Great Leaders Don't Follow the Pattern

0:00We work with companies and organizations all the time and we are constantly learning lessons. Sometimes we're learning a new angle on a lesson we've previously known. Sometimes we realize we need to give a piece of information that we haven't emphasized enough. And that's why we created the rundown. The rundown is an email that we send out every other week. And this isn't your typical newsletter trying to sell you a bunch of stuff. This is simply just a practical breakdown of a leadership principle. How to apply it in a real-world situation and then some action steps that you can take to make sure that if you can use this principle to solve your problems in leadership. Go sign up for the rundown at echelonfront.com. I'm Jamie Cochran. I'm LifeBavin. Lead, Win. An extreme ownership podcast. Back with another episode of the Lead, Win podcast and we have with us once again, JP Denel, Chief Chaining Officer at echelonfront and one of our senior leadership instructors.

1:00So the topic today is to stop being surprised by behavior that you should have planned for. And I want to start by sharing a little story because a couple of weeks ago, my teenage boys were preparing for a really big wrestling tournament and they had two days that they were going to be at this tournament. So what did I do as their loving mom who cares about them? I got up really early 515 in the morning to pack this cooler full of all the things they would need, all the hydration, the water, of course a couple of jack-o-gos, all the fuel, all the food that they would need. And I packed that up and set it out there for them, made sure they got off on the right foot for this big tournament. And two hours later as I'm getting ready to leave and head towards this tournament and meet them, my son sends me a text and says, Mom, I left the cooler in my truck. That's awesome. And my instinct was to be just furious because I'm thinking this is an assault on me. He doesn't even care about what I do to help him that I wasn't. He doesn't appreciate you. He doesn't respect. Yeah, that was my instinct.

2:01I'm thinking I went to the store last night. I got up and did all these things. And my instinct was to have that reaction. And then I paused for a moment and I thought, OK, Jamie, what do you expect from teenage boys who are driving at 530 in the morning to go get on a bus who are tired and sort of mentally preparing for this tournament? Yeah, am I surprised he left the cooler in truck? No, I'm not. I should have expected that that could be an outcome in this situation. And so I decided in that moment, I need to stop expecting something different from a teenage boy and just recognize that teenage boys do dumb stuff sometimes. And instead, my choice was to react to that situation or to simply say, yeah, you know what? He kind of did exactly what I should have expected. And my reaction in that moment was, hey, don't worry about it. I'll pack a cooler here at the house. I'll be there in a couple hours and I'll make sure that you got some stuff for the rest of the weekend. And by doing that, I was able to prevent him from going into this very difficult tournament with a really negative and bad attitude.

3:03And all of that took me just looking at the situation and saying, hey, what do you expect? And the same thing goes when I asked my 12-year-old daughter to go clean her room. If I have the expectation, she is going to be like, yes, mom. I love to do this. This would be great. This would be amazing. Then I'm always going to feel let down. I'm always going to be let down. And so if I have the expectation instead that my 12-year-old is likely going to react with a little bit of annoyance, I can react to them appropriately. Yeah, I know. It's kind of a bummer. Hey, turn on some music. Give yourself 20 minutes. I'll come up and help in a few minutes and we can do this together. I can change the outcome of that situation by managing my expectations, my expectations of other people. As a former teenage boy, I certainly can recognize that people do dumb things. That's such a great point, Jamie, because we have these perfect expectations that we put on other people, and then we excuse mistakes and failures,

4:04or lapses and judgment that we make. Hey, I was running late to the meeting. You know, I'd look at whatever. It's not that big of a deal. It was a few minutes. But you were late to the meeting. I was here and you were wasting my time, right? This is, we put expectations on other people, whether it's our kids, whether it's our coworkers, whether it's our boss. I mean, so many times, right? We've talked to people about just seeing the perspective of others, the leaders that we work with, seeing the perspective of others. People that are frustrated with their boss and decisions they're making or they don't have the information, and particularly through a chaotic or difficult time, and you can say, hey, consider what they're going through right now. You think that's a tough situation? Like, do you think they hold the answers? Do you think they know how this is going to go? Like, try to put yourself in their shoes, be a little empathetic. But this idea that, like, you're surprised by obvious things, it's really just a failure to contingency plan, right? And this is a whole chapter that we wrote about in extreme ownership about planning for the contingency. You can't plan for every single contingency.

