[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jamie Cochran.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Lake Babin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Read when.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm extreme watershed podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: New episode of the podcast and of course we have with us Jaco Willink joining us today.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then topic today is leading through low morale, or particularly with people who are not happy or never happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we do that as well?
[SPEAKER_01]: How fitting.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a rough environment out here.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a rough environment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what do we do as leaders when we have people on our team that are just not happy and we're dealing with the low morale of your organization?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this is a subject that I wrote about in the book, Leadership Strategy and Tactics.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a guy in another Sea of Platoon, not in my Sea of Platoon, who had kind of a negative attitude.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had a lot of potential, kind of a stud, actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he just had kind of a negative attitude in one of the assistant platoon commander of that platoon came over and talked to me and explained the situation.
[SPEAKER_01]: This guy is a negative attitude.
[SPEAKER_01]: What should we do?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what to do with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, of course, told him, hey,
[SPEAKER_01]: Let him give him some responsibility, give him some ownership.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he has some control over his own destiny, he has some responsibility, some weight on his shoulders.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the guy says, yeah, cool, you know, I'll give that a try.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I went on a trip, I think, and a couple weeks later, I come back and I see the guy, and I said, oh, you know, how's everything going?
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes, it's got worse.
[SPEAKER_01]: He got worse.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm kind of surprised because I had been through this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like when I was given responsibility, I, my attitude got better.
[SPEAKER_01]: better than it was as a young cocky young seal who no one's ever do anything good enough and all this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I was really surprised to hear when this other assistant Patoon commander said, yeah, is that a dude's gotten worse and I couldn't really understand why, but then I thought about and I said, hold on a second, what did you put him in charge of?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, we put him in charge of cleaning the bathrooms on the second deck, and I said, okay, that's definitely a problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you need to put him in charge of something real, put him in charge of something that's meaningful and significant.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they happen to be doing a
[SPEAKER_01]: dive block of training at the time and he said okay well give it a try and he put him in charge of a training mission with the dive gear and they went out next week of this mission and it was it was really fascinating I saw the guy walking down the hallway you know the next day and
[SPEAKER_01]: I could visibly see that his attitude was better.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, visibly see that his attitude is better because he had some control over his own destiny.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was in charge of something meaningful.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was being challenged.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had some responsibility and so weight put on him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that feels good to most humans.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's normally my first sort of check is how what can I do to put somebody to improve someone's morale is I'll put them in charge of something.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think as a leader, it's our job to get to the root cause of the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is causing the low morale and you're right, oftentimes it's because people don't feel valued.
[SPEAKER_00]: People don't have a clear direction of what they should be doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not sure how to contribute to the mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: That impacts how they feel about themselves as it relates to the organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think as a leader, it's our job to get to the root cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is causing this low morale?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is causing this behavior or this feeling of being unhappy in my position?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and the trap is to blame that person, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: They're just, they're negative.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have a bad attitude, or, you know, they're, they're tracking the rest of the team down.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's, it's very easy to do that, because it's frustrating to work with someone, particularly if everybody else is excited to be there and they're, and they're excited about the mission and what they're doing and others maybe or are not as excited about it and expressing that kind of negative attitude, it's, it's a problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's easy to blame that person.
[SPEAKER_02]: As a leader, I think you got to look at yourself, it's okay, if that person doesn't understand how they're contributing, if they don't understand the impact they're actually making, if they don't have ownership of what they're doing, who's fault is that, it's my fault.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's an example of that when we were in Ramadi with Tascina Bruser, we were in my guys in Charlie Batoon, that was a machine gunner, and he was really frustrated that he was going out on these operations, carrying this heavy belt-fed machine gun, and
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, all of the rounds that he's carrying, he's carrying a ton of weight and we're done a lot of foot patrol.
[SPEAKER_02]: So in addition to his helmet and radio and body armor and all the Gary's carry is carrying hundreds of rounds of machine gun ammunition and this big heavy machine gun and it's brutal work in 120 degree heat in the daytime, slogging through these muddy fields of patrol
[SPEAKER_02]: He told me all I am is just the security detail for the cypress, you know, the cypress are actually going out and engaging bad guys and making a difference and I'm just here for the security detail.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when he was expressing that kind of negative attitude and frustration to me, I realized very quickly, I had totally failed.
