody i’m going to get somebody in there so anybody is better than somebody then they go down the objective requirements like well they don’t have this they don’t have this and so they’re checking off red flags of objective requirements to put somebody in your role and never asking the question is this the person with the character attributes that can do the job they’re not looking they’re they’re literally scared well if i hire this person and oh they don’t have five years how am i going to be looked at what if they don’t do as well as i think and they don’t they don’t think that their leadership can take somebody with the right characteristics two or three years less experience than they mark and put them in the role and and and coach them to succeed they’re they’re scared to death they want it it just turns into this machine how fast that how fast can you hire how fast can you get that butt in a seat i’ll take that a step further at the risk of being a little bit of a stereotyping people but who’s hungrier the person that you know has two years experience going into a role that needs five years experience or will you know or the person that has seven years experience going into a role with five years experience required who’s who’s hungrier who’s trying to prove themselves a little bit more i don’t know man i’m kind of leaning towards that two-year hungry individual that wants to prove themselves and and i’ve seen this time and again is you know the recruiters that i brought up the town acquisition specialist i call them talent consultants because they’re really embedded in the business they’ll go hey i’ve talked with this guy yeah they’re two or three years light on the experience you were asking for i promise you they’re hungry they’re hungry they want it they want to get after it and the manager says well they don’t have the seven years of experience and it goes back to what brian decker said you know they picked seven years almost out of the year that seven years is not predictive of success working for a competitor is not predictive of success character attributes are predictive and you need to be watching for those check another fear by fear-based hiring um problem leaders shouldn’t be outshined by their followers average or underperforming managers often fear hiring someone who will outshine them because they don’t want to hire themselves out of a job there should never be a maximum standard for talent only a minimum if you’re not hiring people better than your current employees you’ll never raise the bar for talent within your organization that’s just the classic surround yourself with people that are better than you i want to work myself out of a job i i want to have it we go in a little bit later about succession planning i need to have as many people who can take my place and corporate america doesn’t do that you know succession planning we do it in the military it’s muscle memory but i always want people who are going to push me to be a better leader they’re going to push me to get better at my game to up the game i mean when you roll with people do you roll with people that are easy to beat sometimes that’s the first moment for echo charles to shine yeah sometimes i do roll with people that are easier a lot easier yeah yeah uh you do somebody’s better than nobody and you you know you talked about that just feeling like we better get someone in the platoon and you know this happened in in charlie platoon leif had a guy a good guy but he just wasn’t really didn’t really have the just couldn’t get the job done and you know coached him we wrote about it in dichotomy leadership but one of the things that i told leif i said hey leif if you get rid of this guy you’re not getting another one and there’s there’s you know you’re gonna go on deployment you’re with missing a guy and because we’re gonna we’re gonna get rid of him and you know life was like well and he thought about it he said you know what i i think we’re better off without him and you know that to me that was a little litmus test for me because you know life might be thinking hey i’ll just replace him with some other guy and we’ll you know we’ll step it up it was a litmus test for me to see what leif really was thinking and if you really would rather not take someone then that means you you don’t feel comfortable with them at all so there’s a quote from charlie beckwith for the listeners charlie beckwith is the founder of delta force you know serve time with the sas which generated the idea for for a specialized force he had a quote that was i’d rather go down the river with seven studs than 100 shitheads and it it goes to point that yeah i’d rather select highly talented people into the organization and have less people than you know volume quantity is not better than quality it never has been and and you know the uh the quote from uh her kill her clitus uh the uh greek philosopher 500 bc about the 100 soldiers on the on the battlefield uh 80 or uh or sorry 80 are just targets um 10 don’t even deserve to be there and then there’s 10 that are warriors but that one that one will always bring us home i mean these guys all talked about the the the importance of talent and you’d rather bring talented people in individually than build a massive quick army that’s when you deviate from the process and it works out poorly for you when you bring the wrong person in you’re actually just creating more drain on your time just mayhem yeah mayhem and then it’s a cancer and then your a players are looking at you going why’d you bring a c player in and now it reflects on you as the leader that your bar wasn’t high enough that your standards weren’t high enough that you were tolerating this c player this b player and we all know how that works out and never ever well uh next section what makes special operations so special and in here you you kind of profile one individual an individual by the name of johnny kim um which uh podcast 221 you can listen to johnny kim’s story it’s it’s just unbelievable what what made you want to profile johnny in here so johnny and i and ryan were all in the same butts class and what stuck out about johnny it goes back to why i was judging ryan you got to understand my career prior to that i’d finished number one in pretty much every military school from boot camp to the school of infantry uh finished third in recon school out of 30 behind two guys that went on to be marshock debt one uh even you know graduated number one from marine ocs so when you’re on a successful track what what happens you become a little bit arrogant you think you have things figured out and i thought i had things figured out naturally because i was still a sergeant in the marine corps the class sort of gravitated towards me because i had a rough neck style of leadership and they loved it and the instructors loved it as well but johnny i just sort of always dismissed johnny because small asian kid uh korean from l a just you know he’s sort of i don’t want to say devoid of emotion he’s not he’s not a showy guy and naturally because he he didn’t have a flamboyant personality i figured out this guy’s just non-performer he’s just another one of the the students that he was going to drop or he’ll make it through and be a non-factor in the seal teams in this book i think you’re seeing that i show my ass a lot in the these assumptions that i made about you know who’s going to be a good seal and who wasn’t and you know usually i was wrong but those are the scars as you get involved in talent acquisition is like you don’t become better at this process of assessing and selecting the right people in your organization unless you screw up yeah i’d say your assessment was wrong uh on multiple levels because not only is johnny kim an awesome seal and ranks you know above among the highest of of you know respect in the seal teams but then just as a human i mean then as a harvard doctor and then as an astronaut and then just basically as an overall human being he’s right up there with very rarefied air so i talked to johnny what i i you know i wanted to get approved yeah through nasa that he was good he read it and you know i think the instructors looked at johnny and they just sort of made a snap adjust judgment that you know he’s just a quiet little guy and uh watching him because again we both reported into seal team three my jaw just continued to drop because he was better than i was was day one out of buds i mean he was just that smart where he picked up everything quickly you know 18 delta now he’s a high-speed medic quickly rushed to sniper school becomes a sniper um you know he’d either be treating casualties on the battlefield or he’d be pulling the trigger eliminating islamic extremists and the guy was amazing and um humbled to uh to uh to have served with him and based off his podcast we had a very uh close conversation about one night in sauder city uh which you know uh was a bad night for everyone but ultimately uh that was on stoner and i that we even let the guys go out when we knew we weren’t ready but uh yeah it’s the the point with johnny is a lot of people just would have looked past him quickly because you know he didn’t have a college degree from l a nothing stood out on paper but as you you on you know peel that onion back yeah i think i think a good word to describe johnny that you would pick up is just unassuming right he’s just i think he just he’s just unassuming and he that’s what he is i mean it’s it’s less now because you kind of people know his background now so i’m sure it’s that just comes across yeah he’s super hump just a super humble unassuming guy and yeah uh uh a beast now i tell people i worked with johnny kim quickly hey you know i start with uh the origins of the soft talent mindset the very core of soft is a talent mindset the idea that small group of talented individuals can be effective fighting force capable of defeating larger enemy forces and delivering strategic impacts through small scale operations three innate traits of lead spot special operations talent mindset and subsequent success one no one has prior special operations experience so raw talent must be the selection criterion the most effective selection is based on mindset and character that’s a crazy thing to think about that when you go into special operations there most of the time there’s zero experience in special operations you know that’s just that’s like a crazy thing to think about where does the seal come from he comes from high school you know this is the story you know we’re working with business leaders and they think the industry experience is so important i say hey i don’t go to a high school and say hey we’re recruiting for navy seals raise a hand if you have special operations experience darn it guys you’re not eligible hey french foreign legion the uk special forces go get some experience come back and uh and then uh let us know uh next one special operations forces are teams teams win not individuals number three special operations teams work in high stakes environments when the stakes are high mediocrity is unacceptable let’s look more closely at these traits raw talent this is this is no emphasis on experience raw talent is difficult to identify industry experience on the other hand is far easier to identify and measure this is why business world often falls in the bad habit of over relying on industry experience and as a hiring criterion special operations does not have that luxury because nobody has prior special operations experience if the soft community began selecting for industry experience the us would not have a special operations community out of necessity special operations had to develop a core competency in potential based hiring where raw talent is the primary consideration that’s self-explanatory next one team mentality special operations forces are structured as teams they are incentivized as teams and they win or lose as teams not as individuals in contrast in the business in the business world egos can often rule and the team can be less and emphasized people are rewarded for individual achievements so individuals are often concerned only about their incentives versus the overall health of the organization bad leaders who hire and manage others often accept and offer and even encourage mediocre employees because it raises their own value in comparison a team mentality greatly reduces the power of eagle ego yeah there’s nothing worse than encouraging mediocre people to be in your organization so that you can look good did you have something on that mic i do let me hit back on the uh the lack of uh industry experience two real vignettes so again we we quoted charlie beckwith if you didn’t know because we also interviewed what we didn’t interview charlie back with because he’s passed but uh we did interview throughout this book a guy named general jerry boykin um amazing individual uh was a long time uh delta force member even the commander was involved in desert one operation eagle claw so you know we went into the history charlie beckwith was a strong believer that before you could even get into special operations and this was the old sort of mentality that that existed within the military is that you have to serve as a conventional soldier either an officer enlisted before you could try out for special operations and uh he was very dogmatic about that and general boykin talked about when the army special forces community created the 18 x-ray program because of the needs of the war where they took people directly off the street that had the right attributes passed the initial uh tests intelligence physical uh standards mental standards uh that they actually made as good of special forces soldiers if not better because they didn’t have bad habits from the conventional uh forces that was one view so let’s let’s put that into a private sector uh you know context the other vignette google did a study on what made their most successful uh managers so successful they they came up with ten criterion that made them so highly successful industry experience came in at number number nine it was one of the least important things now if you look at extreme ownership pretty much all those principles of how we lead uh were much farther ahead than the importance of extreme i’m sorry the industry experience so that’s why this potential based hiring is so much more powerful than objective trivial requirements like industry experience when when they started the 18x when did they do that i want to say that was roughly around 2003 2004 that that program came to fruition i i’d have to go back and find the exact uh year yeah uh john striker meyer was talking about that and how there was like people in the special forces community that were saying oh this is garbage you’re going to get these guys that don’t know what they’re doing but like so many of those sog operators went right from boot camp to you know to ait and then on to special force and then they went right over into vietnam and freaking just got after it he he like was laughing about it because those guys were just freaking legit what what general boykin was telling the story you know you had senior leaders when he was the commander of yusuf which is he’s the commander of all army special operations and they were arguing there’s two camps of no we can’t accept people without conventional infantry experience and the other camp was hey no we can take people off the street and turn them into great special forces soldiers and of course what there was a command sergeant major of yusuf sitting back the senior enlisted advisor while both camps fought and finally he said when he piped in he said hey i was an ojt soldier in vietnam i didn’t go to the special forces qualification course they sent me right over to uh to vietnam and i learned the job while outside in the wire and they all shut up and said okay there you go that’s right last thing high stakes perhaps more than any other factor the high stakes under which soft operators under which soft operates necessitate a talent mindset war and combat are among the most unforgiving environments in the world a mistake on the battlefield can mean the difference between life and death not only for oneself but for one’s fellow soldiers a failed mission can mean the destruction of cities and the loss of civilian life excellence and execution is the standard because it has to be the stakes are that high it should be no difference in bit different in business in business the risk may not be life or death but the stakes are incredibly high don’t fool yourself business is war war by non-violent means the result of a bad hire or several bad hires is the underperformance of the business if not a nosedive to bankruptcy it is not literal death but it is death in the marketplace that death spells disaster for you and your employees whose well-being depends on the health of your organization look at today covid hit us for those people that have these attributes as leaders no factor it’s like okay hey that’s that’s part of the environment we got to operate in let’s go do it all right hey let’s you know let’s prioritize what do we got to pay attention to how do we pay attention to our people how do we pay attention to our product how do we continue to drive the revenue and take care of our people and it was it just didn’t phase those people and i’ve been around quite a few of them where it was like okay yeah we got cobit okay and what’s your point but you can start to see those companies where that talent wasn’t there where that talent mindset where that leadership wasn’t there covid hits they lose their minds what do they do oh let’s start cutting people let’s cut this let’s cut this immediately what we’re going through today speaks exactly to why it’s so critical to have a talent mindset and get people with those character attributes in the roles that make a difference and and i love what you guys have pointed out earlier the us military isn’t the most powerful force in the world it’s the us economy and that was one of the things we wanted to do with this book was to we want to continue to contribute to strengthen that you go into a um skipping ahead a little bit you go into a scenario and it just it just spells out exactly what you’re talking about you got a guy daniel you go into this daniel is looking to hire candidates for sales leadership position and he used two search firms ef overwatch which is what which is esl on front and a competitor and jeremy so this here’s the two people that got presented jeremy presented by a competitive search firm 3 9 gpa from a prestigious university high intelligence four years of industry experience with two different companies driven highly competent borderline arrogant chris presented by ef overwatch 3 2 gpa from a public university above average intelligence faced significant adversity in life came from a lower middle class family and held a full-time job while in college recently separated army infantry officer who held several different functional billets in the army has all the attributes required to be a highly successful sales leader but lacks industry experience which of these candidates would you choose since this chapter is about hiring for character and skill you might know the answer is most likely chris not jeremy but be honest at your company which one of these candidates would most likely be hired that’s a good