The Debrief w/ Jocko and Dave Berke #2: Importance of Contingency Planning

Jocko and Good Deal Dave Analyze some issues and look for solutions. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is the Jocko Debrief Podcast, episode two with Dave Berke and me, Jocko Willink. Dave, let's debrief. What do you got?

• 0:09Dave Berke?

  Working with this company and we've been them for a little while, but they have a

• 0:16Dave Berke?

  facing a little bit of a challenge. They've got a competitor right now that for the last several months has been prepping a release of a competitive product, same idea, same space as them. And they had been building up in anticipation of this competition, releasing this product. And their plan was they were going to go out, kind of canvas the country with a lot of face to face interaction with their potential clients and kind of explaining to them the difference between those two and try to show that their product is still the superior product.

• 0:45Dave Berke?

  There is no face to face conversations right now. So I'm talking to the head of the sales department who had built the strategy on doing this face to face and because they cannot implement that strategy, he feels like they are setting themselves up for a retreat and that they are going to lose because this other company is positioned a bit better and that they are concerned about how that's going to play out.

• 1:09Dave Berke?

  And they actually should be concerned.

• 1:13Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, if you're, if you've got Plan A and it looks like Plan A isn't going to work and you don't know what Plan B is, you're, you're going to face some issues. That's why we contingency plan.

• 1:23Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:25Dave Berke?

  The contingency planning, first of all, contingency planning is something you should do all the time. Plan A is always a good plan. That's fine, but you should always have some backups or at least consider what a lot of people do, and I understand this too. We don't always think of these other really worst case scenarios. When they were doing their initial planning a year and a half ago, I mean, this is a long range release. This doesn't just happen overnight. Nobody was really thinking of this massive change, which is totally understandable. So some of the, the problems that come with this totally different world, all the companies are facing it. It's not like one company can go do face to face meetings and you can't. You're all kind of stuck in the same boat. The real issue here is we started to dissect it was, so we had this big wave come out in March, this, this COVID wave that shut all

• 2:09Dave Berke?

  this travel down. And the plan was, hey, it's May, June, I see the light at the end of the tunnel. We're starting to kind of ramp back up. It looks like travel is going to open back up. We're going to stick with Plan A.

• 2:23Dave Berke?

  And as this, I don't know if it's the right word to call it, like a second wave or whatever we want to call it, as it became clear that things were not opening up on the, on the right pace, that's kind of when, when the panic set in. And, and the initial part of the conversation is, hey, what's the real problem? Hey, the real problem is you did not have a plan B. The real problem isn't what the competitor's doing, isn't how they positioned themselves or what they're delivering to the market. The problem is, is that you did not put your sales team, you did not lead your team to be in a position to respond to this crisis effectively.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and there's a, a little, I'll pick on you a little bit about the way you said that. So you said the problem was that they didn't have a plan B. That's one statement, which is accurate. But then you also said that the problem is that they didn't respond. And that's an accurate statement. I believe that the more accurate statement out of those two, you see the difference between those two, right?

• 3:19Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 3:20Jocko Willink?

  Like, hey, I didn't have a plan B, but guess what? When I got hit with a contingency that I didn't expect, it's okay, because I'm going to respond to it. So for me, in this particular case, I'm thinking this is more along the lines of lack of response happening. Because there's a funny thing that we used to make fun of guys in the SEAL Teams that would start to plan contingencies, and they start to plan for every contingency. And we would say, hey, what, you know, what happens if a UFO touched down and, and three of your people are, are scooped up by the UFO? Then what, then what are you going to do? So that, to me, this is a, that's what COVID is. I, I had no contingency in my mind where

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  I thought, hey, you know, I can understand, look, we get a terrorist attack and travel gets shut down for a week, two weeks. Okay, you know, we, we, there's a contingency plan for that, and it's a pretty straightforward one. You barely even have to do it. Guess what? We're going to cancel some stuff, and then we'll reschedule. I mean, this is something, something that's so simple, you don't really even have to think about it. But when you start saying, okay, if you would have told me to list out the top 20 contingencies for, for Echelon Front, or from any business, I would have not put... Viral travel shutdown in the top 20 and maybe I'm ignorant, sure.

• 4:40Dave Berke?

  No, I, I think that is a reasonable thing to not include in your contingency list, which is a global pandemic shutdown.

• 4:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, right. I mean, I, I know I should have listened to Bill Gates because he did a Ted talk about it and it was, you know, seriously, there's like people that, and there was, you know, it's interesting on the political spectrum too. You saw people saying, well, you, you should have been ready for this contingency. It's like, how many contingencies are you going to be ready for? Right? And so instead of the, well, in addition to being ready for likely contingency, that's a key word that we always used in the SEAL teams. When we talked about contingencies, it was likely contingencies. You prepare for the top three, four likely contingencies. Once you get beyond that, well, now what we have to do is we have to be able to respond quickly.

