The Debrief w/ Jocko and Dave Berke #4: When The Boss's Boss Skips Down The Chain for All The Info

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 four with David Burke and me, Jocko Willink. Dave, let's debrief. What do you got?

• 0:09Dave Berke?

  All right, I got one.

• 0:13Dave Berke?

  We've got the boss's boss skipping the chain of command and coming straight to one of the key leaders in the team. So what's happening is you've got the, this person we're working with, cool company that are in the sales side. And the head of sales, the VP of sales works for the chief revenue officer.

• 0:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So the chief revenue officer is the boss's boss?

• 0:36Dave Berke?

  No, the chief revenue officer is the boss. So the VP of sales works for the CRO.

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 0:41Dave Berke?

  The CRO works for the CEO.

• 0:43Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 0:44Dave Berke?

  The CEO.

• 0:45Jocko Willink?

  Is the boss's boss.

• 0:46Dave Berke?

  Is the boss's boss is coming straight to the head of sales on a pretty regular basis. Kind of talking about problems, some misalignments. So company is doing fine, actually. But as you might guess, with COVID, all their 2020 projections kind of got reestablished. So they have new monthly sales baselines, which are lower than what they expected. And so they're not meeting their numbers, but they're, they're going to be okay. But the CEO is frustrated. And when the CEO is frustrated with how the team is performing, instead of going to the CRO, he's skipping over the CRO, going straight to the head of sales, the VP of sales to ask questions. And at first it wasn't a big deal.

• 1:26Dave Berke?

  As it's been happening more and more regularly, the conversation, the reason he called me to ask to talk about it, you know, to kind of talk to the scenario is that he was starting to get upset. And it was coming through when the CEO was coming down, he was sort of expressing that frustration and making it clear like, hey, you know, you should.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  The CRO was getting mad?

• 1:48Dave Berke?

  No, CRO was out of the loop.

• 1:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:51Dave Berke?

  The VP of sales was basically telling the CEO, hey, don't come to me, go to my boss.

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:59Dave Berke?

  And.

• 1:59Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 1:59Dave Berke?

  Yes, interesting. And it was, hey.

• 2:01Jocko Willink?

  What was bothering the individual about that?

• 2:04Dave Berke?

  The biggest issue was. He felt like his boss was being kept out of loop and he had to go do the whole, he had to go smooth things over with his boss because the CEO was going straight to him.

• 2:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:17Dave Berke?

  Which actually was happening. There was, it was, he was creating friction. The CEO was creating friction for the head of sales because the head of sales at the end of those conversations had to go to the boss and say, hey, the CEO is coming straight to me. He's upset about these things. These are some problems. Hey, what do you think you should, I should do? How do I handle this? I'm starting to get frustrated with the boss, with the CEO.

• 2:35Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:36Dave Berke?

  Makes sense?

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  Yes. It makes sense. It makes sense that that could be interpreted as an issue that needs to be discussed.

• 2:46Dave Berke?

  Yes. I should say, does the scenario make sense?

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:50Dave Berke?

  I mean, the answer, so, I mean.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  Because, and I guess why we're, why I'm chuckling is because this is not, this does not seem like a type of problem that we're getting very super concerned about because it doesn't sound like a, isn't a huge threat to really anybody.

• 3:10Dave Berke?

  That's right. This is actually not a big deal. That's, that's kind of the crux of this debrief. Hey, what do you think I should do? And my answer was, first, don't get mad. There's, there's nothing to be mad about.

• 3:25Dave Berke?

  The reason the CEO is coming to you is that the company's underperforming a little right now. This is a tough time. There's a lot on his mind. But I wanted to talk a little bit, I wanted there to be more to it other than, hey, just stay detached, which you need to be detached. Don't get frustrated and push that frustration back on the CEO of all people. But I wanted there to be more reasons, and what I wanted to uncover was, hey, let's think about why this is happening. Why is the CEO coming straight to you? And the way we kind of talked about it is, there's, there's kind of two scenarios that you could play. I don't know which is which yet. Let's kind of, let's figure them out. One could be actually a really good thing. CEO's got a lot of trust in you, understands that you're close to the front lines, sees you as a person who can solve problems,

• 4:07Dave Berke?

  sees you in a position that can shorten the amount of time he can get straight answers that he needs on, on problems that he thinks are, are important to the company. The other side of it could be, maybe the CEO has lost the confidence of the CRO, the intermediate leader that works for him that's in between in skipping this person coming to you because doesn't think the CRO is doing a very good job. And that's not a good, you don't want, you don't want your boss to be misaligned with the big boss. So there's kind of two different things to think about. The first and most important thing that we talked about was, hey, if the boss is coming to you with questions, that's okay. He can skip the chain, he can kind of do what he wants. There's nothing to get frustrated. Just, just answer the questions.