[SPEAKER_02]: to, I'd failed my seals to explain to them, particularly my machine gunners explained to them how critical they were because anytime that we were getting attacked on almost every single one of those operations and when you have a dozen enemy fighters that are attacking you with machine guns, you are not breaking contact with a bolt action sniper rifle.
[SPEAKER_02]: The only thing that was keeping us alive was those machine gunners, who would repell attacks, keep us from getting overrun, or if we got contacted on the move, which happened a lot, then we could actually, they would lay down surprised at faster that we could maneuver to safety.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I explained to him just how critical and important that he was to those missions.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I also explained to him how historic.
[SPEAKER_02]: that was as well because I'd even talk I talked to some Vietnam seals that had been in multiple deployments to Vietnam and done some legendary things where incredible seals just just had had driven the incredible legacy of the seal teams that we have today and I talked to some of them who had been machine gunners on multiple deployments you know about how often they actually how often they got in contact and how many rounds they shot and they talked
[SPEAKER_02]: out of multiple Vietnam veterans that I talked to, I didn't talk to a single one that had shot their entire loadout of every single round that they were carrying.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so as I'm talking to my machine gunner about this, he was like, how often have you done that?
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was almost every operation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Almost every single operation he's shooting, every single round that he is carrying.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all the other rounds that everyone else is carrying.
[SPEAKER_02]: So
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like man this this is pretty cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like this is historic.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're doing something that nobody else has done.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is this is awesome.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, let's think about just how how cool this is in his historic context and the impact you're actually making and the difference that you're making and none of that would be possible without you.
[SPEAKER_02]: carrying that heavy velvet machine gun.
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, not his fault for being down on, you know, the hard work they had to do and not recognizing the importance that it had on the battlefield and the impact that it had to our strategic mission.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's my fault as the leader for just assuming that he knew and not actually explaining it to him and making that clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we tell leaders all the time, the importance of communicating the why to your people.
[SPEAKER_00]: But oftentimes, what people do in that scenario is they explain why we're doing something, but they connect it to the bottom line or the organizational goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think part of what you're describing here is if you want people to be engaged, you even want to fix some of that low morale is ensuring that when you connect the why to the broader organization or the broader mission, they understand why this matters to them and their peace in it and how they get ahead value.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that oftentimes will help fix that maybe negative reaction of what I'm doing, nobody cares about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Usually it's coming, that sense of negativity is coming from a place of not feeling valued, feeling insecure, all those negative emotions that are creating the outward expression of that negativity.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think as leaders, we can connect the why to why what they're doing matters to the broader mission.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, another thing to think about is getting some dubious.
[SPEAKER_01]: So look, we get in situations where there's business, whether it's in life, whether it's a sports team, whether it's a practice, whether it's training, whether it's rehearsal, whether it's sales, we get in situations where we start to lose.
[SPEAKER_01]: I work with some, but we all work with some sales or organizations where someone will try 10, 15, 20 times to get a deal and they'll get told no on every single one of those.
[SPEAKER_01]: so what can we do as leaders to set up some abuse?
[SPEAKER_01]: Get some wins and it might be something look.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you completely fabricate it?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you completely fabricated and it's totally meaningless, that's not going to help you out.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you can set a standard or you can set a competition or you can set up a game where we can get some
[SPEAKER_01]: W's as a team or as an individual, some of that's hurting, get that person to W. So let's say I got Jamie.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's on my sales team.
[SPEAKER_01]: She hasn't closed the deal in two months and all of a sudden we got a hot lead coming in.
[SPEAKER_01]: I might throw that thing to Jamie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Get her that W. So Brit, allowing that to happen is another way to help people when they're struggling a little bit with morale.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another piece of this is, if you can reframe the tough times to be challenges that are being overcome by the team as an organization, if you can reframe that right there, hey, we got to do something tonight.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to go do something miserable tonight.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever that thing is, we gotta go and do this miserable thing tonight.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you frame it, we gotta go do this miserable thing tonight.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's gonna be terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Guess what?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's gonna be terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you frame it as a challenge that your team, we are stepping up to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna crush.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's gonna adjust them around properly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember when we canceled that mustard a week before the mustard?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I remember that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we had 1,000 people registered for that event.