question when you put be honest in front of it because right because it’s a fear-based hire is to go you know what we don’t know about this chris guy he seems like a good guy he’s in the army but man jeremy he’s got four years of experience you go on most companies would choose jeremy without hesitation chris’s gpa was average compares to jeremy’s but he didn’t have the indus he didn’t have the industry specific experience but he was one of those people who performed time and time again whatever you put in front of him he would find a way through it over it around it he was relentless and adaptable so you go on they they eventually chose jeremy over chris and two weeks later the guy calls up and says we made a huge mistake that’s how it turns out that quick that quick time and time again and and here’s the funny thing is um you remember trey holder who who helped us out during the uh the infancy of ef overwatch we had this call and uh it was either a week and a half to two weeks after they’d made that selection and this leader within the company who we had a personal relationship said hey this guy isn’t arrogant you know what he was like we’ve got a problem and you know we’re not going to say hey we told you so the guy the guy is trying to run a major distribution center uh he made a call we’re there to support him and our basic question was well do you want to talk to our candidate he said no he said we asked what are you going to do about it he said nothing and i just asked him i said if you have somebody that you feel is going to poison the culture why aren’t you going to do anything and it was if i let him go two weeks into the job my senior leaders are gonna look at me like what are you doing down there and so that individual was gonna let it ride i haven’t talked to him i don’t know if that individual stayed and sometimes things change within four you know a few weeks maybe he that that individual who was arrogant came around but uh what do you think the chances of that are very little it’s but how often let’s you know we talk a lot about special operations and how great an organization is how great they are at selecting high potentials but how often if we’re being honest with ourselves did we let mediocrity reign within the seal teams yeah well i mean you need you need people and what was horrible you know i didn’t mind that look you got to have people that are going to do some of the jobs that are a little bit easier in the teams i mean it’s just the reality of the situation and you know when i was going through officer candidate school i had whatever 80 people in my class in my officer candidate class i was a class president and you got to write like suggestions to the drill instructor and or whatever so i guess a group of people like four or five people because i had a bunch of prior enlisted guys in my class all great guys and and females as well there’s guys and girls in there and somebody wrote to the drill instructor and said we need to get rid of these four people they don’t belong they don’t belong as officers in the navy and so my drill instructor whose name was gunnery sergeant seals oddly enough great guy you know as you know i mean any marine corps drill instructor is just freaking outstanding so he gets up and he says hey i’ll tell you what let’s say we get rid of the bottom 10 of this class and he says now what happens tomorrow we got a new bottom 10 percent what happens after that we got a new bottom 10 percent so eventually you realize guess what there’s going to be a bell curve in any organization where i have a problem with this so so that’s my explanation like hey the steel teams look you’re gonna have some guys that are not the not long ball hitters you know you’re gonna have some guys that are not long ball hitters the problem i have and and had and still have is when you take those guys and you put them into leadership positions that’s where it’s a problem that’s where it’s a real problem in my book and we still allowed that to happen yeah it happened we still allowed that to happen because hey they’ve put in their time they’ve earned that spot that’s not a good criteria first off i’m going to say you guys had a suggestion box in navy officer candidate school yeah it wasn’t really a suggestion box i don’t i don’t that’s why i couldn’t really name what it was but it was some way of communicating with the drill instructor i don’t i forget what it was because i didn’t do it but because i’m just gonna say it marine corps officer candidate school that was called the trash can and the drill instructors did not care what suggestions you have i don’t know i don’t know where i don’t know where this idea came from i’m thinking it must have been some kind of suggestion box or maybe they raised their hands and asked him i don’t no but it was it was the reason i remember it it was somehow clandestine right they weren’t they didn’t say in the middle of the class like because we used to basically get briefed all the time standing in the hallways the barracks you know you just all staying out front of your rooms you’re all in big lines so no one had the courage to say hey officer candidate smith jones and and brown need to be let go no one had the courage to do that so they somehow through some mechanism and i get your humor through some mechanism they it got to the to the drill instructor and yeah i don’t know what that mechanism was but well the the navy um officer candidate school was pretty good to go i thought i had a good time we so we actually one of the candidates that came to uf overwatch founder pilot actually was going through the training because we hold webinars every friday both in leadership and then career search and uh struck a chord with this guy he actually moved to austin he’s like hey just just so you know i went to uh officer candidate school with uh with chaka with willing yeah he’s like that guy solid leader um so you bring up a point that again we nerd out on this yeah all talent follows a bell curve or a normal distribution curve and you know that that that is a fundamental truth however the performance within that talent distribution is more like a i’m sorry the the the performance is more along the lines of a power distribution or some people call it the pareto principle it’s just eighty percent of the results driven within your organization come from twenty percent of the workforce that’s that’s it’s just the realities uh as you say but ultimately what makes better organizations and as we did the research is that competing companies within the industry all have that bell curve it’s you want the average performance of your entire workforce the statistical mean to be higher than your competitors yeah and that’s what makes special operations so great is that not everyone’s a a player they’re not it’s a small element the long tail um but the overall performance of the entire force is much higher yeah you want to slide that thing to the right yeah that’s that’s the goal you can for sure uh so we’re talking all about all this uh you know experience and and how that’s not the most important thing but then you guys go on to say this which is also important we’re not advocating that you disregard experience entirely you’re not going to hire a kid straight out of high school for a c-suite position experience and past performance matters for certain positions but you do need to be thoughtful about how you use experience in the selection process we see companies make three common mistakes when it comes to looking at experience one they require experience that doesn’t matter to job performance two they require very specific experience when general experience would be just as good and three they prioritize industry experience over character so you guys aren’t saying to ignore experience you’re saying hey pay attention to it yeah exactly it’s and ultimately it’s not what counts and you know one of the other fallacies is you know if i have somebody with experience that was working at this competitor and i bring them in well if they were successful there they’ll be successful here that that’s just i boggles my mind and i see it all the time but yeah these are the three the three mistakes and and you know we talk about this in the book about gates once you set your requirements for this role and they meet those that gate then closes everything after that is this part of what determines success as far as the nine attributes and most people and you’ll and on the ground level you’ll watch a person come in you’ve got these objective requirements and you’ll have five people in the hiring process all these five different members of the team and they will all ask different versions of the same questions about their experience nobody’s digging in nobody’s digging in it it i you know it’s patience is a virtue in my function i assure you and but they’re listing out experience and hiring managers will dump all of this stuff in thinking if i get all of this this experience in one person my company will do better they’re looking at the wrong things it’s the character it’s those attributes that make the difference when when a covid comes up when when uh when another company comes out with a product when you know we’re behind or we’re short team members it’s those character attributes that drive that team forward when things get tough when you’re under stress that’s when character reveals itself and in the business world that’s when it counts the most so we over rotate on experience and you know you know mike and i try to go to great lengths in this book look we understand you’re a business leader you’ve got 50 000 things going on if you’re a ceo you’ve got a million things going on in your head but this will help you be better this is the competitive advantage that you need and it’s prioritizing talent and these things that make the difference and yet these three common mistakes they happen time and time and time again they will happen 10 times a day in one company and that’s a small company you get to a big company some of the fortune 50 that i’ve worked with you’ll see this a thousand times in one day and and it multiplies itself but you guys have both seen and i’ve seen it in my time you get a good leader you get talent on your team that’s infectious the game comes up you get a good player you get a rock star you’re all like okay i’m chasing that guy i’m coming up i gotta elevate my game because this is not looking good for me you know person on my left person on my right they’re outshining me i got to step it up so you know you’ve got to get the experience that’s minimum for the job hey you got to be able to do these things in the job it does matter we’re not saying disregard it don’t make it so specific that it’s ruling out talent and that happens a lot and industry experience is not as important as you think and i mean google points it out i mean it you know statistically it’s not important but it makes managers feel better oh i took somebody from my competitor they were doing really well they know our industry they’re gonna do well here it’s just a fallacy and and if we can get people focused on character if we get people focused on leadership that will power your company when the hard times come hey you’re going to rock it you’re going to survive you’re going to make the u s economy that much more powerful if you get the right mindset and you focus and you drive and get after it brian decker talked about this with uh special forces assessment and selection so to get into any of the special operations community intellectual horsepower is a requirement you have to have a minimum score we take the asvab there’s a score once a person passes that intelligence requirement what george is talking about is that gate is closed it no longer comes back into the planning factor or the hiring factor whatsoever and what they found is that level they put a lot of thought behind it and what they see is that if somebody hits the requirement dead on and somebody exceeds that requirement is that the person that exceeds that requirement it’s not necessarily correlated to a higher level of performance so that’s why you have to be very careful up front about the gates you uh you select you know brian decker also told a story about again you know industry experience versus none so when he was running sfas you know sometimes we bring civilians on and give them sort of the dog and pony they put two groups through some obstacles that special forces soldiers run through uh in groups and again these exercises are you know the cadre are watching to see what behaviors come out from uh from the individuals so it was a group of mbas who were off the charts intelligence had industry experience were were currently getting their mbas and then a group of undergrads you’re talking 18 19 20 year olds first group of 27 to 35 year olds and you know naturally brian and his cadre uh you know they were showing him a good time but had an assumption that the mbas were just going to outperform the undergrads like hands down how do you think that ended up the the undergrads absolutely decimated every obstacle much quicker than the mba group and it goes to to show you that you know that even though they had prior uh experience more vast experience um those undergrads actually because they lacked ego you know it’s because they lack the group the group dynamic it goes to so if you have a lot of talented individuals that are humble and lack ego when they come together it’s an exponential effect one plus one isn’t two with a group that truly unifies behind a common good one plus one equals three that it’s an exponential effect in task unit bruiser there was a point where we were i don’t know how far we were from deploying but we knew we were deploying to iraq and one of the senior officers at the command he came to me and said hey you know you’re going to iraq do you want to switch out one of your platoons with this other platoon commander with this with this other platoon who the platoon commander has a lot more experience than your two you know your two oics which was seth and leif and it’s kind of funny because remember how the ceilings were out because they were doing construction so seth and leif were in the tasking bruiser office and they hear this individual basically asking me if i wanted to swap out either one of these two so seth and leif had very little experience they both done one deployment but they had just been in the teams for like two years and one of the platoon commanders in one of the other platoons had a lot more experience like he was a prior enlisted guy and so the the senior officer was saying hey you know you can take one you know you can take this guy and his platoon and he’s got way more experience and it might be a lot better for you and i was like uh i was like no and at this point i already knew seth and life and i go um no i said these guys have exactly what i want them to have which is they’re tough they’re humble and they listen and that’s all that’s all i need those are like my most important characteristics and he was like are you sure and i was like 100 that was that uh next section the nine foundational character attributes of talent under pressure one’s mental and physical limits hard skills rapidly degrade what remains is character skills are by design meant for un meant for predictable situations and environments says retired seal commander rich divini if businesses are interested in forming organizations and teams that effectively deal with unpredictability and complexity they have to go deeper than the guy who has the best sales record or the harvard grad who’s at the top of the class they have to look at character character is key because it is an indicator of a person’s capacity general william boykin points to capacity as more important than current ability quote what are you looking for hard skills or capacity ideally you look for both but if you have to choose and you have a fair way of doing so assess their capacity what is their capacity to learn new skills what is their capacity to think for themselves what is their capacity to problem solve i just gotta interrupt isn’t it interesting you hear general boinkin like one of the priorities that he puts in there is their capacity to think for themselves not to follow rules but to think for themselves back to the book according to general boinkin it is the focus on capacity has made special operations so successful on the battlefield and beyond a person’s character is the aggregate of their deeply ingrained attributes as we define it the nine foundational character attributes of high potential individuals are drive resiliency adaptability humility integrity effective intelligence team ability curiosity and emotional strength these traits are predictors of high performance these attributes cannot be taught so they should be the focus of your hiring check and then you go into a little spot a little section about how different special operations groups sort of weigh those things out a little bit differently but they all are looking for the same basic the same basic uh things dr carol green uh air force colonel uh psychologist he was heavily involved in the marsoc assessment and selection he said a grid he’s like they’re all basically looking for ice cream just different like slightly different flavors but as you know the the the special forces guys the seals marsoc uh you know the afzok guys the pjs and ccts they’re they’re all interchangeable if you throw them into a group the attributes are are very close totally uh you go into resiliency here a little bit somebody with high resiliency bounces back from stress quickly is adaptable and is not easily discouraged an individual with high resiliency resists quitting and is focused on completing goals essentially resiliency is how people handle setbacks and persevere in the face of challenges they accept failure as part of the process they don’t accept it passively but utilize their lessons learned and mistakes as a basis to grow and then you go into a well it’s a section about a person that could be considered possibly one of the most resilient human beings in the world which is mike day who is just on this podcast number 241 and you know shot 27 times and then killed the enemy that had shot him and just unbelievable story you put that in there you you going so yeah adaptability you talk about adaptability talk about humility and here we go people often asked us what is the most important trait of any leader without a doubt it’s humility the us army a 244 year old institution credited with training some of our nation’s most prominent leaders in practically writing the leadership manual for leaders in any field recently added humility as one of the key attributes of good leaders to the army doctrine publication 6 tac 22 saying a leader with the right level of humility is a willing learner maintains accurate self-awareness and seeks out others input and feedback and this is something that one day on our echelon front ops call i said hey i’ve got something to tell everyone in this group we’ve been talking about humility as the most important characteristic for a leader for the past 13 years or whatever it was 12 years at the time and the army just added this to their manual which is freaking awesome because those characteristics hadn’t changed for a long long time in the army but they realized if you’re not