• 4:50Dave Berke?

  Just give him the information that he wants. And then you most certainly want to stay aligned with your boss. So when the CEO is done and goes back to his office, go to the CRO and say, hey, wanted to give you a heads up. CEO came down to me. These are the questions he asked. And then the most important thing there is you and the CRO need to get aligned. You need to kind of figure out what's going here. What are the frustrations from, from the CEO? Why is this keep happening? And what can you do to A, if in your, if your leadership is having problems, how do you help them? But more importantly, how do you give the CEO what he needs before he has to come down and find you? And really what it boiled down to is, he wanted projections, more accurate and more up to date projections on how far below the line they were going to fall this month. Because what

• 5:34Dave Berke?

  the CEO is doing, he's looking six, eight, 12 months down the road is, hey, our revenue projections are lower than they, we thought because of COVID. How long can I keep this trend before we have to start taking other actions? And the person who's most aware of that is the person in charge of the sales team where all the revenue is generated. So it was actually a relatively short conversation. Some of it was just in the vein of just, hey, staying detached. But the biggest thing too is if you got your boss or your boss or anybody coming to you, asking you for information, that's a red flag that you're not giving them the information they need well before that happened. So that's, that's kind of the larger scenario and how we kind of talked about what this real issue was.

• 6:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So that was, so the solution was you just said, yep, answer the questions and go inform your immediate boss of what's happening and then start to try and do a better job to get ahead of it, giving your boss more detail so that your boss can answer these questions for the CEO.

• 6:32Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and help your boss understand what the concern is.

• 6:37Jocko Willink?

  Right. And you said there was two scenarios that could be happening. One is that they didn't trust. And one is that he just wanted information direct from the front lines.

• 6:45Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Jocko Willink?

  What I like about this, and this has been happening to me quite often lately, is the solution is actually universal. So the solution that you proposed, which I agree with, regardless of which one of these two scenarios is unfolding, the, the best thing you can do is yes, give the CEO the answers that he wants, and then provide that information of the conversation and the questions and the answers to those questions to your chain of command, and then try and preload them for future situations. So really, multiple possible causes, only one nice solution. I like it.

• 7:26Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and it wasn't that complex. It was one of those at the end of the conversation was like, yeah, that makes sense. It wasn't, uh, yeah.

• 7:34Jocko Willink?

  Check. All right. Record, record time for that solution.

• 7:40Dave Berke?

  Boom.

• 7:40Jocko Willink?

  Under eight minutes. What do you got?

• 7:45Dave Berke?

  We're working with the company. We've been with them for a while. Good things happen inside there. We had a, uh, we've got, it's a tech company. So one of the teams inside this tech company is called data collection. The head of data collection recently got promoted. So she moved up to become the chief technical officer, the CTO. So she's kind of in charge of data collection, everything on the tech side. And that promotion left up a, a gap in leadership in the data collection team, and someone from the data collection team got elevated to be the head of the data collection team. So we've got two new leaders, but they've both been part of this company for a while.

• 8:22Jocko Willink?

  So the data collection team leader got promoted to CTO. One of the data collection team members got promoted to head of data collection team. Okay.

• 8:32Dave Berke?

  Exactly. This data collection team, what they do is they aggregate data. They kind of put together this package and deliver it to their clients. The way that process works is the data collection team manager shows the CTO, this is the monthly product we're about to put out, gets a thumbs up, and then they push it out to their clients. And the CTO doesn't like the new format of the

• 8:56Dave Berke?

  Aggregate data collection package that the new manager is putting together.

• 9:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so the person that has become the data team manager said, "Cool, I'm in charge now. I'm going to reformat this thing," and then pushed up the chain of command to the person that I used to work for at this level. Now they're the CTO and the CTO obviously thinks, "Well, the way I always did it was pretty damn good."

• 9:17Dave Berke?

