The Debrief w/ Jocko and Dave Berke #1: Telling Your Employees The Truth

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 one with Dave Berke and me, Jocko Willink. So Dave, here we are. I want to talk a little bit about how we got here and why we decided to do this. What we do at Echelon Front is work with companies. We talk to them about leadership. We try and pass on the lessons that we learned about leadership. We try and help them along the pathway and help the organization align all of their leadership. We do the same thing with EF Online, which is our online platform. And we spend

• 0:42Jocko Willink?

  basically all day, every day, talking about leadership with all these different individuals and all these different scenarios. And we, when these things happen, you know, there's issues that get resolved. There's issues that get, that don't get resolved and take another move and another step. And we spent a lot of time debriefing these things. And I was thinking, and we were thinking that it would be, we got done talking about one of these things. And I said, it would be nice if we had recorded that debrief and let everybody know that there's a solution to that particular problem. Lot of good topics, lot of universal lessons. And we thought it might be cool to put together a podcast about that.

• 1:27Jocko Willink?

  So here we go. We try and keep it a little bit shorter than the normal Jocko podcast, not talk for five hours. So that way people can digest them, get the lessons and move on. Try and keep a, maybe like a half an hour, something like that, cover a couple of topics. So with that, Dave, let's debrief. What do you got?

• 1:48Dave Berke?

  Yeah. The cool part about talking about leadership all day, every day is like, I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing. And the conversations we're having are these real time problems that these companies are struggling with. And when we come up with a solution, it makes a huge impact. And I think the connection I was making when we were talking to it is how useful that can, you don't have to be at this company for the lesson and the takeaway to be useful for you. So I think this stuff is pretty universal. The first company, this first conversation we were having, it came up recently. And the thing that's crazy about it, I probably had four different companies that I've been working with just in the last couple of weeks, all dealing with

• 2:33Dave Berke?

  the exact same thing. COVID hits, it's early March, the whole thing, everything kind of shuts down. And one of the first things we were talking about, you talked about this on one of our very first EF online sessions is you got to tell your people the truth. And this is an emotional time, you got to say detach from the emotion, but you have to tell your people the truth. And one of the things I think a few people did was in their, their concern about making their people worried, is they said, hey, there's nothing to worry about. Everything's going to be fine. We're not laying anybody off. We're not going to make any big movements. And so in the, the interest of keeping people calm, they said something that in, in, in the short term actually kept them pretty calm. Hey, you got nothing to worry about.

• 3:17Jocko Willink?

  Let me ask you this, was what they were saying the truth?

• 3:21Dave Berke?

  So, no, it wasn't the truth.

• 3:23Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, because there's a, you can, you can pre-identify the issue that you're gonna have when the out of the gate, what you're saying is not the truth.

• 3:33Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Jocko Willink?

  And here's what you gotta watch out for is you might think that you understand, you might think you understand, and you kind of bolster your opinion up because you know it's the easy way. It's the easy way to roll. So I look and go, hey, you know what, this virus is hitting, it's gonna last a month. You know what, we can, we got enough funds, we'll be fine. We're not laying anyone off. That's the truth as you see it. The part that you're missing is you don't know. That's the part that you're missing. And, and if you remember, early on, when we were talking in Echelon Front, I said, hey, this is a virus, it's gonna run its course. It just like when you get sick as a human being with a virus. Look, when you get a bacterial infection, guess what? You go and you take antibiotics and it cleans you up. That's just what you do.

• 4:20Jocko Willink?

  With a virus, there's no, there's no antibiotics. It runs its course and then it's, you spend three days in bed. And then when it's over, it's over, you lose, you know, five, eight pounds of whatever. Cause you can't eat or you're sick or you're throwing up and then you get done and it's over. And, and then you go back to normal life and I, and I just thought to myself, okay, this is a virus. It's going to run its course. And you just extrapolate that out to the nation and you say, okay, well, the virus, that's what I did. Okay. The virus is going to run its course. And, and, and actually, when you look at, when you look at the world, many places, that's exactly what it looks like. There's a massive spike, the virus runs its course and then it's kind of gone.

• 5:02Jocko Willink?

