Mike Sarraille

[00:04:59] Sean: Mike, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?

[00:05:02] Mike Sarraille: I’m doing well. Thank you, Sean.

Mike Sarraille Mindset 

[00:05:04] Sean: I’m fired up for this one. This is one of those really interesting fun conversations that’s going to encapsulate a lot. I would love to know if you could pass on one of your mindsets to someone just starting out their career. What would you love to pass on to everyone?

[00:05:18] Mike Sarraille: It’s a mindset I call the other way and we refer to it as one step at a time. It really is the realization that with each step, whether that step is successful, or it’s a failure, each step takes you somewhere. And whether, again, it’s a success or failure you learn from each step. We all want success overnight, it doesn’t exist. If I look back on my career, which I started as an enlisted Recon Marine which is the Marine Corps, special operations community, and then all of a sudden I want to become a SEAL and I make it into the SEAL Team. 

And then I found that there’s a tier-one group above all special operations and I made it there. And then my MBA in business after business it’s been a long path, and arguably I’ve hit some success in my life. I’m not dwelling on that much like I don’t dwell on my failures. None of that happened overnight especially for a 119-pound kid that joined the Marines, and then I leave at around 200 pounds. It was a 20-year journey and I’m still on that journey. 

Take everything one step at a time. And if you stay in the moment and you try to learn from each day, then I tell you what you’re going to be a lot more equipped to deal with life’s difficulties. And I guarantee if you take it one step at a time, you will get to whatever your goal is a lot quicker than just mindlessly following no path.

[00:06:52] Sean: Mike Sarraille, I think one of the really important things you hit on is that everything’s not just going to be a perfect success. Understanding that going in, but then also taking those difficult times, those tough moments and learning from them to develop you moving forward. I just wanted to highlight that because I think that’s so important. I’m wondering if you look at all your different mindsets, I know this is broad but is that the one you’ve spent the most time cultivating? Is that the lifelong one you’ve got to just spend so much time with?

[00:07:19] Mike Sarraille: I would hate to say that it’s been my lifelong mindset. I was so caught up in the moment that I didn’t take time to reflect on how I got to where I got. It was in the military special operations during a time of war, it’s onto the next thing, and onto the next thing. It’s after I retired that I truly started to reflect on what made me successful and where I failed, and could have done a better job. 

So really in the last three years, because I only retired three years ago, have I truly been putting pen to paper in trying to codify what this mindset is as to how I approach success or any daunting task. And it’s the realization now that it was a series of millions and millions of steps to get where I’ve got. 

After-Action Review

[00:08:17] Sean: It’s so crucial. So many people think it happens overnight, it’s instantaneous. My father-in-law used to say an overnight success takes 15 years. One of the things I want to hit on though, because you said it wasn’t until you got out of your 20 plus year military career, that you were able to reflect, as a leader, as an executive, entrepreneur, someone in business, how do you zoom in and then also zoom out? Not after you left the corporate world, I’m wondering how we can do this for people who are ingrained in this and just part of that process right now.

[00:08:48] Mike Sarraille: Sean, this is what I do for a living. I come in and we do leadership development for organizations based on the special operations model. Now, when I talk about reflection, I’m talking about it from a personal level. Of course, during my 20 years, I did reflect, but I did quickly move on to the next thing. For entrepreneurs, those running a business, you have to put this organizational reflection, you’ve got to put this process into place in your businesses.

The one thing the special operations community does extremely well is after everything we do, we do an after-action review, what we call an AAR for short because we put an acronym on everything. In the business world, some people call these debriefs. What I’ve noticed is that very few, probably less than 1% of all the businesses I’ve worked with actually conduct this after-action review. And what it is, it’s simply a candid, vulnerable process where we say, Hey, whether we succeeded or failed, what did we do well, and what did we do poorly during that last evolution?

And how can we improve? It’s not a long-drawn-out process. It can be based on let’s say the volume or the size of the project you just completed, but you can even take five minutes at the end of the day to bring your team in and say, Hey, we all get one point, whether it’s a success or failure. What’s that one thing we learned today. And if you do that for five minutes at the end of every day, or maybe you can’t do it every day. You do 30 minutes at the end of the week, I guarantee your organization will learn. 

Each person on an individual level will learn from one another, both their successes and their failures. And you’ll put the steps in place to make the business more efficient, more effective, and to deliver a better good or service to your customers. But very few organizations do that outside of the special operations community. 

[00:10:45] Sean: You mentioned so few. Why do you think that so few organizations do it today?

[00:10:53] Mike Sarraille: This is a great question. And here’s the most common answer I get when I’m in businesses sort of explaining this process and, you know, Daniel Coyle who wrote the Talent Code and Culture Code actually came into my last tier-one command, and he observed us doing this after-action review. He wrote about it in the Culture Code. It works, but the most common sort of excuse I get from usually it’s the smartest person in the room and says, Hey Mike, that’s great in the military because you guys have the time, in the business world we don’t have the time. 

