Bill had Friends on the Hill, but He was no SEAL!

Originally shared in A Daily Dose Of Leadership on June 24, 2020.

Several years ago, just a few weeks after I started with a new company as their Safety & Human Resources Manager, I joined a coworker and the guy who handled the company’s group health policy for lunch. This was the first time I had met Bill, but the goal was for me to get to know him outside the office a bit since I would be interacting closely with him moving forward. One of the insurance options he was explaining to us on the way to lunch was fairly similar to something a friend of mine had rolled at with a local company just a few years earlier, and I had dealt very closely with that option at another company. I mentioned that experience to Bill, who had woven in a list of all the folks on Capital Hill he had just visited that week before slumming with us for lunch, with hopes of giving him some peace that I actually had some experience in dealing with group health insurance. 

Apparently peace wasn’t the feeling it gave dear old Bill. After intentionally screwing up the name of the local company, he proceeded to make two or three comments about how inferior that company’s services were to his and followed that with a few statements about the process that the local company used to determine whether or not their proprietary product was right for the client. Needless to say, this sent up some flags with me immediately…

While I didn’t realize it at the time, the idea we looked at in the last blog about us Task-Oriented People needing to know we can trust someone before there’s any hope whatsoever of us ever liking them was hard at work inside me as we sat done for lunch. After Bill told us one or two more stretchers about the big shots he had been, well let’s say rubbing elbows with, in DC earlier that week, I had felt all the warm air up my backside that I could handle. I was very frank in telling Bill that I was going to have a really tough time ever trusting him since in less than fifteen minutes he had told a few things I absolutely knew weren’t true and several more that I highly doubted to be true.

Believe it or not, Bill still bought us lunch that day. But the conversation was a bit more tense after my comment, at least it was for him… 

Dear old Bill stood no chance of becoming a Navy SEAL; not because of his age or his chosen profession, but because of his complete unwillingness to ever earn the slightest bit of my trust during that initial meeting or the few years that followed where I had to interact with him on a routine basis.

In his newest book, The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek dedicates an entire chapter to the importance of building an organization or a relationship on a foundation of trust. In that chapter, Trusting Teams, Sinek explains the selection process when a SEAL team adds a new member. While there’s certainly a high focus on the technical ability each potential candidate could bring to the team, those making the final decision also understand that the candidates they’re studying are all arguably some of the most highly trained people in the world. In this process, those making the selection are far more focused on determining which candidate they would be able to trust most when their lives depend on it – because they realize that time will be coming soon after the selection is made… In the circumstances they’ll soon be facing as a team, trusting one another will be critical! 

Simon followed that explanation by asking “if trust is so important to Navy SEALS, why do we still value technical ability over trust in nearly every business setting on the planet?”

Great question Mr. Sinek!

With that in mind, I suppose there’s no real surprise as to why Bill would have never made a good SEAL. But he certainly fits in well with all the poliTICKS on Capital Hill…

In the next blog, we’ll take a look at what Jeffrey Gitomer said about the importance of trust.