The Debrief w/ Jocko and Dave Berke #3: High Valued Employee Creating Friction

Jocko and Good Deal Dave analyze problems and find solutions for companies. 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 three with Dave Berke and me, Jocko Willink. Dave, let's debrief. What do you got?

• 0:11Dave Berke?

  I've got a really small tech company that's actually doing pretty well, even despite what's going on. Small company, but they're growing a bunch. They work in the software space and they're actually doing just fine, which is actually cool because not every company is doing so well right now. Working with the COO, kind of the number two, there's a small enough company that everybody kind of, there's a lot of overlap in their jobs. There's only like 15 or so folks here. So they all have a lot of overlap, but he's head of operations. He's really designed to make sure this thing is working. He has someone working with him, the CTO, the Chief Technology Officer, that is really critical of the operation, kind of is the driver behind the software that they're building, but he's really hard to

• 0:55Dave Berke?

  deal with. And actually, what the problem he's having is that this CTO, who's really sharp, is overstepping his bounds, is kind of getting in his peers' business, his ego is kind of running out of control, and he's creating a whole bunch of friction across the organization. And there's a little bit of a fear that if he, he's kind of irreplaceable, that nobody has the corporate knowledge he has, nobody really understands what he does, and he's positioned himself that they're having, or they feel like they have to tolerate the way he is because of what he knows and what he can do. And this Chief Operating Officer is struggling with how to handle that situation.

• 1:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, clearly, there's an issue if you've got people on your team that are irreplaceable, right? We don't want to let that happen. We don't want to let it happen for defensive reasons, meaning, you know, we don't want to be, put ourselves in a situation where we lose somebody for whatever reason. And for offensive reasons, if someone's out of line, we need to be able to Handle that problem, right? We need to be able to get rid of somebody. No one should have that leverage over the company, right? That just, that just doesn't make sense. So, did you, I mean, that had to be the first thing that you talked about.

• 2:11Dave Berke?

  First thing was, listen, you can't have anybody on your team that if that person goes away for any reason, unforeseen, he leaves, whatever it is, that when that person departs, the team fails. The team's gonna fall apart because somebody on your team holds so much knowledge or so much ability that the team can't succeed without them. That's actually true for the person in charge as well. So, we kinda just talked about the fundamentals of even for the person in charge of the company, the company cannot be reliant on you that if you went away, the company fails. That's not the type of leadership situation you wanna set up. The, the other component of the issue is that there's a lot of potential in the CTO. He's a really capable, smart, and for a while, especially when they initially brought him on board, he was a really

• 2:53Dave Berke?

  positive contributor. And, and what's happened is, the, as he has succeeded and contributed, the ego has, has been growing. And really, the, once we got past the initial conversation, and the CEO didn't object, he understood like, yeah, I cannot have somebody on my team that's a single source of failure. The other question is, how do you cultivate the relationship? How do you continue to develop this with him so that he continues to contribute in the positive ways and we manage the things that he's doing that's negatively and try to find out what it is that's causing that? And what his role is, what I didn't want him to do was write this person off like, hey, this person's a problem. I gotta get somebody who can replace him so I can get rid of this person. It's actually, hey, what's the real problem here?

• 3:35Dave Berke?

  How do we solve that? And what can we do to make this person continue to be a really valuable, constructive, contributing member of the team?

• 3:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we wanna, we wanna, we wanna attack this problem from two different directions. One is make sure that they're not irreplaceable. And two is, how do we get this person reeled in? How do we reel in their ego?

• 3:54Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Jocko Willink?

  And I think that boils down to an escalation of counseling. I mean, on, on the one hand, obviously, this boils down from... The one attack is an escalation of counseling. Hey, you know, this is what we're, are you okay? Is there something bothering you? Is there, is there someone on the team that, that you feel like you need to flex on? Because man, that last meeting was a little bit hostile, right? I mean, this is just a conversation. Hey, Dave, did you have some friction with, with Leif about that? Cause that last meeting was you, you were going at him pretty hard. Is everything, is there something I'm not seeing, right? So that's not a, that's not an attack. That's a, that's a legitimate question of concern. Hey, I want to make sure everything's okay. So I think this is an escalation of counseling situation to try and figure out what's going on. And if, you know, if Dave says, you know what?