• 5:29Jocko Willink?

  We have to make decisions quickly and this is one of the main lessons that I've been teaching through COVID is iterative decision making. Is, hey, I'm going to make, I'm known for being very, very decisive. Why am I known for being very decisive? Because I make very quick decisions, but the way that I cheat in doing that is I make very quick, small decisions. When COVID hit and we started, we had the muster happening in, what was it supposed to happen in May?

• 5:58Jocko Willink?

  Hey, COVID's here, no travel, cancel muster. Well, am I going to immediately cancel muster? Well, I don't know how long COVID is going to last. It might be gone by then. What, so instead it's not a massive decision immediately. Hey, Jamie, call the hotel, we're shutting down. No. Hey, Jamie. Who, if you don't know, is our operations director at, at Echelon Front. Hey, Jamie. Why don't you talk to the hotel and just see what kind of things we could do if we need to push this event back? How much flexibility do they have? So she starts going down the road. That's a, that's a pretty decisive, hey, I made that decision in five seconds, right? Oh, Jocko was super decisive. Yeah, I'm super decisive because all I did was ask Jamie to call someone and talk to him about something.

• 6:43Jocko Willink?

  It's decisive, but, but here's the cool thing. It was action. It was action. We're taking, we're taking positive action. So Jamie, who prior to that's going on, you know, thinking herself, oh gosh, what, what's going to happen to the muster? You know, she, that's a big, that's a big thought. What's going to happen to the muster? What's going to happen? Well, so she doesn't know what to do. Well, guess what? Here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna call the hotel and see what the options are. Okay, boom. All of a sudden, she's got a mode. She knows what she's doing. She's gonna gather some information. And when she gathers that information, guess what we're gonna do? We're gonna reassess it. We're gonna make another small step. So, so being able to respond to bad situations, or completely unpredictable situations, or situations where the information isn't all that good,

• 7:29Jocko Willink?

  all those things, if you're able to do that well, are the marks of a good leader and a good team. When you aren't able to respond, well, that's obviously the marks of a bad leader and a bad team. So, yeah, I think it's important to recognize that you're not gonna be able to plan for every contingency. It's just not gonna happen. And what you need to do is train and keep your mind open so that when things that you don't expect happen, you can adapt to the situation and you can respond appropriately.

• 8:06Dave Berke?

  Yeah, that's a really good point. And, and one of the interesting things that played out as this several month process went through is this, their initial, their, their pre-COVID plan's a good plan. They're really well positioned. They had a solid team. They're in the game. You, you'd worked with them in the past. This is kind of their second iteration with us.

• 8:27Dave Berke?

  They kind of embraced the reality back in March, but they never really, they never really let go of the, what they wanted to do. This face-to-face is the best way we communicate. Nobody does it better than us. I can sit down across from you. I can convey this message. And it was a little unwillingness to just accept what was happening. And one of the things that was, again, very early on in the COVID scenario was you're on EF Online. You had, you said something, I think in the very first one, and we repeated it over and over again. Accept this is real. You said, you told people, you got to accept this is real. And so as March became April, and April kind of turned to June, and hey, maybe

• 9:11Dave Berke?

  they looked for reasons why they could just go back to the original plan. And the part that was the most challenging was from March to July, August.

• 9:22Dave Berke?

  That alternative plan was no longer quite as crazy as it would have been if we were doing this back last year. So this potential of not being able to do face to face was becoming much more real. And what they started to look for is reasons why they didn't have to do that. Hey, I heard travel is opening up in the Northeast. Hey, this airline is not. And so they held on to that too long. The outcome of that was, just like you said, the ability to maneuver, what prevented them from, from being able to respond was the unwillingness to just accept this is real and accept that is a, is a much more likely alternative than if you were to say, like I said, seven months ago, you got some magic crystal ball, here

• 10:05Dave Berke?

  come the Martians. Of course, that's not a reasonable thing. The way this kind of played out, though, is when we had that first conversation was like, listen, the issue here is as a leader, you didn't put your team in a position to respond. What he came back with was, we've got a two day role play scenario. I'm bringing every salesperson on my sales team on a live two day Zoom session. Can you support with us and role play? Because we have to be ready for the, the virtual interaction. And that idea actually came from a couple of subordinates, a couple of his junior sales reps who had accepted the fact that this is not going to play out the way you think, boss. I think this is going to be a problem for us. We're

• 10:48Dave Berke?

  not going to get to do face to face. And when he finally accepted that this was real, it was awesome to see that team pivot and him say, hey, listen, you know what? I miscalculated, team. I got this wrong. What do we do now? Because now we're weeks away from this. And they were able to go right into this two day session that we supported and jumped on the calls of them and watch them go through back and forth and help them do the role play. And the, the real issue for him was he finally accepted that this was real.