5:05None of us have a crystal ball. We don't know the outcome or how things may go exactly. But we certainly can prepare for the likely things. And one example that I see of this regularly is, everybody knows that we live in politically charged times, right? And you're on social media, you see this all the time, and people are in each other's throats, and they feel so strongly about one side or the other. And sometimes I'll talk to people, and they will be irate about someone who is on the complete opposite side of the political aisle from them, something that that person said. And they're just irate about, can you believe they said that? And from a detached perspective, the answer is yes. I actually can. I actually would expect them to say exactly that. And you can disagree with them. And you can talk about maybe how their position might be flawed, but why would you allow yourself to get upset by something that someone is saying that you could absolutely expect them to say? And know that they would say, so why would I get upset about that?

6:05And I think this is, it's just, you have to choose to allow yourself to get upset by that. You have to choose to allow yourself to get frustrated. And of course, in the times that we live in, you click on something that spins you up, and what does social media want they want? They want you to see more of that. The algorithm is feeding you more of that so that you're emotional about it, and you just stay emotional all the time. You've got to break that cycle, you've got to break that trap. And I think if you recognize how are people likely to react in a certain scenario, what would you expect them to do? But your emotions to check and just take a step back and detach for one second you'll see, like, are they doing exactly what I expect them to do? Just as you saw with your teenage boys, and then you don't get spun up about it. You're like, okay, that's just the way it is. Yeah, so frustration often comes from a leader's unrealistic expectations of someone, not typically poor performance. It's our expectations that we're setting and not clearly communicating what those expectations are.

7:06And it's easy for us to get sucked into those emotions that we feel. That's why we talk about detachment as a superpower. And so as leaders, if we can go into these situations or conversations detached from our emotions, it helps us set the tone. And obviously, when you go into it and you're asking earnest questions to understand their perspective or their situation that allows you to have insight to their world and what's going on and their views and their struggles that you might not have been aware of, which could also change your perspective of, oh, instead of me being frustrated now, I actually have some empathy for what they have going on. Also, it gives you the ability to help lead them by asking them questions. That's one of the things we talk about in decentralized command. If somebody comes over the plan that I don't really like, okay, why? Like, why do I not like to plan? Oh, I don't understand their perspective, their ideas. The reason is behind those things. And the other just thing to have in the back of your mind

8:07is what was their intent? Like with that story with your son. Your son's intent was not to forget his cooler. He did not want to frustrate you. He did not want to disrespect you by not bringing the cooler that you took all this time. And so if we can go into it with a detached mindset of, you know, we're not getting emotional or not frustrated. It's, hey, how can I help them? Like, that's the intent. We want to help you want to help your sons. You want to help your spouse. You want to help your boss. You want to help your peers. You want to help your team. Like, we as leaders want to help the people around us. That means that we have to understand their perspective, give them a little bit of grace, and ask ourselves, like, hey, what was their intent? And 99% of the time, the people we work with, their intent was never, man, I really hope I screwed this up. Yes. And you're describing giving a little grace. Yes. I threw a bone to my son. I saved him in that moment. But that doesn't mean that I just let it go. Oh, no. He had a tournament the following weekend.