• 4:40Jocko Willink?

  Leif really made me, he, he, he, he put a bunch of stuff on my plate and I was mad about it. And I let it get to my head. I'm sorry, it's my fault. Okay, cool. And maybe it's not a problem. And as we know, maybe you fix it and it's okay. You, you handle it. Maybe it's, maybe, maybe it continues and you get hostile with him or you get hostile with someone else. And then I gotta escalate that counseling. Hey, Dave, you, you, you went off on Mike today. What's going on? Did, did Mike do something that bothered you? Cause in the meeting, from what I saw in the meeting, look, man, that seemed unprovoked. What's going on? And so now we're starting to escalate. And by the way, last week you, you kind of went off on Leif and now you're going off on Mike.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  You know, who's next? And if, if you're only attacking people, guess what? That tells me that you're not really listening to what other people are saying. So if you're not listening to what other people are saying, then we're not moving ideas forward. So, so what's going on? And there, and then it goes from there, right? So I think on the, on the getting the ego in check, there is a, there's an escalation in counseling that needs to happen. On the front of how do we get other people to, to, to make sure that this person isn't irreplaceable? Well, I talked to you and I say, hey, Dave, you know, I, I, look, I know you've been spearheading this project from the beginning. What we actually need is some backup. Who on your team is, who on your team like really understands this? And of course, if you're a big ego guy, what do you say?

• 6:09Dave Berke?

  No one. I'm the only one that gets this done.

• 6:12Jocko Willink?

  You know what, Dave? I know that you're smart and I, and of course I, I suspected that maybe you're the only person that really understood this. And although that sounds cool, guess what? It ain't cool. Cause if you're the only one that knows how to do this and you get hit by a bus, we got problems. So what can we do to get this other person trained up? You know what I actually want you to do? I want you to take a two week vacation. And when you get back, I don't want you in these meetings for another two weeks. So I want to go a month with no Dave. Cause I want to make sure, look, you got a month to get this ready. But after a month, I want Bill to run this thing. And so that's how I'd approach these two, uh, to approach this from two different directions.

• 6:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah, really similar. And that, that multiple, two things at once, you know, a parallel efforts that you have to manage. The first one I think is spot on that, that as, as an organizational leader, you actually have to be looking at risk all the time. You have to be looking around up and out while your people are down making things happen. You have to look and see where you're exposed. Where is there potential for risk? From the outside, competition, environment thing, and, and also from the inside. And the assessment of risk in that case is an internal problem, which is Jocko goes away, Jocko's the only one that can do this. The company fails. That's risk that you cannot accept any different than if your competition is maneuvering on you and they're going to outmaneuver you and then they're going to beat you in this, in the same fashion.

• 7:41Dave Berke?

  So that's, and that should be happening all the time. The other piece, when you were talking about that second effort in parallel, what was happening with this COO, this kind of boss, but somewhat parallel, but a little bit kind of senior was the rest of the organization, remember this is a small team. They all kind of very close know each other loosely define roles. A lot of people are going direct to the COO, kind of bullying him into that escalation to counseling you described, they kind of wanted to get to step four, which was this guy is awful, he's toxic, we gotta get rid of him. And what he was struggling with is

• 8:15Dave Berke?

  Hey, I haven't done any counseling at all. I'm getting a ton of pressure. I gotta get rid of this guy. He's, he's causing a lot of problems. Well, I've got some of this risk, but also recognizing that you actually can't go to step four. And, and there's two different reasons that I thought of is to why that is. One is, look, there actually is a fairly straightforward HR process. Like when we have to move people out of organizations, there is a deliberate process to do that. You don't get to just skip steps because your mind tells you this is the best way to do it. But the real question that he needed to ask is, how did this guy go from a key contributor who joined this startup from the beginning, who believed in what this was and invested all his time and energy and all the risk with startups? Because startups are high risk.

• 9:00Dave Berke?

