319 Becoming Unstoppable: Leadership Lessons from a Navy SEAL Turned CEO with Alden Mills | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: . Alden Mills. Welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you back with me. 

[00:00:05] Alden Mills: That makes two of us. Great to be back, Leanne. 

[00:00:09] Mahan Tavakoli: Alden, I loved our last conversation and would encourage everyone to listen to it. Episode 218, leading unstoppable teams, and can't wait to talk about your newest book, unstoppable mindset, how to use what you have to get what you want.

But before we get to that, I heard you're going through a lot of transitions before we press record. 

[00:00:33] Alden Mills: I think the theme since we met with episode two 18, the theme is transition and chaos. Just tuning in. I'm a father of four boys, four high energy boys.

They range from 14 to 20. I have four boys in four different schools. One is a junior in college, one's a freshman in college, one's a junior in high school, and one's in eighth grade. So we are crisscrossing literally around the country dealing with all of them. And it's been heightened since the last time we talked because one is being very actively recruited for football.

Wow, what a difference that is from water polo or rowing. Very different environment. And then we have two Labradors.

They demand being walked every day. If we don't walk them, they mess up our home. So that's the story of all the mills is life right now. 

[00:01:35] Mahan Tavakoli: You are going through a lot of change, but one of the things I love about your thinking and your book Unstoppable Mindset, Alden, is that we are all going through a lot of change, whether we like it or not.

For a while, CEOs were telling me they can't wait until COVID is quote unquote over. Over because they were hoping the pace of change will slow down and things would revert back to the way they were, but whether it is with return to office or now applications of generative AI and organizations, the pace of change is actually picking up

[00:02:14] Alden Mills: it really is. It's accelerating. 

[00:02:17] Mahan Tavakoli: Now you also work with a lot of teams and organizations. What is it that you are seeing with respect to change that's going on with your clients? 

[00:02:29] Alden Mills: I would say . Is all about getting people to take more ownership as the pace of change accelerates. Executives at whatever level of leadership you're at realize they can't do this alone. They're not even going to come close to doing this. And so what they're relying on more and more is the opportunity to empower others.

To have them own the decisions and move quicker to help everybody keep up the pace of change. The old adage about letting go to empower others is a very difficult challenge, especially when you don't even appreciate some of the technologies that are coming out. And how do you get, not just the senior leadership, but how do you infect the rest of the organization?

And embracing and owning the direction, the culture, the team dynamics and their individual leadership. 

[00:03:30] Mahan Tavakoli: Some of that goes to part of what you cover in the book as well, all then, which is what I wanted to get your thoughts on part of it is leaders learning to let go. But part of it is the mindset of people who work in organizations.

 I was talking to a CEO this Monday, and she was complaining about the fact that Many people in her organization, and I've seen this, there's a tendency to point sideways rather than taking on accountability and having the mindset that you talk about that ownership mindset.

So how can leaders develop that kind of mindset in their organizations? Part of it is letting go, but part of it is people being willing to step up and take ownership. 

[00:04:16] Alden Mills: 100%. When we talk about mindset. I want to be very clear with everybody that I think of that as the first level of leadership, I speak to probably 40 or 50.

audiences a year. And most of the time, whether I'm talking about unstoppable mindset, unstoppable teams, unstoppable culture, I always talk about the three levels of leadership first, so people can have an appreciation that it isn't just about their mindset, it's about everybody's mindset around them, and the more that they understand it.

And so I give this metaphor. And the simple metaphor is this, you're looking at a reflection pond. Crystal clear, but dead calm mirror, and you take a pebble and you drop it in the pond. And these three concentric circles radiate out from the action of the pebble breaking the surface of the reflection pond.

The metaphor is that pebble, when it drops in, is the individual's action. And when that person at any level of the company takes an action, It radiates out. The first circle of leadership, if you will, is leading yourself. Now, this is a very important thing to understand, and this is the first chapter of the book, is everybody is a leader.

How many people follow you is a different discussion. How many people will follow you directly correlates with how you lead yourself. If you take that approach and appreciate and start to inoculate everyone with the understanding of welcome to our organization. You're a leader. You may not have a huge leadership title right now, but we view you as a leader.

And this is what we expect out of everybody in leadership. Level two of the ring that expands out is team leading. A team is nothing more than a reflection of its leader, when that radiates out to the third ring is culture. Culture of an organization is nothing more than the correlation of all the different consistent actions of a team.