9:07And you know what the solution was? I had him pack his own cooler. And by having him pack his own cooler, I think he had a little more ownership over the plan. And after missing it or forgetting it the week before, he was much more inclined to remember that cooler that he packed. So it wasn't that I'm going to save him and now just manage those expectations from here on out. I'm going to make sure I set better expectations. So the next week, I set the plan out for him. Hey, here's the cooler. I got some stuff from you in the fridge before you go in the morning, pack it up, and make sure you got what you need for the tournament. And giving him a little more ownership of that plan, solved the problem and also solved the expectation that I was having for him. And he took a lot more ownership of that and made sure he brought that cooler. Any of us with kids, right? Get frustrated, they forgot something. And I got younger kids at home. My kids are a few years younger than yours. And my youngest is in kindergarten. I've got a fourth and fifth grader. And they forget stuff all the time. And you get so frustrated with them for that. And yet, do I forget stuff?

10:09I forget stuff all of us forget stuff all the time. So I think, again, we apply this standard to other people that we can't even meet ourselves. But how do you prevent from forgetting stuff? You run through a checklist of the stuff that you need. And so that's one that I've tried to teach them. You know, if they do forget stuff, you know, I might immediately be like, I'm so frustrated that we forgot that. But like, you know what? This is actually my fault because I got, these are younger kids. I'm responsible for them. They, I should have known. I should have had the expectation they're going to forget stuff. And what I should have done is run through that checklist with them. Just a verbal checklist of, okay, do you have your backpack? Do you have your water bottle? Do you have your school binder? Do you have your PE gear? You know, do you have your extra shoes? You know, do you have your lacrosse or quit? Whatever it is, you know, that they needed for the day to think through that. And we learned that in the seal terms. I mean, my platoon chief, Tony Friday, he was an amazing platoon chief, had years of experience and multiple deployments. And every single time he launched an operation,

11:10he would go through that verbal checklist of, again, I mean, starting from like head to toe, start with your night vision and your helmet and, you know, your eye approach, just working all the way down your body to like your weapons, radios, gear to your boots. And, and it's the times that I was in a hurry and didn't do that. I forgot critical stuff. There were times I launched an operation where I didn't even have my like GPS unit on me. Really important as the platoon commander, the ground force commander operation to know exactly where you are and be able to have those GPS coordinates. Now, luckily I had other people around me that had those things and luckily we were operating in areas where we were primarily operating off a map, you know, with streets and building numbers. And so I could do without it, but it was horrible to not have that in the event that I needed it. And yet there were more than once I forgot that on an operation and the only way I could prevent from doing it is to run through that checklist.

12:11So it's just, it's theory versus reality, right? We've talked about in previous episodes that in theory, you should remember everything and not forget stuff. In reality, you're going to forget stuff. And the only way to prevent that is to run through that mental checklist. So teaching your kids to do that, thinking about the things that your team might do, they're human beings. And just like you, they're going to forget stuff. Just like you, they're going to have sleepless nights or maybe they didn't get a good night's rest. And they're going to be thinking about other stuff or stress at home. People are going to react in certain ways. You've got to give them some grace. You've got to be prepared for that. And if I go in with the expectation, you know, that you're going to, let's say we have a conversation about, you know, you see something differently than I do. And I want to make sure things are done in a certain way. And you want to do them a different way. I got to have the expectation that you might actually bristle at that. You might actually get defensive at that. You might actually not get on board and say, oh, life, that makes perfect sense. The way you just explained it. I'm fully on board with the way you want to do it. That's just not the way human beings are.

13:12And so if I set these false expectations, I'm never going to be able to overcome those obstacles, be prepared for some of the contingencies that might come my way. And it's, I'm going to be a lot less successful. Yeah, I have found that we are, as humans, far more forgiving of ourselves than we are of other people. And especially our younger selves, I think of myself as a mom and some of the challenges that I face now with teenagers who are going through all sorts of difficulties. My instinct sometimes is to feel that disappointment when my kids do something that doesn't align with our family values or doesn't align with what I would expect of them. And when I have these conversations with my husband, I have to remind him, hey, what were you doing at 16? What were you doing at 17? Because if we're comparing apples to apples? I was doing it all perfectly. Yeah. Our kids are doing pretty good. I did everything my parents told me to do. Yes. I never broke the rules. I never did any of those things. And the reality is, that's just not true. And we're far more forgiving for ourselves than we are of other people. And the same thing happens in our businesses. When you have new leaders that are making mistakes,