  There's no guarantee they're going to work. How do we go from that guy to this toxic person who's undermining the organization? And what is it that you don't know about what's going on in this person's life? Then all of a sudden, everybody else is telling you, get rid of them. And you don't know how you got to that point, which is another reason why you have to start with step one, which how you described is, Jocko, man, hey, you seem really out of character in that meeting. What's going on? That's that first step in the escalation of counseling. No matter what it is, whether they showed up late or people are telling you to fire them on the spot, you sort of need to start with, hey, what is going on in your life?

• 9:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that's cool. And one thing that's good to note about the escalation of counseling, like you said, if you're skipping steps, you're skipping steps because you, you made errors. You, there was hard conversations that you should have had that you didn't have. So if you're skipping steps, you put yourself in that position and it's going to be ugly. One thing that's nice about the escalation of counseling is the, it's a compressible timeline. So you could have, you know, you could go through the entire escalation of counseling in, in a week. You know, I always use the example of construction sites. When you're on a big construction project where there's a timeline and if you don't make the timeline, you pay the owner money. You pay them 50, $80,000 a day in some cases when you miss a timeline. So.

• 10:22Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes those timelines are really compressed. If I got a foreman that's not doing their job, guess what? I'm going to tell you today, you're not doing your job. The next day, I'm going to write you up. The third day, you're getting fired. I'm bringing someone else in there. With, let's say commissioned based salespeople, hey, I'm not paying you anything, Dave. So that escalation accounting could be six months, right? In this particular case, if you're getting pressure, cool. You should be getting pressure because you're not doing your job. If you hadn't said anything yet, that's, that's absolutely, you failed as a leader. So you do have to start, I recommend you start with step one, a nice friendly, positive conversation to let that person know, hey, you're out of line. I see it. The team sees it.

• 11:06Jocko Willink?

  What's going on? Let's move forward.

• 11:10Dave Berke?

  Yeah. You, you made the connection when you were talking about it to what's going with this person. This person's ego is getting out of control. One of the main issues with this guy was he thought he was smarter than everybody else. And what he was sort of coming to discover, or at least the, the way that it looked was he'd been there long enough to think that he should kind of be in charge a little bit and he knew more than other people. So you can also, same thing, you could also go one of two directions. You can sort of jump at the conclusion that he's this toxic guy that needs to go away, where you can actually kind of dig in and find out what's really going on.

• 11:44Dave Berke?

  When we role played the discussion to have, when he, when he, when this, we had a couple of different iterations of this. Went on for a couple of weeks, kind of working through this problem to get where we are now. When the CEO kind of came to realize that the frustration that this guy was having was that he wanted to have more influence. He wanted to be able to, part of why he was overstepping with his peers is that he thought he should have more influence over his peers. The amazing connection there that you, you talked about is what he had to show him is, hey, listen, if you want to have more influence in this organization, if you feel that you're the type of person that can level up and start to influence the organization, one of the most important things you can do is actually train people to do the job that you're doing. So we can free you up to do that, which is exactly what you just described.

• 12:27Dave Berke?

  He wasn't making the connection of, I'm not going to, I'm going to elevate you to some other role in the organization. If you're the only person that can do this, you're going to be doing this. And we don't want to train his replacement as a hedge of getting rid of him. The ideal situation, even though we're doing this in parallel, is we train his replacement. So we actually can contribute more if indeed he has something viable to contribute and.

• 12:51Dave Berke?

  The frustration with this person's ego is like you said the last time, like you say every single time was his own ego saying, who does this guy think he is? And the ego v ego solution is not-

• 13:01Jocko Willink?

  Was that the COO?

• 13:03Dave Berke?

  COO.

• 13:03Jocko Willink?

  So the COO's ego is clashing with the CTO's ego.

• 13:08Dave Berke?

  A little bit.

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  Who does this guy think he is that he can roll into these meetings and all of a sudden it's hostilities?

• 13:14Dave Berke?

