Stop Toxic People In Their Tracks | Navy SEAL Wisdom

Who does this guy think he is that he can roll into these meetings and all of a sudden it's hostilities? Yes. Let's debrief. What do you got? I've got a really small tech company with the COO, kind of the number two. There's a small enough company that everybody kind of, there's a lot of overlap in their jobs. There's only like 15 or so folks here, so they all have a lot of overlap, but he's head of operations. He's really designed to make sure this thing is working. He has someone working with him, the CTO, the chief technology officer that is really critical to the operation, kind of is the driver behind the software that they're building, but he's really hard to deal with. And actually what the problem he's having is that this CTO, who's really sharp, is overstepping his bounds. He's kind of getting in his peers' business. His ego is kind of running out of control and he's creating a whole bunch of friction across the organization. And there's a little bit of a fear that if he, he's kind of irreplaceable, that nobody has the corporate knowledge he has, nobody really understands what he does and his position himself that they're having, or they feel like they have to tolerate the way he is because of what he knows and what he can do. And this chief operating officer is struggling with how to handle that situation. Well, clearly there's an issue if you've got people on your team that are irreplaceable, right? We don't want to let that happen. We don't want to let it happen for defensive reasons, meaning we don't want to be put ourselves in a situation where we lose somebody for whatever reason. And for offensive reasons, if someone's out of line, we need to be able to handle that problem, right? We need to be able to get rid of somebody. No one should have that leverage over the company, right? That just doesn't make sense. So did you, I mean, that had to be the first thing that you talked about. First thing was, listen, you can't have anybody on your team that if that person goes away for any reason, unforeseen, he leaves, whatever it is that when that person departs, the team fails. The team's going to fall apart because somebody on your team holds so much knowledge or so much ability that the team can't succeed without them. That's actually true for the person in charge as well. So we kind of just talked about the fundamentals of even for the person in charge of the company, the company cannot be relying on you that if you went away, the company fails. That's not the type of leadership situation you want to set up. The other component of the issue is that there's a lot of potential in the CTO. He's really capably smart. And for a while, especially when they initially brought him on board, he was a really positive contributor. And what's happened is as he has succeeded and contributed, the ego has been growing. And really, once we got past the initial conversation and the COO didn't object, he understood like, yeah, I cannot have somebody on my team that's a single source of failure. The other question is how do you cultivate the relationship? How do you continue to develop this with him so that he continues to contribute in the positive ways and we manage the things that he's doing that's negatively and try to find out what it is that's causing that and what his role is. What I didn't want him to do was write this person off like, hey, this person is a problem. I got to get somebody who can replace him so I can get rid of this person. It's actually, hey, what's the real problem here? How do we solve that? And what can we do to make this person continue to be a really valuable, constructive, contributing member of the team? Yeah, we want to attack this problem from two different directions. One is make sure that they're not irreplaceable. And two is how do we get this person reeled in? How do we reel in their ego? And I think that boils down to an escalation of counseling. On the one hand, obviously, this boils down to the one attack is an escalation of counseling. Hey, are you okay? Is there something bothering you? Is there someone on the team that you feel like you need to flex on? Because man, that last meeting was a little bit hostile, right? I mean, this is just a conversation, hey, Dave, did you have some friction with Leif about that? Because that last meeting, you were going at him pretty hard. Is there something I'm not seeing, right? So that's not an attack, that's a legitimate question of concern. Hey, I want to make sure everything's okay. So I think this is an escalation of counseling situation to try and figure out what's going on. And if Dave says, you know what, Leif really made me, he put a bunch of stuff on my plate and I was mad about it and I let it get to my head, I'm sorry, it's my fault. Okay, cool. And maybe it's not a problem. And as we know, maybe you fix it and it's okay. You handle it, maybe it continues. And you get hostile with him or you get hostile with someone else and then I got to escalate that counseling. Hey, Dave, you went off on Mike today. What's going on? Did Mike do something that bothered you? Because in the meeting, from what I saw in the meeting, look man, that seemed unprovoked. What's going on? And so now we're starting to escalate. And by the way, last week you kind of went off on Leif and now you're going off on Mike. You know, who's next? And if you're only attacking people, guess what, that tells me that you're not really listening to what other