So what I do with those individuals, is I listen to them and hear their explanation for not having the time to conduct the after-action review, and I give them a sense of what our normal day was. Afghanistan for instance, where we were averaging four to five hours of sleep a day if we were lucky. Where we’re on what we call vampire hours because we operated at night. It gives us an advantage over the enemy. And so maybe I’m up at 11:00 AM I get my quick one-hour workout in because I got to maintain my cardio, my physical fitness. 

And then I start reading intelligence reports with my staff and by 6:00 PM, we may have an enemy target fixed to a certain location. We go and do a rapid planning cycle. And then maybe at 10:00 PM, we fly off into the night. Hike for about four hours in the mountains to get to the target. We get in a firefight, either kill or capture the enemy. And if we’re lucky we get home by dawn, 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM. Guys are dehydrated, they’re exhausted, and everyone just wants to eat something and go to sleep.

But as professionals, what do we do? We actually reload all our magazines, put our radios back in the charter and make sure our kids are ready for the next night because we know we’re probably going up the next night and then we all meet in a room. And then even though we’re hungry, dehydrated, and tired, if it takes us an hour, it takes us an hour. If it takes us two hours, it takes us two hours. But we conduct that after-action review because we know that’s the process through which we improve both individually and organizationally. 

And the level of professionalism during these could not have made me prouder because we know that we’re going back out the next night and we may learn one thing that may make us more effective over the enemy or may result in bringing our guys home alive. And so that’s what we were willing to do. Now, if you want to argue that while in business, the risk isn’t life and death, okay, be that as it may, but the risk is whether your business is around for 10 years or around for one year. 

And again, that’s up to you and you have to have the discipline. This is what it comes down to, the self-discipline to one, structure your schedule in a way that you have time for this at the end of the day or the end of the week. And if you don’t, you have no one else to blame, but yourself.

What Young People Require to Develop into Great Leaders

[00:13:43] Sean: I think you see that amongst the high performers, the elite leaders out there, they had that little bit of discipline. As you mentioned, it doesn’t take too much, but at the end of the day, recapping doing those little things. It’s funny, you mentioned some of those business leaders say we don’t have the time. There’s this great Henry Ford story, where one of his executives said, what happens if we spend all the time training up our leaders and they leave the organization. 

And he says, what happens if we don’t do that? That was a hundred years ago and I love how applicable it is today. We have to train up our talent, develop them because if not, we’re just setting ourselves up for failure. One of the things that you mentioned is that you got to spend your time in the military for 20 years, and that really is like the elite training ground for leadership. So many people aren’t going to have that experience. 

If you were designing that system and this can just be someone fresh out of college, they’ve got that growth mindset, they want to develop, what are the big buckets they need to be thinking about in order to develop themselves as leaders?

[00:14:41] Mike Sarraille: Let me actually step back and take that question. You just said something that we preach that the military is the world’s greatest leadership incubator. Especially if you look at the Service Academies, The Air Force Academy, The Naval Academy. And even though I come from the Navy, my favorite academy is West Point they produce some of the nation’s finest leaders. I don’t know what has happened since World War II where the American public, and this does exist, people may say, oh, no, we love our military. 

Yes, everyone loves the military, but what I’ve seen is there’s this view that for people to join the military it was the last resort. For me and my experience for 20years, it was the complete opposite. You have individuals who were college athletes, college-educated, some of the most just prolific leaders I’ve ever met, who could have gone into the business world and started companies and been multimillionaires by now but they have this selfless gene where they had a sense of purpose and pride in their country, and so they joined in.

To make it into the special operations community, it is very elite. There are some bad examples out there of people that represented the military, who are yelling stuff and this ultra-aggressive attitude. The most elite lethal warriors I knew were the most empathetic, respectful, quiet, or what we call silent professionals and you would never know what they did. They would just have a conversation with you in an airport, a bar, and you think, wow, that was amazing man or woman. 

Hollywood shapes, a lot of perceptions of what people think of the military. And they do an awful job. They’ve got to sell films, so everything is PTSD. Everyone walks around, yelling at everyone. That was the complete opposite of my experience. The best leaders I had were coaches and mentors, they didn’t yell. Even when you fail, they pulled you and they saw that as an opportunity to help you learn and make you a better leader. We do not shy away from failure. We understand that it’s part of the process. 

So for a young college graduate don’t try to bulldoze things. I understand that this is a lifelong process. I turned 44 on Thursday, and I still have 30, 40 years of mentorship left. As a leader, I do not have this figured out and I studied under some world-class leaders like Admiral William H. M. McRaven, Wyman Howard, and Dave Cooper. Some of the most amazing leaders I’ve ever served with. Read as much as you can, read at least one book on business leadership or combat leadership one week, seek out mentors who you highly respect, those who treat people with respect and, you know they’ll put time into you.