  Yes, and that was the, hey, he's getting pressured to kind of go right to step four and kind of get to the, you're out of here. And some of it was, yeah, and it was like, hang on, why are we at this level? It's like you said, what did we not do? What did we skip to get to this? And all the things we skipped had nothing to do with this person. It had to do with the CEO, not, not even not just having hard conversations, but just saying the first time when he noticed three or four months ago going, Jocko, man, hey, what's going on? These guys were all close, they're all friends, and all of a sudden Jocko's acting out of character. I don't want to wait four months to start asking Jocko what's going on in his life, when in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, well, the best thing is to get rid of Jocko.

• 13:58Dave Berke?

  So he skipped steps and there's a whole bunch of reasons why skipping those steps, but the barrier there was when you come to the conclusion that this other person is the problem, you lose the potential of not just salvaging this person for the company, but actually helping them become what they want to become as well, which is the ideal outcome. Now, you don't pretend that that's the only way it's going to work. You absolutely protect your organization, you build backups, you manage that risk, but in your mind, what you're really trying to figure out is how can you help this person get past these problems that are frustrating them? Why, and understanding why his ego is getting out of control?

• 14:33Jocko Willink?

  It's always interesting when, when Dave is mad because you, Dave thinks he should have my job. And if I'm, if I, if I have a big ego, that makes me mad.

• 14:53Jocko Willink?

  If I can keep my ego in check, you know what I say to that? That's awesome. I'm glad Dave wants my job. I hope he can come and take it when I go on to the next job. Instead of using that to drive you crazy, I look at that as an awesome situation. I'm not threatened by Dave. I'm happy that Dave wants my job and I hope he works hard enough to get it from me. And if, you know, I had that question a long time ago. I forget what it was. Oh, no, I think it was just on the podcast. But you know, what do I do when this guy's vying for my job? And I'm like, hey, if someone's vying for my job, that's awesome. That's awesome. I'm going to work even harder. And guess what? If they beat me, they beat me.

• 15:39Jocko Willink?

  They do a better job than me if they're more suitable for this job and I fail. Good on them. You know, I should do better.

• 15:49Jocko Willink?

  You know, now if you think someone's going to outwork me, good luck, bring it. But what does that do? All that does is help the team because now we're working hard.

• 15:58Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, don't be threatened by those things.

• 16:03Jocko Willink?

  All right. Next one. What do you got?

• 16:08Dave Berke?

  Company we've been working with again, I keep saying this, but these companies have been working for a long time. And that's one of the most fun things we get to do is we get to stay with them for a long time. See how things evolve and improve and get better and get more connected to what they're doing. And makes it easier to help when we understand this is a company we've been working with for a long time.

• 16:29Jocko Willink?

  And another thing that's important to note when you say that is this.

• 16:34Jocko Willink?

  We work with companies for a long time. And oftentimes when we show up there, they're already deep into extreme ownership. They got everyone listening to the podcast. They got the, they got the laws of combat printed on their walls. I've been in places where they have murals of the laws of combat. It's awesome. It's awesome. And they're totally on board. They're totally engaged. And yet. We still have to talk about the issue that they're having because it is hard. It is, it is simple, not easy. Go ahead.

• 17:10Dave Berke?

  Look, that's what all these scenarios we've been talking about and we'll continue to talk about is the constant reminder of, because most of the companies we work with are exactly how you described and they still struggle with this stuff because this stuff is all hard. And one of the best things that we do is that we come in from a detached position. And it's much easier for us to see what's going on and help and make the connection between the principles and mindsets that they can apply to help solve those problems because we are detached, which is actually what was going on in this situation. We had this key, they had a leadership team that was kind of made up of four or five small group of people, a key leadership team that was influencing a much larger company.

• 17:50Dave Berke?

  And one of the key leaders in this organization had developed himself a reputation of being the hammer. And it kind of reminded me when back in the military, it's probably similar with you is, you know, you have someone in charge of the, of the unit called the squadron commander or the battalion commander. And they always had a number two, the number two is typically called the XO, the executive officer, the number two. And the number two kind of had the reputation of being the hammer. Well, this person had become the hammer, which means they had any kind of issue that required some sort of counseling or discipline. This person was the one to do it. And the simple question this person asked me, because he's been

• 18:28Dave Berke?

  in the game on Extreme Ownership and reading his burn through leadership strategy and tactics repeatedly and looking at things. He was talking about that book, talking about how you should lead in these particular situations. And he said, I'm worried that I'm being pigeonholed as the hammer. Should I be concerned about that was the simple question. And of course, my answer was yes, you absolutely do not want to be positioned or, or have the reputation of being the hammer. And it was, the question was, hey, talk to me about why that is. And why that is, is that his-

• 19:00Jocko Willink?