  You know, if you look at Italy right now, massive spike, people dying, it's awful. And then it's over, it runs its course. So that was, that was my opinion of what was going to happen. But if you remember, when we talked about what we were going to do at Echelon Front, I said, we could breath hold through this thing. Meaning, hey, we could just be like, okay, batten down the hatches, let this thing get, go through and we'll be back on the road in two months and we'll be back to normal business. But there was enough of an, there's enough of an ego control mechanism in place. That I was, said to myself, yeah, I think that's what's going to happen, but I don't know that that's what's going to happen. So I didn't convince myself that that was the truth.

• 5:45Jocko Willink?

  I said, hey, this is what I think will happen, but we're not going to do a breath hold. We're going to make proactive changes right now, make adjustments because I don't know how long this thing's going to last. I'll tell you how long I think it's going to last, but I don't know that. So therefore we are going to make adjustments right now to be ready. If this thing worked, if this thing is over in two months, great, we'll, we'll, we'll carry on. If it's not over, if it lasts for three months or five months or six months or a year, we're making adjustments right now to be able to contend with that sort of a future. So out of the gate, when you start thinking about these things as a leader, you, you not only have to tell the truth.

• 6:24Jocko Willink?

  You have to make sure that you are telling the truth to yourself about what you know and what you don't know. So to come out of the gate when something like this hits and say, "We're gonna be fine." You know, "Everything's good. We don't have to make any adjustments. I'm not laying anyone off. We're not cutting." That's not being truthful to yourself about what you know and what you don't know.

• 6:49Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and that right there is the difference. When you... None of these companies, none of these folks we've been working with, sat down and said, "This is gonna be really bad, but I can't tell my people that, so I'm gonna lie to them." That's not what this was. It was exactly how you described, which was, "Hey, I don't really know, but I think the best thing I can do is keep everybody calm, because we're gonna get through this." That's the breath hold. "Hey, everybody, we're gonna be fine." And the not telling your truth to yourself, so you don't tell the truth to your people, what it does is it defers the problem. And now they're in a position where, not only are they grappling with what to do now, because now they're having to make some harder decisions, they're also in a position to have to sort of explain and defend why they said what they said four, five months ago,

• 7:33Dave Berke?

  instead of being truthful, which is, "Listen, I don't know what's gonna happen. I do not know what's gonna happen. Here are some things that I think may play out. Here's some experience that tells me we might move in this direction, but the way we're gonna operate at this company is we're gonna be agile, we're gonna be flexible, we're gonna change, to make sure we succeed and thrive and get through this. And that may mean some hard decisions along the way, that when they come, we'll address them, and I don't know how that's gonna play out, but what we're gonna do is everything that we can to make sure we get through this." That is a very different conversation than, "You have nothing to worry about. Everything is fine. Don't worry about how this plays out, because in a couple of months, we're gonna be back to ops normal."

• 8:11Jocko Willink?

  So, that goes into, you tell your people the truth, and...

• 8:17Jocko Willink?

  You make a mistake. So then what do you do? Clearly, we know what to do.

• 8:22Jocko Willink?

  The book is called Extreme Ownership. When you, when you come up and say, hey, everyone, don't worry about it. We'll be fine. It's going to be gone in a couple of months. No factor. And then a couple of months goes by and it's still there and you don't have any income and all of a sudden we gotta start letting people go. What you do is you tell the people the truth about what's happening. And you say, here's what is happening. And then the most important thing you've gotta do, once you, once you say, hey, this is the adjustment that I've got to make. You've got to say, and here's why I need to make this adjustment. I was wrong. I thought this thing would be over in two months. I was wrong. Here's the adjustment we're making. The reason that we have to, what's the situation? The reason we have to reduce salary right now is because

• 9:04Jocko Willink?

  if we don't reduce salary, we are going to run out of money. And if we run out of money, we won't have a business anymore. So we are going to cut salaries right now. And you know what? I don't know when it's coming back. Here are some other measures that we are going to take. We are going to adjust our business in this direction. We are going to adjust our business in another direction. At Echelon Front, for instance, what business did we adjust? We started doing all online training. We went from 99.9% face to face to

• 9:39Jocko Willink?