humble you got problems i just want to say plagiarism is one of the highest forms of flattery so if you bring your lawyers at me we will go to tow a lot of this is taken from my mentors i i did not uh credit you in certain spots um it goes back to johnny and i think the military as a whole there was a point where we viewed humility as a weakness and i think at a young age i mistook somebody like johnny who’s just one of the most humble dudes he still is as a slight form of of weakness it is funny that the army i think sort of has morphed as well their their view on that the the criticality of humility yeah no doubt about it and you also realize after you know you’ve realized the thing that pointed this out to me stronger than anything else was when we would fire a guy that was going through my training we would be firing that person if they were in a leadership position if they were in a leadership position they could get fired for safety or a number of anything any other things but if they were getting fired from a leadership position they weren’t generally having safety problems they weren’t having they knew how to shoot their gun they were in good physical condition they were getting fired because they lack humility which meant they weren’t listening to anybody else they weren’t listening to the critique from their own platoon they weren’t listening to advice from their platoon chief or from their tasking commander anyone else definitely not the freaking training cadre so they’re just a disaster and i have to bring up a comment a youtube comment okay uh so the johnny kim podcast on youtube and it says something like you know the title of the podcast is johnny kim um you know seal sniper harvard doctor astronaut and the first comment on youtube is dude can’t hold a job which i thought was pretty funny uh integrity you guys talk about integrity i mean these you go through these characteristics kind of uh each one effective intelligence talk to me about effective intelligence like what what’s effective intelligence compared to just plain old intelligence and i hope this has something to do with the fact that speaking of acquiring people there was a time in the late 90s where in the seal teams in the officer community i wasn’t an officer yet but they were the seals were starting to get popular and they started getting really good candidates for the officer program and so they started recruiting and and beyond just recruiting they started accepting all these just ivy league ivy league individuals you’d meet every every every new group of officers that would show up the seal team you know there’d be a bunch of naval academy guys because they get a bunch of the billets every year and then there’d be a bunch of guys from freaking harvard and and yale and these really smart guys and maybe they didn’t have and i’m not saying this about ever because some of them were great guys but not all of them have what i’m hoping is referred to in this book as effective intelligence is that somewhat accurate it is i’m going to take one step back so integrity i know we sort of glossed over that uh josh cotton dr cotton is very passionate about this one he’s done a lot of studies and looked at the data organizations that are in you know high ethics or highly uh you know high in integrity the culture is much healthier than organizations that don’t and i know that’s sort of an obvious statement but you look at enron yeah and i think also you you you say it seems like an obvious statement and yet there’s so many organizations that let those things slide and here’s the problem with letting things slide when it comes to integrity once this is you know this slippery slope sometimes they say a slippery slope fallacy because you know well just because i did this doesn’t really mean i’m gonna do that the slippery slope when it comes to integrity is i think is almost unstoppable thing because you know if i let echo get away with something well now he’s got something on me and now he lets me get away with something we go back and forth we go on this downward spiral and there’s no one that can i once once i give up my integrity i i give up my ability to tighten anyone else’s integrity up and you’ve also set a new standard you’ve put your personal stamp on approval that that behavior is now tolerated yep and you that’s what makes it so hard you can’t go backwards yeah you can’t unring that bell it’s really hard to do and if you have to go backwards because look you can put yourself in a situation what do you do you own it you stand up in front of the troops and you say hey look i made a bad decision it’s a bad personal decision i thought this was a good thing to do it didn’t make sense it was the wrong thing i won’t let it happen again that might be you know that’s your that’s your first step in trying to recover your integrity yeah but when you give it up that’s why it’s so uh you know the moral high ground the moral high ground and keeping the high ground i talked about this the other day on ef online it’s like once you give up the moral high ground it’s just like being in combat you now you now are gonna have to fight to get it back and it’s a freaking uphill battle and there’s a good chance and you can’t get up there anymore so you cannot give up that moral and ethical high ground it just it’s it’s one of the worst possible moves you can make on the battlefield and it’s one of the worst possible moves you can make in life so i didn’t mean to breeze over integrity like that um but no doubt it’s a it’s a core component of what you got to be looking for in people and people don’t scream for it that’s the weirdest thing nobody ever asks well i should say nobody i want to be careful on extremes there but i’ve watched you know the predominance of the hiring i do i manage a team but most of the hiring that i’m looking after is executive level and you know all of these offers combined you’re talking half million cash and more i mean they’re they’re significant compensation and i don’t hear anybody ask the question can you give me an example of when you had to hold the line on integrity and take the harder path even just that simple question you won’t hear it in an interview process it it would it would shock me if i heard it but it is so fundamental if you don’t have this the rest doesn’t matter if there’s if the integrity is gone that’s it you you cannot have a person without integrity in your organization full stop what was interesting is we were writing this book as socom was dealing with a number of ethical issues and let’s be honest a lot of them were coming from the seal community and you know we sort of struggled hey do we have to change some of the language in here but you know one individual doesn’t speak for the organization but they do when they’re on the front lines the way or front pages front page they speak for your organization and you know you mentioned ivy league and and i feel bad sometimes because i i over index on the ivy league guys and sometimes i’m critical there there were some great seal officers that came out for sure for sure some outstanding guys no doubt but they were more the exception than the uh the norm so as i’m talking to johnny kim johnny was like speaking of harvard that was after he became a steal so he gets a he gets a pass and johnny brought up a story in my life where i’m like johnny that’s that’s not a good story so uh you know we’re talking about buzz we’re talking about ryan and him and i are you know you could tell we’re getting a little emotional on the phone he’s like hey you remember that time we had a harvard officer in our buds class who actually worked for enron but some officer you know i don’t know what the fascination was they’re like oh this guy went to harvard and he was with ed ron and you know and he’s in buds and um this guy was i mean arguably one of the smartest guys in the class not as far as johnny um this guy just alienated everyone he he thought he was the smartest man in the room and he was egotistical he was an a-hole and johnny’s like so he’s telling the story about we’re running to the chow hall and still there’s like 250 225 people in the class and this guy knew i was a recon marine and you know sometimes you’ll run the formation there’s one guy that runs to the right of the uh is it the left or the left left this is my yeah for marine that’s that’s pretty embarrassing put his hands up the one that makes your left mind and he’s singing cadence and he’s just ripping on recon and johnny’s laughing on the phone because the whole class saw this guy just fall out of the main formation run out and i just took a hand you know sort of the the knight nothing i can but the the hard hand slap knocked the helmet right off his uh his head and he goes rolling across the street he has to run over and i just took over the cadence and uh i’m like johnny that was not my best moment but this guy i kind of like that moment this guy was uh he was going to make it through hell he he was going to meet the physical requirements and the mental toughness requirements but the cadre stepped in and dropped him and that’s rare because he was just that toxic that toxic and it’s funny that the instructors could recognize that because usually the instructor’s like hey he meets all these requirements we can read that out of them effective intelligence is the ability to use the intelligence you have in a real-world setting to solve problems for which there is no playbook and that is the heart of special operations so there you know we found a study what would you guess it was the average gpa of most millionaires that went to college i have no idea 2 9 2 9 and that’s my saving grace because i think i got a 2 99 yes yeah so hey average uh but no so what we found in the people that are off the charts smart and what we saw on the seal teams is that they suffered a lot from paralysis through analysis or they made things so overly complex and when you work in high stake environments time is usually a factor and it goes back to the the second law of combat simple yeah yeah that’s that’s all good stuff and again hey we’re not banging on the guys that came in and had awesome education and a lot of them were awesome and and here’s another another reason that it hurt the community was because these guys would be coming in and they were had such high potential this is in the 90s there’s no war going on they do four years they they get they do their system platoon commander they do their platoon commander they look at what’s ahead of them in the 90s and it was like oh you’re gonna you’re gonna you’re gonna you know ride a desk for the next 18 or whatever the next 16 years before you can retire and guys would say you know i’m going to get out and i’m going to go do do something else so it hurt us from just a personnel billeting standpoint as well but that’s uh the other thing that i’ve seen is where you get and look some people pull this off and they do it great but there are some people that have a problem taking their highly intellectual view of something and translating it to the frontline troops where now the people the people that have to go and execute whatever it is you want them to execute is doing it in a simple clear concise way that’s why simple is one of the laws of combat but you know part of the law of combat is planning keep your your planning simple the other part of that law of combat is to communicate simply and there’s a lot of people that have a hard time doing not a lot there are some people that have a hard time doing that so that’s a that effective intelligence is uh is definitely an important thing and that is the one i mean one of the attributes specific to marsoc is that they called it effective intelligence and that’s you know again flattery we we took that one it was the way they described it in their assessment and selection manual that that’s one of their primary requirements the way they described it was absolutely beautiful had the advantage of having joined socom late you know i was a recon marine we were never part of socom back then and eventually in 2000 was it five six marshal debt one led by colonel uh kaczynski 2004 yeah because they relieved me in baghdad that’s right and everyone’s like yeah this is a no-brainer but they could look when they were building the marsoc assessment and selection course they could look at what the seals are in the sf community and they were very deliberate and that’s what the marstock community stand by they’re they’re just going to be powerful they already are yeah you know we were talking about to bring this over to the business world you know when we talk about effective intelligence and people over indexing on experience they’re wanting people to come and take a playbook and run it over here and and assuming that the situations that you’re going to find in this particular business are going to be exactly the same and so they’re thinking well they’ve handled these situations over here they’ll be able to handle them here will be successful end of story it’s the effect of intelligence that’s not assuming any course of action for a business problem they’re looking at it that that ability to take the intellectual horsepower and look at all of the data points all of the indicators all of the little pieces of intel collect them and put them into a cohesive picture that then you explain simply with the plan of attack and it’s so different than experience and if we could get people to index on that versus the experience you see the difference immediately you know george we actually we talk about the 70 solution that’s a that’s a great example what you’re you’re explaining in a business context is again the guys that are wildly intelligent when they only have 70 percent of the operational picture they can’t make a decision but people high in high effective intelligence can draw threads parallels and make a very decisive decision with incomplete information and you know they we pulled a quote out because we were talking to tracy keough and so she was talking about the ceo of microsoft he said we don’t want know-it-alls we want learn-a-dolls if you can get that how far ahead of the game are you uh i’m gonna i’m gonna reach into some people’s brains that are listening to this right now and i’m just gonna do a little a little tweak on their brains because i promise you i promise you that there’s some people that when you said hey you’re talking about someone that just takes a playbook and runs the playbook and that’s it i promise you that there’s some people that are thinking wait that’s what i want that’s what i want right there is i want someone who’s going to take that playbook and they’re going to run that’s what they’re going to do and and i’m going to reach in there and just i have to stop you from thinking that because i know that’s what you think you want that’s what that’s what leaders think they think hey look i’ve got this all figured out if everyone would just do what i tell them to do run the playbook just do what i say to do we’ll be good to go here’s the thing there’s no static function in the world that what you want is non-thinking apparatus to run a playbook and if you do if you have something like that yes automate that get a robot to do that task and do them over and over again the same way when you’re hiring a leader you want them to be able to adapt and change and make improvements and do whatever they have to do to win that’s what you want so if you hear george say hey we don’t want someone that’s just going to run the playbook and you’re thinking no way did i do that do want that no you don’t and this was the same thing this happened with the micromanagers coming through my training when i was running training you get someone that’s thinking hey look i’ve been either i’m experienced or i know i’m highly educated i know how to run these operations so everyone if everyone just get in line and just do what i tell them to do we’ll be good to go and what does that turn into it’s micromanagement that you can’t tell everyone what to do there’s no way you can be everywhere at once and everything falls apart you need thinking shooters is what we used to call it so what what we’re offering at ef overwatch is thinking leaders that will actually solve problems yeah you’re right and and you know we made a little vignette a little video about this uh but coming up through the army and i you know jocko i was actually one of those people that that started to get out in the 90s i was i’d gotten through you know i had two years of line command and i’m thinking i love this i i got to go to the field i love being with my soldiers and then you then you know your time for command comes up in the army and you’re looking ahead and you’re going now i’m going to say something i don’t want to hear crap about it later mike but i’m thinking i got a life of harvard graphics ahead of me which preceded powerpoint just to bring you along with the program here but and so i got out but i have to tell you the us army and the us military is the world’s greatest leadership incubator and i owe so much back to the military to my mentors to my coaches to the soldiers to the non-commissioned officers of people i served with and it created in me that thinking leader do i have all the answers no no but that the u s military when we talk about ef overwatch we talk about placing leaders it’s you’re in a fishbowl 24 7 365 is a leader it is the biggest and best burden you can ever carry is to be a leader in the united states military it is just it’s an honor a privilege it’s scary as hell it’s rewarding as hell it’s everything but you’re in an incubator to lead and and i am so so grateful for that and and so when we talk about the principles in this book and when we talk about that effective intelligence the army helped me in my case deliver that that that did i know everything about the enemy no i had to take all these cues and start putting pieces together what do i have to do what are my possible courses of action what’s good what’s bad what’s high risk what’s low risk and anyway it just it is it astounded me how much i learned to think about the art of leadership coming to the us military i mean muskets were not as intuitive during his days as you know as we have now but we had good horses mike so you know i’m good with that this is what i have to put up with daily uh team ability did you guys make up that word that hyphenated word team ability we we did not i we i think we found that within our research we we liked it right so we we stuck with yeah it kind of because we were talking with brian decker we were talking a lot of people you everybody had different versions of that same word so we put that together yeah the teamwork and how different and do you have the ability to put yourself whatever level you’re at as a team player and that there’s a certain element of that to be a follower as well do you like that word yeah yeah okay then yeah we came up with it good to go moving on uh you say about nothing worth accomplishing it can be done alone there are no rambos in the military that might look cool in the movies but individuals die pretty quickly on the battlefield or worse get others hurt their greatest success requires that we work together curiosity exploring the unknown and questioning the status quo in pursuit of better more effective solutions is the key to innovation without