  You mean why it is that he got this reputation? Yeah, that was the, the thing I'm thinking is the reputation that you have is the reputation that you earned.

• 19:11Dave Berke?

  Exactly.

• 19:12Jocko Willink?

  And very, very seldom is someone running around with a reputation that they didn't earn and deserve.

• 19:19Dave Berke?

  That's exactly right.

• 19:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 19:20Dave Berke?

  And that was, hey, why do you have this reputation? Well.

• 19:26Dave Berke?

  I don't like to wait. I don't see the reason to just sit on things. I am default aggressive. I like to get in there and solve problems. And really what that translated to was that when issues that he was involved in, he would get a little fired up, get a little emotional. And he had a reputation of diving in there. And he had built a reputation as someone who is aggressive. The problem with that approach of being aggressive is it was kind of out of balance. He had the same approach to every single problem. And the being pigeonholed was they were starting to use him only in places where the other leadership thought it made sense. So areas where they thought, hey, we need to take a slow approach to this, maybe a longer, more strategic view. He was kind of being a little excluded, a little isolated because they could sort of

• 20:08Dave Berke?

  predetermine his approach, which was going to be over the top, make things happen. It's like, absolutely. And, and the connection they were making was that concept of being detached. And the thing that was great about this was that the question he asked, and he made the comment, he goes, "I feel like I need to be more detached before I make decisions." Like, look, man, you're actually kind of making this very easy on me because that's exactly what you need to do. And the reputation you want isn't the hammer. The reputation that you want is the reputation of someone that is detached, even on things that directly affect you. And so that the decisions you make and the contribution you make is what's in the best interest of the organization. And you don't pigeonhole yourself as to someone who goes off every single time something's wrong.

• 20:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, if you think about it, any halfway, marginally decent organization should not have scenarios unfolding on a regular basis that require a quote hammer. This is not an optimal situation. I mean, look, do you occasionally get a rogue element of people that have gone off the reservation and are now doing things that they shouldn't be doing? And you've got toxic scenarios happening? That does happen. And sometimes you gotta go in there like, look, when I go into that situation, I'm going to straighten things out and I'm going to do it with a hammer. That is so rare.

• 21:35Jocko Willink?

  That if that's your reputation, you should hardly ever get utilized. And what's scary about that is that's what your goal is. Number one, it's scary to think that you're in an organization where the hammer needs to get used all the time. Number two, it's scary to think that you're in an organization if the hammer doesn't get used all the time. But your leadership thinks that the hammer is the best, the best tool for the job. That's a little bit scary. So what I, what I would do in this situation is yeah, obviously he's got to detach. Obviously he's got to get control of his temper. But also I would look at these scenarios and say, okay, when I go into this, I'm going to actually detach. I'm going to handle these in a, with, with, with the minimum force required. The minimum leadership required, you know, I've, I've been using that term a lot lately.

• 22:18Jocko Willink?

  When it comes to leadership, using the minimum force required is almost always the optimal way to do it. And what's interesting is I was, I've been lately sort of preemptively answering the question, you know? Hey, if, look, I, I get things done in default aggressive. If Dave's got an issue, the most efficient thing for me to do is to go in there, you know? Sit down in front of Dave and say, here's the things that you're screwing up. You need to get on board with the program. That's the most efficient way. And, and on the surface, yep, yeah, that is, that seems very efficient. What does it actually create? What it creates is resentment from Dave. It creates resentment from Dave's team. It requires, it creates a lack of effort. It creates a lack of initiative.

• 23:02Jocko Willink?

