In the corporate world, too many times well-meaning leaders can’t resist jumping in and solving problems for their team. This can demotivate and disempower individuals, who then hesitate to act boldly. The best leaders know that the job of a team leader is to put the right members in place, give them the tools to do the job, and then remove any obstacles that might prevent them from solving the problem at hand. But that’s not enough. As a leader, you must allow your team to make mistakes in order to learn from them. You must expect mistakes to be made and have contingency plans to recover from them. You must accept that even without mistakes, circumstances will change.
A team, of course, is only as good as its members, so selecting people with the right physical aptitude and psychological profile is crucial. Olson [Admiral Eric Olson, who retired from the United States Navy in 2011 as a four-star Admiral after more than 38 years of military service] says that when assembling a team, it pays to look for problem solvers who are also optimists. The Navy once conducted a study to find out why the attrition rate in SEAL training was so high. About 75 percent of candidates literally rang a brass bell that hangs near the training ground when they couldn’t take the grueling drills any longer. The number shouldn’t have been that high, because all the people who walked in the front door were theoretically capable of graduating, having already been through a careful screening process. Some candidates failed to keep up with the physical or academic demands of the course, but the largest group of dropouts voluntarily quit not in the middle of some really hard, wet, or cold event but soon after breakfast or lunch when they were warm and dry.
The Navy discovered that these candidates dropped out because they anticipated that they might fail the next challenge or drill, such as a long run or swim or lying cold and wet for hours in the sand. “It was an epiphany for me,” says Olson, “that people would give up a lifelong dream because they feared failure and not because they actually failed.” Interestingly, the findings of the study didn’t lead the Navy to change its SEAL training regimen very much, and to this day the attrition rate has stayed high. “We determined,” says Olson, “that if people were quitting because they were afraid to face real conditions, it was good that we discovered that under controlled circumstances rather than when lives or mission success depended on them. If they quit during a fair and equal training and testing environment, then we weren’t too sorry to see them go.
So the 25 percent who made it were optimistic risk-takers, not afraid of failure, and had a proclivity for success. Many of them were competitive water polo players or wrestlers in high school or college, but the real surprise was that many of the successful candidates were also chess players. In fact, those quality athletes who also played chess were much more likely to become a Navy SEAL than those who didn’t, because they were good problem solvers. “Chess players don’t quit at lunch because there’s going to be a fourteen-mile run that afternoon,” says Olson. “They are thinking several moves ahead, figuring out what they are going to do next week and next month and after they graduate. They are strategic thinkers and problem solvers not only in the moment but also for the next event and the one after that.
The other characteristic the Navy found among successful SEAL candidates is that no matter how tough the challenge, they would keep trying to find a solution. As Olson puts it, “We look for people who know that there’s always a way to solve a problem.” He could have been talking about himself. When he was a kid growing up in Tacoma, Washington, Olson, who loved to swim in the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest, wanted a wetsuit but couldn’t afford it. The income from his paper route wasn’t enough to buy one. But it was enough to buy two bags of neoprene scraps and eight cans of wetsuit glue from Harvey’s Dive Shop in Seattle. He cut and glued dozens of scraps together to make his first wetsuit, the only one he had before he joined the Navy.
A key aspect of dealing with failure is being able to rebound under extreme pressure. In the SEALs’ underwater competency test, for example, instructors intentionally create challenges for the trainees, pulling off their masks, turning off their air, or weighing them down with additional weights. A number of the candidates failed to remain underwater for the required twenty minutes. To help raise the passing rate, the Navy then created a decision-making system called “The Big Four.”
These are:
- Goal setting: Break big challenges into easily accomplished micro-goals—first slip your mask back on and then worry about the air hose. As you finish one after another, your confidence builds.
- Mental rehearsal: Visualize a fear or a challenge (like being attacked underwater or giving a big corporate presentation) over and over until it feels familiar and therefore becomes easier to handle under duress.
- Self-talk: When under stress, learn to stop talking to yourself in a panicked voice and switch to a calmer, more reasonable tone, one that can help you solve problems.
- Stay calm: When you feel overwhelmed by stress, try to slow your breathing and try to center yourself.
After trainees were exposed to “The Big Four,” passing rates for the underwater drill rose by a third.
(Excerpted from The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out by Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink and Ramesh Srinivasan. Reprinted by permission of Portfolio / Penguin / Penguin Random House LLC)
