Leadership lessons from a Navy SEAL

Navy SEAL secrets of success, with Jonathan Wilson

Hello, and welcome to the PracticeLab podcast, where we talk to top advisors about what makes them successful, so you can apply those lessons in your own business. I'm your host, Will McKenna, and our guest today is Jonathan Wilson.

Jonathan spent 16 years as a Navy SEAL before joining Capital Group, where he now consults with advisors on how to grow their retirement plan business. Jonathan helps advisors apply the lessons he learned as a Navy SEAL to help them grow in today's fast-paced industry. So in this episode, you'll hear Jonathan talk about the three keys to success: mission, systems and culture. And within the systems discussion, Jonathan digs into what he calls the four P's: problem, plan, perform and probe, and how you can implement that approach in your team. And finally, Jonathan shares his insights about culture and what it takes to lead a high-performing team as a financial professional.

So let's get started by hearing about Jonathan's experience as a SEAL, and how that informs his work today.

Jonathan Wilson:  So let's add a little color to my background, because it kind of paints the picture for the rest of our time today. I'm Jonathan Wilson, and my prior job was Navy SEAL. I was in the Navy for 16 years. And that's what we're going to spend a lot of today's time on: How did those skill sets, how did that mindset, how does all that translate? And here's the thing: It absolutely does translate to our industry, but not just ours, any industry. And we'll go deep in that in a second.

When I went through BUDS, basic underwater demolition SEAL, which is basically SEAL training where you try out to be a Navy SEAL, 216 people tried out. So 216 people showed up day one. Out of that 216 people, 16 of us made it through. There's absolutely a lot of luck involved with that. But there was also this mindset of getting comfortable being uncomfortable. And I promise you, everybody on this podcast that's listening has been uncomfortable this last year. How do we embrace that uncomfortable? That's where we grow. That's where we learn. We'll come back to that later in the presentation.

So if we think about my background, I've deployed to the locations that you would think of, including Afghanistan and Iraq. In my time in the SEALs, we went on over 200-plus missions. Why is that important? Think about this: 200-plus combat operations missions — not a single one of those missions went as planned. Let that hit home: 200-plus missions, despite the fact that the U.S. military has these amazing assets, the aircraft, the ground assets, the imagery, the sources, the list goes on and on. We have the most amazing intelligence community in the world, in my opinion. And then you layer on her allies, so the British and every other ally that we have. We still couldn't predict the future. So how do you create a high-performing structure that knows, at any given moment, it's going to have to adapt and pivot? It absolutely comes down to three things: mission, systems and culture.

Let's hop in, right out of the gate, with what's important and what matters most, and that's our mission. What is the mission? Is it clear and concise? It has to be. Does everybody know their roles and responsibilities to achieve mission success? And as the commander or the leader, are we painting a picture of what success looks like? We call that “commander's intent” in the military. And we know we're no longer the subject matter expert. The team leaders are out there on the field doing it. They know what they're striving for. We trust them to get the job done.

Let me paint this picture: Imagine us overseas right now, everybody on this call. We're the SEAL team, and we're overseas and we're waiting in the ready room. So picture a room. It's pretty open, but there's TV screens everywhere — imagery, there’s satellite, there’s ISR footage, the drones above staring at different targets. We're waiting to see if any of our targets are in the area. And if they're not there, then we're not going to go on a mission.

But all of a sudden, we're all sitting there, and the intel officer comes in. And he or she gives us nothing more than the five W's: the who, what, when, where and why. With that very basic, but very powerful information, this empowered team instantaneously starts deploying to do their piece of the planning phase. So again, everybody knows their roles and responsibilities, and we needed nothing more than the five W’s to start planning.

If we're going out in the desert, well, we need different gear. Every single teammate knows what gear they need. If we're going into a city and urban setting, we know what gear we need, if we're using aircraft, if we’re using HILOS. Five minutes after the intel officer gave us that information, we would be back home right here in front of the cameras — imagine us in that ready room — briefing everybody. Not just the leadership, but we're briefing each other, to align each other to make sure that we're not exposing gaps, that we’re cross-communicating. Ten minutes after receiving that brief, we would be outside talking about contingencies: What can go wrong? We always talked about what can go wrong. We would be walking through and talking through the plan as well. Twenty minutes after receiving their brief on a time-sensitive mission, we would be on a helicopter flying to target. Twenty minutes and the five W’s is all an empowered team needs: a clear mission to get out the door.