• 11:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And wrapped up in all that is, is an expression that you hear all the time.

• 11:24Jocko Willink?

  And it's, it's that people see what they wanna see. And that is so wrapped up in there. And if you think about what that expression is wrapped up in, guess what? That expression is wrapped up in ego. I, I think things are gonna go this way. I want things to go this way. And therefore, when I see, you know, the Northeast open up travel on trains, planes are next, bro. Planes are next. We're good to be south, the Northeast is, they got hit first. They're already out of it. We're good to go. Let's roll. It's, we don't have to worry about this stupid online stuff. We're gonna be back face to face. People see what they wanna see. And when I say people,

• 12:06Jocko Willink?

  I'm talking about you. I'm talking about me. I see what I wanna see. And that's one of those, one of the things that you have to be watch out for when you're a positive minded person. Hey, this is gonna go good. And this is where I, I actually, you know, I'm, you know, Mr. Positive, see the good, right? All the time. But there's things that I feel deeply. One of them is the crunch of time. I, I really feel the crunch of time because I recognized it a long time ago as the one factor that there's absolutely no mercy. It has no mercy. You let that, you let that hour go, you let those two months go by, they are not gonna have mercy on you. And if you think about that,

• 12:50Jocko Willink?

  if you constantly pay attention to time, because people just lose track of it. People just lose track of it. They think that they can crunch it. They think you can make it back. They think you can turn it around. You can't. And for me, time is always like a primary driver of letting me see what reality is. Because if you're not dealing with reality, if you're not accepting what is gonna happen or what could happen. And by the way, how much, what do I give up if? If I think something is going to happen, or I think something else is going to happen, what do I sacrifice by saying, okay, it looks like I got some contingencies to plan for. Looks like I need to set up, you know, a security element over here in case we get attacked from over there. That that seems like a good move. What does it cost me? Nothing. It doesn't cost me anything. So you can make maneuvers to prepare for things that are coming.

• 13:35Jocko Willink?

  Whether you're right or wrong, it doesn't matter. You didn't sacrifice very much to make this adjustment. So when you get shut down and you think it's going to be for a month and then you'll be able to go back to face to face. Cool. So what are you going to do for the next month? We're going to hibernate. We're going to sit around. Right? What do you gain from that? Nothing. What do you gain by saying, hey, look, just in case, just in case I'm wrong, and just in case the reality is we're not going to be able to travel for another six months. Let's start coming up with a plan on how we're going to execute this thing. And by the way, let's start executing it. Let's give it a shot. And if you do that, what do you sacrifice? You don't sacrifice anything and you actually move yourself and your team forward, which is what we're trying to do.

• 14:20Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and there's so many components inside there. There's obviously taking ownership of the problem. There's cover and move where people are working together and solving problems. There's a whole bunch of individual elements that we teach. But all of it together is the idea that as a leader, you're responsible for your team being successful. You have to do whatever is required to do that. And the only thing worse than the panic of recognizing you wasted those two months, or whatever that time is, is when you look out over the horizon and you see that your competition didn't. And that was a hard lesson for them. Again, you know, their ability to respond to that, they had they had support literally to step up and make things happen,

• 15:01Dave Berke?

  which was awesome to see, but that adds to the, hey, not only did you waste your time, they didn't.

• 15:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because where does that put you? That puts you four months behind. Right? Because they moved two months and you waited.

• 15:14Dave Berke?

  Nowhere. Yeah.

• 15:15Jocko Willink?

  Rough. All right. Next one. What do you got?

• 15:22Dave Berke?

  Company reached out to us. This was kind of cool because when they first reached out to Echelon Front looking for leadership development, what they were looking for is they are, they got a company that works and safety is a huge part of what they do. They put people out on site and they deal with kind of high-risk terrain and things like that. So, safety is a critical component of their culture. As you might guess, companies that work in high-risk environments, they're littered with young, motivated, type A people that don't always think about their own personal safety. And when they reached out to Echelon Front, a lot of it was the experience that the SEALs had and they actually connected with me as well because in my experience with aviation, they thought there'd be a really cool connection

• 16:05Dave Berke?

  between the risk that the military takes on the aviation side and in the ground side and drawing a parallel to how to improve their safety culture. So, they originally asked us to come and join them and we started working with them. Their goal was to help us or have us help them build a better culture of safety to lower mishaps, lower injuries, and help their team. When I first started to explain to them, I said, "Hey, let me, let me offer how Echelon Front as a company, when we work with companies a lot dealing with the same thing, let me talk to you about how we look at safety culture." Safety problems inside an organization is a leadership problem. We don't look at safety as some sort of standalone,

• 16:47Dave Berke?

  separate, isolated thing that you have to fix your safety culture. If you have a problem with safety, you have a leadership problem.