  99.9% virtual at Origin. What do we do at Origin? We went from making gis and jeans. By the way, gis, that's a great business to be in. When there's thousands of jujitsu schools expanding across the country and then in about a one week period, every single jujitsu school and academy in America were shut down. Who's buying gis when you can't do jujitsu? So what do we do? Pivot. We started making other products, products that we need. We started making masks. We ramped up some of our other production. But you, you can't just sit there and say, well, you know what? We'll just sit around and wait until, until people need gis again. When is that going to be?

• 10:21Jocko Willink?

  I mean, well, to be quite frank, actually, people are starting to order gis again now and we ramped up production again, but we didn't know how long it was going to be. So you have to explain not just, not just what you're doing, not just about the mistakes you made, not just about your error in judgment, but also why you're, why you're doing this. You know, I had, I was working with a client the other day. It's almost the exact same problem.

• 10:43Jocko Willink?

  And he was, we were role playing. How he was gonna tell his team, hey, you know, we're gonna have to get rid of some people. It wasn't just cutting pay anymore, it was that we're gonna have to get rid of some people. And, and what he was saying was, this is a business decision. Which, which is on the extreme version of, I'm not having any emotions, right? Hey, this is a business decision. I mean, if you tell, if Dave tells me, he's my boss, says, yep, I'm cutting three people, it's a business decision, sorry. That means, to me, Dave doesn't care about me. He just cares about the business. If you tell me that we're doing this because if we don't cut people right now, we will have to shut everything down and no one's gonna have a job.

• 11:25Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, my goal is, we bring, once business starts going again and we make these adjustments and we pivot and we move, we'll be able to bring some other people back on board.

• 11:33Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Jocko Willink?

  Yes, that's what we're trying to do. So, telling people the truth, telling them why you're doing what they're doing and admitting that you're making mistakes, very important things to go through in situations like this.

• 11:47Dave Berke?

  Yeah, we were talking about, just today on EF Online, we're talking about leadership capital. And the best way to lose leadership capital, lose trust, lose respect, is to show your team that you don't care about them. And when you talk about the why, one of the things you're trying to explain inside that why is, how do we get through this? How do we get healthy? And why those sacrifices are important? And it is not easy to let someone go. It's not easy to do that. But if you have enough leadership capital and you care about your people enough, when you explain why we're doing what we're doing? And how these things, these steps along the way, might give us a chance to, to actually increase investment over here.

• 12:32Dave Berke?

  And I might shift you from this job to that job, or I might not be able to bring you back here, but when this happens and this happens, I now have an opportunity to bring you back. Those people, what we're seeing is that people are getting their hours cut, people are getting their salaries cut. They're still trying to contribute as much as they can and work above and beyond what's expected of them, because they believe in what's happening and they wanna be part of the recovery of that team and help maybe the ones that aren't gonna be there, or even just make that company survive. So, even in these hard business decisions, the thing that matters the most is your people believing in what they're doing for you. And what we're seeing is these companies that are working through this, their people are stepping up and contributing. When on paper, they really shouldn't, but they're doing it because their leaders,

• 13:16Dave Berke?

  they're saying and doing the things that make them know that I care about you and I want you to be successful. And this is how we make it happen. And if we don't, and we all fail, we all lose.

• 13:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the losing leadership capital by not taking care of your people. The biggest indicator and self-check to ensure that you're not allowing that to happen is make sure that you're putting your team above you. Put, put, put, put the team above yourself. And that is one of those things you think you can get away with. You think no one's going to notice that you kind of, you took care of yourself. You took the easy job. You took, you didn't take the pay cut, whatever the case may be. You think no one's going to notice that? They all notice it. And this is coming from years of experience of my own, of watching my leaders and seeing them take care of themselves sometimes and, and hearing the whole, not just me.

• 14:06Jocko Willink?

  It's not just like I noticed it because I was super perceptive. No, I'm talking about everyone in the platoon. Did you see that piece of crap over there sitting with his hands in his pockets while we're working? It's everybody notices that. And one of the things I said on EF online today that somebody pulled out a little quote and put it in the chat box was, you know, if you're, if your team is going to suffer, you better partake in that suffering as a leader and you better partake more as, more than everybody else. More than everybody else. Otherwise you're burning your leadership capital for no reason.

• 14:42Dave Berke?

  And this is, this is the situation. These are the times where that leadership capital matters the most. You had another cool line today, EF online.

• 14:53Dave Berke?

  Leadership capital is the currency of winning.

• 14:57Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 14:59Dave Berke?

