Trust or High Performance

What is more important for a team… trust or high performance. A pivotal question for entrepreneurs, teams & leaders.

Meet Mr J. (not his real name), a former member of the Rangers, the U.S. Army’s elite fighting force which specializes in close contact and direct-fire battles.?“Rangers Lead the Way” is their rallying cry. They have been an elite division in the Army since before the American Revolution. Mr J. is now a retired U.S. Ranger who, along with highly specialized colleagues, conducts military training for business leaders.

Over the years, I’ve been very fortunate to train with these warriors several times. More than a decade ago, I spent four days and nights with the U.S. Navy Seals at a training exercise called Leadership under Fire (civilian version of BUD/S training) in Coronado, California.?That’s where I first “met” Mr J. – “met” being the operative word as there was no two-way communication with Mr J. for fear of reprisal (100 spontaneous push-ups, among other).

I’ve also had the privilege to participate in an executive training day at CFB Trenton, the Toronto Police Services SWAT team and recently, last November, with specialized U.S. servicemen in Arizona. These sessions are meant to test one’s endurance and challenge your mental discipline. They certainly have tested me.

It was in Arizona where I met Mr J. again. And it was during that session, the issue of high performance versus trust was debated. After a full day of strenuous training for business leaders, some asked Mr J. whether he valued high performance or trust, fully expecting the battle-tested veteran to say high performance. Not so.

As Mr J. so precisely described, in the military, as in other aspects of life, performance can be measured. One can go to college and get a degree, do x-number of push-ups, run a mile in a specified time, achieve a certain rank. Performance can be quantified. But high performance is not always an indication of character or integrity, which are the building blocks of trust. He told this story.

When the going gets tough, it’s about whether you can trust someone to get the job done. On the battlefield, the one person that everyone cares for is the medic; not because s/he’s a doctor or accredited surgeon, but because s/he won’t quit – s/he’ll do whatever it takes to keep a soldier alive. Soldiers have a job to do, and they do it so well because they know and trust that the medic is there behind them if something happened. Soldiers and medics share a unique and visceral relationship…. built on trust.

For Mr J., it was an easy choice. Soldiers all need to meet the high-performance standard, but trust is ultimately the defining trait. He knows that for the military, soldiers must trust each other to survive. Trust that the lead in a military operation has soldiers guarding his or her back. If one team member fails in that trusted relationship, the consequences can be severe.

I returned from Arizona with my admiration and respect for Mr J. and his military colleagues enthusiastically renewed and with a sharper lens through which to look at my business. Trust is the connective tissue keeping my business on the right track. As a team, we all work every single day to earn trust and build on that foundation.

I think in our heart of hearts, we all have deep respect for the military. We admire soldiers’ courage, their discipline, their determination in the face of adversity, their sense of purpose.?Frankly, I am in awe of the military leaders I have met.?So many of their qualities are ones to which I aspire.?

#usrangers #canadianarmedforces #navyseal #truepatriot and #leadership