• 16:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and by the way, we look at every problem that you have as a leadership problem. But you are right, it is interesting that people try and carve safety out as if this isn't really, "Hey, look, you know, people gotta be safe," but that's the responsibility of the safety officer over there.

• 17:09Dave Berke?

  Totally. We have a safety team. We want to help bolster the safety team so they can go make people safe. And what I did was I just made the connection between our view of safety and, look, aviation, same in the world you came up with, safety is very important. But what I told him, I said, hey, let me just explain how we see it and see if we can find some compatibility. This is before we started working together. I said, hey, we do not see safety as the mission. Safety is not what we do. Let me talk about why safety is important, though. Our mission, my mission in aviation was to take an airplane, go over and drop bombs, or do what I'm going to do with an aircraft. I'm going to take a team and I'm going to go cross the line of departure and engage an enemy. There is inherent risk

• 17:51Dave Berke?

  associated with that. Flying airplanes can be risky. And if I want to ensure that I have a perfect safety record, the way to guarantee that I have no safety mishaps and no safety problems in an airplane is I don't fly. I will never crash an airplane if I don't go fly an airplane. The problem with that is, is I will not accomplish my mission. I will not be successful in the military. As a pilot, I won't be successful in business if we say to ensure safety. So we just won't go do our job. We won't go out on site and work in a high-risk environment. The flip side, if I just ignore safety and go, hey, I'm not here to be safe. I'm here to get the job done. I'm here to accomplish the mission. I'm going to take my team and go do whatever is required. You're going to start hurt people. You're going to start breaking things. You're going to start damaging things. And over time, you won't have the people and the equipment to do your job. And guess what happens to

• 18:35Dave Berke?

  the mission? The exact same thing. You will not be successful. So there's actually a balance between having no concern for risk and being so risk averse and being so safety-focused that you don't actually do your job. Neither one of those will help you accomplish it. And when we made the connection, they recognized what they didn't need was us to train their safety team. What they needed was leadership development inside their company. And by definition, the safety culture would improve at their company.

• 19:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think this was on EF Online the other day. It might have been with a client. Somebody asked about culture and, you know, the establishment of culture and how important is culture. And I got a little fired up talking about this because when you extrapolate culture out, culture is actually the ultimate form of decentralized command, is the ultimate form of decentralized command. If I understand the culture of my team, then I can actually

• 19:42Jocko Willink?

  make decisions based on our values. If I know that as an American service member overseas, we wanna, we, we uphold the highest values. When I have to make a decision about what I'm going to do, I can make a decision. I can make just about any decision based on the fact that I want to do the right thing. That's what I'm trying to do. So if you're in a company and you understand what the culture is, you understand that the culture is we always take care of the customer. You can make 99% of your decisions just based on the fact that, hey, look, the customer's bringing back this piece of equipment that

• 20:24Jocko Willink?

  we gave them and they say it's broken. Okay. Yep. Hey, Roger that. No problem. Here's your, here's a new piece of equipment. Now, can it get to a point where somebody brings back a, you know, a million dollar piece of equipment? You say, oh yeah, no problem. No questions asked here. No, there's a limit, but you can make 99% of your decisions just based on understanding the culture of the company. Same thing with safety. If we understand where the level of safety and how important safety is, if we understand that, then we understand that we can make 99.9% of our decisions correctly, just based on the, our understanding of safety culture. So, culture is an absolutely powerful thing. And yes,

• 21:08Jocko Willink?

  you are right that where culture comes from is leadership. And what's important, when I say that culture comes from leadership, when I talk to companies about culture, I say, where does culture come from? People say the leadership. I say, who are the leaders? Everybody, everybody in an organization is responsible for the culture inside that organization. It's not just, hey, the, the CEO sets the culture. Well, the CEO has influence on the culture, but that CEO can have a culture in his mind. But if the people, if the team doesn't understand, accept, acknowledge, encourage, grow, and believe that culture, that culture is worthless. Everyone, that, that culture has to be unified throughout the organization.

• 21:51Jocko Willink?