Talk to everyone, open your aperture, and conduct that personal after-action review at the end of every night. And I even do this for one minute. Just ask yourself, what did you do well. Do more of that. Ask yourself what you did poorly. Put steps in place to get better at that thing that you did poorly. And if you have this self-reflection, which has the greatest common theme I’ve seen of all leaders, they were highly reflective, you are on a path that very few figure out at an early age. 

And then work hard, nothing replaces hard work. Don’t be entitled. You’re not entitled to everything. It seems nowadays that everyone thinks they’re going to make 60,000 out of college and that they’re entitled to equity. That’s not the case. If you are handed equity I’d think twice about that company. Earn it, there is no replacement for hard work. Lastly, treat people with respect. There’s a lot of people out there that are rich in the bank and that’s great, I highly admire them for what they’ve accomplished, but they are absolutely poor in character.

I make sure my tribe, my circle because iron sharpens iron as one man sharpens another, I make sure that the people I surround myself with are high-achievers that they’re respectful to other people, that they’re selfless, and that they’ll take care of one another to include me. And so you got to be careful about who you surround yourself with as well.

Learning From Great Leaders

[00:19:20] Sean: Mike Sarraille, one of the things you bring up around great leaders, and I know you’ve served with a lot and in certain ones we’ve even had on the show. I know Chris Fussell was someone you worked with. We do a once-a-month deep dive on someone, called The Distillery, and actually, last month was Jonny Kim, one of these humble leaders.

What do you do when you are surrounded by someone like this every day? I’m thinking about certain people who are really lucky in certain organizations to be around these humble leaders and how do we learn and grow the most from them. I’m just wondering if there’s anything that you did throughout your time in the military, when you knew you were surrounded by someone like that, just to take more of their lessons with you.

[00:19:59] Mike Sarraille: Well, it’s funny you mentioned Chris Fussell and Dr. Jonny Kim, who’ve both had an extreme impact on my life. I’ll start with Chris Fussell, and I have a letter from Chris Fussell that he wrote me in 2012. He was overseas averaging four hours of sleep. He didn’t have the time and he wrote me a five-page email as I was leaving his command. He was my commander and moving to another subsequent command under the same umbrella. 

That letter stays with me what he wrote and some of the most sage advice I’ve ever received. A good practice that Chris put in place for, what you would call your junior officers, and I was one of his junior officers, every Friday at 10:00 AM, he would have all of us meet in his office and he would do professional development. He would coach and mentor us on things he’d learned, things had done well, technical skills as well as things he did poorly. And at first not knowing the guy, I actually dismissed him. I’m like, who the hell does this guy think he is?

Yes, we don’t have the time for one hour, two-hour session. And after the first one, I was completely wrong and I formed a close relationship with Chris. And that is somebody that all leaders should seek out, especially in the business world to gain advice from. Of course, that’s why he’s General McChrystal’s, right-hand man. Dr. Jonny Kim, this is a good story that resonates. Jonny and I went to BUD/S together. And Jonny was this scrawny little kid, this Korean American from LA almost to the stereotype. 

I saw him, I’m a Recon Marine and I’m like, God, that kid probably won’t make it, but that’s how much time I gave Jonny. And at the end out of the 250, I think there were 30 of us left. I looked down the line and there’s Jonny Kim. And I was completely wrong. I judged a book by its cover. We both went to SEAL Team Three together. We were in the same task unit together. I actually watched him conduct the action where he was awarded the silver star and I can not be more proud.

And I’ve actually told Jonny I’m sorry, I completely made a snap judgment on you. SEAL silver star, Harvard-educated doctor, NASA astronaut all by the age of 34, perfect human. And actually, I just lined him up, we have our Centennial class, BUD/S reunion. We were class 247, 347 graduates in February, and I just lined him up to speak to that class. He was the perfect guy with the other perfect message. But it goes back to your tribe, your tribe matters, and your tribe is very influential in your maturation, your development as a person, and as a leader. 

And everyone wants a tribe. The seals are our ultimate tribe. The Boy Scouts are a tribe, even something like Hells Angels or worse ISIS are a tribe. We’d argue that their tribe, I mean their culture, nonetheless, they’re a tribe that reinforces evil values. So you’ve got to be careful who you surround yourself with. I resort back to Chris and Jonny for advice and I’m humbled to even be associated with them.

Nature versus Nurture

[00:23:30] Sean: One of the things you mentioned with those great leaders even just looking at a book by its cover with Dr. Kim, how much of their ability was nature versus nurture? How much were they just born with and then how much can get developed and cultivated over time?