[SPEAKER_00]: So our team is looking at this list, which is, you know, seems like a big deal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And no one had a bad attitude.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were dealing with negativity.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you were definitely dealing with a challenge that we had.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we had a short amount of time in which to get a whole of each person.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we made it a competition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I threw down some sort of, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: can't even remember what it was, but some prize for whoever got the most.
[SPEAKER_00]: But to the point you're making, it made it fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: It made a crappy thing that we had to get done a little bit of fun, and a little bit of competition took away maybe the negativity people had had by saying, well, there goes my knife with my kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got to stay up until whatever time to get these emails sent out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think we can control a lot more of the environment than we give ourselves credit for as leaders.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's one of the things that
[SPEAKER_02]: that always loved about, you know, and work, work with your Jaco was that you made things fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: No matter how challenged they were, and it was just your attitude of like, oh, this is going to be really hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nobody else thinks that we can do this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's make it happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it just became something that, uh,
[SPEAKER_02]: uh... it became something that drove teamwork you know it drove the relationships on the team that we took pride in being task unit bruiser you know everyone else the other just normal you know out of a bravo charlie whatever they were task in a bruiser were some a different were something special
[SPEAKER_02]: we're willing to push harder and I think you as a leader like that's that the team is going to reflect your attitude and it doesn't matter you don't have to be a senior person in charge you can just bring that attitude that you just be in charge of yourself and your piece of the mission but if you have a great attitude about taking on a difficult challenge people around you start to thrive on that I think it's a great thing to be able to do and you always do that extremely well and it was it was
[SPEAKER_02]: Despite the toughest challenge that we went through, it was fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was always awesome to be a part of that, taking those challenges on.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was something that you brought to the table as a leader.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was thinking about this from perspective of
[SPEAKER_02]: I was talking to leader recently who was talking about the morale on his team was being challenged, they're in a restructuring and so the new strategy has been put in place and they've lost a couple of people and he was worried about other people leaving from the team as well and what I talk to him about is
[SPEAKER_02]: going and building the best relationship that he can with the people on his team and so establishing one-on-one meetings and sitting down and talking to people and understanding what their frustrations are.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes if people are negative and they just need a vent, they just need a vent and they haven't had anyone to vent to and so just sitting down opening up a notebook and listening to what they have to say so that they can vent about some of the things that are going on and what they're frustrated about.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's it builds you're willing to listen to those people now they're more willing to listen to you It builds a relationship those relationships that we talk about based on trustless and respect Influencer care and so that's one great way to do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just listen to some way that wants to complain about about the situation And then as a leader you can identify what are some things that maybe maybe you can't take on all the things that they just talked about You know, they're they're frustrated about but you could maybe take on one or two of those things and even if you can solve
[SPEAKER_02]: even just one or two of those challenges that might even seem miniscule.
[SPEAKER_02]: If to that person, it's a massive morale booster.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the W that the Jocco is talking about because I'm concerned about, you know, these five things.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe I can't handle all five of those things.
[SPEAKER_02]: Three of them, I can't do anything about, but two of these, I can definitely start to move out on and get something to accomplish.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that first thing, we're going to knock that thing out of the park and get it solved tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that just shows your team you care about them.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're listening to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: They actually have influence on what's going on, and it's an instant morale booster.
[SPEAKER_01]: The piece we were talking about earlier, and this is something that
[SPEAKER_01]: I usually discuss the idea that when you're in a leadership position, you're in charge of a mob.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as that mob is going to have a mob mentality, meaning they're all going to kind of go in one direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when they start going in that direction, one direction or another direction, you as the leader have to make sure that the direction that they're going in is the right direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can't get, you can't be a part of the mob, you can't get caught up in the mob because if it's the wrong direction, you'll be a part of it and you won't be able to help them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you should always be detached enough from the mob that you can hold them in the other direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: So case and point, if you see that people have a negative attitude morale is down, maybe they're somber about what's going on.