  How do you get the culture unified throughout the organization? Well, what we have to do is we have to make sure that everyone understands why we have this culture. We have to understand that, hey, listen, you want to know why we have the culture of the customer always being right, the customer comes first, you want to know why we have that culture? Why? Well, number one, we want to provide a good service. That's great. We're good people, we want to provide a good service. Also, when we provide good service, people go out and tell other people about the good service that we provide. People review us on the internet. People refer us business. We end up with a good quality rating. When we get a good quality rating from people, people come back. It grows our business.

• 22:35Jocko Willink?

  The more our business grows, the more people come in here, the more people get treated well, the more people spread that word, that is how we grow. The opposite, if we don't care about our customers, guess what? Bad word spreads even faster than good word, and we'll end up with no business here at all. Safety. Why is safety important for our culture? Well, because we don't want anyone to hurt. Yeah, absolutely, we care about our people, for sure. Guess what else? If we have accidents all the time, guess what happens to our insurance? Do you know that there's, there's companies, there's, there's owners that will not hire us to build? If we have a bad safety record, they don't want a safety group, they want a group with safety issues. So if, if we have a bad safety record, Dave, if you break the safety rules and you get hurt, it's not just you that gets hurt.

• 23:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's horrible for you, it's horrible for your family, it's horrible for your, being able to pay your mortgage, it's horrible for a bunch of reasons. But on top of that, you're not just hurting yourself. It hurts the company because now the company has to pay more insurance and now guess what happens to our price? We got to raise our price. And now, what do we get more jobs or less jobs when we raise our price? I'll tell you, we get less jobs. When we get less jobs, does, do you still have a job? No, you don't. So, the culture is not just something you can pull out of thin air and mandate it on people. There has to be an explanation behind culture, and the most important part of that explanation has to be why we have this culture, and how

• 23:58Jocko Willink?

  the culture itself reinforces the survivability and the growth of our organization.

• 24:09Dave Berke?

  That culture to decentralized command connection, you actually also made that on an EF online session from a question from one of the troopers who joins us on EF online. But that was one that I called you on, on the phone after, because every time something comes up, you and I end up on the phone talking about some leadership thing and

• 24:27Jocko Willink?

  Doing a debrief?

• 24:28Dave Berke?

  Doing a debrief, that's right. And I remember calling you like, hey, that was that, the way you communicated that to them. And we actually made the connection to this client, which was this idea that culture is what, that's what decentralized command is built around. And that was a really powerful thing for me, because it was this idea that in simplest terms for decentralized command, it's what let people make those decisions without their boss being over there telling them what to do, which simply cannot be done because you can't be with all your people all the time. But it got connected directly to what you said was, one of the problems they described is like, well, we only have a two-person safety team. We can't hire 20 safety people. It's exactly right. That's

• 25:13Dave Berke?

  why every single person in the organization has to understand that despite whatever their title is, or their job, or their particular skill, they are responsible for safety. And actually, they're responsible for everything. But that connection of culture, which, and so, all too often, culture is just some sort of thing that's written on the wall. This is what we believe, but people don't truly understand what it means. When I can now connect that to a principle that we teach, decentralized command is a principle we teach, and I'm actually able to explain it in a way that they go, oh, I know what you're talking about. I read that in the book. You talked about that when you gave your combat leadership brief to us. That was a really powerful thing that worked directly with them because you know what? Most companies can't have an entire safety team just running around making sure everybody's

• 25:58Dave Berke?

  safe. They need to rely on their people to believe in that. It lets their people make decisions that they know is in the best interest of the organization winning. And that was just a huge point that made a huge input impacted this team.

• 26:13Jocko Willink?

  It's amazing how everything's connected, isn't it?

• 26:17Dave Berke?

  Indeed.

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  All right. What do we got? One more?

• 26:20Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Jocko Willink?

  What do you got?

• 26:23Dave Berke?

  We got, so.

• 26:25Jocko Willink?

  You like the fact that you prep these?

• 26:26Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Dave Berke?

  This is awesome.

• 26:28Jocko Willink?

  I'm like, well, let's do it. But I can't prep any more podcasts, bro. You need to, you need to at least come up with a subject matter. I'll debrief it all day long, but these are on you, man.

• 26:39Dave Berke?

  Dude, the coolest part about it is when you ask me, you're like, hey, I got this idea. I think we should do this. Can you come up with some stuff? And I'm like, Jocko, I have an unlimited supply. I mean, every single day, I am talking with clients that we're working with about these problems and how we're applying the principles to help them come up with a solution. And there's an unlimited supply of this. And again, these problems might be specific to these companies, but they are relevant and apply everywhere.

• 27:07Jocko Willink?