curious individuals nothing would ever change or improve emotional strength in the u s military and i’m given like these highly abbreviated definitions and you guys go into it not not only do you go into better examples but then not only not only more detailed definitions but examples you know you’re talking about the rescue cap and phillips i mean you got really cool examples in here to back these things up but that’s what people buy the book so that they can read those curiosity already covered that emotional strength in the us military the whole man concept is the belief that the individuals need to be assessed based on the entirety of their person mental physical and emotional an emotionally strong individual has a positive attitude high empathy and emotional control in stressful situations many of the individuals we interviewed identified positive attitude as important to their hiring decisions attitude is contagious positivity breeds positivity while negativity begets more negativity an individual the negative attitude can still produce results but is often at the expense of company culture typically that one person’s results are not worth the resulting damage to the team you have i highlighted this section emotional strength is the ability to regulate one’s emotions to remain logical under stress stressful situations marshawn calls this stress tolerance and defines it as the ability to deal with ambiguous dangerous high pressure or frustrating events while maintaining control of emotions actions composure and effectiveness it is a universal truth in life that humans don’t make good decisions and emotional state people who are able to remain cool calm and collected in the face of challenges and the unknown are people you want in your organization this is the exact reason soft creates stressful environments to mimic the conditions of war during assessment and selection programs stress tolerance is so important that some soft organizations even use heart rate monitors to evaluate individuals psychological physiological responses to stress got to stay calm got to be able to detach the these were this chapter i mean you get people that are very passionate ryan decker was heavily involved in this chapter uh rich da vinnie do you ever serve with rich i did not rich is a brother um very very passionate about in fact he has a book called the attributes 25 hidden drivers of optical performance it’s about attributes some of his observations like empathy you know when you think about it in the way he described it he said special operations is very good about dialing up and dialing down empathy he said it’s almost like a dimmer switch when you go out on an operation and you’re right in the home there’s a likelihood that there are women and children in there and you know you’ve got to dial down your empathy to accomplish the mission not you know safeguard them while still bringing the hurt to the the combatants you’re going after um yet we’re very good about down that empathy back up when we come back from from from uh operations so um very detailed conversations very passionate about these uh these subjects and um those two were instrumental in uh in this chapter yeah you guys dug into some uh like i said good stuff and obviously going with getting those that information from good people um creating a talent acquisition plan talk to me about that well you know one of the many mistakes that you know once you get past you know making sure that your chief human resources chief human resource officer is strategic and tied into your ceo you have to look ahead you know at that old adage if if you fail to plan you’re planning to fail people look at talent and recruiting and staffing is hey we’ve got these open positions let’s crank it there’s not often a plan behind it and that starts with looking at your company and it starts with going okay what is the strength of our company when it comes to talent what gaps do we have what gaps do we have in leadership what gaps do we have in technology what gaps do we have in sales in leaders and individual contributors do we have key points of failure do we have only one person that can do this job and if they go we’ve nobody to step up do we have number twos do we have number threes okay where are we gonna grow where are we gonna grow next year and and you know this could go on and on and on but the basics are is you need to be sitting down and looking at each organization what are you missing why aren’t you winning in that department why aren’t you winning in sales why aren’t you winning in product why aren’t you winning in service or whatever and find out what your gaps are and that’s where you start with talent and get that down into a plan that says okay we’re going to go after this in a strategic way we are going to go out into the market you know we’re going to look within our own organization first but then we’re going to go out to the market and we’re going to build an organization and talent acquisition hr that says these are the people that are the gatekeepers and they are going to find and they are going to know what our success profiles look like and they are going to bring us high caliber people with those character attributes to be considered for these positions but you plan it out versus going oh you know what hey um we have an open position over here you know we’ve authorized 10 head count in this particular department you’ve got an empty seat what do you need that’s not a plan that’s just that’s a button to see like we talked about you you have to take that time to say what does my organization look like as far as talent and people it’s one of the many things that because everybody’s focused on everything else they don’t take the time to go what’s going to bring us into 21 what’s going to bring us into 22 you and like don robertson said in our book you have to be hired for the skills and needs of the future where your company is going to go and i think we even brought it up it’s like the term is fighting the last war you know you’re not thinking ahead as to what you’re going to need and so there’s no plan to go after that and build that for the future this is one of those things where you it happens at echelon front sometimes you’ll be working with a company and and you know they’re whatever company it is it happens all the time companies caught up in that firefight day to day they’re trying to survive they’re trying to make things happen they got projects due they got all those things going on and then you know you ask them about you know hey do you do you have anyone that’s looking at you know six months down the line about where you’re gonna be about what supplies you’re gonna need or whatever just whatever those and and you can see they’re caught they’re caught like on their heels because they don’t and if you if you think about what you’re talking about here a talent acquisition plan how we’re actually going to build a company and you think about how many companies are out there that the way they think about is just it’s a firefight right we need to fill this seat right now that’s the plan the plan is hire someone to do that role next week we have a new plan the plan is hire someone to fill this other role yep there’s no unified long-term strategic plan of what we’re doing and what does the military do better than well there’s many things they do better than most there’s always a pipeline there’s always a pipeline there’s always a plan there’s a succession plan there is a pipeline of high quality people coming into a pipeline so we can assess and select and put them into those things it’s it’s a forethought we have people that are out there doing that stuff but they’re actually thinking what do we need for 21 22 23 24 25 well even that goes all the way out the systems and equipment and but the military does it all whereas corporations will go to your point they’re out there firefighting oh wow wow i’ve got nobody on team i got to bring somebody in but if you do have an opening on your team it should be hey we got a pipeline ready talent that’s banging down the door to get into this place because we have a talent mindset we have leadership we are focused we empower our people we lead our people we drive our people we win and people will want to be a part of that yeah you guys break it down and hear what you have to do what you have to do to create this talent acquisition plan defining greatness in your organization identify your high performance assess your talent uh objective assessments just you guys go line by line and explain all these things in great detail build your talent profiles mike you already mentioned that workforce planning i mean you just go through the detail so that people that don’t have a plan can actually open up this book and put a plan together so that they’re moving forward with a with a route right with a route instead of just moving forward in the blind which is crazy to think about and yet it happens all the time it’s just start with the conversation the the the senior leaders and companies are are not having this conversation and that that’s where it starts there’s many ways to go about this you don’t need to bring you know bring in a top five consulting firm yes you can bring in ef overwatch that’s my plug but you know this this isn’t something where you’re going to bring in you know industrial organizational psychologists and you’re going to create assessments that are going to solve this for you this is this is this is basic leadership that you have to have the discipline to follow through on and you can create these processes from scratch special operations community had to start somewhere they basically started from scratch and you can build this it’s going to take time but you have to have those conversations and you have to have those conversations all the time every every week every month are we selecting not only for what we need now but five years down the line if you’re creating a talent profile how does that talent profile change with the digital transformation five years from now what’s going to be required in terms of attributes five years down the road or 10 years down the road next section is about attracting top talent what talented people look for attracting talent requires knowing what talented people want many companies assume that the answer is money and perks they offer competitive salaries and wonderful creature comforts high-end expression machines fully stocked kitchens pool tables and more and yet they still hemorrhage talent on the other end we’ve seen countless people turn down higher pay to stay with a company where they feel challenged and love the people they work with if you want people to dedicate their talents to your company you must offer something equally valuable in return since talented people have high drive they are interested they’re just as interested in achievement and challenge as money let’s not fool ourselves if your compensation and benefits are not competitive within your industry you’ll lose out on talent but attracting top people goes beyond that beyond money talented people look for talented leaders and colleagues a sense of community a challenge opportunities for professional and personal growth and purpose talent attracts talent it’s a magnet good leaders or you want to go even in my military career i know who those good leaders are and i’m like oh i got to get in that organization because they’re going to help me get to the next level they’re going to pass on that experience that coaching and mentorship i did that in the military i do it here in the corporate world i’ve been doing it for 20 years you know one of the people in this book i actually followed to another organization he’s like hey hey i need i’m like i’m there i’m there you know he goes do you want to talk about the compensation i said no let’s just move let’s go um and the great part is is that you know there’s a lot of bad habits that get you into a vicious cycle but attracting great talent gets you into a positive cycle of attracting better talent all the time your alumni and the people currently in your organization are the best way to attract talent hands down i mean you’re doing it right now you’ve probably caused a lot of young men and women to enlist or or see commissions in the military based off the lessons they’re learning yes that is a factual statement there we go there’s a lot of a lot of people out there that are straight up in the military um from listening to this podcast because i hear from all the time it’s awesome in fact we were having dinner last night an air force individual came up and said hey i follow everything you do thank you for what you do and then he asked he handed me the phone said hey can you take a picture of jacqueline mike’s rally he’s like yeah okay so you know we tell the story and this is 100 true i didn’t come from the military lineage i didn’t i’d seen the movies i thought they were pretty cool i thought the military was potentially a path for me there was multiple paths um the backup dancer for madonna was just not going to be uh a career that that provided uh you know what i needed to live so i wouldn’t know that an inside joke inside it’s also a frightening mental image i assure you there’s a sequin thong somewhere in his house so when i was i was 18 and uh living in colorado i ran into and i’m not going to mention his name let’s just call him staff sergeant ben staff sergeant ben was attending the university of colorado on the mesep program which is the same program i eventually attended at texas a m the marine enlisted commissioning education program where they take the enlisted sent them to get their degrees and ultimately earn a commission so i met ben and at the age of 18 here you have the staff sergeant from the force recon community and he was humbly confident he was articulate highly respectful to everyone what differentiated him from the other marines was even though he was you know this dual cool you know highly decorated is he was actually nicer than the other marines he had nothing to prove and physically the whole man concept he was there he had a stature about him and when i’m 18 i’m like dude that guy’s awesome that’s who i want to be that’s who i want to be i mean to the point where i enlisted in the marine corps to become a recon ring because of the image because of the person the marine corps put forward in front of young men and women like me when you have strong leaders stepping up representing their communities it sends a very strong message to people that i want to join that and it never changed when i went to infantry school you know seven recon marines stepped in front of us and said who wants to screen from recon i’m like oh my god it’s like seven staff sergeant ben’s and then when i finally met the seals you know while i was in the marine corps i’m like oh my god that’s my next challenge and uh your alumni and current uh employees or uh team members are your greatest uh recruiting tool always yeah i always i’ve had many conversations with uh businesses as you know they’re losing somebody somebody decides to leave and they start thinking about we’re gonna hit him with the no compete we’re gonna get him with this we’re gonna get him with that and i i say i got a better idea why don’t you wish them luck and thank them for what they did while they were here and let them go about their way because if you send them out the door with a kick in the ass they’re not coming back if you send them out the door and say good luck it’s been great working with you first of all they’re not going to go out in the street and say you know oh jock was a jerk you don’t want to work for him he’s going to go i left them but they’re good people right and those people will come back to you by the way i mean eventually they’re going to come back because you know somebody is over the reason they’re leaving is because if you’re treating people well the reason people are leaving is because someone is lying to them you know they’re lying they’re giving them some line that they’re not going to be able to uphold so when people are leaving it’s it’s your alumni you got to treat them like your alumni and say hey good luck let me know if you ever need anything you know even though you’re working for a competitor it’s all right you know you’re my friend yeah you know we we took it one step further we have some of the the just great members of my team about 90 days down the road they’ll call them up where they went hey how are things going for you hey was it everything that you expected i hope you’re experiencing great success and it’s everything because there’s people that move along because for whatever reason their next challenge may be somewhere else and you have to be accepting of that and you and you have to to your point encourage that too and if you have good number two you’re fine you don’t worry about it but reach out to somebody and say hey how are you doing you know what hey if things aren’t going well there hey give me a call give me a call because we loved having you here you wouldn’t believe how many people are going you know what they don’t have to admit that they made a mistake they’re going you know what it wasn’t as good it wasn’t as good we call we we call it the ultimate litmus test it’s if there’s pride in the organization whether you’re with the organization at that time or after look at the marine corps when somebody says hey you know what do you do well i’m a former marine they proclaim that vice somebody’s saying hey i’m a coder no if if they’re pr prideful in their organization they say i’m a googler and so when they identify with the organization it’s one they’re sort of identifying that there’s a talent talent-oriented culture and that there’s strong leadership at that company to the point where they have a sense of pride and that becomes a talent magnet for other people at that cocktail party that you set it so uh very powerful we can’t uh sort of over index on that one enough no and it’s just you know everybody in your company is a talent scout everybody in your company is an example of what you hold as important especially your leaders when they’re out in the public and everybody should always be looking and we talked about this like you know the term is opportunistic hiring most people are only hiring for an open position but if you’ve got talent scouts out there they’re bringing talent to you and saying you know what this person’s a difference maker this isn’t a player we have got to find a place in our organization so everybody when you have a talent mindset it’s not just you know from the ceo down all the way through that you’ve got the mechanics and you’re looking for top talent but it’s all your employees once they’re in the door their branding going hey you want to come try out here this is a tough place to work and that’s exactly what happens in the special operations community there is no shortage of people signing up to get a beating no shortage whatsoever and in an ideal world if you have a company with that kind of mindset you’ll have those people going you know what i got to work there because that that’s going to make me better you know jockey you brought a point about when somebody leaves your organization you show them respect and and try to keep that relationship intact what we found great organizations do even in the hiring process if they