  Listen, we were all running on a pretty hot streak. The country, the world is running on a hot streak. We were all benefiting from this rising tide that all of us were growing, expanding, making money, and things were really good for most of us for a pretty long time. Well.

• 15:16Dave Berke?

  It's not like that right now and where it really matters, where you really show that you believe in the things that you say, that the ethos that your people come first, all those things that we can say, when it's easy to say, when things are easy, this is where that leadership capital matters the most. And this is when winning is the most difficult, when that currency is the most viable. This is the time to have that currency.

• 15:39Dave Berke?

  That's a legit quote.

• 15:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I thought you might like that one.

• 15:44Jocko Willink?

  So that's good. Good ways to deal with these situations and preventing the rumor and the chaos and the mayhem. And how do you do that? Tell the truth, explain why. And make sure that you lead from the front when it comes to suffering.

• 16:03Dave Berke?

  Partake in the suffering. That's good.

• 16:06Jocko Willink?

  What was the next one?

• 16:08Dave Berke?

  Uh, the next one.

• 16:11Dave Berke?

  So this is a kind of a relationship thing. We've got a couple of people. These are kind of more senior folks on the team, kind of key leaders on the team. They all work pretty well together. They've got two peers, two people kind of both manager, you know, leadership positions. They both work with each other and

• 16:29Dave Berke?

  one person, I was always coming to the other person and asking for help. It's like, I'm coming to you, hey, I've got the situation. Can I get your advice? And I listen to your advice and I never follow it. So there's been this kind of ongoing trend that for months and years, we're equals, we're peers. I make the gesture of asking what you think, but I actually don't apply or implement what you think. But if I go do what I want to do and I try to solve the situation on my own and it doesn't work out, I kind of come back at you and kind of point the finger at you. So I've got this person who's been frustrated because he feels that every time he offers some advice, this other person kind of ignores it, still blames them anyway. So a couple of weeks ago, I got, hey, do you have time for a call? I said, kind of absolutely.

• 17:11Dave Berke?

  They walked me through this. This person came to them and asked them for advice and they said, I don't want to give you my advice anymore. You don't listen to me and even if I offer you something and it doesn't work, you still blame me for the problem. So this person has kind of resigned themselves that this equal, I'm not going to help you. I'm not going to work through this with you or I'm tired of you asking me and not doing what I say. What should I do in this situation? And that was kind of the scenario is they were tired of having this other person ask them for help.

• 17:41Jocko Willink?

  So what did you tell him?

• 17:42Dave Berke?

  Well, I told him, I told him what he didn't want to hear. Uh, look, man, this is one, this is a hard thing to, and the reason this one was hard for them, and the reason why this is hard for anybody, and we can all put ourselves in the position where we don't, we're kind of exhausted by this other person's behavior. The only issue really that's going on here is this person's own frustration, this person's own ego. So, the question I asked is, hey, listen, let me make sure I got the situation. And they ask you, they ignore your advice, they do what they want, it doesn't work, then they keep coming back to you for advice, and you don't want to help them anymore. And I said, who, who benefits from that?

• 18:22Dave Berke?

  He said, nobody. So, okay, how does the team benefit? The team doesn't benefit. So what's the real problem here? And I didn't actually have to tell them what the problem was or explain it. They said, the problem is my own ego. And the reason this person, this, this person I'm working with was able to say that is because we've been working with them for months and months and months, and they, like most people do over time, come to the conclusion that in almost every situation where you've got a relationship problem, the answer is almost always your own ego. It's almost always you are the, are the problem inside that relationship. And so, the question I asked him is, is it, is it potential that maybe the advice that you give this other person, isn't that good? So we kind of dissected a little bit of, hey, the two real key things to think about is,

• 19:04Dave Berke?

  one is, hey, it may be that the problem isn't with them, the problem is with you. And the other element too is, if you come to the conclusion that you're no longer going to participate on this team, you're no longer to contribute, you're no longer, no longer going to offer what you have, what's the outcome of that? And the outcome is that everybody's going to lose. And so, that conversation kind of sunk in, which is like, listen, that frustration, that is your problem. You can, how do you get past that?

• 19:31Jocko Willink?

  So I'll, I'll go one step further on that.

• 19:35Jocko Willink?