If I were to recap just again, before I move on to the systems component: Mission, it is the most important thing. It is our guidepost; it is our North star. Is it clear and concise? Does everybody on the team, in the company, in the industry know it and believe it, and do they know how to achieve mission success? And then as a commander, or as a leader or team leader, have we set that picture of what the expectations are, or what the end state needs to be? And then, with the clear roles and responsibilities, now your team can march. We can trust them to march towards mission success.

Will McKenna: So that's a great summary of mission. And whether you're on the battlefield or in the boardroom, it's important for all members of the team to have a clear, concise mission statement, and to know their roles and responsibilities. From there, you can define the parameters of the mission using the five W’s: who, what, when, where and why. Jonathan goes on to talk about the importance of having clear lines of communication. And that's a lesson he learned from working with General McChrystal. Take a listen.

Jonathan Wilson: Clear channels of communication. I worked for General McChrystal at one point. And what I would say is, prior to General McChrystal implementing what he called his “O & I briefs” — where every single morning, we would have a 90-minute brief — prior to that, every team thought we were doing great things. And we were, to some degree. We were winning our battles, the SEAL teams, the Delta Force, the Rangers. All the different units were doing great. But we were losing the war because we weren't cross-communicating, because we weren't learning from each other's mistakes and failures, because we weren't leveraging each other's resources. The list goes on and on. So how did General McChrystal fix this problem? Again, it was the O & I, the op and intel brief that would take place every single morning. Where 6,000 people — let me say it again, 6,000 people — would get on a call to align, making sure that everybody had the most recent information. That if people were operating, there was a reason to go out and operate that night. And if we weren't working, we can support each other. That was the purpose of the O & I.

Will McKenna: OK, let's turn our attention to systems. When it comes to systems, Jonathan in the SEAL team used a four-step framework called the four P's. It's a simple but powerful checklist that they use on every mission. And the four P's are:

• Problem, which is the mission statement or commander's intent.
• Plan, or what are all the steps to reach our milestone?
• Perform, how the plan will be carried out with individual roles and responsibilities.
• And probe, which is what the military calls the after-action review, to understand what works, what didn't and how do we improve next time.

So let's go back to Jonathan and hear him walk us through the systems and the four P’s.

Jonathan Wilson: Why do we have systems or use systems? Because we're planning for the unexpected. So let me share a couple tools that we use, and they are basic. And again, we've all used these before. You could think about why we're using these or elaborate on that in a second. But these basic tools include a checklist, like I just mentioned, and a debrief. So we're going to spend a little bit of time on both of those.

I'm going to start with the first one: the checklist. Before every single mission, we would use this checklist that we call the mission planning document. And what is that? Well, it is basically what you would do to plan for a mission to make sure you don't forget a single thing on that list. Because, believe it or not, before we had this in place, we were forgetting things. And if you forget something or you make a small mistake, well, on the battlefield, people get hurt. If we make mistakes in our industry, that could be the difference between winning or losing a relationship, an opportunity, the list goes on and on. But how do we make sure we don't make those mistakes? Put a simple checklist in place.

If you think of some other high-performing individuals, and I would say everybody on this call is, we work in a high-paced industry. Pilots use it in pre- and post-flight and emergency situations, ER doctors use it so they don't make these simple mistakes. In fact, there's a great book called The Checklist Manifesto. They analyze an ER team that went from making a lot of mistakes, believe it or not, because they’re operating constantly with long hours, to barely making any when they simply put a five check-in-the-box system in place and empowered the nurses to make sure to tell the doctors to go through that list. So I'm going to share our mission planning document. How can you use this? Let's go through what this will look like.

So the first thing is: Define the problem. Or a different way of saying that is essentially what we just talked about. What is the mission? Is it clear and concise? What does success look like? Or what are the outcomes needed? And does everybody know their roles and responsibilities to achieve it? Check in the box.

Planning phase, that's the next one on the list. So you're the team leader. You are tasked with this project. Who are the teammates and the resources you need to have the best outcome possible? As a team leader, you need to be vocal to your leadership about who you need and those resources. You may not get them, but come out of the gates asking for everything.

