Trust and Performance

In his book, “Leaders Eat Last”, Simon Sinek tells of how the United States Navy Seals think about Trust and its relationship to Performance. He shares a simple graph, on the horizontal axis is Trust from left to right, and on the vertical axis is Performance from low to high. As you can imagine among the Navy Seals, there are many high performers, but if a guy is determined to be in the upper left-hand quadrant, meaning high performance and low trust, he's usually not a good fit for a Seal Team. The Navy Seals would rather see a guy in the middle right or even lower right-hand quadrants which indicates medium or even lower performance but with high trust on their teams.

Of course, the gold standard is to be in the upper right-hand quadrant, an indication of high performer of high trust but the Seals would choose a medium performer who is high trust over somebody with high performer with low trust.

Which quadrant are you in? Have you only strived to be a high performer but at the cost of low trust? Have you pulled other teammates alongside you as you grew your skills and performance indicators? Have you trained alone, or have you trained and collaborated as a team? Are you a trustworthy spouse, partner and team member?