don’t hire somebody is they spill still spend time to say hey we’d love to debrief you on why we didn’t select you for this position and they show them a great deal of respect the special operations community does this when somebody drops from the buds they do pull them aside and they have a conversation hey what do you want to do in the navy what have you learned from this process and they speak highly of the seals or the special forces selection process when they leave we’ve seen organizations that are so highly respectful to people that they don’t even hire that at the end of the debrief they say wow no other organization has done that for me they just simply some don’t even respond or some just say hey we didn’t select you thanks and they said it’s not uncommon organizations that sort of follow this this this tactic it’s part of their culture where the person looks at him and says do you have any other positions available in the in the organization and literally make hires based off that by showing them such a a great experience during that hiring process it drives me nuts to have a bad process because effectively and especially in today’s era of social digital media that experience is your brand going back out in the marketplace and you’ve created an impression you’ve created a customer consumer or you’ve pushed one away if you didn’t select them so it you know how you treat people in the process it says everything about your company says everything about having a talent mindset yeah and the bottom line with all these things that we’re talking about all these behaviors is your you have a culture that people that are talented are gonna wanna go to and that’s what this you know this section’s about a sense of community the challenge the growth opportunities having a purpose there salary and benefits giving people ownership giving people control over their own destiny and that all those things you kind of sum up here with brand yourself as a talent magnet the us military especially special operations has skillful marketing and branding which is very weird for me to say but i know it’s very true their branding i mean let’s face it the marine corps is branding itself way before branding was a thing same with the army i mean i remember i was totally brainwashed when i was a kid to be all you can be or the few the proud marines like that was just 100 percent just my whole br the branding in my mind is stuck to this day uh you know the few the proud marines rangers lead the way that others may live uh de oppresso libre libre how do you say that i can’t believe i can’t say that the oppresso libre is that right i think you got it right yes sorry tim kennedy bro i’m sorry tim kennedy de apresso liber there you go to free the oppressed the only easy day was yesterday and what you’re doing with these things is is the other the other big part of this is employee value proposition what you as an employee as employer offer to your employees and you kind of you kind of lay out some you lay on one price waterhouse coopers from empowering mentorships to customize coaching pwc provides you with the support you need to help you develop your career you’ll work with people from diverse backgrounds and industries to solve important problems are you ready to grow here’s the here’s the ranger one recognizing that i volunteered as a ranger fully knowing the hazards of my chosen profession i will always endure to uphold the prestige honor and high esprit de corps of the rangers acknowledging the fact that a ranger is a more elite soldier who arrives at the cutting edge of battle by land sea or air i accept the fact that as a ranger my country expects me to move further faster and fight harder than any other soldier rangers lead the way branding i hate calling that stuff branding because it’s so badass using social media to reach top talent all right let’s hear it guys you guys apparently you know you just talked about this what are we talking about last night with socom doing oh yeah socom is starting a podcast who did they reach out to they they reached out to me but yeah it’s very cool what they’re doing you know they’ve got a they just wanted to you know get my kind of cut on it and very cool what they’re trying to do you know they’re just trying to get the word out there and and then you pointed out to me that whatever a year ago socom started an instagram account so we see our own special operations community building their social media presence so that they can communicate with the next generation of special operations humans the military has been pretty good about this so back in the late 90s or mid 90s x games was really coming to to to fruition and the military started creating their own extreme sports teams because that’s where they knew the new talent is that that’s where that you know the demographic of the 18 or i’m sorry let’s say 15 year olds to the 25 year olds was was pushing towards that time where do you think the military is going now for recruiting uh video games esports teams they’re putting esports teams together now if you asked our generation when they said hey we’re gonna go recruit out of the esports or video game uh talent pools we’d probably say no way yeah hey that future seals and future marshal you know raiders and special forces are not going to come out of those communities that’s wrong that’s that’s where the new talent lays not all of the town there’s still town out there playing sports uh you know on teams wrestling but you know that’s just this new generation they play a lot of video games and that’s where they’re finding uh success with their recruiting yeah um i’m curious about that video games make me nervous because people get addicted to them and yeah it’s really it’s a real thing it’s a real thing so let’s be honest yeah it missed my generation my my dad was not big on video games in the house yeah we didn’t have it that’s why when i would go to my friend’s house i would stay up till four while they were sleeping playing the video games nintendo uh mike tyson’s uh punch-out but what did the guys usually do when we got back from operations oh bro i i mean my first deployment to iraq they had halo set up between tents and then they had this so seals i was already like like you guys are playing video games wait what is this what are you guys doing pac-man i mean i don’t know i’m so out of it i’m from you know back in the day i don’t appreciate it so i’m thinking what is it so i like i went in there looked and so you see whatever the guys were playing halo and and i just didn’t really get it and i thought it was this weird couple you know five or six seals that were all into it but then they had a siege soda tournament of halo did you hear what i just said we’re in iraq we’re on deployment we’re fighting the enemy and they have a at the command of joint special operations task force for iraq they have a halo tournament so that’s a little bit embarrassing so it’s embarrassing that i got seals doing it it’s even more embarrassing that they have a siege sort of tournament and the height of embarrassment was when my two players went up there for the tournament not only did they win they utterly destroyed everyone and i guess in that game you you in the game halo the version that they were playing you have to get to 50 kills and in the finals these two guys in the finals they killed the opponent 50 times and they got killed once and they came back and they were super stoked and i just was uh i was like gentlemen i’m very disappointed what’s really crazy is uh just i mean great guys and one of them was a total freaking physical stud the other one was one of my bad ass you know pipe hitting seals so they were awesome guys so i don’t know maybe i’m misjudging who did it does make me nervous though because people get addicted to those video games yeah it’s kind of for the same reason they get addicted to other stuff too though a lot of the time because they don’t have like other stuff going on necessarily yeah but i don’t know it’s been kind of proven to that vid video games are like a good method of problem solving like in your brain so people it’s surely it’s true they can be conducive in certain circumstances why don’t you take jujitsu and do some problem solving there is that too but you get guys who play video games and jiu jitsu you see what i’m saying i’m saying it can be it can have a little role in there it should have a little role have you been have you been good at any video game ever in your whole life no you mike shirley i i tried playing with these guys i would take two steps and die yeah and i eventually yeah you’re talking about halo that one’s like okay that’s that one’s kind of advanced like you mentioned mike tyson punch out yeah i never i never made it to that who mentioned mike tyson did you mention that yeah no it’s too bad i beat mike tyson buncho i beat mike tyson punch out and regular punch out you know what the what the difference is no nothing really except one is the last guy’s mike tyson you know brown guy and then on regular punch out the last guy is mr dream same exact pixel formation of the guy except he’s a little lighter because that’s when i think mike tyson ran into some problems publicly i think with the law and whatnot and what not you know but i think they just had a documentary come out on the evolution of video games for for netflix yeah you should check that out thank you for standing up for this generation yes sir appreciate that yes sir yeah all right moving back to the subject at hand it’s i think these lessons creating the hiring team creating the hiring team is one of the most important decisions to make in the talent war but we see companies make the same four mistakes again and again here they are b players or c players being put in charge of hiring you already kind of mentioned that that’s not a universal statement but it does happen the hiring team is homogeneous homogeneous homogeneous homogeneous there we go thank you actual trolls tightening up the english major over there i’m trying the hiring team is homogeneous which means what we’ve got a team here and they’re all they’re all all the same people they’re all engineers they’re all sales people one thing or to put it in the context of special operations if you just selected breachers to be the team of people selecting not not not the point man not the navigator yeah your breachers are going to look for future breachers number three there’s no training what’s the training that you’re talking about you know how to dig in and first of all and you know i’ve got to say this is that every time you hire there are legal ramifications i could tell you horror stories about asking the wrong questions um no it was great actually i had i literally had a senior hiring manager go in and there was a lady that came in and one of his questions was is when are you due and i’m like really and yeah she wasn’t pregnant so that made that just she got an offer on the spot for me we saved the company a couple million dollars in a lawsuit but the training you have to teach people to make sure that you’re asking questions that are simply job related and performance related number one but number two how do you dig in and examine those questions how do you put that person under pressure how do you pressure test them and train your hiring managers otherwise you get five guys on the engineering team into my example five breachers who are all asking questions about breaching you’re asking engineers and they’re all asking different well how did you do this at this company they go to the next person you you get candidates that come out go well i answered the same question seven times and hopefully i got it right six out of seven times but you need to train your interviewing team as to what your success profile is and you know there are nine attributes but those you’re not looking for all nine maybe it’s three maybe it’s four maybe it’s two for this specific role how are you going to dig in on those and elicit responses that tell you are they a person of high drive are they a person of high resiliency are they adaptable do they have team ability how are you digging in and which characteristics you’re looking for depend on what the success profile of that particular role is and you have to train people to do that interviewing is not a skill that people just out of thin air can do very very well it takes time to train and the more you train those people the you know the more clear they become on selecting the best candidate that’s in front of them for that role so training them to that process what is the process that works for you for this organization your your hiring team of a players needs to understand the process and then they under they need to understand as george is talking about is what are you looking for during that process so brian decker with sfas they would continually go through training as they came up with obstacles and identifying that hey the reason we’re putting them through this specific obstacle is we’re looking for these two attributes and this is how you judge based off the scorecard where they they they score on that attribute so that’s the the training we’re talking about let me say this one thing we say a players because a true a player has humility the ability to look at a bunch of young seal candidates or a bunch of future employees and say that that girl right there she has the potential to be a lot better than i am and she’s going to make me she’s going to raise my performance as well she’s going to raise the bar and she’s going to challenge me a players can do that because they want competition they want healthy competition they want to be surrounded by other a players you put b players or c players what we’re saying there is again it goes back to you know fear-based hiring is i don’t want to be outshined that that johnny kim right there i i will be a non-player in the organization if he’s there we’re not taking him that that’s what that’s what’s what happens and so when you have ego and you have people that are mediocre performers in charge of your hiring guess what you’re gonna get mediocre talent uh the last mistake that people make is hiring as a secondary function so we’re not going to take jacqueline willink as a troop commander tasking commander and say hey you got to train to go to war oh hey by the way you’ve got to cut over to buds every day at 3 pm to assist with the assessment selection you you can’t do the phrase in the military to think shitty one thing well yeah we take in this this is hard to take one priority we take a players off the battlefield guys who want to continue going to war and we say hey for the next two years actually you’re gonna have a greater impact on the community your sole job your one thing it’s not a secondary function this is your primary function for the next two years or six months is focusing on filling the talent funnel and assessing and selecting people into this organization that’s what it means by a secondary function and then you could score it and then you can do a feedback loop if you’ve got the same people in eight i mean you’ll have multiple teams across multiple departments but once you’ve seen how they interview if if each one of those talented candidates is going through the same group of people and getting the same structure you can go back and evaluate the results you can get that feedback loop okay we hired this person how did they do or we hired this person and they didn’t do well what did we miss in the process and you’re going back to the same group of people as how to iterate a little bit better and you get a little bit better each time but if you keep changing that team out you’re effectively you have no standard or you get the standard of the day with the team that you put together but if you get those a players you make hiring the priority for what they do you train them properly you can look at how we’re doing and how do we exponentially increase what they’re doing that’s hard for a business leader to sometimes very hard very very hard so what you’re telling me to do is take my best salesman or saleswoman take them off the line for six months and have them focus on hiring the next generation of sales leaders and our answer is yes in the short term a tactical mindset that may hurt if you have a strategic mindset for the long term for the long run if he hires three or four solid sales leaders that’s going to have a much more exponential effect and impact on the organization again that’s hard to do it was hard for the seal community to take guys like you off the battlefield and say hey we need you to run training now we know where you wanted to be and so again a lot of this is getting that we say talent mindset getting business leaders just to make that mental paradigm shift of out of that tactical mindset and into a strategic mindset to play the long game and that’s what the top war is it’s the long game it’s just that important it you know everything in your environment your your product your service the economy the market the global conditions are gonna change and they’re gonna change rapidly but those nine attributes don’t change and they allow you to confront any circumstance as a business with confidence and to win those things just won’t change everything around you will change but those leadership principles those nine character attributes those are the foundations and they will let you attack and win in any given situation when you don’t pay attention to them you’re firefighting covid comes along oh my god what do we do everybody’s you know chicken littles and and it becomes a very difficult problem to solve versus okay got it roger that’s today’s situation let’s go next section here is characters revealed at one’s limits and there’s a subsection called mike feels the pressure this is it mike thought staring up the rope i’m going to fail out of buds because of a freaking rope two weeks prior mike had completed hell week the instructors had even pulled him aside and said you’re one of the standout leaders in the class we know what you can do as a leader so we need you to step aside so we can test and evaluate other officers yet now mike was struggling to climb a basic rope like he had been climbing since day one of the marine corps he had been climbing ropes for years and he was good at it he never failed to get up one until now for the first time in training mike was displaying serious signs of fatigue it was an ideal moment to test him so the instructors dug in shouting up at him the other students who had already completed the exercise watched from their nearby formation mike started up the rope again he could sense all eyes on him he could feel the pressure he made it 10 feet and dropped the instructors kept yelling and mike started up the rope again and again and again mike was frustrated he felt like a dirt bag for not being able to get up the rope but there was no way he was going to quit he started up the rope again and fell again he got to his feet and prepared to start up the rope again but the instructors stopped them and pulled him aside out of view from the other students it’s okay we all have these days one of the instructors said we wanted to apply some pressure to you to see how you would react and whether you would quit the instructors didn’t really care whether mike made it to the top of the rope or not good little