  When's the last time you went on the road face to face with a company?

• 27:09Dave Berke?

  The first week of March was the last time I was on an airplane.

• 27:12Jocko Willink?

  So it's, it's been interesting and we've been very lucky because we never would have been able to convince people that we can do what we do over the internet. We never would have been able to convince people if everyone didn't get forced to make Zoom calls with their family and make Zoom calls. You know, I, I always tell people I had Easter dinner with my parents on Zoom. And that's when I realized, okay, this is, we're at a different place now. And, you know, trying to explain to a client, there's another good move was, was, and we, we all just, just kind of did this instinctively. When we had to cancel some, when a client canceled with us and we would connect with them to discuss where we go from here.

• 27:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, sure. Let's do a Zoom meeting and let's talk about what we can do to help you out. Boom, all of a sudden, we're on a Zoom meeting with them and we're having a real time discussion and they can see that. Look, do you lose something on Zoom? Sure, you lose, there's, there's some, there's some element that gets lost. It is very small. Yeah. It is very small. It's a very small element. You know, maybe you lose some of the body language. Maybe you lose some level of, of, of the presence. But the reality is when I'm talking to 200 people in a room. I can't see, I can't see the facial expressions of those people in the back. When I'm talking to 200 people on a Zoom call, I see everybody. Yeah. I see, I see what they, I see someone that's got that puzzled look on your face, their face.

• 28:39Jocko Willink?

  Or you've heard me do this on EF online where I get done answering a question and I, and I, and they go, oh, they go, okay. And I go, you didn't like that answer. We're not there yet. I don't understand. In fact, I did that today. I don't know if you noticed that today. I go, I gave a couple of answers and I go, you know, those aren't the answers we're looking for. Those were my initial probes to try and figure out what's going on here, but those aren't the answers that we're looking for. To tell, explain to me what's actually happening. And, and that, that would not have happened if I couldn't have seen that guy's face. And been able in a Zoom call to be like, oh, okay, we can, we can drill down a little bit right now. Look, I'm on stage, there's 200 people sitting there, there's 400 people, there's a thousand people sitting in the audience.

• 29:20Jocko Willink?

  We're not drilling down into the specifics of this guy's situation. On a Zoom call, I'm right here. Wait, let me, let me explain why. I'm in an auditorium with a thousand people and this guy asks a question. I'm going to give an answer. There's a thousand people that are waiting. I can't see this guy's face barely. I don't, I, we don't have the time and we don't have the. We don't have the, for lack of a better word, we don't have the intimacy for me to look at this guy and say, "Explain to me what's happening." But when you're on a Zoom call, I'm six inches away from your face and you're six inches away from my face because we're staring at a camera that's six inches away.

• 30:00Jocko Willink?

  So, the, the, the loss of, oh, maybe some presence, the loss of some body language, just in the fact that we can go a little bit deeper, it, it makes, there's some aspects of a Zoom meeting that absolutely is better than a live meeting. Absolutely. Especially, you know, when I go on to talk to, you know, someone's having a conference and it's a thousand people. Look, you, you put, you put 2,000 people into an auditorium, the people in the back, you know what they're looking at when I'm speaking? They're looking at, they're looking at the video camera that's projecting my big freaking head. And by the way, in the back, they can't really even see that that clear. So what are they looking at when they're on Zoom? They're looking at me. And guess what I'm doing?

• 30:44Jocko Willink?

  I can see them. And when they ask a question, there they are. So there's some absolute advantages to it and, and we get these things on EFL line and that allows us to dig down and figure out what's going on. But it's amazing that you, you list off the fact that you have all these, you know, I say, "Hey, do you have any issues we can talk about?" You're like, "I got issues we can talk about all day." And what's amazing to me is all these are issues that are unfolding right now in Echelon Front 2.0, which is Echelon Front Virtual Training through the interwebs. It's awesome.

• 31:15Dave Berke?

  Yeah. Totally agree. I, I remember thinking at first too, because hey, I, I like, I like speaking. I like to talk. And one of the coolest parts about this job is it was very much wheelhouse for me. I, I don't, I like to be on the stage. I like to talk. I get a little animated. You can get right up with somebody. You can sit down and there's a lot of things about the speaking in public thing that I really liked. And I was, I was concerned a little bit like, "Hey, how am I, Dave Berke, going to be able to replicate that through Zoom?" I've actually even found, you said it well, because there are things that you can actually do through Zoom that you can't do in person. Anybody that's resistant to the idea that we can't forge good relationships or learn, that's not true.

• 32:00Dave Berke?