So it goes leading yourself, leading teams, leading culture, and the initial action and all the little miniature actions that happen after that. Are all about taking leadership and making an impact. So is that leader who's looking to let go? The first thing I would argue is Put on your coaching hat. Start from day one, thinking yourself, not just as a leader, but as a coach people to expect to tell them what you expect and get them to stand up and say, Hey, you are a leader.

I look at you as a leader, and I am looking for answers of this. Put them in positions and ask them. What do we do? How would you do this? Tell me what you would do if you're in my position. Get them to start to realize they're not just a little cog in a machine. You're something that can make an actual difference in the organization.

[00:07:39] Mahan Tavakoli: I love the way you put it, Alden, in that those rings start first and foremost with us, the leader, him or herself, and then that impacts the team and that's what sets the culture of the organization. Now, one of the things that I find is becoming even more important and you address in the book is the necessity for a certain level of resilience.

And I love the story that you share including your failed attempt at the pool competency test in Navy SEALs 

[00:08:20] Alden Mills: So let me set the stage on that particular story.

Full competency. If you were to go through SEAL training, there are three major phases of SEAL training. They're very creatively called first phase, second phase, third phase. They cover, roughly 30 weeks of training. In the first phase of training, the major obstacle is how weak. There's lots of mini obstacles that people have to get past and some don't.

But how weak is the one in first phase, which is a 5. 5 day period of time. They give you like three hours of sleep. It's a big weed out in second phase, which is dive phase. They have the pool competency week, and it ends with a pool competency test. That's about a 20 to 25 minute period of time where you're underwater with a particular kind of dive rig with a series of instructors.

Assaulting you from all different sides, testing your resilience and your ability to stay calm under intense challenges. And by the way, you're losing a lot of air at the same time, so staying calm while you feel like you're about to pass out is a very challenging. Full competency was the one thing out of the three phases.

I go, I got this. I was that 12 year old kid who the moment I turned 12, all I would ask for is I want to go to dive school. I want to go and get my scuba diving certification. I would show up and sit in front of the TV with my mask and my snorkel on and my flippers watching flipper, the old dolphin show.

And who didn't want to be Rick and Sandy down in the keys or watching sea quest or Johnny quest, I love the idea. And so I had been diving for 10 years before I showed up at SEAL training. And I'm thinking, I got this one in the bag. No problem. I'm the class leader. So as the class leader, you start to test first, all the other classmates, their backs are turned.

You're sitting on the ground facing a wall, and you can only hear one person get in the water at a time. And they're like, Mr. Bell is getting the water. You get on a water boat, and they're yelling at you till you get underwater and they're not yelling at you. They're just attacking you. And the rule of pool competency is if you get a tap on your head three times, you're immediately to surface.

That means it's over. Now, remind you, it's supposed to go for 20 to 25 minutes. I get in the water. You go down. Basically, you have your fins on, but they don't last very long. You swim down to the nine foot section, and they tell you to start crawling around in the nine foot section with Big twin scuba tanks on your back and a big regulator system.

And they immediately rip off your mask and they flip you around. And I'm going through the procedures to get out of my equipment. Cause they gave me a problem in the back and within 90 seconds, I got a tap on the head like that. Come to the surface. What's up? Get out. Sit over there by the pool. Now I'm the very first one in I'm senior officer.

And you can hear the chatter. Oh my God. Mills have been scuba diving for 10 years. He's already done that afternoon. They give me another shot. Get back in the water. I make it about three minutes. Tap on the head. You fail. Get out against the water and go report to Instructor Aloha tomorrow morning, 0700.

What, Instructor Aloha? What? You have one more shot and only have the weekend to deal with this. Because if I fail on Monday, I'm out. It's over. My wholesale career thing is done. And that weekend. You meet a character who is from the North Shore of Oahu, surfed with Eddie Aiku, big wave surfer, and he had a big straw hat.

He's a Navy SEAL. He's an instructor, but he's a different kind of Navy SEAL. And he would be saying, Oh, my little tadpoles, you ain't gonna get your frog legs if you don't pass this next little test. I'm gonna introduce you to the big kahuna in the sky. Now, when a Navy SEAL tells you he's gonna introduce you to God, that's not a great way to start a training session, at all. And here was my problem, I had created a habit, I didn't even know I had it. And the civilian world The very first thing you do, it became instinct as you drop your weight belt, drop your weight belt, get to the surface. Surface is where it's friendly. In SEAL Team, it's the complete opposite.