  That's right.

• 9:18Jocko Willink?

  So I don't really want to... Okay, so, so, and then, and then what is, so what's the problem?

• 9:25Dave Berke?

  So, the problem that, that, what's obvious on the outside is the problem is that, so you're now, you're my boss. I give you this thing, you don't like it, and you come back to me and go, "Hey, Dave, I don't like this format. I want you to use the old format. I've been using that format for years. It works. Clients are happy. Just stick to the old format." And I can't really do that. I just can't bring myself to do what you're saying. The underlying problem was that I kind of look at you a little bit as like, "You're, you're a little bit of a dinosaur." Things have changed a lot. What's going on in this world is changing rapidly. We have some really smart people down here, some really good ideas, and actually this way I think is, is actually better. It covers what you're saying, but it's really more of what our clients want.

• 10:08Dave Berke?

  And I'm, I'm going to kind of convince you, I'm going to convince you that this new product is really the way we should do it. And we kind of know, we live in this world, you're up in this bigger world and kind of lost track of some of these things. So there's this kind of ongoing friction. So the first call I get is from this new data manager saying, "Hey, my boss, the CTO, every month is telling me she doesn't like the way I'm delivering this package. What should I do? I have to convince her. I got to find a way to explain to her now this new format is the right new format."

• 10:43Dave Berke?

  And it's awesome because I think you're reaching for it, but I said, "Hey."

• 10:49Dave Berke?

  Here's, here's my first thought. If my boss comes to me and said, "This is the format that I want you to deliver this document to me in," you know what I'm gonna do? Exactly what she says. You know how I'm gonna do that? Long enough until she realizes, "Oh, Dave's totally gives me what I want. It's exactly how I want it. It's good to go. It meets all my expectations. Dave's got things covered." To the point that there's no question in her mind that I'm her best subordinate. This data management, data collection team is the best team. I don't even worry about them. And then all of a sudden, I've been a little bit of goodwill, a little bit of trust and confidence. And if I feel like I want to adjust over time and go, "Hey, boss, this thing's been working well. The client's been happy. We've gotten some feedback over here that maybe there's some gaps.

• 11:30Dave Berke?

  Our team came up a couple of new ways to maybe adjust this a little bit that we think might be better. What do you think?" So, the short answer was, "Listen, if your boss isn't happy with the work that you're giving, do what makes your boss happy." Because the real problem here is that if the thing actually does need to evolve, if this product needs to get better, you gotta find a way to convince the boss, "Hey, boss, we're seeing some real gaps in this product here, and we want to be able to make the change in this product to fill in those gaps." You have to have the credibility and the trust from your boss to be able to do that. And the way you do that isn't on day one saying, "The way you did it has been wrong for the last four and a half years. Here's your answer."

• 12:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, definitely the way that you don't do it is just by submitting the first report up the chain of command, which is different than the way that the person that just had that job did it for the last X number of years. Yeah, the, the idea of performance as a way to build a relationship is a very solid, it's a very, very solid way to build relationships. I used to do that all the time with my bosses. I would just win, win, deliver, deliver trophies to my boss. "Hey, yep, we won again. Here you go. Here's another trophy." And then eventually you say, "Oh, by the way, if I'm gonna keep winning these trophies, I need to make a small adjustment over there." And they go, "Oh, yeah, you do whatever you want, Jocko. It's all good."

• 12:45Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 12:46Jocko Willink?

  That is a, yeah, and the thing, if people are listening to this, the thing I was reaching for was the book Leadership Strategies and Leadership Strategy and Tactics, which I wrote, which has a big section about this exact thing, because this does happen.

• 13:02Jocko Willink?

  Clearly, there's a, there's a little ego thing that we have to pay attention to here.

• 13:08Jocko Willink?

  You know, on, on a most recent Jocko podcast, we talked about some things to think about as you're, as you're deciding how you're going to execute. And there's some cornerstone things that lead you in the right direction. One of them is being able to detach. One of them is keeping your ego in check. One of them is seeing other people's perspective. And then the last thing you have to watch out for an underlying thing is that you're just not getting complacent. So, you know, when you, when you pull your ego out of it, your ego is probably the thing that's saying, hey, my way is better, which is the quote that you used, my way is better. When you're not detached, well, then you might not understand what the strategic vision is from up the chain of command. You might not see that

• 13:52Jocko Willink?

  your ego is out of control. And, and then the perspective, what's the perspective of my boss? And why am I not seeing it? You know, does my boss want us to deliver a horrible product? No, but there's some reason. And so let's figure those things out. And if we can figure those things out, we have a better understanding, we have a better, better understanding, we make better decisions.