  If I'm trying to, let's say I'm trying to give you advice.

• 19:37Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 19:38Jocko Willink?

  And you're not taking the advice.

• 19:41Jocko Willink?

  One question I could absolutely ask myself is, you know, if I, if I take ownership of that and said, well, maybe my advice isn't that good. That, that, that could be an outcome, right? The other, and then what do I do about that? I try and formulate better ideas. But the, the other thing is, maybe I'm not doing a good job of communicating my advice to you in a way that you actually want to take my advice.

• 20:06Jocko Willink?

  And if I, if I can't communicate something in a way that you want to accept it, then you're not going to accept it. And, and one of the most rudimentary mistakes that human beings make is giving, when I say, "Hey Dave, here's a better way to do what you're trying to do."

• 20:24Jocko Willink?

  That's, hey, you, in fact, let's try this. "Dave, let me give you some advice." Now, look, if I know you've got a big ego and I come to you with, "Let me give you some advice," how's that gonna work out? It ain't gonna work out. It ain't gonna work out. You're gonna say, "Yeah, go ahead." And I'm gonna tell you my idea, it's gonna bounce off your ego shield like, with, with, with no, not even making a dent. It's not even gonna make a dent. So, maybe, and when we start pulling the strings on this and, and this is, it's one of those things where sometimes you almost feel like, it's a, it's a cop out to get to the point in the conversation where you say, you start pulling the string, pull the string, pull the string, and you get to a point where you go, "Oh, you don't have a good, I don't have a good enough relationship with you."

• 21:09Jocko Willink?

  Cause if I had a good enough relationship with you and I gave you advice, you'd be like, "Oh, I didn't see it that way." And if I don't have that strong enough in the relationship with you, what I need to do is actually be more tactful and maybe say, "Hey Dave, can you explain to me why you're executing it like that so I can understand it better?" You say, "Well, you know, we're doing it this way because it's the most efficient way." "Oh, hey, the, the way you're doing this one part over here, this cycle over here, does that always, does that always work the fastest?" And you go, "Yeah, it's always the best way." "Oh, that's awesome. Have you ever seen anyone do it this other way? I was wondering what your opinion was of that." And all I'm doing is just opening up your mind, trying to have a conversation. I'm actually, now instead of me giving you my opinion, I've actually flipped the deck over, now I'm asking you for your opinion.

• 21:55Jocko Willink?

  I'm asking you for your opinion, which means that I'm elevating your opinion because I'm asking, I'm not giving you mine. When I give you my opinion, I'm elevating my own opinion. I'm gonna elevate your opinion. So I say, "What do you think about that little part of the project over here, this little cycle? Do you think that's the best way? What's your opinion on that?" And you say, "Well, you know, I have seen it done better." "Oh." And all of a sudden, we're having a real conversation about it. Similar vein.

• 22:21Jocko Willink?

  I had a, I had an individual on a, on a, on a call with a company and, and the guy props, the guy says, "Hey, what do I do when my spouse won't take ownership?" You know, and it's just, and I had to go through the whole thing. Listen, you know,

• 22:42Jocko Willink?

  this isn't about your spouse. This is about you. And if, if you're looking at your spouse, when your spouse doesn't execute the thing you way you wanted it to, it's actually on you. And I go, I always go back to Charlie Plum. To Charlie Plum. If you haven't heard that podcast, it's number 76. And they, in the, in the Hanoi Hilton, after you was shot down and was a prisoner of war for six years. And when they had cellmates, if their cellmate was doing something that annoyed them, if, if Dave was doing something as my cellmate that annoyed me, it was my fault. It was my fault. And if that's where, if that's step number one for you,

• 23:27Jocko Willink?

  you're going to get a lot further in all your relationships. Instead of thinking when Dave's does something that annoys me, that's my fault. Instead, it's Dave does something that annoys me. It's my fault for allowing it to annoy me and I need to adjust. Start there. It's a good place to start.

• 23:46Dave Berke?

  Yeah, the, the beauty of that too is, is whatever level, whatever way you look at this, and however you want to pull that thread of that problem and get to the core of it, every direction you look at it, every way you attack it, it always comes back to you. Which is actually a really good thing because that means you have all the control over the situation. And if the first approach didn't work, cool, no factor. Take another approach.

• 24:10Dave Berke?