Don't touch that weight belt. Stay at the bottom. It's safe down there. Figure out your problem underwater, but don't go to the surface. You compromise everybody. What was I doing? I hit my weight belt and then I would work on everything and get out of there. And so he had to do a reprogramming for me and several other people.

Most of those guys had also been private scuba divers. And so we all had this habit that we didn't even appreciate. And he would go through this process. In the beginning, it was pretty simple. He'd hide a mask, a fin, and a snorkel, and he'd give a number to him. One, two, three, And he put him out in this protected parking lot.

No civilian could see what was going on. It was all walled off, but it was a parking lot area. And he put him in plain sight and he'd have a line. It was just a parking line. And he'd be like, this is our start and our finish line. And he'd have us hold our breath for a minute. And then he'd call out a sequence two, one, three, go.

So you have to remember that. Two was the mask, three was the snorkel and one was the fin. And then you had to go get those three after you've held your breath and get back. You could get through that because it would only take you about a minute and 20 seconds, but then when you started adding four things and then five things, and now you're active and moving around and thinking about five different things in a sequence, you run out of air.

And now we're collapsing and we're scuffing the chins and falling down. And we're passing out because you're at two minutes to 10 trying to remember everything. And he's adding more and more pressure. So after that day, we're like, Oh, that was miserable. The next day he put us on the ground, put our equipment on and he's now I'm going to call out the five things.

And these are what the five things are. And he walked us back through the sequence. I share that particular story because it was about going through and learning how to re change the behavior that built a habit. Now, it's very important to understand this because when we talked earlier about ownership, a lot of people have the habit already of I'm not a leader.

That's not for me. I'm not going to do that. I can't do that. I'm not the leader. They're the leader. That is a form of creating a habit in your mindset. And when you think about that mindset is just self improvement. I'm like no. This is leadership. This is the essence of teaching people how to learn and lead the things that they can control.

There's very few things that we can control. If you think about it, we can control our thoughts. Our focus and our beliefs, and they all interoperate like a little trinity. And when we learn to lead ourselves on what thoughts, where we put our focus, what beliefs we decide to embrace and what beliefs we decide to let go all within our capabilities, now we've got an opportunity.

To truly activate our potential. 

[00:16:50] Mahan Tavakoli: I love that example and those lessons all done for so many different reasons. First of all, it made me think about the fact that when the environment changes, it requires a different approach and therefore different behaviors. The approach, the behaviors, the process you went through as a scuba diver were drastically different than what you needed to go through as a Navy SEAL because the environment was different.

And that's the same thing many of us face. Many leaders who have had experience for years or decades were used to operating in a different environment. And as the environment has changed, now they need to unlearn some of the past habits and have the mindset to learn new habits that fit this environment and these requirements.

[00:17:50] Alden Mills: It's exactly correct. And Oh, by the way, it's going to keep changing. Today we have generator of AI. What's next? I have no idea, but there will be something after that. And as long as you start to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable, being on that edge on the horizon, and I talk about your personal horizon, I use a horizon as a metaphor for our ability of learning.

If you think about horizons for just a moment, if I'm a six foot tall person. And I am able to stand on water. It's a dead calm day and I'm looking directly out to sea. I ask audiences all around the world, how far can I see if I'm six feet tall, dead calm day, looking out to sea. People will yell a hundred kilometers, 50 miles.

Oh no. I know what it is. It's infinity. Literally, I've had infinity, but the point is, you can only see 2. 9 miles. The key piece is you're six feet tall, right? If you're 12 feet tall, you can see further. But on average, if you're six feet tall, you can see 2. 9 miles. It's actually not that far. And when you actually get to that point at 2.

9 miles, when you're at three miles, assuming you've got a very low landscape, you lose sight of land. And when you lose sight of land, that's the edge of your horizon. Now, what we like to do as humans. Is stay in the comfort zone of familiarity. We're like, no, this is where I operate. This is what I know.

I've been in COVID. I'm ready to go back to where I was because we're thinking around rear view mirror, our comfort zone is our rear view mirror. It likes what we've already known. Here's the rub folks, that edge of the horizon and we beyond it, by the way, is where we need to get to and get comfortable living because that's where success lives.

And to get there means we have to do a leadership shift. We have to go from our known area of comfort zone of familiarity, which by the way, is mediocrity. That's what happens there. That's where the average lives. And we have to cross the bridge, cross the horizon into the unknown. Now, what's the challenge there?