people are saying. So if you're not listening to what other people are saying, then we're not moving ideas forward. So what's going on? And then it goes from there, right? So I think on the getting the ego in check, there is an escalation in counseling that needs to happen. On the front of how do we get other people to make sure that this person isn't irreplaceable? Well, I talk to you and I say, hey, Dave, you know, look, I know you've been spearheading this project from the beginning. What we actually need is some backup. Who on your team really understands this? And of course, if you're a big ego guy, what do you say? No one. I'm the only one that gets this done. You know what, Dave? I know that you're smart, and of course, I suspected that maybe you're the only person that really understood this. And although that sounds cool, guess what, it ain't cool, because if you're the only one that knows how to do this and you get hit by a bus, we got problems. So what can we do to get this other person trained up? You know what I actually want you to do? I want you to take a two-week vacation, and when you get back, I don't want you in these meetings for another two weeks. So I want to go a month with no Dave, because I want to make sure, look, you got a month to get this ready, but after a month, I want Bill to run this thing. And so that's how I'd approach these two approaches from two different directions. Yeah. Really similar, and that multiple, two things at once, you know, parallel efforts that you have to manage. The first one I think is spot on, that as an organizational leader, you actually have to be looking at risk all the time. You have to be looking around, up and out, while your people are down making things happen, you have to look and see where you're exposed. Where is there potential for risk? From the outside, competition, environment, and also from the inside. And the assessment of risk in that case is an internal problem, which is, Jocko goes away, Jocko's the only one that can do this, the company fails. That's risk that you cannot accept, any different than if your competition is maneuvering on you and they're going to outmaneuver you and then they're going to beat you in the same fashion. So that's, and that should be happening all the time. The other piece, when you were talking about that second effort in parallel, what was happening with the COO, this kind of boss, but somewhat parallel, but a little bit kind of senior was the rest of the organization, remember, this is a small team, they all kind of very close, know each other, loosely defined roles. A lot of people are going direct to the COO, kind of bullying him into that escalation of counseling you described, they kind of wanted to get to step four, which was this guy is awful, he's toxic, we've got to get rid of him. And what he was struggling with is, hey, I haven't done any counseling at all, I'm getting a ton of pressure, I've got to get rid of this guy, he's causing a lot of problems. Well, I've got some of this risk, but also recognizing that you actually can't go to step four. And there's two different reasons that I thought of as to why that is. One is, look, there actually is a fairly straightforward HR process, like when we have to move people out of organizations, there is a deliberate process to do that, you don't get to just skip steps because your mind tells you this is the best way to do it. But the real question that he needed to ask is, how did this guy go from a key contributor who joined this startup from the beginning, who believed in what this was and invested all his time and energy and all the risk with startups, because startups are high risk, there's no guarantee they're going to work. How do we go from that guy to this toxic person who's undermining the organization, and what is it that you don't know about what's going on in this person's life, that all of a sudden everybody else is telling you, get rid of him. And you don't know how you got to that point, which is another reason why you have to start with step one, which I described as, Jocko, man, hey, you seem really out of character in that meeting, what's going on? That's that first step in the escalation of counseling, no matter what it is, whether they showed up late, or people were telling you to fire them on the spot, you sort of need to start with, hey, what is going on in your life? Yeah, and that's cool, and one thing that's good to note about the escalation of counseling, like you said, if you're skipping steps, you're skipping steps because you made errors. There was hard conversations that you should have had that you didn't have. So if you're skipping steps, you put yourself in that position, and it's going to be ugly. One thing that's nice about the escalation of counseling is it's a compressible timeline. So you could go through the entire escalation of counseling in a week. I always use the example of construction sites when you're on a big construction project where there's a timeline, and if you don't make the timeline, you pay the owner money. You pay them $50,000, $80,000 a day in some cases when you miss a timeline. So sometimes those timelines are really compressive. If I got a foreman that's not doing their job, guess what? I'm going to tell you today you're not doing your job. The next day, I'm going to write you up. The third day, you're getting fired. I'm bringing someone else in there. With let's say commissioned-based salespeople, hey, I'm not paying you anything, Dave. So