[SPEAKER_01]: As the leader, you got to bring a little light to the situation, bring some humor to the situation, bring some levity to the situation, bring that challenge to the situation, you got to shift that mob mentality and bring it into the right direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: The opposite is also true.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been in situations where, you know, task unit bruiser, oh, big tough task unit bruiser, task unit bruiser would joke to the point where sometimes I would have to say, hey, guys lock it up, we got to get this
[SPEAKER_01]: Believe me, it'd be very easy for me to dive in and get caught up in the humor and the laughter of a situation, and when that's appropriate, it's fine, but when it's not appropriate or it starts getting too extreme, you have to be able to pull that back out and pay attention to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: The attitude that you have, and again, the attitude that you have as a leader, and as late pointed out, doesn't matter where you are in the chain of command, you can influence what people are, what people's attitude is going to be and what the morale is going to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you have to pay attention to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And really, you can have a huge amount of impact.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's just about every seal platoon has a guy there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe two of them that are gonna bring levity to situations and make things fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's gonna be somebody else in the platoon that is going to bring some serious and some focus when it's needed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you as the leader can kinda,
[SPEAKER_01]: elevate those people in certain situations and allow them to help you move the mob in the right direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: So those are really important things to think about.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mob mentality is not static.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a fluid thing that is moving and you need to be able to kind of push it in the right direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the only other thing I'd say about this is a lot of times morale problems come from a
[SPEAKER_01]: not having a clear understanding and a clear picture of what's going on.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what people do and what the mob does and what the team does and what individuals do is they create their own understanding of the situation and because of human nature it's usually a negative one.
[SPEAKER_01]: So sitting people down and telling them the truth of what's happening, even if the truth is rough, even if the truth is hard, telling people what the situation is, why it's going to be difficult, how we ended up here, the mistakes that I made to get us here, and this is what we're going to do to get us out.
[SPEAKER_01]: the truth goes a long way in improving morale.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what we get scared of is sometimes the truth hurts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes the truth is negative.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we lost money last quarter.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we lost that big contract.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we're going to be doing a mission tonight.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to be very, very challenging.
[SPEAKER_01]: We lost our assets, whatever that
[SPEAKER_01]: hard truth is that you have to tell the teams sometimes people shy away from it because it's hard and what that does is it creates a little knowledge vacuum where now people are going to fill that knowledge vacuum with negativity and it's going to hurt them around of the team.
[SPEAKER_01]: So making sure that the team is informed telling the truth about what's happening is usually is not even usually it's the best policy to take when it comes to conveying the information to the team.
[SPEAKER_00]: A tactic that you taught me that is coming handy, particularly as a mom with teenagers who can be quite emotional and sometimes maybe negative, is this idea of reflecting the minutes, reflecting emotion, but then diminishing it to the point.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's where the point of truth you're bringing up comes in a play, diminishing that to a point of, yes, I am with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm on your side.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to reflect that emotion, negative or positive.
[SPEAKER_00]: But ultimately, I'm going to diminish it to a point of now let's shift our perspective on how we're going to solve this problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, it's so easy to get frustrated by somebody who's negative, somebody who's bringing the rest of the team down as we like to say and we can't over exaggerate these things.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you take ownership of that, no matter where you are in the organization, you could have massive influence over the team, over the attitude of the team, and you can boost morale.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that brings us to our immediate action drill for this episode, which is as a leader look around and figure out where there might be a friction point or where there might be some things that aren't that much fun and find a way to make it fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give a little energy boost, make it fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: Make it fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember that they're gonna reflect your attitude matter where you are in the organization, have a good attitude so that that rub's off on, if that's contagious, it rub's off on everybody else, and that attitude will spread, and you can boost more output, negative people in charge of things, wherever you can, something meaningful, and explain to them why they're doing what they're doing and the impact that actually has on the overall success of the organization
[SPEAKER_02]: down to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you do those things, you will be able to lead and win.