  It creates a lack of ingenuity. It creates a lack of initiative, all those things. That's what it does. And it won't matter on this particular tactical situation. It's okay because I got what I wanted from Dave. But I haven't developed Dave. I haven't developed Dave's team. I've, I've squashed his ability to think at that moment. I've squashed his future ability to think because he's afraid of getting quote hammered by me. So there's, even though for the moment, something in the short term immediately might seem like it's more efficient. In the long term?

• 23:37Jocko Willink?

  Well, what I have to do is just constantly hammer people. And, and once you use the hammer, guess what? You gotta use it again and you gotta use it again. Cause people don't learn when they get hammered. They just, they, they just end up like a beaten dog. What is a beaten dog like? A beaten dog is like two things. Number one, they don't show an initiative. They're scared. And then guess what they do? They lash out. Beaten dogs are the ones that bite people. Because they get abused. So if I abuse you, you're gonna bite at some point. Whether that's leave the company, whether that's blow up, whether that's cause of mutiny. Whatever it is, I'm not developing my relationship. And by the way, if you don't like me.

• 24:13Jocko Willink?

  If you don't like me, what kind of performance are you giving me? You know, are you giving me your best performance? If all I do is slap you every time I work with you, every time I give you direction, it comes with a slap to the face. Every time you need correction, it comes with a punch to the gut. Do you like me? The answer is no. Do you respect me? The answer is no. Do we have a good relationship? The answer is no. Do we trust each other? The answer is no. So what kind of team is that? It's a freaking crappy one.

• 24:46Jocko Willink?

  So, does the hammer need to be used on occasion? Yes. Does it need to be the primary? Should you have it in your toolbox? Sure. Do I have a hammer in my toolbox? Sure do. It's a big one. How often do I take it out? Almost never.

• 25:05Jocko Willink?

  Think through that. What, you got one more?

• 25:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah, we got one more.

• 25:13Dave Berke?

  We had a manager that we've been working with. Emailed me and said, hey, I'd like to jump on a call. I have a subordinate. Who feels like they are not giving, being given a fair opportunity to get promoted. So the way this company is designed is that there's a pretty quick opportunity to elevate. So managers have a bunch of subordinates and the subordinates do well. The company is broad enough that you can elevate pretty quickly and get a leadership role and have some folks working for you and. Upper mobility is not a huge problem. So there's an opportunity that and had someone that felt like they were being passed over repeatedly to people who were un- who are less qualified than him.

• 25:55Dave Berke?

  So not just that they wasn't, wasn't getting opportunities to get promoted, but the people that were getting those opportunities, he felt like they weren't as good as them. And the real question that came out when this subordinate went to the boss and said, hey, boss, I feel like I'm getting overlooked here. And I feel like other people are getting promoted ahead of me. Was that said, I don't think I understand the process that what I'm supposed to do to be able to get considered for this promotion. And that boss asked me, he's like, hey, what do I do with someone who feels like they don't understand the process? When clearly I've got people in on my team that are getting promoted up and out on a regular basis.

• 26:36Dave Berke?

  And you told him? I told him it was his fault. Now, I mean, it was one of those that I think part of the issue was. It was his fault that what? That that person didn't understand the process. So when this person, so as simple as this one sounds, so the barrier that this person was having was, hey, it's kind of crazy for someone to come to me and say they don't understand what to do. Because on a regular basis, I prepare the people on my team. And I've got an awesome track record of people on my team who are gonna leave my team. I'm not trying to keep people down on my team. Every opportunity people on my team get, I prep them. I put them in front of what is essentially a promotion board opportunity.

• 27:19Dave Berke?

  Most of my people do well, they go up, they leave and go somewhere else. And I get a new crop of young people or new people and I do the same thing. So for someone to say to me, hey, I don't understand the process. I don't know how else I can explain it because I'm confident that people on my team know the process. And I've got a lot of evidence and proof to show you that I'm doing it. I don't understand what the problem is here.

• 27:42Jocko Willink?

  And so you said, hey, look, you need to do a better job of explaining the process. It's on you.

• 27:47Dave Berke?