14:14we can get frustrated with them. And yet, when I think back about my early time at echelon front, I made a million mistakes. I made a million decisions where I should have done something better or I learned the hard way. And yet, it's much easier for me to look back and say, yeah, but that was back then. And I've grown and I've made these improvements. As opposed to looking at new leaders and saying, oh, yeah, you know what, I made that mistake before too. Let me walk you through how to solve that. Let me walk you through the next steps of how to handle the situation next time. And keeping that perspective and being far more forgiving for other people allows us to actually find a pathway of solving problems as opposed to putting the weight on their shoulders to have to fix it themselves. And as we're thinking about our previous mistakes that we've made in life, we also have to understand that it's okay to ask for help. I know that when I go to the grocery store and I'm talking to my wife Amanda before I run the grocery store, I know that I'm going to forget stuff if I don't write it down.

15:15And so our SOP, our standard operating procedure for when I go to the grocery store, is she will send me a text message following up with what she asked me to get, even if it's three things. And it's now to the point I like, and my wife has this crazy superpower where she knows the aisle. Like she'll be like, hey, it's not this aisle, or she might even look it up if I'm in a different store in that location and she'll send me screenshots from the store's app with the aisle information because she wants a specific brand for whatever she's cooking. And it's originated for me just asking her one time, hey, could you please text me all the things that you wanted me to get? And my wife is like, yeah, no worries. And that's just our SOP for that. And you know, it reminded me of what you were saying, in the SEAL teams, when we were checking our gear, self-check, buddy check. And it's the same thing that we talk about, and we teach at the FTX, the field training exercises that we run at echelon front because there are times that Cody and I are out there running scenarios and people's gear isn't plugged in.

16:15The laser tag systems that we invested into, their sensors aren't plugged in, or their vest is on backwards and their gears is set up incorrectly. And we don't say anything, we let them run it. We let them just run the scenario and they're having issues with their gear and they're all frustrated. And then we will show them pictures or videos or we'll talk about in the debrief. And that's one of the points that we always get to bring up at an FTX because we are batting 100% over the last couple of years of somebody messing up that gear is, hey, check your gear. You need to have a checklist. Hey, do you have checklist at work? If people skip their checklist at work, are there certain industries where if they do that, somebody could get injured or killed? And the answer is always yes. And so it's just a good reminder for us to explain the importance of doing a self-check, buddy check, and be willing to ask for help. Hey, could you look over my gear? Is my gear ready? It's the same thing that we do at echelon front for our mustard breeze. We rehearse with each other. Hey, Jamie, look over my slides. Does this make sense? You know, we'll do, you know,

17:16when new instructors come on board, they're not just going up on stage and just talking. They're going to do multiple rehearsals with the instructors and it's because we know that if they're not properly prepared, they're not going to do a good job. And we want to set people up for success. And that's, we want our people to win. Jamie, in preparation for this episode, we were talking about how when you talked to someone with some constructive criticism about how, about how they can get better. And if you go into that with the expectation that they're going to be like, thank you so much. Thank you so much for telling me. I'm so grateful for this. I'm so grateful for you telling me that I'm all screwed up. They're not going to react that way, right? If you have any other expectation, you're going to set yourself up for failure. Yeah, expect that person if you have negative feedback to be defensive. Expect for them to push back. Expect for them to have their side of the story. And again, this is where having the right expectations for people allow us to handle those situations

18:17with much more effectiveness. Because if I am expecting someone to react in a way that makes sense in the real world, I am better prepared to handle my reaction when they, in fact, meet those expectations. And instead of setting the expectations that are unrealistic and then being frustrated with that individual because they're not reacting in a way that I am hoping they're going to react. It changes the dynamic of how we engage with people and more importantly, what it does is, if I manage my expectations for that individual, I can approach that situation with the right mindset, the right tone, the right tact, the right delivery to actually hopefully have some influence in this situation. Yeah, I mean, if I'm going to talk to JP about something that I think he probably needs to fix, or a mistake that he's making, and I go into that thinking like, okay, you know, I need to use the indirect approach. I need to, instead of saying JP, you're screwed up, I should ask some questions to try to allow him to reveal the truth to himself, to say, hey, JP, what do you think