The challenge is that the moment we start thinking of the new thing. Let's pick on generative AI. That's the new buzzword, where does my mind go? Oh, it's going to take over the world. It's going to ruin everything. And we're going to be slaves to generative AI and all this negative, have you seen Terminator? Look, what's going to happen. Skynet's going to come alive and our vacuum cleaners are going to eat us in the middle of the night. That's the negative. That's called negativity bias. It's a normal survival mechanism.

It's a couple million years old. We all have negativity bias. Get past the negativity bias because if we are alerted to it and know about it, we go, oh, that's just a normal thing to keep them back in the comfort zone. Oh, that's good. I'm embracing that. I'm excited about that because that means I'm on the cusp of learning something new.

I have an opportunity to get better at something. I'm going to learn now that I'm facing my negativity bias. We get to that and now we're in the opportunity for finding new opportunities and that crossing between the known and the unknown. Is what I call one of your key leadership decisions and the decision I literally make a picture out of this in the book is like the wheel of fortune.

You know the wheel of fortune, it's got bankruptcy, a million dollars, 50 bucks, all these different slivers, and spinning and you spin it. We have our own wheel of fortune, but it's a leadership decision in the main leadership decision that we all face. especially if we're looking to get people to take ownership, is deciding first as the individual, can I or can't I?

I can or I can't. That's what leading is about. Everything in my book is about helping you as a leader and then helping your teams as a leader and building a culture of I can, we can. Let's go. 

 To that point Alden you talk beautifully about the willingness to go from the known to the unknown, to go beyond that 2.

[00:22:58] Mahan Tavakoli: 9 mile edge to that unknown. There is a lot of fear. Associated with that. And then there is also the risk of failure that's associated with that. So one of the reasons we want to hold on to the comfort zone and the known and see the land is because of that fear and also the possibility of failure. How do you address that?

[00:23:26] Alden Mills: 100%. I'm so glad you brought that up. In the book, I have a picture of the horizon, the metaphorical horizon. I call it a mindset horizon. And first you have to outline like, Hey, this is what it is. There's the known, there's the unknown. If I were to layer on top of it, which I do in a later chapter, there are three basic times where people give up.

See it in SEAL Team. Saw it as an entrepreneur. See it when I coached by other CEOs, the first time people give up, you might not think of it as giving up is starting. They won't even start, they'll say, no, I'm not even going that far. Why even go out and leave the Harbor safe right here. Don't even need to go.

So many people don't even start. The last time we were together. We talked about this character called instructor half, but that he convinced half the class to quit before they even started seal training, they didn't even try. It was the first chapter in unstoppable teams.

And we talked about that story, that's starting. So many people are like, are you kidding? I'm terrible at computers. Why would I even bother learning generative AI? I want to stay away from it. We're quitting before we even started. Then the next one is when we failed once or twice, we've just gotten past that horizon, or maybe we're just getting to the rise and we're like, Oh, the waves are too hard, or is the aground, this sucks and forget about it.

And after a couple of times they say to themselves, see. I knew it was a bad idea, and they support the judgment of not being able to make it. The third time, they've gone past that horizon, but they haven't gotten to their destination. It's dark, it's cold, and they're just exhausted, and they get tired, and they're, you know what, I gotta call it.

And how many times have you heard of people who have given up when literally success was right around the corner? And I call that Affectionately, it's darkest before dawn, which, by the way, is typically true. It's also coldest before dawn. And a lot of times leadership just is reminding, hey, keep going.

We're making it. Take a look at this progress. So you ask a very important question about, so how do we deal with the fear? There's two basic fears. There's the fear of staying put. And there's the fear of moving forward. From a leadership perspective, those are our two basic fears. Until the fear of staying put is greater than the fear of moving forward, we stay put.

Why would I ever leave this beautiful harbor of comfort zone and they wouldn't call it mediocrity, they'd be like, I know this place perfectly, I can navigate with my eyes closed. Because if we do that and everybody else goes out to sea and has new trade routes and learns new things, we're out of business over time, but it really takes your own personal leadership to start to realize, Hey, three years from now, if I'm not embracing generative AI and everybody else's they're going to be able to do a lot more business than I can do.

If you've gotten past the idea that they're not going to activate all our vacuum cleaners and eat us alive in the middle of the night, then we start to realize, wait, there's some actual good things that can happen out of this. And is it worth it for me to stay here? And three years later, I may just be looking at the greatest fear of going out of business now.