  Yes, I mean, simply, and, and I think what it was is that this person's arsenal, the, the, the tools that this person had to share with their subordinates, the approach, was effective, but it was really limited. Hey, this is the one way, and what was happening is they would get brought in in front of like a panel of two or three people that would interview them. And this person that kept on getting passed over actually knew what to say. They understood what to say, but they didn't say it very well. And was constantly getting passed over by people he would look around and go, I'm outperforming this person, but I'm, I think I mean, I might be missing something. And what they were struggling with, this, this boss was struggling with is they know exactly what to do, exactly what to do.

• 28:31Dave Berke?

  They can't, they cannot look me in the eye and say they don't understand the process. The issue was, again, hey, so talk to me through when you interact with this person, what does that conversation look like? And when they role play with you, what they're going to go say in that board, what do they say? Said, well, I don't role play with them. I just tell them the best way to answer these questions and the best way to be prepared for that. So what was the disconnect there is the first thing this, this manager did with the subordinate is they went back, there was two elements to this. The first is the obvious one, you went to like, hey, listen, Jago, first of all, if you don't feel like you understand the process, that is completely my responsibility. It's absolutely my responsibility to make sure you know what that process is.

• 29:15Dave Berke?

  I'm going to do it again, and I want to break it down step by step so you understand it. That actually wasn't what was wrong. What was wrong is that when they role played the conversation that you would have with that promotion board, you weren't very good at having the conversation. You didn't know how to say what you wanted to say. And so it wasn't really the process that was the problem. The problem was this person wasn't comfortable and didn't like communicating to this board.

• 29:40Dave Berke?

  So they did a role play scenario a couple of times and, and started with the ownership piece, and it was the role play piece, not the process piece that was the actual, the issue here.

• 29:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 29:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, when you, when, when you were talking through this initially, you were saying, oh, the guy, the, the subordinate didn't understand the process. That's my fault because my subordinate didn't understand the process. So I need to explain it to him better. But there's more to it than that, which you were just starting to get to, which is it's not that you didn't understand the process. It's that you're, you are not doing a good job.

• 30:17Jocko Willink?

  And what this boils down to, this is a hard conversation. And so now we're going to talk, and I think this is a, a very

• 30:26Jocko Willink?

  important thing to understand because I talk all the time about the general superiority of indirect coaching and mentoring. The general superior, it's not always superior. It's like grappling and striking. Grappling has some inherent advantages over striking. It's just the way it is. There's things in the world, I'm sure you could name me aircraft that there's this aircraft has a inherent advantage over this other aircraft. It's not necessarily that this, that the inferior aircraft is always worse. Sometimes you, you want that supposedly inferior aircraft. We get it. So

• 31:10Jocko Willink?

  I constantly sort of elevate an indirect approach. And I denigrate the direct approach. Why? Because the direct approach is something that offends people when delivered the wrong way.

• 31:27Jocko Willink?

  On top of that, if Dave works for me and Dave is not doing what he's supposed to be doing.

• 31:36Jocko Willink?

  I have to, I am responsible as a leader to explain to him what he's doing wrong so that he can do the right thing. Does that start off with an indirect conversation? Yes, it absolutely does. It absolutely starts off with me saying, hey, Dave, when you when you do your task over there, hey, do you know what the standard is? And you go, yeah, I'm pretty sure. Tell me what it is. We say, I got to do this many pieces in, you know, every hour. Actually, you know what? That's not the standard. The standard is actually this many pieces. Oh, wow. I didn't even know that. I was over here kind of slacking. We definitely don't want you slacking. Yeah, no problem. All stuff. So it starts off with a nice little indirect conversation.

• 32:17Jocko Willink?

  And then, as we've talked about already, then as if I fail, if the indirect approach fails, well, then I have to escalate it more. If the indirect approach fails again, I have to escalate again. So where I'm going with this

• 32:33Jocko Willink?

  is that when it comes time for promotion, you should have already escalated through the escalation of counseling. You should have already explained to people what they're doing wrong. You should have already gotten there. And if you haven't,

• 32:52Jocko Willink?

  and Dave doesn't get promoted, guess what just happened? What just happened is Dave got a direct slap in the face. I went from zero to slap in the face, direct slap in the face, direct assault on your ego, direct assault on your being because you didn't get promoted. So now, the direct approach has already been taken.