that escalation of counseling could be six months, right? In this particular case, if you're getting pressure, cool. You should be getting pressure because you're not doing your job. If you hadn't said anything yet, that's absolutely, you failed as a leader. So you do have to start, I recommend you start with step one, a nice, friendly, positive conversation to let that person know, hey, you're out of line. I see it. The team sees it. What's going on? Let's move forward. Yeah, you made the connection when you were talking about it to what's going with this person, this person's ego is getting out of control. One of the main issues with this guy was he thought he was smarter than everybody else. And what he was sort of coming to discover, at least the way that it looked was he'd been there long enough to think that he should kind of be in charge a little bit and he knew more than other people. So you can also, same thing, you can also go one of two directions. You can sort of jump to the conclusion that he's this toxic guy that needs to go away where you can actually kind of dig in and find out what's really going on. When we role-played the discussion to have, when he, when this, we had a couple of different iterations of this, went on for a couple of weeks kind of working through this problem to get where we are now, when the CEO kind of came to realize that the frustration that this guy was having was that he wanted to have more influence. He wanted to be able to, part of why he was overstepping with his peers is that he thought he should have more influence over his peers. The amazing connection there that you talked about is what he had to show him is, hey, listen, if you want to have more influence in this organization, if you feel that you're the type of person that can level up and start to influence the organization, one of the most important things you can do is actually train people to do the job that you're doing so we can free you up to do that, which is exactly what you just described. He wasn't making the connection of, I'm not going to, I'm not going to elevate you to some other role in the organization. If you're the only person that can do this, you're going to be doing this. And we don't want to train his replacement as a hedge of getting rid of him. The ideal situation, even though we're doing this in parallel, is we train his replacement so we actually can contribute more if indeed he has something viable to contribute. And the frustration with this person's ego is, like you said the last time, like you say every single time, was his own ego saying, who does this guy think he is? And the ego v. ego solution is not. Wait, was that the COO? COO. So the COO's ego is clashing with the CTO's ego. A little bit. Who does this guy think he is that he can roll into these meetings and all of a sudden it's hostilities? Yes. And that was the, hey, he's getting pressure to kind of go right to step four and kind of get to the, you're out of here. And some of it was, yeah. And it was like, hang on. Why are we at this level? It's like you said, what did we not do? What did we skip to get to this? And all the things we skipped had nothing to do with this person. It had to do with the CEO. Not, not even not just having hard conversations, but just saying the first time when he noticed three or four months ago going, Jocko, man, hey, what's going on? These guys were all close. They're all friends. And all of a sudden Jocko's acting out of character. I don't want to wait four months to start asking Jocko what's going on in his life. When in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, well, the best thing is to get rid of Jocko. So he skipped steps and there's a whole bunch of reason why skipping those steps. But the barrier there was when you come to the conclusion that this other person is the problem, you lose the potential of not just salvaging this person for the company, but actually helping them become what they want to become as well, which is the ideal outcome. Now, you don't pretend that that's the only way it's going to work. You absolutely protect your organization. You build backups. You manage that risk. But in your mind, what you're really trying to figure out is how can you help this person get past these problems that are frustrating them? Why? And understanding why his ego is getting out of control. It's always interesting when Dave is mad because Dave thinks he should have my job. And if I have a big ego, that makes me mad. If I can keep my ego in check, you know what I say to that? That's awesome. I'm glad Dave wants my job. I hope he can come and take it when I go on to the next job. Instead of using that to drive you crazy, I look at that as an awesome situation. I'm not threatened by Dave. I'm happy that Dave wants my job. And I hope he works hard enough to get it from me. And I had that question a long time ago. I forget what it was. Oh, no, I think it was just on the podcast. But what do I do when this guy's vying for my job? And I'm like, hey, if someone's vying for my job, that's awesome. That's awesome. I'm going to work even harder. And guess what? If they beat me, they beat me. They do a better job than me. If they're more suitable for this job and I fail, good on them. But you know, I should do better, you know? Now, if you think someone's going to outwork me, good luck. Bring it. But what does that do? All that does is help the team because now we're working hard. But yeah, don't be threatened by those things.