test see where it’s at that that day and again i’d been in the marine corps for what five years at this point climbed plenty of ropes was good at climbing ropes i remember that day just something with the body was off i had zero energy and you talk about feeling like the eyes were on me yeah like i i was almost near tears not not not from the pressure but i would just spent all that together i i was i was done and i mean it just reinforces the point that you know you say character cannot be created where none exists and you truly don’t know people until you push them to the limits that’s not just physical limits that’s also mental limits and that’s the point of the special operations assessment and selection it’s not because we’re sadistic maybe maybe we are a little but it’s not to put these these young men and women through uh you know pain for our benefit there’s a purpose behind it much like an interview process is we know that once we can push them to the threshold that’s our moment okay now we’re going to see if this individual has what it takes if they have the right attributes one of the things and you go back to the attributes one of one of our colleagues uh jason tushin uh you know he talked about resiliency the whole point of a lot of you know the special operations assessment selection is to see how resilient people are he talked about in bud’s attracts much like the other special operations some pretty phenomenal human beings like ncaa athletes and olympic athletes and when he ran first phase he saw a lot of these you know what people consider exceptional athletes quit and he said they were low on resiliency because this was the first time they had failed in their life and that’s a point in the training as he says just to keep knocking people down to see how they react and when you have a high achiever who’s never really experienced failure and they repeatedly fail in buds or these other assessment programs sometimes they quit and that’s what you’re looking for but somebody who’s experienced nothing but obstacles in their life is well is more prepared for what they face in special operations and more equipped to deal with crisis than than some of these exceptional athletes who’ve just never really faced challenge yeah you’re going to fail some stuff they’re going to make sure you fail some stuff 100 like you’re not going to pass everything i don’t care who you are they’re going to make you sure you fail some stuff to make sure that when you do fail something you don’t lose the bubble you talked a little bit about the interview process and you go into the interview process here and uh here’s a strategy on on you you go on a bunch of stuff i’m gonna skip to one part uh for guidance on strategy look to special operations murder boards murder boards are not quite as terrifying as they sound they are full of pressure but professionally run an operator sits on one side of the table and on the other side is a psychologist and five to eight senior enlisted and officers representing the entire community the psychologist has previously assessed the operator to identify potential red flags the senior panel then digs in raising the pressure by probing the red flags and presenting complex scenarios they ask difficult questions and push against sore spots to see how the operator reacts if you approach your interviews a little more like a soft murder board you can reveal valuable information to that end we have five tips number one know what you’re looking for with each question number two create a core set of questions to be used with each candidate number three ask scenario based and behavioral questions number four add challenges number five push candidates outside their comfort zone you gotta be careful on the legal side of this huh george you did you do um and and that’s where you know that training comes in that we talked about earlier you people have to understand you know um hiring decisions there’s a lot of law around it and so you want to train those people effectively but you can create an enormous amount of pressure on somebody by asking them difficult questions and you know it’s funny when we’re when when we’re teaching veteran candidates do you the number one candidate or the number one question that stumps people executives and military people alike i’ll just ask them a simple question tell me about your leadership style and people think from muscle memory they have muscle memory that oh i should be able to answer this and they go on and on and on and on i get that with execs i get that with veterans but push people to to describe themselves put them in uncomfortable situations talk about failures tell me about a time that you failed and and there are several executives that if you can’t talk about how you failed and failed miserably and got back up and what you learned from it that’s a person you need to avoid but yeah there’s there’s a lot of law around it but if you know what you’re looking for with each question you plan your questions you plan your inter you know your interviewing panel your murder board you can create a lot of pressure but mind you there’s a balance too because you you don’t want to make it like the military version of it because canada’s going okay i’m not working there but there’s you can carve a simple balance where they know they’re going to be tested in your environment and those people that know they’re going to be tested in your environment the right people are going to be drawn to your environment because of that test any any person who’s of talent that’s worth their salt that comes through an easy interview process and rocks it in the back of their head when they walk out there they’re going okay that was a little bit easy and so now they’re starting to think about well okay that’s that was a little too easy but a person with true talent that wants to be challenged that wants to be valued and you know work in an environment where there’s the grind and the drive that tough process they’re gonna go okay i’m ready for this bring it let’s go let’s do this and you find out a lot by putting people under pressure in that scenario and let’s dispel the notion that you know we call it a murder board and you’ve you’ve been on them people aren’t yelling at you yeah no just out asking and they’re looking if you give an answer they whether they like it or not they’re gonna dig a little in a very professional manner and and some murder boards go quickly because they identify that this person’s humble and they’re admitting you know past mistakes and that they learn from it and that they’re they’re still a work in progress and improving and those murder boards go quickly it’s the others where somebody comes in they’re overly confident and they’re arrogant and so that’s where people that are trained to assess those behaviors and this is one big behavioral interview this is the military’s version of a behavioral interview uh those go very long and uh it almost becomes like a confessional uh they just they just keep digging themselves now another tactic to that is after you put the person through a murderboard just like one person goes out and say hey how did you feel about that process what do you think you could have done better what areas didn’t you expand upon to see now if they can do a what do we call a brutally honest self-assessment like hey you know what man i wish i could do that again um i missed this this i didn’t reinforce this point and so if that person’s trained they come back in say hey real real self-reflective after action that they just gave and one of the reasons that we put this specific technique in there is because most interviews and companies are done on a one-to-one basis and jocko echo i bet i you could i could put you in one of these murder boards and you could watch three other people ask questions and they’ll have their opinions but just in the observation mode that is of tremendous value just to watch people how they answer how they act how they think how they reason through a particular scenario how they explain their problem-solving methodology so so many interviews due to the firefighting and the time and you know that this is reactionary they don’t put the time into it they don’t put people in a room and go okay this was my impression of the answer to the question this is how i think they’ll work or succeed or fail or struggle in this particular environment you can get actually a lot out of observation which is why we put this in the book i mean to give an example of what are on those murder boards and you probably remember this one is they’re going to ask you an ethical question you’re dealing with a boss who does something highly unethical um you know what actions do you take uh and the response is gonna tell you a lot about the person yeah yeah you guys do a great job of kind of laying all the stuff out from how to observe them to do role plays with them case case studies and scenarios um you’ve got all that stuff in here observation what to look for how to look for it different situations you can look for it and i mean it’s just it’s just a very thorough chapter and then you get into assessment tests and you talk about you know the the iq test that the army used and uh just the the different assessment tests that get used now so that’s all good one of those tasks you comment on here one company we work with at ef overwatch using aptitude motivation and personality assessment to weed out candidates our veterans despite being high performers were all scoring very low on the test and thus being eliminated from the hiring process curious mike took the test for himself his score just 57 a failing grade so what was up with that test so your assessment tests naturally have bias built in by whoever designed that test and there was a bias against you know i’m not saying in a negative light veterans are very different from the demographic that test was based around the bottom line we’re trying to say here is assessments are good it’s another layer to the process that you use to select people especially if you have talent profiles and when you do these talent profiles to identify your high performers you also want to do that against your low performers to see if the assessment test is actually accurate because if your high performers and low performers in the same role are generally getting the same results that that assessment test is most likely not relevant or added value to that process yeah is it measuring what you want it to measure right is it determining the success factors and one of the challenges with companies is that and this is just you know kind of that that inside the talent acquisition function and talent management function people will buy an enterprise-wide solution and apply that test across the board and just say okay this test applies to everybody and in mike’s particular case it’s screening out veterans and and we’re able to look at that and go something every yeah something’s wrong um but it’s hard to persuade people that you know something they’ve invested a good amount of money in is not showing them what it should show them i mean they’re very wedded to their solution they’re they’re bought in and it’s hard to move them off the mark but mike was an exceptional example of where people are using something that’s not showing success factors that you want it to be showing you it’s another data point yeah so we do see companies that use these personality assessments as a either no go or go criteria and i would caution people not to do that you talked about not being a rules follower funny enough we had a company that recently assessed one of our people and you know i won’t say what specific organization this person works for um but he’s with a very unique organization and he’s been in that seat for five years which is an indicator that this guy is a high performing individual ethical absolutely and when he took this test the company came back and said this guy’s not you know it shows that he doesn’t follow rules and we sort of had to explain the context of the role he was in and say he finds a way to win and that may be why he’s not testing well on that one criteria on that assessment so you’ve got to be cautious even like josh cotton dr cotton that does this for a living will will caution you uh with regards to results on assessments he said yeah you got to take it with a grain of salt and some people to use a phrase that that you know i remember hearing it muster actually assessment tests are not inoculations they don’t insulate you from making a bad hire they don’t inoculate you from you know all the risk in the world you need to use them as mike says they’re just one more data point but they it all begins and ends with knowing what success looks like for a particular role and that requires thought it requires you know planning and and mapping that out how you’re going to go do it like i said you got that chapter locked in the next chapter goes into the fact that you can’t hire or fire your way to success talent acquisition is only one part of a two variable equation for success talent plus leadership equals victory and then there’s a story in here about mike and a little task unit that you were in called task unit charlie and what’s interesting about tasking to charlie so tasking a bruiser and tasking to charlie and tasking to alpha were all at seal team three and every one of those task units had some great guys in them and you know if you put the bell curve on all of them they’d all be relatively the same group of you know seals you know a couple low guys couple high guys bunch of guys in the middle i mean just just kind of typical not nothing good or bad just typical but it didn’t really work out that way from a leadership perspective no it did not so pulled from the same talent pool like like you said the the talent profile for both the the task units was the exact same and this is where you know we caution people on the you know this is why we end the book with this chapter is you had two groups where the resources the talent everything was predominantly the same same budgets same weapon systems same people really and one rised raised to the occasion and one fell below the standard in the seal teams and was toxic and the final determination was leadership so bad leadership can poison any talent pool of exceptional people it it just can in that i i’m so fortunate i got to observe that at a young tenure in my career and what i benefit too is you know i got plucked out of that task unit and put in your task unit and it talks about how i i wasn’t the root of the problem but the person that was the root of the problem i basically threatened because i have an allergic reaction to people that are just selfish and all about themselves and this individual wasn’t he he wasn’t to solely blame but he was the impetus of the the problem and so i came i guess with warnings when they sent me over to you and then all of a sudden i start to prosper and i become your operations officer i was your assistant operations officer you put me in charge of the operations officer uh you that was the remote day and then you promoted me two months later to uh delta platoon aoyc you know the funny thing is a lot of the guys the deployment after that where seth stone took basically tasking a bruiser back to iraq and we ended up in the battle of sauder city a majority of the guys in that troupe were from task unit charlie so again you put them under a great leader and they did exceptional things so that’s why we say you can no longer you know you can’t fire or hire fire your way to success ultimately you have to lead and you have to develop your people and that’s what this chapter is about yeah we we kind of brought it around to you know as we mentioned earlier in the book you have to treat your human capital as importantly or as important as your financial capital and this was a way to kind of close that out to say the journey doesn’t end when you hire a players you get this whole process right that’s not the end of it you’re not done and we did this little video clip and we call it the talent war the interesting thing about this title is and we went into this in the video is that war doesn’t end it’s continuous you’re going to win some battles but there’s no point in this even if you read this book if you do everything in this book and mike and i are working with you and everything goes perfectly you don’t get to declare victory people grow people change products change the environment changes people move on you have to keep after this this is a discipline that you need to bring to your company and when you do you will have a competitive advantage it’s the path it’s part of the path back to the book far too often a company will hire talented candidate a talented candidate whose performance ends up being lackluster the company chalks it up to a bad hire fires the person and starts all over again a costly assumption there are many reasons someone might not be performing as you expect and only one of them is a bad hire chances are if a talented individual is not performing to standard it’s not their fault it’s yours a little a little extreme ownership coming at you live from the talent award talent development you guys talk about training mentoring and coaching um good quote in here from jonah pinto from 7-eleven ceo most important thing in any organization is leadership it’s always leadership first because leaders find a way to get things done once again i’m summing up a a great attitude and and for the listeners joe dipinto is actually a west point military academy graduate he served as a army officer before he entered the the corporate world leadership is the most critical determinant of achieving victory for business leaders are the ones who drive change makes things happen so when working to transform high potential high potentials into high performers it’s critical to identify and develop future leaders that’s just the way it’s got to be and then um wrapping this up a little bit here actually this i’ll wrap this up right here with this with this like it’s not quite the closer but it’s close a true talent mindset like i said this is kind of the underlying thread of the book remember the most critical step in winning the war on talent is developing a talent mindset the deep belief that human capital is the single most important competitive advantage your company can have if you truly believe human capital is your greatest competitive advantage you won’t stop with the hiring process you will continue to invest in and develop your people creating an unbroken chain of excellence that’s what good leaders do that’s how great organizations are formed the training and leadership development opportunities you provide your employees reveal the truth of your talent mindset you might be able to attract candidates with the talk of a talent mindset but if you want them to stay you need to show your employees that you truly value talent by helping them to grow into their potential it starts with you if you demonstrate exemplary leadership others will follow practice a talent mindset mentor and coach your key leaders put in the time and effort to develop your people into something great and a great organization will emerge so that’s i mean that you you go on you have a good closing but um you know that’s it it’s recruiting selecting training mentorship putting the