How Navy Seals choose their team members - Simon Sinek

Dear Reader,

I saw this 7 minutes video by Simon Sinek. It is about why it is important to include trust as a key factor while deciding promotions or bonuses. He shares how Navy Seals, who are one of the best performing teams under most difficult situations, choose their team members. In the corporate world, we often choose and reward team members based on only their results rather than their trustworthiness.

While it is easy to measure business performance, it is unusual and difficult to measure impact of leaders on others.

I have recently interviewed many senior leaders for my upcoming book – Hi Conflict! Bye Conflict! A common theme that emerged was that a good leader is one who people trust, who is authentic, has people’s back and grows others. (S)he has an empowering impact and creates an environment for everyone else to succeed. Such a leader puts team goal ahead of self goal.

5 years back at Rejoiss, we coined a term for such a leader: Priceless Contributor (PC). We recognised that that while focusing on self is essential, it is insufficient recipe for sustained success. Your true success comes when others start rooting for your success. That happens naturally as an outcome of PC practice since you genuinely root for others in their endeavours.

I recall my career at ICICI from campus. No one gave me any clue that only pursuing excellence is no more enough, you need to focus on your team winning over odds, help others to be champions. I got a very low rating once and my bosses could not explain me that the problem was my self-serving attitude.

At Rejoiss, we put together our life’s learnings to find an authentic measure of attitude and enable attitude transformation in leaders. This resulted in creating the Rejoiss Leadership Index. This measures the impact of each team member on others. It can be done in as little as an hour and yet is profound, authentic and relevant. When you club the results with leaders’ business performance, you get exactly the chart Simon Sinek talks about. Rejoiss Leadership Index is a method to bring objectivity into a subjective, yet critical leadership trait.

It has been quite a journey using this index for our clients. The way the exercise is designed, you simply can’t poke hole in the results. This exercise helps leaders recognise their blind spots. This new awareness works silently and many begin to change their attitude. What has been common is that for every team we did this exercise, the sponsors have confirmed that with few surprises, the results reflect the reality very accurately. It has helped them take some critical decisions. To know more about Rejoiss Leaders Index for your teams, reply to me or write to my team at connect@rejoiss.com.

May this mail give you some clues to recognize your most effective leaders and build a great team.

Rohan