• 14:15Dave Berke?

  Yeah, this was a, hey, what you've done now is put yourself in a position where you've got all her attention. She's a micromanaging, she's pushing back on everything you're doing. This is your problem. This is an easy fix. Take a step back, give her what she wants, build some credibility. And over time, just like you said, you're gonna have the space that you need to do it.

• 14:33Jocko Willink?

  Did you do any role playing with her?

• 14:34Dave Berke?

  We absolutely, we did, we role played the entire conversation. And the, the best part about-

• 14:39Jocko Willink?

  Did you get to play an evil dinosaur that says that your, your way is terrible?

• 14:44Dave Berke?

  Yeah. Oh, you mean, the way I've been doing it for four and a half years that got me into this position is now automatically overnight, no longer the right way to do it. And the cool thing about role play is when you, when you role play for them, how their boss is going to react, or whoever it is in the situation, the question I ask all the time is, hey, how do you think that's going to go over? And when you ask them like that, they always know the answer. Oh, that's not going to go over well at all. She's gonna be completely upset if I say that. Like, exactly. So the role play and we do role play all the time with our clients, all the time, even short 30 seconds, one or two rounds of it, and it makes a huge difference.

• 15:19Jocko Willink?

  Little rehearsal goes a long way.

• 15:20Dave Berke?

  It does.

• 15:21Jocko Willink?

  All right, let's get one more in.

• 15:23Dave Berke?

  Uh, the cool thing about this one more is the exact same scenario because this company, we have an awesome-

• 15:28Jocko Willink?

  Same company as well?

• 15:29Dave Berke?

  Same company, same people.

• 15:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 15:32Dave Berke?

  This was one that I kinda saw coming. We've been working with these folks for a while. It was an awesome company and when this new manager-

• 15:38Jocko Willink?

  By the way, if you're listening, you're trying to figure out what company these are. And if you're trying to figure out if this company is you, we, we maneuver things around so that it's actually not you. If you think it's you, it's not.

• 15:50Dave Berke?

  And it's pretty unfair for me to say this is an awesome company because every company we work with is awesome and we have an awesome time with them. So this was one that I saw coming a mile away. As soon as this leader called me and was describing the problem with his boss, the next day, the boss called me and said, "Hey, I'm having a problem with one of my subordinates."

• 16:09Jocko Willink?

  So this, okay, so now the CTO is calling us.

• 16:12Dave Berke?

  CTO calls me and says, "Hey, you know, about six months ago, I elevated this position. I'm having a really hard time getting this one team leader to give me this really simple product that I've been doing for years, the way that I want it. Every month I come back, I give him a debrief, I explain what's not right about it. I show him what I want and I simply cannot get through to him and get him to do what I want." And I told her the exact same thing. "You're the problem here." And so this is, the cool thing about it is I had a lot of the context and we were talking and, and look, the nuance is there, there are some, you're in a different position in the organization. I said, "But hey, what do you think that manager is thinking when he's giving you a new product? Do you think he's thinking, 'You're all screwed up, you're

• 16:57Dave Berke?

  a problem, you're a dinosaur' or is he thinking, 'Hey, I've got these awesome ideas that I've been thinking about, I've got this great opportunity, I think I'm going to give you something that's going to make what you've done even better.'" Which, which are the two approaches do you think your subordinate is taking with you? Wants to shove it in your face and tell you you're wrong, or he's trying to make things better? And we asked that question. It's like, "Well, no, he's awesome. That's why I promoted him to be the manager. Clearly what he's trying to do is give me something that's, that's even better." So, so look, if he's got some ideas, the, the first thing you want to do is realize maybe him and his young team that, that has a slightly different viewpoint actually has a better way of doing it. And the best thing you can do is say, "Listen..." I've been doing this for a while. I think I know it works, but you know what?

• 17:39Dave Berke?

  Tell me what, tell me what you're seeing. Tell me why you want to make these changes and help me better understand how this product will help our clients better. And if it makes sense, let's go ahead and do it.