  The other reason why I really wanted to talk about this one, this is a company we've got a longstanding relationship with. We've been with them for well over a year. We, we know these people really well. And this is one of those conversations that I get to have that's kind of fun is that in the middle of the conversation, I can see the other person. Dial in like they know what's going on. And when we were talking and I was, I was talking about the idea of, hey, listen, when you resign yourself to, I'm not going to do this anymore. As I'm going to get to an explanation, this person cuts me off and says, that's not cover and move. And that right there's a, hey, we're done. That's, you got it. That's exactly right. And so when you're working with other people and you see them make the connection.

• 24:50Dave Berke?

  It makes that ownership piece so much easier when they can, in their own mind, say, oh, hey, what I'm not doing is this and that's hurting me and it's hurting the team. I can easily go fix that. It makes those other pieces so much easier to apply. It's easier to keep your ego in check. We can act when you can actually connect it to the things we teach. And this was one where they said, that's not cover and move. I got it. That's good to go.

• 25:11Jocko Willink?

  Check. All right. So build good relationships and by the way, it's on you.

• 25:20Jocko Willink?

  Well, let's do, let's do one more.

• 25:22Dave Berke?

  Do one more? Yeah. All right. What do we got? We had.

• 25:29Dave Berke?

  We had a company where we had a regional manager, uh, kind of responsible for, uh, several different districts. So this regional manager is kind of seeing, I think they own like the eastern portion of the United States or something along those lines. And had a bunch of different districts, uh, that kind of answered to this person. And one of those district managers is probably their best district manager, good to go, but bit of an ego. And this district manager sent an email to his boss telling him, hey, here's all the things you were doing wrong. Here's all the mistake, kind of just an aggressive email and kind of articulate a little bit of frustration with how this regional manager was operating. So it wasn't effective email. Obviously that didn't go.

• 26:11Jocko Willink?

  That wasn't an effective email? You mean the regional manager didn't read it and go, gosh, thank you for this input. Thank you for coming at me like that. I really liked your, I really appreciate your transparency.

• 26:22Dave Berke?

  Yeah, that did, that's not how it went over. And it's funny you said that because I think inside the email, there was a phrase, I'm just being transparent or I'm just being honest, something like that. Which was the caveat of, hey, I'm going to be a jerk, totally out of line, inappropriate, and nothing I'm going to say is going to resonate, but I'm going to say it anyway. So that's kind of how the email came across. And of course, the regional manager amazingly didn't appreciate that. Well, so an interesting thing happened. They talked about it and this person that sent the email, this guy was like, hey, you know what? I'm sorry. You're right. And realized that the way that he communicated wasn't effective and straight up took ownership of it and said, "Hey, I shouldn't have done that. I let my emotions get the best of me. I apologize."

• 27:05Dave Berke?

  "And hey, that's not gonna happen again. I'm gonna do a much better job communicating." But that, that wasn't, that wasn't the issue. The issue is, in this case, that regional manager, that boss, took the apology of the subordinate as a win, as a, as a victory. And so when this person took ownership and apologized, said, "Hey, I was out of line", the regional manager reinforced that by saying, "Yeah, you were", something like, "Don't ever let that happen again. Don't ever talk to me like that", and left it as, "I kinda won the argument. I put you back in your place, and there should be no confusion on your mind of how this thing works." And that was actually the real issue here,

• 27:47Dave Berke?

  because that regional manager, this senior boss, was in a position to have an incredible win at this bad situation, and what they did was actually undermine their relationship, because the other person was doing what we've been talking about, which is take ownership, and when they did that, they kinda got smacked in the face over doing that. And that, the amazing thing about it was, that regional manager took a win and turned it into a loss and created more problems with that subordinate than had, nothing had ever come out of it from the get-go.

• 28:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's interesting. So, usually, it's the other way that I have to discuss this issue, which is, when my, when I say as the boss, "Hey Dave, this was my fault. It shouldn't have gone this way. I made a couple bad calls. It's on me", and people say, "Yeah, but what happens when Dave says back to me, 'Yeah, you're damn right, Jocko. It is your fault'?" And people don't know what to do. That, that catches them off-guard. They don't know what to do. And I say, "Hey, Dave, you know, this was my fault. I shouldn't have let this happen." You go, "Yeah, it was your fault." And now I think, "Wait, wait a second", what happens? My ego flares up.