So now that you have your team and you have your resources, let's develop a plan. Knowing that those plans most likely will change, what are the high-probability plans? Let's make a high-probability plan number one and a high-probability plan number two. And then after that, always, always, always talk about contingencies. And then always do the walk-through. Always do the talk-through. Always do those rehearsals.

I'm thinking about a couple missions that I went on. One in particular we were training for, if you remember, was the Somali pirate mission. So this is about a decade almost, maybe eight or nine years into the Iraq War and Afghanistan War, and the Somali pirates started hijacking a lot of these vessels. So we needed, we were the SEALs, and despite being in Iraq and Afghanistan in the desert, we're supposed to be the water unit here. So we had to get back on the water and figure out how are we going to tackle this problem.

So we trained for it. The first area that we trained at was off the coast of California in San Clemente. And we would take helicopters from the Marriott Long Beach, fly to San Clemente, train on the gas and oil platforms that you may or may not be able to see from the coast (but they’re are out there). And we would practice taking down these targets that some of these pirates have taken over. And we got really, really good at that.

So that was the problem, now that was the plan. We are on the perform phase of these four P's. Perform. Here's what I'll say here is, as a leader, stick to that plan until the battlefield pivots. When the battlefield pivots, as a leader, pick your head up, analyze the situation, talk to colleagues of yours if you have to and leadership. Do we need to pivot here?. And if not, continue to mission. If so, make that pivot, and then move in the new direction and make sure your teammates understand why. And empower them to head in that new area that you have to go down, check in the box.

So now the problem, plan and perform boxes are checked. We're done with that mission. We performed it. What do we do now? We probe it. Or, another way of saying it, do an after-action review. And this is the debrief. This is a second tool we were talking about, our second system, if you will. This is one of the most powerful tools any team has, when done correctly. This allows you to constantly optimize, learn from your mistakes, not make the same mistakes twice, if done correctly. As a leader, we have to set the tone. This is mandatory. We would do this instantaneously after a mission. It did not matter what happened on that mission, if people got hurt. It didn't matter if we were in the field for 10 minutes or two weeks. The first thing we would do is not take our gear off. We would go back to that room where we were briefing, that we were a Navy SEAL team. And we would re-brief what we said we were going to do. And I mentioned earlier, we all make mistakes. So as a leader, set the tone: Share your mistakes. Allow others to share their mistakes, and do not put them down when they do. The second that we put somebody down or ridicule somebody or embarrass somebody, that'll be the last time that they actually share what actually took place. The feedback process has to be respectful.

So what would this look like? Again, you're the leader. You set the tone. You're giving people the authority to share those mistakes. The first thing you're going to do is re-brief what you said you were going to do. So, for example, you were going to win an opportunity. You came up with a plan. You discussed the plan. Remind everybody in this after-action review or this probe what that plan was. And every key stakeholder in that meeting would go back and re-brief what they said they were going to do. And then you're going to share what actually happened.

So what did happen? Let's not justify it. Let's not make excuses, even if it's a mistake. What happened? That's all we want to hear. And then afterwards, when everybody's shared what actually happened, we'd go through and analyze if that is a mistake or a better way of doing business. If it's a better way of doing business, we're going to test it out on the battlefield. And if it makes sense, we're going to make it our new standard operating procedure. If it's a mistake, let's get to the root cause. It’s not about pointing fingers, again. Let’s just get to the root cause and make sure it never happens again. And let's share it broadly, so we never make the same mistakes twice.

Will McKenna: OK, so that's a detailed look at systems and the four P's. So let's turn to the final section, with a focus on culture. Jonathan says that culture is all about fostering an environment of responsibility and empowerment, giving the people on your team the confidence and the support to make their own decisions.

Jonathan told me a story about General Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had a rule around decision-making in uncertain environments, and he called it the 40/70 rule. When making a decision, you should have no less than 40% and no more than 70% of the information needed. Anything less could lead to mistakes, but anything more usually meant a missed opportunity. Jonathan's SEAL training taught him that culture is also about getting comfortable being uncomfortable, and learning how to push past our own preconceived limits. Now, let's go back to Jonathan.

Jonathan Wilson: Let's move to the final part of this, and that's culture. I made a statement earlier, when I shared that 216 people tried out and 16 of us made it, this comment of getting comfortable being uncomfortable. And I said, this last year, we've all been uncomfortable to some degree. Well, here's what I'll say: That uncomfortable area, that place where it doesn't feel natural or feels a little uneasy, if you will, that's where growth is happening. That's where we're pushing ourselves out of where our preconceived limits were, and we're pushing ourselves to do more. And we've all been here before.