  Because, yes, do you lose something face to face? Sure. But you can more than make up for it in other ways. And it is not an excuse or a reason why you can't make things happen. Which has been awesome for me, who likes to be face to face talking to people.

• 32:15Jocko Willink?

  Check. So, speaking of all these issues we see right now, virtually, what's the third one?

• 32:21Dave Berke?

  All right, so we have a

• 32:23Jocko Willink?

  Last one.

• 32:23Dave Berke?

  We have a site manager. So, inside a district that had five sites. So, a district had five different operations and each one was run by a site manager. This site manager that I was working with, that this larger company, got promoted to district manager. The very first task, the very first assignment for this newly promoted district manager, who used to be a site manager, was one of the other sites in their district was underperforming and they were now tasked with making sure that they get up on the step. So, what happened was, is this person who was a site manager went from having a peer who was underperforming, one of the sites was underperforming, actually making this

• 33:06Dave Berke?

  site manager look pretty good, because she was outperforming her peers, now had a subordinate who was underperforming, which made her look bad, because she had a team that was she was responsible for. And the core of the question was, how am I going to take ownership of this other site that I was working parallel to, sort of independently inside the district? Now I'm responsible for this person's performance. What am I going to do and say to allow me to now, in this new role as her, as his boss, her as his boss, getting them from being underperforming to getting up on the step? When before, we were just peers, working totally independently,

• 33:49Dave Berke?

  and the previous district manager didn't get that person where they needed to be.

• 33:54Dave Berke?

  And again, the answer to that question wasn't really that hard when we started to dissect what her role was as a site manager, her previous role.

• 34:05Jocko Willink?

  And was she having issues with just the idea like, oh, now I'm responsible for this when before? What was, what was the thing that she was trying to overcome?

• 34:14Dave Berke?

  Yeah, what she wanted to, what she wanted to do when she was going to set up her very first conversation with her now subordinate site lead was sound authentic. And how do I say that, that I can take ownership of this as your district manager without kind of coming across as like, I'm just using the words of extreme ownership because she was struggling with how to say it. So if I'm, I'm your boss and how I can take ownership of the problem that your site is underperforming and she couldn't, she wanted to talk through, how can she sound authentic in explaining that this is her problem to solve and this is something she's responsible for, she has ownership of.

• 34:50Jocko Willink?

  So where'd you take her?

• 34:51Dave Berke?

  Well,

• 34:54Dave Berke?

  the first thing was, hey, and I highly recommend to everyone, when you are going to take ownership of a problem is you should be authentic. You actually have to believe that is your responsibility. Do not walk in, apply the words that we teach at Echelon Front and think those words are going to solve your problem for you.

• 35:10Jocko Willink?

  So, so when she was questioning her authenticity, do you think that she was actually thinking, well, now I'm supposed to be in charge, but I really don't?

• 35:18Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I, I don't really know how to make the connection because I don't really understand how I could be responsible because before he ran his site, I ran my site and just because I'm his boss now, how do I go back in time and say that this history of underperforming, that I'm now responsible as a district manager is something I, I need to take ownership of?

• 35:39Jocko Willink?

  Do you think the disconnect was her thinking, look, I'm, I was over there, I did my job. What, what, you don't need to get babysat. Why am I supposed to help this person out?

• 35:46Dave Berke?

  That's exactly what it was.

• 35:47Jocko Willink?

  So, so, okay. So that's, that's what I was missing. I couldn't quite figure out what the issue was because I was just thinking, yeah, cool. No bad teams, only bad leaders. We got someone that's underperforming. How do we, how do we get in there and support them? How can we help them? And let's make this happen. But she was thinking, Not really my responsibility.

• 36:02Dave Berke?

  Yeah, how am I responsible for him? As a matter of fact, I outmaneuvered this person. I got elevated and promoted as a result of that performance. And again, it's exactly what you just described, which was what we did is we just spent a little time kind of dissecting what her role was when she was a site manager. And why understanding what her role was as a site manager will help her as a district manager with five sites kind of all answering to her. And the piece that she was missing, which is understandable, is her job wasn't just for her site to do well. That's not what the site manager does, but in a very simplistic way, the site manager's responsible for their site. She's supposed to make sure her site performs and delivers and meets the metrics and delivers on time.

• 36:47Dave Berke?

  And she did very well.

• 36:50Dave Berke?

  That's actually not what your site manager's supposed to do. Or should I say, that's not the only thing your site manager's supposed to do. And so the real question was, how do you want your five site leads to interact with each other? How do you want them to work together? Do you want them to be competing with each other, undercutting each other, benefiting from somebody else's underperformance? Or do you actually want those five site leads, especially the ones that are outperforming the others, to find ways to help those other sites so the entire district does better? And that whole explanation you just gave from the safety is actually the same thing too, is that if I as a site lead help the other site leads perform well, who benefits? And so the hurdle was, hey, your role as a site lead wasn't just to have an awesome site that did really well.