So you have to allow yourself to do, and there's an entire chapter dedicated to envisioning of dealing with your current fear versus the hypothetical fear of the future fear that's out across the horizon. We're great at building negative hypotheticals. A negative hypothetical is nothing more than a fear based series of assumptions.

Challenge those and know the facts before you really decide to allow a fear to become a belief. Because once that belief gets set in motion, the belief starts the process of a behavior and the behavior starts to form a habit. 

[00:28:18] Mahan Tavakoli: Love the way you put it, Alden. And I was thinking about this where, if there isn't clarity With respect to the fear of staying the same and not changing, then their fear of change or the potential unknown will always be greater.

So there has to be clarity on that fear or the consequences of not changing, staying the same, that by itself, makes it more likely to then initiate action, whether it is for ourselves to have the kind of belief that we can and need to change or our teams or our organizations as well. 

[00:29:01] Alden Mills: And I would say, we really started this conversation around how do we get leaders to get other people to take ownership, which is one of the great leadership challenges.

And that process, everything that I am sharing. Dealing with habits, dealing with the fears, dealing with the horizon is all transferable to the individuals out there. And that's why I talk about an ensemble mindset as a leadership book. 

[00:29:30] Mahan Tavakoli: One other point that you mentioned Alden is the, Need for us to have the belief and stick to it.

You never know when it's going to succeed. And I agree with that vast majority of successes. It might've taken half a dozen times, hundreds of times. I know you went into business and would love to touch on the perfect pushup. A decade of hard work to make that work. But one of the questions that I often get asked, and I think it's a relevant question is.

When is sticking to it. The wrong thing to do, so yes, there are examples of people that succeeded the hundredth time, the thousandth time, but there are also countless people that we don't use as examples who miserably failed and went bankrupt because they never gave up on something they should have given up.

So how do you balance? That belief that by sticking to it, I'm going to be able to make it work or the team and organization will be able to make it work versus, this is not worth sticking to it. We need to give up and win by giving up.

[00:30:40] Alden Mills: That's a big question, isn't it?

This is my favorite all time product, the body rep. I raised a million and a half dollars and then learned 1, 475, 000 worth of ways. Not to launch this product. . Four years. Four years. Hey, I was down to my last $25,000. Those right there. That's perfect. Pushup. The other one right there. I had that in my hip pocket since 1995.

Okay, this is 2000. Two to 2006. Did I go too long? 100%. I was sticking with it. No one's going to tell me otherwise. Did a bunch of people go, Hey, you just burned through a million dollars. You really think another million is all it's going to take?

You don't have another million. And did you think it would just be a hundred thousand more? No, I didn't read the tea leaves very well on that. And. With the last 25, 000 and, we talked a lot about this on the last time with unstoppable teams and how did I keep a team together of five people for 90 days with nothing more than paying for their healthcare before we could launch the perfect pushup.

And everyone said it couldn't do it. We were lucky in some ways, but we stuck with it and we got it done. I would argue that a lot of that has to do with experience sharing. And there's no perfect answer. But as you go through this, I really encourage you to find different people. And I call these different people get set.

Set is S E T. And what I mean by that is you need different kinds of swim buddies. Now a swim buddy and SEAL team is the smallest team. There's two people. If you're the CEO and you're entering into a new area, generative AI, how do we make it work for me? Don't know if it's going to work. You find strategic emergency and tactical Advisors, a strategic advisor could say, Hey, I know all about technology in your industry.

And they've seen the horizon. They've been past the horizon, they've had more experience than you in that area. You look for the strategic, the emergency advisor is someone that'd be like, I know in the middle of the night, I can call this person up and be like, Hey, how do I deal with this?

They're on short notice. And then there are industry specific. Advisors, they're tactical. They know all about generative AI and they know how it applies to a fintech company. Maybe you're in fintech or maybe you're a consultant working in that area and you're a service in that area. Think of it like get set.

Am I set to go across the horizon? Do I have these different lifelines that I can call when I'm not sure? Is this the time to do the pivot, or in the nautical term, the tack. The idea is about living to fight the next day. It's not about going down with a ship. It doesn't help anybody when we do that. I almost went down with a ship, and that was the first time I had looked at bankruptcy.

Now, a lot of these lessons learned are deep reflections after staving off three different types of bankruptcy. While you go out and create You know, that was the fastest growing consumer products company in the country, but it didn't come without amazing challenges and a lot of lessons learned, one of which was figuring out when to make that pivot.