[00:23:48] Mike Sarraille: The nature versus nurture argument I don’t put much credence on nature. My family is not physically overbearing. We were never the best at sports, but somehow I step into the SEAL Teams and physically beat guys on runs, even though I’m a larger guy. Beating guys on swims and holding my own it’s because I worked at it and I had great parents that nurtured me, that always pushed me, not too hard. If you split twins at birth and put one in a home where they’re constantly engaging in leadership development, which is what parenting is.

It’s trying to create an empathetic, respectful, competent, self-reliant human being. And then you put the other twin in a household described by abuse, both mental and physical, and they will develop into two wildly different people. The seals, the assessment selection process is you have to have that mental toughness even make it through the training. And that’s ultimately what we’re looking for. We don’t put these young men and women through training because we’re sadistic. 

We’re trying to reinforce that your mind will break long before your body does. Your body is resilient even though during hell week, you’re going to run close to a hundred miles even with the 200-pound boats on your head, you’re constantly moving without sleep, your body is resilient. It will keep going. With the exception, if you break a bone or something along those lines but your mind will break if it’s not strong. Now, when you make it into the SEAL community, once you make it past SEAL training, it’s great. 

You’ve passed the entrance exam, and you see who’s receptive to mentorship and coaching and who is not. There’s a caveat to that too, let’s put it this way, there are some piss poor leaders in the SEAL Teams that we allow to remain in the community, and that is extremely frustrating. Now, when those piss poor leaders get ahold of young SEALs, that is a bad situation because they usually reinforce the wrong values.  And a lot of those SEALs go on to have short careers or would say subpar careers. 

Who you end up under as a mentee does matter, but your development is only beginning once you make it into the SEAL Teams and you report to the first SEAL Team. You ultimately are going to determine whether you have a long and productive career because you have an open mind, you can accept feedback, you can check your ego and you can allow yourself to be vulnerable, or you’re going to be full of ego, you can’t listen to anyone. And usually, those guys were unconsciously incompetent and their reputation suffered severely in the SEALs Teams and nobody wanted to work with them quite frankly. 

Mental Toughness

[00:26:56] Sean: When did that puzzle piece go into place for you, that you understood just how powerful the mind was?

[00:27:04] Mike Sarraille: I think it started in Marine Corps Bootcamp. My dad came from very little, did very well, and provided my brother and sister with a very good life. We grew up in Atherton, California, which is one of the most affluent towns in America, sort of the who’s who of Silicon Valley lives there. I really wanted to prove to my dad who came from nothing and had to earn everything that he had raised me well as well as my mom and that I could do it on my own. And it was the realization when you go to Marine Corps Bootcamp, which is a scary prospect, that you’re on your own. 

There was a great sense of loneliness, even though you’re surrounded by 60 other people that are going through the same thing, there’s a sense of loneliness. And that was really hard to overcome and to block out and to focus on the task at hand. But, I had great drill instructors who I highly admired, and at the end of the day, they want you to succeed. So they’re giving you all the input, the techniques, the tactics to succeed in the Marine Corps and to become mentally tough, but it was a journey. And I’ll actually say the Marine Corps Bootcamp was probably the toughest for me. 

After that, I stepped into Recon school, which again has a high attrition rate. One person told me, the one thing the instructors can’t control is the clock and every evolution has to end. And I took that same mindset. I became more mentally tough as I became a Recon Marine. I became a Scout Sniper. I went to Moreno Valley and graduated from the army and set some records. My mental toughness started to build. It is something you can build, self-discipline, by taking small steps every day and those small steps add up, you can build your mental toughness. 

You got to identify a starting point that’s reasonable and then build upon that. By the time I got to SEAL training it wasn’t and I don’t want to sound arrogant, failing or quitting wasn’t an option. The war was going on, and all I cared about is let’s get this done the first time around as quickly as possible because there are people downrange 580 max, where I need to be. That’s where my contribution is going to take place. And it just worked out for me just like that. 

But there are guys that get hurt in SEAL training, some of them stay there for a year during the first, what is supposed to be a six-month phase. They stay there for over a year because they just get injured and injured and they won’t quit. They say, Hey, you want to be recycled to the next class and their answer is, hell, yeah. And so I had a lot of friends that did that and I highly admire them because again, BUD/S like Marine Bootcamp is not a fun place to be. 

Confidence

[00:29:53] Sean: One of the things you say is you don’t want to come off as arrogant, I think there’s a major difference between unearned arrogance and earned confidence. I would love to know how much confidence just plays into this entire journey for you.

[00:30:03] Mike Sarraille: Confident that I could overcome any obstacle, not arrogant enough to know that I wasn’t going to do it on the first trial. I wasn’t naturally gifted, not physically, not tactically. I just knew that no matter what I was going to find a way to persevere and I didn’t think it was going to be pretty easy there. A lot of my victories in life are completely ugly. The picture Hollywood paints is everything looks cool on the combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq or elsewhere, they were ugly. 