So if I go back to my time in SEAL training, I promise you, we were uncomfortable there. I think about one specific situation: We would do something called surf torture. So we would interlock our arms, lay in the water, and they would force us to be uncomfortable. It forced us to push ourselves — or not — past what we thought were our limits. And we would be freezing, hypothermic. And people thought, “This is it. I can't go any further.” And those people would walk away. They would quit. And the other people decided just to push a little bit further. And then when they hit that spot, they decided to push a little bit further. And the last time we did that, that surf torture, we went from sunset to sunrise, and not a single person quit. And that's where our instructor — I still remember him to this day — he  stood us up and he said, “Gentlemen, these are the people we are going to go to war with.” I'm pretty sure, to everybody on this podcast, that absolutely makes sense. Got it. But he also said, “These are, mentally, some of the strongest people on this planet.” And I didn't get that. I do now.

That mindset of getting comfortable being uncomfortable. That mindset of pushing past your preconceived limits, taking the ability to see the end goal, that outcome that you're shooting for. And maybe the fog of war is kicking in, or you're having a horrible day and you can't see the peak anymore, but you don't give up. You look at the next ridge line. And maybe that's just too much this day. There's just too much to bear and too many tough conversations. You just lost a huge opportunity. Keep that end goal in mind, but don't look at that next ridge line, because that's too much. Look at the next hill. And if that's too much, just find yourself taking that next step. And I promise you, at some point, we'll come out of this.

And what I also promise you is you've all been here before. We've all been here before. What do I mean by that? Think about the degree you have, or the fact that you're in your role right now, the promotion you got, the race that you were in on the sports team you were part of in college, the state championships. Whatever it is, we got comfortable being uncomfortable. We earned the right to have that trophy, we earned the right to have that medal, earned the right to have our jobs. We've been here before. And I promise you will come out of this, like we have time and time again.

Will McKenna: Finally, Jonathan gives us a peek into his family life. That includes not only his wife and five kids, but also a working farm with a veritable menagerie of farm animals. So how do they bring order to that chaos? Mission, systems and culture, of course. Take it away, Jonathan.

Jonathan Wilson: So mission, systems and culture, to bring us all back, obviously applies on the battlefield. I hope I've been able to show you that. It definitely applies in our industry, but it's not just our industry. It's within our families as well. It's on the gridiron, the diamond, it doesn't matter. It applies everywhere. If you have it, you can be that high-performance team that constantly pivots at any given moment.

If I think about my family, so I haven't shared with you, I'm a family of seven. We have five beautiful kids, oldest is in college, my youngest just turned 10. Three girls, two boys, but we also have a farm. So we have two horses. We have a pig, with plus or minus five on that. We have 50 chickens. I'm not sure the coyotes have been around lately. We have three dogs; we have a cat. You probably heard some of that in the background. A lot of you are probably cringing to some degree or laughing and thinking, “Wow, that's a lot.” And you're absolutely right. How do you manage chaos? Ladies and gentlemen, just what we talked about. It comes down to clear mission, it comes down to systems, and just this culture of empowerment.

What do I mean by that? Well, we have a chore chart. And that chore chart is exactly what we talked about today. So if, on a Monday, there's an A on that chore chart next to Feed the Dogs. Well, that's my youngest guy. That's, that's Alex, that's my 10-year-old. If his letter’s there, he knows it's his day to feed the dogs. As a leader, we've empowered him by telling them what success looks like. What's the end state here? The dog gets fed. I'm not going to micromanage you, Alex, you've been empowered to do it. Get the job done. But again, it's just given us clear guidance, when there's a lot of moving parts. How do you make sure we don't drop the ball or make those simple mistakes? It's by putting some systems in place. High-performing teams absolutely have mission systems and culture.

With that, I just want to thank everybody for the time today. Thank you for letting me share my perspective. I absolutely know it works and applies not just here, as we talked about, not just in our industry, not just on the battlefield, but with our families as well. Thanks.

Will McKenna: OK, so that wraps up this episode of the PracticeLab podcast. Special thanks to Jonathan Wilson for coming on the show.

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