• 29:01Jocko Willink?

  And it seems uncomfortable because now you're blaming me and when you blame me, I get defensive and now I go on the attack and I actually retract my ownership. So what I find interesting about this one is I'm the DM. I'm the, I'm the subordinate and I submit the, the apology. Hey boss, I'm really sorry. I, I got emotional and I got, I wrote this aggressive email. I should have read it before I sent it. You know, I want to build a good relationship with you. It's on me. I won't let it happen again. I'm sorry.

• 29:36Jocko Willink?

  And then the regional manager goes, yeah, it is your fault and you better not do that again. And what happens to the subordinate? The subordinate goes, wait a second. Wait, you're saying this is my fault? And the correct response actually is, yeah, boss, absolutely. As I just said, this is on me. It's my fault. But what happened is so, so even though, yeah, the, the regional manager, the boss made a bad move. Made a bad tactical move, didn't build a relationship, didn't move it forward. But the subordinate, what he should do, that, that's, you know, I, I was, I, this is one of the, one of the times where I consistently yell an answer.

• 30:20Jocko Willink?

  You know, when, when I consistently yell an answer, which is when, when I say, hey, this is my fault. And you say, yes, it is. And I go, I know. That's exactly what I just said. It's the same thing. Hey, hey boss, I shouldn't have done this. It's my fault. Yeah, you're right. It is your fault. Yes, absolutely, boss. That's what I just said. And then I'm definitely want to take ownership and I, I need to be, think through things before I do it. Boom. Elevate the conversation, move it forward as opposed to letting your ego flare up a little bit. Look, this is what we're doing. How do you, how do you?

• 30:52Jocko Willink?

  How do you disarm the ego? You subordinate your own. I can't, I can't forcibly subordinate your ego. I can't forcibly do it. I, and we have two big egos in the room. I can't forcibly subordinate you. I can try. And how do I, how can I try and do it? I can be offensive to you. I can put you down. I can prank on you. There's all these ways I can try and force the submission of your ego. None of them work. I mean, they, they might work temporarily. You know, I could yell and scream at you and kick you out of my office. Cool. I won that, that minute battle. Yeah. And then you're, you're bunkered even more into your position. You hate me now. Yeah. You went from like, hey, I'm pissed at the boss. Now I hate my boss. So it's not a win.

• 31:33Jocko Willink?

  When I forcibly try and submit your ego, I'm not gonna make it happen properly. So what I, what I can do is I subordinate my own ego. And you know what? That stings. It stings. I know it stings. I know it stings. And people think, oh, Jocko, you go into a room and if your boss, if your boss was telling you to do something stupid, you just stand up and say, hell no, boss, I'm not doing it. Wrong. I'm, I'm, I made a career out of subordinating my ego. Why? Not, not to kiss someone's ass, not to make them feel good, but so that I could do my job better. So my team could get the support we needed, so we could move forward. So I could develop that relation. So when I did need something from my boss, I could actually get it. That's what we're doing here.

• 32:19Jocko Willink?

  So when you feel that frustration and you can hear it, you can hear it in someone's voice. Well, I don't know the words that they use. We don't have quotes in here. But you know, when you, when even when I hear, he, he took it as a win and, and took it as if he was right.

• 32:38Jocko Willink?

  He was. He was. Accept that. Accept that. And use that as a starting point to begin to redevelop and rebuild that relationship.

• 32:55Jocko Willink?

  Probably a good place to stop. We did it. 33 minutes. Not bad. All right. If you want to join, if you want to dig deeper into to all these aspects of leadership in any arena, you can join Dave and me and the rest of the EF, the Echelon Front team, efonline.com. We solve problems through leadership. This is what we do. If you want leadership guidance inside your organization, you can come check out our leadership consultancy at echelonfront.com. I've also written a bunch of books on the subject of leadership, Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy of Leadership, Leadership Strategy and Tactics. Got some other podcasts, Jocko Podcast, Jocko Unraveling, Grounded, and the Warrior Kid Podcast.

• 33:37Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to support any of these podcasts, including this one, then you can get some gear from jacostore.com or originmaine.com. Thanks for listening to the debrief. Now go out and lead. This is Dave and Jocko. Out.