Our victories were ugly. But at the end of the day, we were victorious. We won almost every battle we were tasked with. And so how you win matters, but don’t expect it to be this crystal clear, neat, pretty process. It’s not. The funniest thing because I didn’t grow up shooting guns, down in California Bay Area, I scored expert on the rifle in Bootcamp. I was shocked. I just listened to what the drill instructors told me. I didn’t have any bad habits, but once they put a pistol in my hand, once I got to the Marine Corps, I didn’t even call on the pistol I failed. 

I was utterly embarrassed in front of my peers, but I had a good mentor who said, Hey, maybe on the weekends, we’ll get you up to speed. And then less than a month after practicing, I “called expert” on the pistol. You have the confidence in yourself that you will overcome, but understand that the journey may belong. You got to have that mindset going in.

Skill Development

[00:31:50] Sean: We need to dive further into skill development. I know you were a Director of the SEAL Junior Officer Training, and one of the things, a lot of potential seals, they’d never swam, they’d never shot a gun. I’m wondering what else you’ve understood now about skill development, where you can take someone from having no to little experience, to basically executing flawlessly at a subconscious level, similar to how you drive a car today? What have you understood about that, that anyone can learn from? 

[00:32:18] Mike Sarraille: The same holds true, practice makes perfect. Now we will put the time into our young SEALs to get them up to the level where they need to be. Before we cut anyone from training, we make sure we can look in the mirror and say, Hey, we’ve done everything possible to get that person up to the standard. And if they fall short and then you’re faced with a tough decision. One of my best tours in the SEAL Teams was as The Director of the Junior Officer Training Course. Those young men were just like sponges. 

The war was going on, they were hungry for as much knowledge because they knew they would be leading people on the battlefield. And it was my job to develop them into what we call GFCs, Ground Force Commanders. It was the most rewarding tour I’ve ever had. And that’s where I developed sort of this concept that I call the legacy of leadership. A good SEAL buddy Rich Diviney who also was a tier-one operator calls it the irony of leadership, that your job as a leader is to actually work yourself out of a job. 

It’s to train the next generation so that they’re so good, they’re better than you, that they take the organization to the next level. I sort of built this reputation that even the regular SEAL teams would come train with us at the tier one level, they would pull me aside after training, to take the young officers aside and run them through professional development. Much like I did in the junior officer training course. I don’t know why leaders in the business world don’t recognize this, or maybe they just haven’t tasted it. 

When you put a lot of time into the people below you just invest in pouring into them, there is this great ROI. The greatest ROI that you’ll ever get, that’s the emotional ROI. It’s the most selfless thing you can do. And you want to genuinely hope that the people can become better than you. That’s the whole point. And that’s why your legacy is built upon that. But I will say this, skills are important, technical or tactical skills are important regardless of your profession but it’s not as valuable as those soft skills. 

We’re going to invest in banking, a great trader, one of the best traders who have the inability to show respect and empathy to people to work well with others will not continue into a leadership position. It goes back to that Google study project, Oxygen, where they did 10 years of analyzing what makes their best leaders. Their best leaders in technical skills came in at number eight, out of 10. The other most important one was the ability to work with others. The ability to inspire, and give people a common purpose and the vision of where they’re going. 

That’s what’s most important. While skill can carry you to a certain leadership level, it won’t carry you any higher. Now it’s your ability to deal with people and to lead. And so you have to remember that yes, in the early years, much like those college graduates become very good technically and tactically at what you do, but you need to also be focusing on those soft skills and watching great leaders, even poor leaders and learning from what they do so that when you attain that level, that you’re leading your team in a way that’s productive, best respectful, and creating an inclusive, and a welcoming environment.

[00:35:43] Sean: You mentioned  Rich Diviney he’s been on the show and it’s funny what you’re talking about right now is helping those underneath you. I was just messaging back and forth with Rich the other day, he was helping develop me in something and he probably doesn’t have the time, and I was even wondering why he’s doing it. Even now that he’s out of the seals, he’s helping those below him. It’s something he just can’t escape, I guess.

[00:36:04] Mike Sarraille: Yeah. His book The Attributes is a good read. Funny enough, Rich and I didn’t talk for a few years, you know, you lose touch with your buddies. And somehow we reconnected on LinkedIn and we both said, Hey, we’re writing a book. And I’m like, oh, we’re writing on special operations, the assessment and selection process, and how that can be lent to the business hiring process. I’m like, we’re also writing about attributes and he’s like, I’m writing a book called The Attributes and I’m like, okay, then we’ll interview you. 

And we interviewed him for the book, and he gave us some great input. His book was hyper focused on optimal performance based on those attributes. It wasn’t the core focus of our book. And now Rich and I are working on a lot of projects together. I consider him a great friend and also mentor because he made it to a higher level than I did in the SEAL Teams.