• 33:21Jocko Willink?

  And I can't now go back and there's no, there's no point in me having an indirect conversation with you. What I owe to you now is actually, look, I failed 14 times. When I didn't have the first hard conversation, that was a level one. And the second hard conversation, that was a level two. Now I have to go and have a level 10 hard conversation with you that says, Dave, I think I let you down because the look on your face when you didn't get promoted, you looked pretty shocked, which means you didn't understand some shortfalls that you have. And I want to make sure that you understand those crystal clear. Look, I already messed up. I already allowed, allowed events to occur that caused a direct assault.

• 34:09Jocko Willink?

  I can't retract those. What I have to do is I have to go in and follow up with the truth. And explain to the person what happened and why they didn't get promoted. Look, are you gonna, this isn't authorization to be a jerk about it. It's authorization to say, hey, listen. I know it's a slap in the face that you didn't get promoted. I can see by the look on your face, you have no idea why. That's on me. And I got a list of 14 items right now that I want to talk to you about. Cause next time, I want you to know exactly what you need to do so that you can get promoted.

• 34:46Dave Berke?

  It turned out that the scenario you just described, when this manager had the conversation in front of the larger executive team meeting to do. That same problem persisted across the entire organization. And they had a whole bunch of other managers that had subordinates going through the same thing. So the application of that, that's not an isolated thing either. That's when your folks are struggling and you're talking about those, the type of conversations to have to help them. He wasn't the only one going through that, having that problem. And there's people across the organization struggling with the exact same thing. And the ability to take ownership of that. When you have already made a mistake, or like you said, I've already screwed up to allow this to happen.

• 35:31Dave Berke?

  That's again, that's a barrier on your, it's a challenge to your ego to be able to say, hey, listen, and, and then to go to that, whatever that next level is, like you said.

• 35:43Dave Berke?

  Indeed.

• 35:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, a, a good, here's a good ego savior. Hey, I'm not, I'm not responsible for getting these guys promoted. That's on them.

• 35:50Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Jocko Willink?

  Right? That's on them. Okay, let's see what that does to your team.

• 35:53Dave Berke?

  They should know.

• 35:53Jocko Willink?

  They should know. Hey, I'm not, I'm not gonna do their, I'm not gonna hold their hands to get them promoted. So now you've got people out there that don't understand why they're not getting promoted. What does that do for morale? What does that do to the team? What does that do? But by the way, never mind their morale. Never mind the team. Check this out. If Dave Berke doesn't know what he's supposed to do to win, how in God's name is he supposed to do it? If I don't give you the standard and I don't tell you what you're supposed to be doing. And, and those things that you are supposed to be doing, doing, aren't aligned with how you get promoted? Well, then I'm an idiot.

• 36:33Dave Berke?

  What does that say about you as a leader? Yeah.

• 36:35Jocko Willink?

  What does it say about your team? So for some.

• 36:40Jocko Willink?

  For some strange reason, once again, it's on you. Good place to stop. And if you want to dig deeper into all aspects of leadership in any arena, we're talking, when we're talking about, we're talking about every different industry there is, every different level of leadership. This is what we do. If you want to learn more about it, you can join Dave and me and the rest of the Echelon Front team online, live. You want to talk to us? Talk to us. You don't just have to sit here and listen to us. You can talk to us too. Go to efonline.com where we solve problems through leadership. Right now, three times a week, we are doing live Zoom

• 37:23Jocko Willink?

  meetings where we will sit there and answer your questions. So come and get some of that. If you want deeper leadership guidance inside your organization, come and check out our leadership consultancy at echelonfront.com. I've also written a bunch of books about leadership, Extreme Ownership, The Dichotomy of Leadership, Leadership Strategy and Tactics. Got some other podcasts. Jocko Podcast also talks about leadership, usually from a military perspective, but you'll see that it applies to every leadership perspective. Also have Jocko Unraveling. We have Grounded and we have the Warrior Kid Podcast. And if you want to support any of these podcasts, including this one, you can get some gear

• 38:06Jocko Willink?

  from jacostore.com or originmaine.com.

• 38:13Jocko Willink?

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