• 17:49Dave Berke?

  You do a quick role play of, hey, what, what you're seeing turns out that as we dissected this, some of the ideas from the, from that manager call over were actually pretty good and some weren't so great. And she was really quickly with me and I'm, I'm not nearly as smart on this stuff as her. She was able to explain, hey, you know what? This idea is actually pretty good and this one's terrible. And let me tell you why. And it was really easy for her to tell me, a complete layman, why this was good and why this didn't make any sense. I said, well, if you can explain it to me, do you think you could have the same conversation with your support and have them go, yeah, you know what? That's a great point. We'll do this, but you're right. That's, that's not really helpful. We're going to take that out of, out of the product. She's like, yeah, that would be easy. Okay. Let's roll play that conversation. We do it for four minutes.

• 18:32Dave Berke?

  The beauty thing, beautiful thing about this outcome is that before they called, you got two people looking at the problem and both of them were a hundred percent sure the other person was the issue. And at the end of those two calls, you got two people, the exact same problem, and they were both convinced they were the problem.

• 18:49Dave Berke?

  So by definition, that problem's going away.

• 18:51Jocko Willink?

  I talked about this on EF online the other day. This is a little something that we like to call overlapping fields of extreme ownership. Meaning people that are working together, that if they both think it's their fault, they both try to solve the problem from their position. And what you, so on the battlefield, it means, you know, if Dave and I have certain corridors of fire, certain fields of fire, we want them to overlap because we want to make sure that there's not a gap in between what you can see and what I can see, because then an enemy could sneak in there. So that means we set up our fields of fire so that they overlap.

• 19:35Jocko Willink?

  So there's no one going to be able to sneak through. And that's what happens in with extreme ownership is Dave solves the problem from his position. I solve it from my position. And that means this problem is not going to get through. It's not going to get through. So that's a positive thing. And, and the, the opposite is when we're blaming each other. Well, now there's no overlap. And as a matter of fact, the problem is there and it's not going to get solved. I don't know. I haven't quite figured out if there's an in between. I guess the in between is if I take ownership of the problem and you don't.

• 20:11Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Jocko Willink?

  Look, I have a pretty good chance of getting it solved. But I'd rather we both are taking ownership. Right? So if it's just one member taking ownership, look, I'm probably going to get the, the problem solved. But there's a chance that I can't quite reach the end of, you know, I can't quite cover the whole problem. So ideally we both take ownership. And what happens is when I start to take ownership of the problem and say, do you know what? Dave, this is my fault. What do you do? You say, actually, there's some things that I could do different. So we end up with the overlapping. And then clearly the opposite of that is when I say, Dave, this is your fault. You go, hell, no, it's not my fault. And now we do no solving of the problem.

• 20:51Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 20:51Jocko Willink?

  And that's, that's the good thing is when I say, hey, Dave, this is my fault. And Dave says, yeah, I know. I say, great. That's why I'm going to do these things to solve this problem. And then you say, well, okay, I'm glad you're getting it taken care of. But you also want a little credit for that. So you, well, there's some adjustments I'm going to make too. And we end up with this nice overlapping fields of extreme ownership. So sometimes people, sometimes people get worried that, you know, well, who's really going to take the fault? We all are.

• 21:17Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Jocko Willink?

  We all are. We all can make changes to make things better.

• 21:21Dave Berke?

  And for whatever risk of, of, hey, me telling you, hey, this is on me, Jocko. I made these mistakes. I'm going to fix this. Is there a risk that you're going to go, yeah, Dave, you're all screwed up. You need to fix this? Yeah, that, that, that could happen. That's a possibility. I can't tell you how many companies we've worked with. I can't tell you how many different sectors we've worked with. They're almost all the same. Ninety-five percent of the people of these companies are just good, motivated, hardworking people. The likelihood that you're gonna say, "Yeah, you're all screwed up," it's so low. Nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I take ownership and you go, "Dude, look, man, I can make these simple changes. There's no factor. Our team can fix this." That overlap happens almost automatically. And if it doesn't, it's okay. No factor. But if you're worried about the

• 22:03Jocko Willink?

  risk- You still get the problem solved.

• 22:04Dave Berke?

  Exactly.

• 22:04Jocko Willink?

  Because if it doesn't happen, I'm still doing everything I can to cover that problem.