Foundational Resources

[00:36:55] Sean: Very cool. You mentioned studying and learning from great leaders and just the ability to study strategy, different books, things like that. What have been some of those foundational pillars in terms of resources for you throughout the years?

[00:37:10] Mike Sarraille: I basically watched great leaders. You learn a lot from just watching and if you get a moment to ask them, Hey, why did you make that decision? Then, they’ll give you invaluable feedback. The greatest resource I’m going to tell you is Lisa Jaster, who’s the third woman to graduate from Ranger School at the age of 37. She calls it leadership through readership. I read so many great books, like the Range by David Epstein. 

I’ve never met David Epstein, but there are a few nuggets from that book that helped maturate me as a leader. And though you won’t meet a lot of the authors that you read their books, they still are informal mentors. That’s why reading is so important. And even reading authors, who you may not agree with. But your greatest resource always has been the ability to read at least one book a week. I’ve heard Mark Cuban reads like three to five books a week, that’s insane. But look at how competent and prolific he has become as a leader.

Training Vs Education

[00:38:27] Sean: The famous saying, a great book is a conversation with the greatest minds of all time. I want to dive back more into some of these different minds that you have, and that military has that saying train for certainty, educate for uncertainty. I’m wondering, you being a doctor and in that for so long, what is the difference between training and education?

[00:38:46] Mike Sarraille: We’re actually, Rich Diviney, myself, and Brian Decker, who is the Director of Player Development for the Indianapolis Colts. He is also a former Green Beret Officer, George Randle, my co-author from the Talent of War, Tom Lokar, who is a former CHR of Mitel are writing a book right now. We’re actually doing a section on that, train the certainty. When we say certainty you’re talking about environments that are, let’s say less ambiguous, less volatile. And that’s where skill truly wins out. 

That’s where you can rely on your skill alone, but how many environments are like that? Combat is not like that. It is so volatile, things explode and people are wounded all around you. That’s where your skills begin to degrade and all you are left with are your attributes. Now you look at COVID for the business world, it threw everyone into this ambiguous, volatile environment where information was changing. It seemed almost like on the hour during the early days of March 2020, as well as April, and is still changing today.

Get people vaccinated, don’t get your people vaccinated. And that’s where you rely on your attributes and the attributes of your team. I’ll give you a good example, the organization that we’re investing in their people, I’m talking about their personal development, their leadership development prior to COVID, we’re well suited to deal with the obstacles that came their way. Now, a lot of companies were doing that between 2015 to 2019. We had one of the largest economic booms in the history of our company. 

And when people are in good times, consumer spending is up, they say, Hey, we can sit back. We don’t have to spend money on our people, the money’s coming in regardless. Well, if you took that attitude you probably saw your team falter in that ambiguous environment. Training and education are important. That’s how we tighten up that skill but beyond education, that’s where that personal development comes into place. Is that a form of training and education? Yes, but it requires somebody adept, a skilled leader to mold and shape other people. 

One of the problems with leadership development with organizations and it’s hard to tell businesses this, I ask who’s in charge of your leadership development, and it’s like a trivial task that they gave to somebody who is not equipped. Who’s not respected within the organization. Who’s not sat in the executive seat felt that stress, that constant daily stress, and so they don’t have the reputation, they don’t have the credibility to teach leadership development. Who you have teaching leadership development in your company matters.

And that’s not always the CEO. It’s not the guy or the woman who started that company. They had a great idea, they helped build that company, but they may not be the best leader that everyone respects. We put a woman who I highly respect Carly Walton. She’s 31, George is 55, and I’m 44. And even though we teach leadership for a living, we put Carly Walton, our President in charge of developing all the people within our company to include us. Carly takes the lead on that because she’s so highly respected and she’s working with the people day-to-day, so she was the right person to lead that. 

How do we support her and augment her leadership development curriculum for our people? We absolutely do. We practice what we preach, but beyond developing your people to build those attributes to succeed, because when people are pushed outside their mental and physical limits that’s when skills begin to degrade and you’re left with only your attributes, your character, your integrity, your resiliency, your ability to be vulnerable. You also actually have to segue or precursor that with who you hire into your organization. During your hiring process, you should be screening for those things.

Because if you hire somebody who’s extremely smart and has high technical ability, but they’re totally devoid of character in the core attributes that we know are required for hard times, that’s not somebody I’m going to hire for an organization or if I do, I’m going to limit them to just that technical ability and not put them in charge of other people. This is actually a process of hiring the right people, continuing to pour into them with the development. And I guarantee if you do those two things well, the next hard time, the next recession, your company is not only going to thrive, they’re going to come out stronger on the other end.