right people in the right places think about that’s why putting the right people in the right places all those things are really one thing and that is leadership and this is how you build a team and leaders have to understand the importance of that they have to understand the importance of building the correct team so one thing that we’re doing you know is obviously helping people build these teams with ef overwatch tell me a little bit about the process ef overwatch to take and find the right people bring them in and get them assigned to the right companies out there these and you know a lot of people say hey you guys are a veteran recruiting firm i sort of actually pushed back i said no we are a leadership time acquisition firm we only deal with military leaders and people naturally put a rank on that oh senior enlisted or or officers no it’s all levels in the military as long as they have the attributes we’re looking for especially humility so the military leaders come coming out of the military have already been highly vetted and guess what they have reputations and it’s very easy for us to reach back into those communities and reach into the seals and say hey does anyone know this choco willing guy yep i went through buzz with them solid another guy says i did two platoons with them you could not find a more reliable team-oriented individual and that’s what we need to hear we are also putting them through multiple assessments josh’s epi we’re going to start utilizing that as a basis for us plus we want to collect data to see if we can start identifying the difference between high performers middle performers and low performers and he’s already started that uh that process um and then really with with the candidate side it’s so simple it’s very easy to identify the ones that are just you’ve got it and we’re really looking for the top 10 20 of every community in the military and those that that don’t fall into that realm we still want to help them with training we’re dedicated to our brothers and sisters in arms to make sure that they’re they’re successful we can’t place every candidate you know we just don’t have enough job opportunities one day we will but if one thing for the military leaders that come to us they go through some of the best training but they go through the extreme ownership and what what we talked about this last night the reason i love extreme ownership is i’ve never seen two people you and life create a leadership system that is so simple because if you go ask the air force the army the navy the marine corps they’re all they’re all going to give you different answers on what attributes are uh important and what are the the primary principles of leadership they’re all saying the same thing but it’s not codified so what extreme ownership and even for the candidates reading the book is what we tell them is hey in the interview process you have to tell a story why we love extreme ownership so much is not only is it going to help you contextualize your leadership experience and that’s what they need help with some of these leaders coming out special operations leaders who have been serving for 20 years leading his muscle memory to them now and that’s why if you ask them the question tell us about your leadership style some struggle through it but when we teach them the context of extreme ownership they start to to get their story and the way you guys wrote the book combat story principal business contacts helps them to translate we all know the number one challenge for veterans trying to get jobs is translating their experience extreme ownership sets them on the path to doing that in a good manner then i handle that first part they get george and carly walden uh and they put them through search training they prepare them for the interview process the feedback we’re getting from senior special operations leaders to other military leaders is this is the best advice i’ve ever gotten from taps and all these other programs that we go through we don’t sugarcoat anything we give them the reality of the situation and we’re very straightforward that it’s on you we can’t step into the interview with you it is on you to convey your value to the organization and get them to say yes they want to say yes that’s the military leader side and talk about rewarding work not only do we do we we make a you know a good paycheck from from this line of work it’s also the emotional return on investment from seeing our former brothers and sisters step into senior management positions and then crush it best feedback we get from business leaders best hire i’ve i’ve ever made on the the client side we screen our clients as diligently as we screen our candidates and this has been a learning process we’ve got to learn this through scars and it comes down to i need the clients to commit and i need to hear that they have a foundational belief that leadership is wildly and infinitely more important than industry experience if we hear that from the clients we believe they truly understand that then that’s a client we’re most likely going to work with but if we get a client we’ve had this like hey listen i need a leader right now to step into this role i don’t want to have to train them i don’t want to have to build a relationship with them literally said this i just need them to do their job and it was a lucrative role we said hey we’re not the best fit because we know that that relationship is just going to end up poorly so also if clients come to us and they say hey we need to fill in 20 days they’ve already compromised the process and we’re not going to do that so we’re very prideful on the white glove service that we provide and if and we don’t have many misses at all but if we find out a candidate didn’t work it is like a gut punch it is like our reputation has been marred and that we take it very seriously um and i think that’s what uh you know sort of differentiates us from from a lot of the executive search firms out there is i know we together and george we’re going to build this into the number one leadership talent acquisition from in the nation i have no doubt that when people look for directors of leadership and training as well as chief leadership officers they’re going to say go to ef overwatch because the men and women we’re placing know how to train people they know how to create uh the foundation for strong cultures and that’s really where we’re making the name right now we’ll still place people in the ceo roles general management roles but one of my passions for if overwatch is that that director of leadership in training or the clo position yeah you know just to be completely transparent to be in talent acquisition you have to have a pretty strong masochistic gene about you because it’s a brutal a brutal job function but i’ve been helping veterans for over 20 years and where it started was i want to be able to give to our brothers and sisters in arms and things that i didn’t have when i transitioned out in the 90s and what they didn’t have was actionable information and we deal once we go through selection kind of an assessment and finding that right candidate with all those attributes there’s still this bridge between the ideal opportunity for that veteran leader for that senior leader and that position it’s called the interview and that is very very difficult for veterans to cross that divide to be able to articulate clearly and in a crisp professional impactful manner in the interview that you’re going to be able to over deliver in that particular role so it isn’t just you know we’re doing all facets of it and i i think that’s what makes the dynamic between me and mike and our team so well so good so solid and so different is that you have 20 years of selection and assessment we’ve both been in leadership roles i’ve been in the executive roles and we’re bringing actionable information to top military leaders so that they are ready for that transition into corporate america and when you put that person in that position it begets more veteran hiring and so we have to get it right with the company we have to get it right with the veteran and and there’s some veterans that we we’re not going to place but we’re absolutely agnostic if they come to us we’re going to help but crossing that bridge screening our candidates screening our clients we are very meticulous about how we go about doing that yeah i think uh talking to some of the clients of people that we’ve placed and it’s just awesome to hear everything that you guys are talking about it’s it’s like it’s like with extreme ownership when we go and work with a company and we check back in with them three months later and they’re like oh yeah this is working this is working this is awesome and it’s the same thing we’re getting back you know when i hear from clients you know this is the best hire we’ve had oh yeah we we were worried and now we’re promoting i mean it’s just like a totally it as as we often say it works this stuff works and you take these individuals and i i know mike you and i have been talking about this and i know it’s a little bit hard to do but where some of the guys some of the guys that we’ve placed we’re going to get them on the podcast so they can talk about not just their military experience but then what it was like going through ef overwatch and now what it’s like entering the civilian world you know we’re letting them get settled in a little bit before we yank them back to fly out to california and do this but i think it’ll be awesome for people to start to hear those stories and get that feedback um when people want to engage ef overwatch what’s the process so they can go to the website efoverwatch com another thing we we do with companies is we are here as a talent advisory we can come in and basically set the foundation based off the playbook we’ve provided so you have a a hiring process from which to grow and that’s probably the greatest service we can provide beyond just finding the right leaders for your organization that’s critical there’s a lot of times that george will actually have to ask the client do you have interview questions what’s your process can i send you something to help you make the selection of the leaders we present and that’s more often than uh than not that talent advisory piece is key but but if i’m just a company out there that wants to hire so i go to i go to efoverwatch com i fill out the various information and then we’re going to set up a call and you’re going to talk with mike you’ll talk to myself you may talk with one other person and we’re gonna really kind of dig in with you as to okay let’s talk about your company what is your position in the market what are you trying to accomplish where are you trying to grow what are your leadership gaps what are your individual contributor gaps you know we want to know both of those things you know what are those things that are keeping you up at night and then let’s talk about how talent and leadership solves those problems and are you committed to leadership is the most important thing in your business and you know we’ll also walk through to find out the maturity of their hiring process and and how they’ve done it because you know we we want to make sure that they know how to do it because there are mechanics behind us as well we’ve helped with offer letters i’ve helped with compensation you know structuring complex offers which which is not easy for small and medium business to do a lot of times they just don’t have that expertise so we will sit down and spend a good hour hour and a half with them uh you know diagnosing you know why did they come to us what is it that they need what can we solve for them and should we be working together and i’m sorry misunderstood the the question jacob absolutely it’s going to be a series of phone calls we want to know everything about your business about your industry um and a lot of times the reason we do these phone calls because what business leaders think they want is not necessarily what they need and our our job as well doing that is to advise them based off what we’re hearing what we think you really need is x y and z not abc and our clients have followed our advice and it’s worked out beautifully we’re you know we’re in that advice is coming from nothing but scars and failures especially with 20 years of talent acquisition between him and uh carly so we we want a very very strong relationship with our clients if they sign the contract beyond that then it gets into the talent sync what a talent sync is for us is we’re going to spec out what that position is and what are the attributes they’re truly looking for from there we tell them hey we’re going to need usually two to three weeks to start screening and assessing potential leaders the the the people the right leaders for this position it could be through our organic talent pool we’re also going to run an external search for people we haven’t touched yet that may be out there that may be a good fit for that uh that role and that takes time and our clients again we’re preaching patients um we have a pretty darn good uh fill speed the rate to fill um and if people allow us to go through our process it usually very statistically works out in a very good uh pairing yeah well it’s like what we do methodical and you know we say all the time at epsilon front what we do is we solve problems through leadership and what better way to solve a problem through leadership than to actually give a person give a give a company a leader that understands these principles that knows how to lead that knows how to step in and make things happen so that’s been awesome ef overwatch com uh i can’t we look we’ve been going for almost three and a half hours but real quick ef battlefield we just kind of ran our first pilot program and uh tell us about that a little bit so this besides let me interject that it was freaking awesome you weren’t a believer at first is that accurate or that’s completely inaccurate i don’t know where you where why do you think that we life and i thought were like oh jocker’s not necessarily a believer he he has to see the concept personally i 100 i’m a believer um that was a thousand percent i mean you know if you think about what i do in this podcast i take i take battlefield strolls through books so for me to go out and walk battlefields is to to me i would do nothing but that that would be my whole life in fact i was telling you i got offered a show in europe to like go and walk battlefields and talk the stories and i just couldn’t do it it was multiple months of filming and i just it’s not happening you know i just can’t do it but at some point in my life i wouldn’t be surprised so yeah i don’t know i don’t know where that that idea came from that is a bad assumption a lack of relationship with knowing our boss yeah and i’m not going to take ownership it’s actually kind of crazy to think that me that me even with my whole life would not want to go out and walk on that sacred hallowed battlefields and talk about leadership that’s yeah so i’m 100 on board and i always have been from day one so so where this came from is uh in 2012 no yeah 2012 with one of my seal squadrons the commanding officer especially the timing was not good we were one month away from going to afghanistan and and i’m an operations officer and of course you know the the the task list of what you need to get done before you deploy is pretty deep as an operations officer and i i sort of tried to reason with him like hey timing’s not good and he heard me out and he said mike guess what i said what we’re going out there leadership development is not optional it’s mandatory and so we went out to gettysburg and of course i’m pouty you know i’m doing my quiet sort of podium i’m there um and as we started to walk the different stands the two-day uh walk of gettysburg you started to realize that the commanders of both confederate and union forces face the same dilemmas same human dilemmas and human problems that we face in afghanistan iraq and other regions of the world what makes them we call this in the military we call these staff rights it is a technique we utilize to develop our people again looking at past examples of commanders humans that made both great decisions and bad decisions and learning from their mistakes and their successes to make you a better leader when you walk and people may see say well you know the civil war is drastically different than iraq or afghanistan technology no the problems they face transcend geography they transcend technology they transcend time and this is why a lot of businesses do these staff rides we call it ef battlefield but what i think we do better than any just sort of historian that takes people out there is we tie extreme ownership into it and on this first one the pilot we brought 20 of our clients out and i don’t know about you i mean they probably don’t call you because they don’t have your phone number but i’ve been getting text messages from ce the ceos that were out there that this was one of the most valuable leadership development trips they’ve ever taken oh you could see it on their faces in the first hour you can see it on their faces they’re looking they’re taking notes they’re talking to each other uh yeah it was just extremely impactful and you know it was a pilot and we’re gonna start spinning those things up um yeah if you will we’ll keep you posted we’ll keep you posted and i mean there’s going to be limited seats i mean that’s just the way it is it’s going to be small groups but who knows it’s freaking it’s just an unbelievable way to learn and an unbelievable way to develop in an unbelievable way to increase your understanding not just of history not just of leadership but of human nature to go out there and see what has happened in our past so it’s freaking awesome um a lot of stuff going on man we do so the book comes out when november 10th so it’s it’s up on amazon right now the talent war um it’s right now we just have the uh ebook the kindle version the paperback will be up momentarily uh it’s in amazon right now then the hardback will follow that in audiobook ultimately though the book launches november 10th which if i need to educate you you know what november 10th is you don’t need to educate me bro the marine corps birthday no coincidence uh george any any uh closing comments here you know this is uh it’s been an interesting journey to write this book and it’s it’s it’s very serendipitous to find somebody who has the same passion for talent that i have and and so i you know i hope that mike and i got the best out of each other in this book pushed each other and uh really proud of what we’ve delivered here because ultimately it it’s about helping companies just get better and win and and i’d like to think we did a pretty good job of giving them a good road map the talent is the most critical thing that you can focus on any closing thoughts mike none check we’re trying to get better we’re trying to build a better team echo charles yes any recommendations on how we can get better interesting thing about what we’ve been talking about is it’s like yeah you guys talk about um you know these are things to to look for you know and as far as hiring and stuff but on the other side of the coin like if you’re looking to get higher hired it’s like a good in from informational resource to be like okay that’s what i’m going to strive