19:17that looked like to the rest of the team? And if I can do that, then I'm not hemorrhaging leadership capital. He doesn't get defensive. It lowers your defenses. And you see the truth for what it actually is and make those corrections, which is the goal of what I'm actually trying to do. And I think if we think about what are we trying to accomplish when you interact with someone else, and you think about what contingencies might arise to prevent you from, whether you're trying to, let's say you're trying to brief the boss on a new strategy that you think would be successful. And you think, oh, this is a no-brainer, we should absolutely do this, think through the contingencies, how might the boss react? Well, you know, the boss is a little concerned about our expenses right now. What's that going to cost us? How are you going to mitigate the risk of managing those expenses? And so if you've already thought about those things, and you're speaking to them, and you put some answers together, it will set you up for a much better success and a much higher probability that you could be successful. Now, the first conversation may not actually be successful

20:19in that effort, too. You got to be patient, and it may take some time, you know, for people to come around to an idea as well. But you definitely have to think through those likely contingencies that might happen. And the reality, when you're dealing with people, people do unexpected things. As well, I was sitting in a hide site in South Korea, with some South Korean seals on my first appointment. And we were doing what we call a special reconnaissance mission, where we're observing a training target. This is an exercise with the South Koreans. And so we're on this mountainside, and you know, we went in at night time over the beach and dug in our positions, and we put these hide sites together, and you don't want to be discovered by the bad guys, or even the local people. And, you know, we thought we were in a position where like, no one's going to, you know, come up to this mountainside. It was pouring down rain, and the weather was cold. And we're up on this mountainside, like, you know, who would be up here, 430 in the morning. There was an elderly Korean man just rolling down the trail

21:22with it, you know, like 20 yards away from our hide site. I was like, oh, man. This, initially, we thought it was the role players and trying to play the bad guys. It was just a civilian. That was out for a show. This was the, this was Jaco's South Korean cousin. They just got up at 430 in the morning to go out and get his hike on, you know, up the mountainside. People do stuff. People are people. They do random things that you can't really predict. And so you need to predict that people are unpredictable, right? Sometimes, you know, if JP, or reaction away, or Jamie, if you react in a way that I'm like, oh, you got super defensive. And I wasn't really expecting that. That's going to happen. I should be running that calculus to recognize to expect the unexpected. But I can't be, I can't, continuously planning is great, but I can't be so focused on like, this is exactly what's going to happen. Because we actually don't know what's going to happen. I don't have a crystal ball. I have to build a flexible plan and have to be ready for the unexpected. And people are unpredictable.

22:22People get dramatic. People get emotional. People react in certain ways. There's things that are going on behind the scenes or in their lives that we may not know about. That can cause that. And you just, you have to be prepared for them. Otherwise, you're going to be let down constantly. So the goal that we're trying to accomplish is to stop being surprised by the behavior that we should expect from people. And that comes down to us managing our expectations. And so the immediate action drill for this episode is to think about that the next time you have an interaction with someone that, you know, potentially is frustrating, prepare for that. Make sure that you're going into that conversation with the right expectations. What should I expect from this individual based on the conversation that we have to have or the situation that we're dealing with? And by managing your expectations, you'll be better prepared to communicate more effectively with that individual. Just remember people of people just like you. And be forgiving.

23:23Give them some grace. Don't set a standard that you can't even achieve for other people to achieve whether it's your kids, whether it's your team, whether it's your coworkers, whether it's your clients, whoever you're working with alongside, make sure that you give some grace, manage those expectations. Think about the contingencies. And if you do that, you can much better lead and win. Thank you.