Pushing People to the Edge

[00:43:25] Sean: Mike Sarraille, one of the things I would love to get your perspective on is you talk about pushing people right to their edge. That’s how we learn, that’s how we develop. It’s such a nuanced thing. How do we understand when we’re pushing someone too far to that breaking point and or not pushing them enough?

[00:43:40] Mike Sarraille: It’s a lot of trial and error and sometimes we push too far and we say, Hey, let’s come back a little and we apologize for that. But Sean, let me give you the last thing I just did. I just got back from Mount Everest, not climbing Mount Everest. Thousands of people have done that, and God bless them, it’s insane. We actually skydived into the highest drop zones in the world. And even though I have 600 jumps and did this in the military on night vision with combat equipment, I was so nervous on every jump. 

I was hyper-focused walking through my mental checklist of what I needed to do, but that anxiety and that nervousness were there. That was my edge. That’s why I went on this trip because if I’m not pushing myself, I’m not growing. True learning takes place again when you push people a little past their mental and physical limits. And you have to do it as well if you’re the leader of an organization. If you’re going to do that to your people, you have to show them that you’re willing to do it to yourself.

For me, that’s what this trip was. Talent War Group, the management consulting and executive search firm that I founded, actually has something called ITWX, Into The Wild Extreme, where we take business teams, usually executive-level teams, and take them to the wilderness. We have to do a lot of pre-work to understand the person, to gauge where their thresholds are and that changes once you actually have them out in the wilderness. 

We do that to the entire team because very few business leaders have mountaineering or outdoor skills, some do, but we basically put them in charge of the trip. We make sure we mitigate risk and it’s a safe environment, but it is the best leadership development tool. You get them out of the office space. It is a constant lesson in transformative and change leadership because as you get higher up the mountain, things change, the environment changes.

You’re rotating them through leadership positions, they’re learning about one another. They’re learning about their strengths and weaknesses. Somebody may be great in the office but they’re not as comfortable in this environment, and so you’ve got to help that person.  You see different teams, especially from a sense of shared adversity, ask yourself, why are the Green Berets, why are the Navy SEALs, why are the Marine Raiders so tight for life? 

Even people in the military as a whole, especially people who have seen combat it is because they have this thing called shared adversity. And I was actually talking to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, and I respect him highly, great business leader, he said, it’s the number one thing that the business world is missing. Is that people don’t have this common bond. And when you take a team of 20 executives to the wilderness, and even though some of them did not thrive in the environment, but they learned a lot about themselves. 

They come out and they share a beer at the bar that same night, and you see this camaraderie in the shared adversity built, and they go back to the workplace, as a different team. We sort of formulated that based on the special operations model, but that’s why we do what we do with the wild extreme.

A Learning Mindset

[00:46:55] Sean: Do you see inflection-type moments with that, like I know Gladwell Malcolm talked about the 10,000 hours. Can we develop that overall mindset in a shorter, condensed timeframe like you guys do out at Extremity?

[00:47:10] Mike Sarraille: Absolutely. Even five days can be life-changing. We were in Everest for two weeks in that was a life-changing moment for me, particularly the jumps in the terrain. The terrain is so overwhelming, that’s the world’s highest terrain. And it made me feel so insignificant and small. Now I say that not in a self-deprecating way. I say that in a positive way. The terrain humbled me and it made me think, I’m a drop in the bucket of this history called Earth. 

And the terrain is so beautiful, it made me smile and think I need to live better. I need to do more. I need to treat people with more respect and especially, I need to take a moment, I need to breathe and take in all of God’s green Earth because it is magnificent. I’m bringing those back, I’m reflecting, I’m writing the article of what I’ve learned from my expedition to Mount Everest. It’s also a learning mindset. You have to have a continual learning mindset, an open mindset to different ways of doing things, different perspectives.

And I see that especially for people when they get over 40 it’s like, this is the way I do stuff, like constant rigidity. There’s no adaptation. It may have been successful in the past, but what got you here, won’t get you there and you have to be open to change. It was Heraclitus that said the only constant thing in life is change. It is the truth. The second you start resisting change, which means you no longer have a learning mindset. I guarantee you change is going to just steamroll you. It’s going to roll right over. 

For a lot of companies, this is the biggest complacency or that lack of change is what kills companies. Hey, we’re on top, we’re the top of our industry, our business model is sound, we just need to keep on doing what we’re doing. And eventually, those companies fall. And history is littered with companies that were on top that are no longer with us. You have to keep looking at the way you do things and say, is there a better way, or what does our consumer want? Because your consumer is king, not your perceptions, not your ideas.

The consumer is king. And so that learning mindset that’s, what’s required for people to stay on top. And we all know that being on top is the most dangerous position in life because everyone’s coming for you. 

Military Free Falls

[00:49:46] Sean: Shoshin, that beginner’s mind is just vital. One of the things that you mentioned, I just love the perspective on is when you were coming in, and seeing how small and insignificant we each are, that’s one of the things you hear out of all astronauts when they go out to space. They look at this little blue dot and they’ve realized how small we actually are. One of the things I’ve got to hear more about is just some of the military free falls you do.