• 37:35Dave Berke?

  It was more than that. And now as a district manager, when you talk about your sites, four of them used to be your peers. They hired from the outside to replace her in her particular job. But the other four were people that were literally peers for the last two and a half years. Is what is it that you really want from them? Operating in silos autonomous from each other and benefiting from their failures? Or do you actually want to build a relationship where you share and challenge each other and force each other to get better? And share best practices and help them out and elevate everybody's game? And we talked about that for a while and that made it a lot easier. When we role played the actual conversation of her initial discussion as hey, I'm here as your new district manager. We role played that a few times to have that discussion.

• 38:19Jocko Willink?

  What approach did she take? Give me like a little bit of her opening salvo at the troops.

• 38:24Dave Berke?

  The opening salvo at the five new, sorry, the five site managers, four of them, which she's known for years that are her peers. Was the first part of the conversation was, hey, listen. I am so stoked for the opportunity to be a district manager and to work and engage with all of you. I gotta be really honest and I'm paraphrasing. This is her saying, I gotta be really honest. My view of what I thought a site manager was supposed to do wasn't exactly right. And what I have come to realize is as I've thought about my role as a district manager. Is that how I function as a site manager wasn't how I really think we should operate. And that's where the ownership piece came in and what made it very easy for her to go, oh, I can't.

• 39:07Dave Berke?

  It's not even hard for me to take ownership of this because all I have to do is explain the things that I didn't do as a site manager. And what I realized I should have been doing the whole time. And then went on from there, you're smiling because I can tell that that actually resonates is the idea of. Hey, if you understand what you could have differently, the ownership piece comes naturally when you recognize what you should have done differently.

• 39:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the note that I wrote down was, you know, when I was like, oh, what did she say? Cause I'm thinking like, this is what I would have said, you know, the way that I paraphrased it myself was that, you know, I'm opening up with. I was wrong, right? I was wrong and that's just a perfect way to open up and say, look, you all saw me as a competitive person. I was hiding information. I was trying to kick your ass and that's actually not the right way to do this. Do we want to be competitive with each other? Sure, we want to do it in a fun, positive way. And right now, what we want to do, and here's where I would go right into it. What we want to do. Is not be competitive with each other's sites. We as a team want to destroy the other districts.

• 40:13Jocko Willink?

  So I, yeah, I mean, we'd go there quick. And of course I'd, I'd say that and have a good time with that. And so, look, even though I want to destroy them, guess what? I want our company to win. And so we're going to kick their ass, but we're also going to show them how we do it. So we elevate everyone and that's going to elevate us and we're going to move forward. So, yeah, that's.

• 40:29Dave Berke?

  I mean, and that's it. And that's almost verbatim how to play it out was this district is going to dominate, but I'm actually going to apply the lessons that I learned that I should have been doing back as a site lead. And apply that all the way across the organization. And actually, one of the things she came to understand was

• 40:46Dave Berke?

  if she does that, if she dominates as a district manager, but also gets all the other districts in the game too. She also is going to continue on the path and she's going to grow in responsibility and she's going to dominate, which is what she wants to do as well. So there's that connection and.

• 41:03Jocko Willink?

  Which is another thing I leadership strategy and tactics. If, if you're doing well and you're doing the right things for the right reasons. Your team is going to do well. And when your team does well and they win, guess what? You win.

• 41:18Jocko Willink?

  All right. Forty-two minutes, a little long, but still kept it under the 45 minute. That's a good place to stop. If you want to dig deeper into all aspects of leadership in any arena, you can join Dave and me and the rest of the Echelon Front team. You can do it all the time. You can talk to us all the time. You can talk to us live efonline.com. It's where we solve problems with leadership. And if you want leadership guidance inside your organization, come check out our leadership consultancy at echelonfront.com. As we talked about, we are doing this stuff through the interwebs. You can come and get it. We will be there six inches from your face.

• 42:01Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I've also written a bunch of books on the subject of leadership, Extreme Ownership, The Dichotomy of Leadership, Leadership Strategy and Tactics. Also have some other podcasts, Jocko Podcast, Jocko Unraveling, Grounded and the Warrior Kid Podcast. And if you want to support any of these podcasts, including this one, you can get some gear from jacostore.com or originmaine.com.

• 42:25Jocko Willink?

  Thank you for listening to the debrief. Now go lead. This is Dave and Jocko. Out.