The Navy SEALs Leadership Secret

I have seen many organizations that never reach their potential because they simply had the wrong players playing. You can have all the strategy, tools, and resources in the world, and still, fall short if your people can’t navigate them. A team is only as good as its weakest link. Organizations that allow subpar players to join their team set themselves up for heartache and misery. It is very difficult, discouraging, and time-consuming to continually have turnover in your organization by failing to get the right players. You can’t allow desperation to lower your expectations. Desperation breeds depreciation. Depreciation causes you to undervalue what it takes and settle for whatever is available, which creates average work at best.

When you settle for average, you surrender your potential for greatness. Being so desperate for a body that you end up putting the wrong people in place can be the most detrimental of mistakes. People should be placed in roles based on strategy, not solely on necessity. Everyone loses when necessity overtakes strategy. The person who wasn’t the right fit loses because they don’t have what it takes to perform at the level needed of them. The people leading lose because they become increasingly frustrated with incompetence. And finally, the organization loses because it’s not operating at its best. An organization is only at its best when the best people are playing in the ensemble.

“When you settle for average, you surrender your potential for greatness.”

You have to create high expectations on the front end if you want to get success on the back end. The good news is when you set the bar high; it filters out the wrong players and ends up elevating the right players. This is why elite teams are highly productive; the right players are in place. For example, The Navy SEALs send potential candidates through a strictly regimented tryout before they even consider a person an actual candidate for the SEALs. It is one of the hardest grueling military challenges in the world, with 75%-80% of candidates dropping out. And these dropouts are not average, run-of-the-mill, people; they are the top the Navy has to offer. Hell Week consists of five-and-a-half days of cold, wet, brutally difficult situations while operating on less than four hours of sleep. Only 25% even make it past Hell Week, which happens early on in the third week of phase one. That is staggering, considering the whole training is six months long, with a total of three phases.

The SEALs have the best of the best, and therefore are the best of the best. This is not happenstance or luck of the draw. They intentionally only allow the right players to even have a shot at playing. The fact that you make it to the top few who get selected for the SEALs is an amazing accomplishment within itself.

You may say, “Well sure––but that’s the SEALs. Our organization isn’t that regimented.” This may be the case, but if you want to grow, don’t hire for what you want to maintain; hire for where you want to go. The more you appreciate your organization and its mission, the more the players should appreciate in value. What you appreciate begins to appreciate in value. When you set the bar high, it will attract only those who play at a high level. The lower you set the bar, the more you’ll attract low capacity players. If you want to be the best, you have to play with the best. You have to decide if you want to be an organization that settles or an organization that is growing.