for you know very interesting anyway as far as striving for stuff let’s talk about jackal fuel as far as striving to transition so okay these uh okay so jackal fuel uh uh how should i say assortment supplementation items the ones that stay on my mind which i noticed like i don’t so much think that much about milk really yeah that’s interesting you must be nuts not wanting to bit be stronger well here’s the things not that i don’t take mulk all the time i don’t think about it all the time but i do think about joint warfare krill oil and vitamin d for some reason i don’t know why i feel like because it’s like an everyday maintenance thing and when i stop taking it that’s when i pay the price harsh here’s my question to you yes do you know what that price is like have you felt it like because you don’t really go off after it i don’t i don’t go off it yeah so i don’t know the price yeah i do yeah so basically like you know how like okay all right let me turn my attention over here so you know like sometimes like you okay maybe you’re feeling weak or whatever right but as far as your joints go you can feel strong but your joints are like jammed up that’s almost in a way worse than being weak because if you’re weak you’re like oh maybe i didn’t eat good maybe whatever but if you’re joint it’s like it’s a it’s a different issue see i’m saying here’s the good news get back on the joint warfare get back on the krill oil you just feel all that stuff just flying back into your joints then you’re back in the game then we start feeling good about it real good by the way um so and i know this too because i have gone off it and gotten on few times and yeah so i know the price and i know the benefits do you are you able to make these assessments because you’re a doctor no okay well my my explanation of the joint warfare and krill oil flying back into your joints was we’ll say a little bit short of a medical explanation as far as how it works i’m not a doctor either yes i know that but i’ve done also a very intense medical assessment of yeah of vitamin d3 and cold war and here’s the assessment i’ve traveled all over the place i’ve shaken hands with a bunch of people i have not had this disease called covid for some reason could that reason be right okay could that reason be because i’m on the d3 and the cold war look i’m not saying it is yeah because i’m not a doctor no but but you know you know there’s there is such thing as coincidence then there’s such thing as correlation and then there’s such thing as causation you see i’m saying the three levels right hey that’s it we’ll leave it at that how about that cool safe right yeah just saying we’re talking earlier about uh you can only ask certain questions in the interview or not so much you can only ask you can’t ask certain questions that’s very correct actually um to deviate from the the jackal fuel thing just for a second isn’t it a lot of the times the case where the interviewer is kind of in a way like wanting to bond with the person just on a maybe on just a small level like hey oh when’s the baby do you know and it’s like oh i jam that up like i didn’t realize you know it’s like it’s not like they’re trying to like enforce power or something like this no i mean the best interviewers are always trying to build a relationship right because one of the critical things you want to get out of people is authenticity yeah that’s one of the biggest things and the best way you do that is by building a relationship and to your point that person may come in they may not come into your company so yeah they do and most of those things aren’t done with malice they happen accidentally but you know in today’s litigious society even accidentally scary that will get you yeah and see that’s why it’s so like yeah like scary for real scary because it’s like man it’s one thing to be like hey that was a dick move for me to do that so i’m not going to do that anymore you know well how about i just not be a dick in the interview problem solved right here’s the thing problem’s not solved because you’re getting sued yeah cause i can be well in that case yes but as far as from a learning perspective or from just a general functioning perspective and be like how about this i’m going to be real nice how about that i’m going to bond with this guy meanwhile you’re like in a line what do you call minefield landmine one of those you’re walking on eggshells and whatnot yeah which kind of isn’t a very good bonding uh approach working on an eggshell yeah then you you kind of get you know you’re seem impersonal you’re risk-averse you know so you know as as we teach veterans any good interview is simply a conversation that’s ultimately what it comes down to and you know when we work with veterans it’s just hey man be yourself be authentic you know but put it in the vernacular of extreme ownership and talk about how great of a leader you are just have a conversation and that’s it’s simple not easy and i love that phrase labor to laws are not always uh a good thing not all of them are great and uh that’s a profession in itself standing on top of uh yeah yeah it’s just part of my profession is you know that training you know ultimately training keeps people safe right that’s what it does yeah and that’s one of those situations where you can be mad about it you might not like a particular law but it’s the law and you gotta you gotta just deal with it that’s just the way it is yeah so you never know people could be making claims like medical claims about things about supplements and you could run into all kinds of legal problems see what you just did there but hey if you’re waging war on colds various sickness illnesses viruses etc you know not to name any is there a medical is that a medical claim really is it i don’t know maybe maybe not nonetheless these are the things that you do want to follow so if you want to call the what’s that called like a caveat or no it’s not a caveat is it a caveat yeah like a distance like uh yeah just here’s my disclaimer i’m not a doctor so don’t listen to me yes yeah well or just listen you know yeah how about this listen to jacques how about that okay we’ll go with it we’ll stick with that now keep in mind that i’m not a doctor yeah johnny kim doctor no doctor all these things in mind yes vitamin vitamin d daily daily man these are things that you know again to stay on your mind i’m not saying don’t keep mulk on your mind i’m not saying that i’m saying me personally in my experience d3 joint warfare krill oil on my mind every day unless molk if it is on your mind or not whatever these are the things that okay we have these two pronged effect let me move my attention over here to my pros so you have long term you have short term right every once in a while you’ll get a golden nugget that’s both that’s what milk is see i’m saying a lot of these health foods they don’t have the immediate gratification as heavy as a lot of these unhealthy fruits you see what i’m saying it’s true milk is one of those rare golden nuggets the other one is sushi my opinion but back to milk it’s dessert in the form of health food or protein health food in the form of a dessert boom either way you’re good there you go either way it’s true also discipline multiple forms multiple forms there’s your intrinsic discipline that you go through life with that comes from within you know we’re not talking about that one right now we’re talking about the supplementation um so yes okay what is it what is the three forms we got the powder that’s a good one there’s a good pre-workout one i like this first pre-workout like i dig i like it for pre-life yeah and by the way it was so hot this weekend out here with bob you’re in texas so i know it was hot there but i mixed up the jocko palmer in the big iced tea like pitcher with ice in it that was your jam also the uh the cans okay here’s the here’s what the cans are really really it’s a health brain health drink right so it doesn’t sound glamorous right think of it it’s a brain and body health drink okay in the form of a of a delicious refreshing beverage beverage but you want to say a different time i was gonna say energy drink but then then you got all the what do you call this what do you call it when you have a reputation a word has a reputation a freaking uh stigma has a stigma you see insane anyway that’s what it is that’s what the can is also this wingo okay look we don’t want to drink the can we don’t want to mix up powders okay i get it pop a pill that even has a stigma nonetheless this one’s a good way of popping good pills capsules technically um you know all these forms depending on your lifestyle depending on what you’re doing that day they can you know at least one’s gonna work for you i think in my experience that’s how it is also we got warrior kid milk we got chocolate white tea and all the stuff is available at the vitamin shop we also got if you’re gonna get into jiu jitsu which you might you probably should go to origin maine com get yourself a geek get yourself a rash guard get yourself things that you you can wear when you’re not on the jiu jitsu mats of justice because despite our best efforts we’re not always training jiu jitsu sometimes you have to have other parts of your life that’s why we make jeans that’s why we make boots that’s why we make t-shirts whatever a bunch of different clothing items all that stuff and the supplements available at origin maine dot com yes sir also we have a store jocko has a store it’s called jocko store anyway some good developments and improvements on there for those of us that browse jackal store for those of us that are seeking praise for our efforts i’m not even saying i’m doing it i’m just saying the store is becoming more and more developed in one person’s opinion and i think it’s an uh what do you call it an objective all right we’ll go anyway jocklestore com go there if you appreciate the developments if you appreciate beautiful web design yeah exactly yeah did you go check out web design yeah well actually technically i didn’t really design it you know i got a finger in the pot nonetheless as far as design goes nonetheless we supply provide really clothing items that you can wear to represent while you’re on this path that we’re on this path that’s not easy by the way i don’t know if you guys know this or not mike and george it’s hard it’s full of pitfalls temptations and traps wise men once told me that nonetheless when you’re on the path you want to represent jocklestore com i got hoodies shirts hats beanies shorts board shorts at some point shirts are sweet they’re here’s the thing they’re not up okay but they’re real improvements it’s a process it’s a process you know what what’d mike say mike said something it’s a methodology it’s a process we’re gonna follow the process trust the patience is one of our things yeah you see what i’m saying anyway incorporate that quote incorporate that into the whole deal and boom you got it anyway yes chocolate store that’s free if you want something i’ll get something also got a podcast record uh subscribe to this podcast because echo thinks that you’re not going to we also have jocko unraveling which has been on this feed it’s going to soon be on its own feed jocko unraveling podcasts to myself and daryl cooper that was the thread we had to change the name because i was getting sued again which is always fun so that’s why it’s called jocko unraveling because i own my own name jocko so i can pretty much put that on anything and no one can bother me about it grounded podcast which we haven’t done in a while maybe record one more this week we have an opportunity warrior kid podcast as well for those little kids out there and if you got little kids or even if you’re a grown human and you need some soap go to irishoaksranch com where young aiden the warrior kid is making soap there’s a new one now what were the warrior kids already made warrior kids so like actual so not just you as an adult but also your children can stay clean youtube yep we have a youtube channel where echo makes videos and if it’s a four-minute video he puts a bunch of explosions in it and if it’s a four-hour video then it’s just nothing yeah because that’s the way he operates different purposes yeah it’s cool all right okay we’re we’re talking about effective hiring processes leadership right mike shelly george should we put explosions smoke and fire in this video occasionally in this in this in this video that we do that we’re doing right now at some point when you’re talking about something it would not be a good thing to have maybe a blackhawk helicopter fly overhead or uh a minigun open up or an explosion happen in the background echo i’m gonna back you up on this uh you know you ask anyone on the if overwatch team i say hey what don’t i do they say we don’t do cute so i’m not talking cute bro i’m talking a minigun i think you’d be over the top i i think you’re heading down the right path i think you’re right but here’s the thing and this is for real if i’m like hey if i get moved inspired and i got my notes here i don’t have my notes here oh so you’re you’re you’re starting to take it under consideration no okay i’m saying i’m explaining i have my notes here maybe i was moved by something george or mike said right i have my notes i’ll be like okay look if i could isolate what they said and try my best to capture the feeling that i got when he said it maybe boom i can cut that up into a little video that might involve explosions the effects would be too much like a certain financial uh tv host right mad money oh yeah do explosions happen did you either like sound effective sound yeah see yes yeah good good comparison i think i think it’s my opinion anyway yes some videos have explosions the shorter ones whatever and the video version of this podcast boom we’re keeping it raw we’re keeping it real i don’t even add color and you want me to add a minigun opening up i don’t know probably not i don’t know though i could be wrong anyway also psychological warfare if you don’t know what that is that’s an album that jocko recorded with tracks each track has a purpose and it gets you past these moments of weakness on this path that we’re on in the event of you being on the path which of course we all are nonetheless 100 effective unknown by the way so yeah you can get that amazon or like a google play anywhere where you can buy mp3s if you want a visual version of the path go to flipsidecanvas com owned by my brother dakota meyer where he’s putting this cool stuff on to things that you can hang on your wall flipsidecanvas com also we got some books we got some books first book talent war by mike cirelli and george randall step up get that we got the code we got leadership strategy in tactics field manual way of the warrior kid one two and three mike in the dragons this blink was freedom field manual and extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership if you like what we’re talking about here check out some of those books books we got echelon from leadership consultancy and what we do is solve problems through leadership go to echelonfront com if you need help inside your organization aligning your leadership getting everyone on the same plan and rowing the boat in the same direction so that you can win echelon echelonfront com and we also have an online version of leadership training look you don’t learn leadership in one day in one hour in one week in one month it’s something you constantly have to check yourself on go to efonline com we totally revamped it we’re doing live stuff all the time if you want to ask me a question if you want to ask me a question you can go to efonline com and i will be there at certain times and you can sit there and ask me a question get feedback have a conversation with me with the rest of the asshole on front team that’s what we’re doing so come and check that out and we got the muster the phoenix muster has been cancelled the orlando muster was cancelled the next muster is dallas texas december 3rd and 4th go to extreme ownership com for details and listen we’re probably going to have to do some kind of social distancing so that means less seats we’ve got people that were scheduled for orlando and were scheduled for phoenix who have now opted to come to dallas i don’t think we’re sold out yet but it’s going to sell out quick just because of those factors so if you want to come go extremeownership com register and we’ve been talking about ef overwatch all day today all this past almost four hours this is what we do efoverwatch com if you’re a company out there and you need leaders which by the way let me tell you something you do need leaders get experienced leaders from the military that understand the principles that we talk about and you can plug them in to your organization so that your organ organization can go to the next level what did i miss fellas that’s it spot on i mean it’s a game changer talent plus leadership equals victory get on board the train america’s mightywarriors org that’s mama lee mark lee’s mom she has dedicated her life after losing mark to helping service members their families gold star families around the world if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america’s mightywarriors org and if you have too much time on your hand and you just want to hear a few more of my monotonous monologues or maybe you think you need just a little bit more of echo’s exasperated explanations then you can find us on the interwebs on twitter instagram facebook echo is at echo charles i am at jocko willink mike zorelli is mj cirelli on twitter and mr cirelli on instagram and facebook michael cirelli george what’s your social media g randall g dot randall g dot randall is instagram that’s the gram echo calls it the gram the gram and for all things echelon front on social media it’s at echelon front and then for ef overwatch at ef overwatch and on the interwebs we can be found at echelonfront com but also efoverwatch com and thanks again guys for coming on been awesome thanks for your service to the country thank you and um you know when you’re you know we always feel like when our service is over in the military we want to serve more and what you guys are doing right now to help veterans transition out of the military get in the civilian sector and get on their next mission you’ve heard me say it a thousand times veterans need a new mission when they leave that mission that they’ve dedicated their life to they get out they need a new mission they’re looking for a new mission you guys are doing a great job providing that mission for them so thank you for that and to all the veterans and all the active duty troops that are out there on the front lines now or have held the line in the past thank you for protecting our ability to pursue life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and to police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and emts and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all the other first responders thank you for protecting us when evil closes in and everyone else out there making things happen is hard accomplishing your mission is hard life is hard but you don’t have to do it alone build yourself a team surround yourself with talent and then go out there and get after it and until next time this is mike and george and echo and jocko out
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