• 22:08Dave Berke?

  That's right.

• 22:09Jocko Willink?

  That's what generally happens. But it doesn't happen all the time. And that's, that's, we get that. But what are my alternatives? Are my alternatives to say, you know, when I say, "Hey, Dave, this was my fault," and you say, "I know it was," and I say, "Just kidding? I only said that so that you would start to take ownership?" No, that's not the way it works. When I tell you that it's my fault, I'm telling you that because I actually believe that it's my fault and there's something I could do to solve the problem. That's what I'm telling you that for.

• 22:38Dave Berke?

  What's, what's awesome about the relationships we have and the position that we're in, you talked about a little bit earlier about that being detached, because we at Echelon Front are de facto detached, we can tell these other people, "Hey, what we're seeing," and they listen. They go, "Hey, listen, this is on you," and they go, "You know what? You're right." And they come to that conclusion so much easier than if you're inside the organization, you're subordinate, says, "You're the problem here." It's almost immediate pushback. But working with us, one of the cool things about it is we get to be detached from all this and be able to see it from a different perspective and help them see that perspective so they can come to the right conclusion.

• 23:12Jocko Willink?

  And if you are paying attention in there, if you're paying attention, then you realize, which by the way, you don't have to be, you, you, you have to be paying attention, yes, but we're actually gonna tell you, "Hey, the reason we're seeing right at this right now is because we're detached." And as a matter of fact, I was, I was going over something with a client today. There's an issue happening and the one individual is not behaving in a good way, right? So saying the wrong things, "I should be promoted," one of those situations, right? "Dave, if you thought that you should get promoted and then you didn't, and then you came to me and said, 'Hey, Jocko, that decision you made was wrong. I'm absolutely better than that guy. You should promote me. I think this is crap. This is ridiculous.

• 23:56Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna start shopping my, my, my resume around to other people.'" What do I think? Yeah. What do I think? And it's so, now if you came to me and said, hey Jocko, look, I know, I know that you selected the other person and I think that's, that's a great call. What I was wondering is if there's anything that I could do. Look, I really want to step up into a leadership position and obviously I must not be ready for it right now, but I want to be ready the next time an opportunity comes. Do you think you could, I know this is a big ask, but do you think that you could number one, kind of debrief me on how you made that selection? Number two, maybe start to coach me so that my leadership improves so that next time this opportunity comes, I'm the guy?

• 24:38Jocko Willink?

  Which one of those two people? I mean, if you came to me and said that, the guy that I selected didn't have that attitude. I'm actually, you know, I'm rethinking this right now. When, so when you explain that to someone. So if, if, if you were the guy that came to me and did that, and then I said, hey, hold on a second, let me tell you about a situation I'm dealing with over here. And I explained that exact situation that you just did to me and changed the names. You'd say, oh dude, you should definitely take the guy with the good attitude that wants to learn. And I'd say, okay, great. So what you're saying is you don't want to get promoted because that's what you just did to me. So that de facto detachment, all you have to do is flip around the story and, and, and take that person and change their name and change the business.

• 25:23Jocko Willink?

  And you explain the story and nine times out of 10, the person knows the right answer, but they don't behave that way. And the reason that they don't behave that way is because they don't detach. They let their ego get in the way and they don't understand the perspective. Yep. Cause when you're wrapped up in things, you can't see. You need, you know, go, go when we went to Gettysburg for EF Battlefield, where there was several locations where you could get on the high ground, literally. And that high ground has multiple meanings. One is, hey, I'm above, I'm in a visual place where I can see more, right? That's the definition of detachment. I'm in an elevated position. I'm not.

• 26:07Jocko Willink?

  I'm not receiving freaking musket fire. I mean, this is before smokeless, smokeless ammo. So you had, or smokeless gunpowder. So you had the battlefields filled with smoke. You can't see anything down there. So you get into these, into the high ground, into the elevated position. When you, when you're on the Gettysburg battlefield and you get up to these elevated positions on little round top. And you look and you can see almost the entire battlefield. And you think, wow. Imagine trying, and, and then 10 minutes later, you're on the ground and you think to yourself, how could I possibly direct a battle? When I can see a hundred yards to this next tree line and that's it.

• 26:48Jocko Willink?

