The Realtionship

A few months ago I was listening to The Tim Ferris Show.  If you are not familiar with Tim’s podcast, I encourage you to check it out. On this particular day Tim’s guest was Jocko Willink, a retired Navy SEAL, author and in every sense, a guy that gets stuff done.

On the podcast Jocko spoke about the book that he had co-authored with Leif Babin.  Extreme Ownership is a great read.  The book holds a lofty position on the New York Times bestseller list so I am not alone in my opinion on this one.  There are plenty of ah-ha moments in the book, but it’s how the information is conveyed that sets it apart.  No waffle, just straight up and at times confronting.

Jocko recently launched his own podcast.  He is five episodes into it so I am late to the party.  This morning I listened to Episode One of “Jocko Podcast”.  The guy is a powerful story teller.  The content was all real world stuff and much of it quite emotive.

In the podcast Jocko spoke about his SEAL Team and the relationships they had built.  His team would do anything he asked of them.  Anything.  Jocko felt this was not because of the directions he had issued as their commander, but because of the strength of the relationships they had forged.  In return he would do anything for them.  Jocko feels none of this happened because of orders, it was all by choice, to support one another.  The power of the relationship.

Hold that thought and consider our environments at work.  Do we have those sorts of relationships with our teams and the individuals within them?  Would they do whatever it took to acheive an outcome?  By choice or through compliance?  What would we do for them?

We spent a lot of time and energy looking out the window at our customers, external stakeholders, investors, etc.  Maybe we need to invest more in our own house.

Combat, service, life and death will build bonds that we will likely never replicate at the office, but that is not an excuse to let it go.  We don’t need to talk about it, consult and over plan.  We just need to get after it.  Make it a priority to demonstrate our commitment to our people through our attitudes and actions and I suspect many of those metrics we like to track will head in the right direction.  As Jocko says, outcomes require action.