I was talking to a good buddy who recently transitioned out of the SEALs and I assumed it was jumping out of airplanes at 15,000 feet, and he said, no, no, no. The free fall out of the helicopter was the most intense thrill I’ve ever had in my life. You mentioned you were scared, what was going on in your mind? What’s the internal dialogue as you’re about to jump.

[00:50:35] Mike Sarraille: The reason I was nervous and arguably these are the highest drop zones in the world. The first drop zone was at 12,500 feet. The highest we could get in the United States Leadville was 10,000. Now I’ve got to do a shout-out to the Complete Parachute Solutions team led by Fred Williams, The President, who’s also a former SEAL from my last command. And I could not have been surrounded by better professionals. They bring that military mindset and way of doing things to mitigate risk and they mitigated risk to the lowest level. 

Still, weather can change on a dime and that happened to us and we had a very scary incident. And then also the canopy control building is much different at that altitude. It travels faster. We did training in Colorado to mitigate that risk to the lowest level. It still exists, but actually jumping out of helicopters, I love that part. That part’s awesome. When you come off an airplane, you’re doing about 120 to 140 knots. You hit your relative speed pretty quick, and you’re flying your body. 

When you jump out of the helicopter, it’s like jumping off a roof. It takes a while to build that speed up. So naturally, people do the swim, they start grabbing for air. I don’t think anyone on the team had a problem. You stepped off the helicopter and you just held it, and if you held it long enough, then your body picks up the relative speed and you’re flying your body. I think everyone was more concerned about making it to the holding area and setting yourself up for a safe and successful landing. 

And that’s where the concern was because if you miss the drop zone and these were what we call confined drop zones, there are not many options outside of there. You may be leaning on the side of the mountain and that’s a very complicated prospect, one for injury or even recovering you. And so that’s where the nervousness and fear were but again, a testament to the Complete Parachute Solution teams who train the majority of our American special operations in military free fall.

They did an outstanding job. Now, military free-fall, there are only two units that are truly trained to do that mission. Almost all special operations go through military free fall, but only two units are truly trained to conduct that mission in combat. And that comment may piss off a lot of people, but in my opinion, that’s the truth. And the people from those units would back me up on that. It’s a complex mission set and there’s a lot more risk. If somebody said, Hey, we’re going to have to do a night military free fall jump into this combat mission.

Our first response would be, is there any other way to get in there other than doing the military free fall And if there’s not that’s why we’re trained in the standard. It’s a very scary prospect when you jump out of an airplane at 18,000 feet at night on night visions before combat equipment and there’s 30 of you. And you’re all trying to do what you call a hop and pop, usually pulling about four seconds after you exit the aircraft, so you can line up. 

Again, you’re looking through almost like toilet rolls, your depth of vision is not large in the ability for two people to collide. And if you wrap up with all that equipment, it’s pretty much the outcome is not good. So that’s why there’s risk involved with that mission. You have to train at that mission set a lot in order to pull that off. And every time I did those night jumps, my nervousness was at an all-time high. You are so nervous and it’s so hard to move with all that combat equipment.

[00:54:27] Sean: Well, thinking about the skill development, I had a blast this morning, just going through a bunch of your videos jumping and then the actual landing. And so I’ll link those up in the show notes, you’ll watch them and your feet will start to tinkle and you’ll get a little bit nervous, but you’ll just appreciate how intricate, complex and skilled you are for being able to do that. I know we’ve got to wrap up here in a minute. I definitely want to make sure the listeners get linked up with everything you’re putting out. I know the book, The Talent War. Where else do you want the listener to stay connected with you, Mike?

[00:54:57] Mike Sarraille: You can find the Talent War on our company page, https://talentwargroup.com/, and https://mikesarraille.com/. We write The Everyday Warrior Column for men’s journals. There’s more coming from that. I’m about to drop an article because it’s the Marine Corps’ birthday tomorrow 246 years of defending our nation. I was privileged to go speak to 500 plus Marines on July 31st. 

Let me tell you, they are the next best generation. I know a lot of people from, especially my generation will dog on the millennials and the Gen Zs, they’re awesome. And the best hope we can have is that they’re better than us and that’s why we need to continue pouring into them. Sean, thank you for having me on. Thank you for these discussions. I love having them. I’ve learned. Hopefully, the audience has taken away one or two nuggets that can help them.

[00:55:52] Sean: Awesome, Mike Sarraille. Well, thanks again for your service. Thanks for joining us here on What Got You There. Hope you have a great rest of the day.

[00:55:57] Mike Sarraille: Perfect. Thanks, Sean.

[00:56:00] Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is by giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends, and also sharing on social. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.

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