  And meanwhile, 10 minutes of walking up the hill and you can see the entire battlefield. That is detachment. And when you can detach from your emotions, it gives you that much power. When you can detach from your ego, it gives you that much power. When you can see from a different perspective, it gives you that much power. And yet we fail to do it all the time. The other part of the high ground that's important to remember is the high ground on the battlefield is something that you do not want to give up. It gives you such a clear advantage that when you give it up, you're giving it up at your peril. Especially if you allow the other person to get the high ground.

• 27:33Jocko Willink?

  But even if you don't do that, if there is someone in the low ground and you decide, you know what, I'm going to go down there with them. At a minimum, you've given up at your advantage. At worst case, they've taken the high ground and now you're completely destroyed. So what is it that, what is it, how does that translate to the business world? Well, here's how it translates to the business world. And to life and to being a leader. There are certain principles that you have. And, and there's, I shouldn't say there, there shouldn't be a lot, there, there likely is not a lot of principles that are as solid as high ground. In other words, you know what, there is a line that I am not crossing. I will not give up my high ground.

• 28:18Jocko Willink?

  So if you want me to, you know, overcharge a client, you know, we're not doing that. That is not happening. If you want me, whatever, you know, think whatever, immoral, illegal, unethical thing. And, and, and, you know, you could also say anything that you don't want to print in the newspaper about what the company did, right? What, what my company did. So there you go. Those are things and, and look, we've been working together for quite a while now.

• 28:51Jocko Willink?

  What percentage of things am I rigid and unmovable on, right? There's a very tiny percentage. That's what the high ground is. The high ground is, look, these are things that I'm not going to give up. Not going to do it. And so then you take those things that you're not going to give up and maybe those are, maybe those are principles, maybe those are operating, operating functions that you have that you're just not going to change because it's, it's, it's a principle that you have to adhere to. And then you get into the ethical high ground, which is, you know, now you want me to do something or you do something that you shouldn't do.

• 29:34Jocko Willink?

  If I accept that or I participate that in any way, I can, I can't, I can't, it's my, I shouldn't say I can't. It is almost impossible for me to get the high ground back. So as you go through life, when you give up the high ground, it's, it's very challenging to try and get that high ground back. You can do it, but it might take a very long time. If you break someone's trust, right? If you, if you lose trust with someone.

• 30:05Jocko Willink?

  You kind of gave up the high ground. Now, look, you can try and get it back, but it is going to be a fight. You've got gravity against you. You've got, you've got the, the angles against you.

• 30:20Jocko Willink?

  It's a horrible situation to be in and it's going to be a fight. So that's why when we talk about keeping the high ground, it, it covers all these different bases. And it's something that you should think about before you make a move. Just, you know, when you're doing land navigation? When you're doing land navigation, this is another time you want to keep the high ground. You, you don't, guess what happens when you go downhill? You have to go uphill again, right? I'm not talking about you're under attack. I'm just talking about you're, you're moving through the, through the woods or through the mountains. When you're on the high ground, you want to stay there because every time you take a step down, at some point you're going to have to step back up. So pay attention to your altitude.

• 31:05Jocko Willink?

  When you go through life, when you take a step, when you move, ask yourself, am, am I taking a step down? Am I losing altitude right now? And pay attention to that. Because if you pay attention to, pay attention to each and every step that you take, you'll find that you won't look up and all of a sudden, and, and here's what's scary. You don't want to pay attention when you're going downhill because it's a little bit easier. It's a little bit easier. And it's just a little bit easier. So your mind's telling you, hey, you know, it's okay. We can get that back later. You don't want to do it. You want to get the high ground and you want to maintain the high ground.

• 31:53Jocko Willink?

  And that's probably a good place to stop for today. And if you want to dig deeper into all these aspects of leadership in any arena, you can join Dave and me and the rest of the team at efonline.com where we solve problems through leadership. If you want guidance inside your organization, if you want the team to come out and work with you, you can check with our leadership consultancy at echelonfront.com.

• 32:22Jocko Willink?

  I've also written a bunch of books on the subject of leadership, Extreme Ownership, The Dichotomy of Leadership, and Leadership Strategy and Tactics. Got some other podcasts.

• 32:32Jocko Willink?

  One is called Jocko Podcast, one is called Jocko Unraveling, one is called Grounded, and one is called 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 from OriginMaine.com.

• 32:50Jocko Willink?

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