[00:34:47] Mahan Tavakoli: What a beautiful nuanced answer, Alden. This is why I really appreciate you in that it is not a simple answer and sometimes I find some of the executives and CEOs, one of the reasons they are skeptical about some of the advice is that people present Binary black, white answers, clear cut.

You should always do this or always do that. It is dependent on the circumstances and there are ways you can find the kind of advisors, resources that help you in your situation, make the right judgment. That said. A lot of times teams and organizations, the fear keeps them from initiating.

They don't even start it. So there are way more that don't start or give up too soon than those that don't. Stick to it way too long, but it is a nuanced approach and you need to find the right fit for yourself, it requires getting those advisors, those people you trust around you to be able to support you in that decision making process.

[00:36:00] Alden Mills: It does. And it's correlated with how comfortable you are with letting go. If you're not comfortable with letting go, and you allow your ego to get really involved in leadership you're going to be less likely to listen to people who have already navigated those seas in front of you.

Maybe not in your industry. But they've been there. They've got the scars. They've got the stories, the experience shares, and it's very important for you to understand marshall Goldsmith wrote the book. What got you here won't get you there. Using the metaphor of the horizon.

You're going to want to learn from other sea captains. That have gone there before. And if you are not putting yourself in a position, which by the way, I wasn't, who knows better than me on how to launch a world's first rotating pushup handle. This thing right here, I invented it. Who would know better than me?

Why would I take any advice? I was the problem. I want to say that again. I was the problem and it was me my ego in part that got some of my investors really frustrated. What are you doing? Hey, you burned through the halfway mark. Maybe we ought to put that on hold and try product number two because you've got enough dry powder to do it.

Don't push yourself out to the very end here. No, I know what I'm doing. I feel like I'm getting the feedback. It's going to work. Blah, blah, blah. I wasn't reading the tea leaves well enough that if I were doing again today, I do some drastically different things. But of course, that's like rear view mirror.

It's looking back on what had been done, but that's a great lesson learned when I'm coaching others who are deciding I don't like the way that person talks to me, so I'm not going to listen to them. Or listen to her. I'm like whoa. Let's pull those two pieces apart.

That's an ego getting bruised. That person has some really interesting points of view. We need to really take that under account. How many people make that kind of judgment, one of our big challenges is that we're all judgment making machines and part of coaching. is getting people to share that judgment in a safe place.

 You can share with the coach. I'm not going to talk to anybody about it. But the problem is if we don't share a judgment, then what are we going to do? We're going to spend all this time looking for ways to reinforce the judgment to go. Yeah. I'm right, they don't know what they're talking about.

That's a dumb idea. Nobody knows, I don't need to go into generative AI because we're great at what we do. That is a recipe for putting your ship on the rocks. And you gotta be really careful of that. 

[00:38:56] Mahan Tavakoli: You gave a beautiful example of your own experience in doing the perfect pushup Alden 

a lot of times when I'm talking to people, they appreciate the experiences that authors have shared those that have been in the military, in the Navy SEALs, you also have great business background and experience. What do you find from the structured military approach, the Navy SEALs approach to teamwork, collaboration, and mindset applies and applied to your business ventures, including the perfect pushup and what elements do you find, or did you find that were more specific?

To the seals experience itself. 

[00:39:47] Alden Mills: The first thing that's really important for everybody to understand seals and civilians are not the same thing.

It is much harder to lead as a civilian than it is as a seal. I'm going to be clear about, I'll say that again. It is easier to lead in SEAL team than it is in civilian team. Why is that? First, we have our own law. It's called the Uniform Code of Military Justice. As an officer, I give an order. I can court martial you if you don't follow my order,

in SEAL training, we have a place called X Division. You know what X Division is? It's where anybody goes, who's either quit or instructors subjectively goes, I don't like your attitude. I don't think you're a team player. And when you're an X division, you go by as a class, they have to stop what they're doing, turn their backs.

They're not even allowed to look at you. We can't have an X division in civilian team world. We can't have an X division in her mind. I talked about that in the book, but the most important thing. That I want to drive everybody to that are corollaries that work on both sides and why SEAL Team is so effective.

Number one is that we trust each other with unbelievable amounts of what I would say faith. Now when I say faith, I'm not talking about the second definition in the dictionary. The second definition is about religious doctrine. believing in something. The first definition of faith is having 100 percent confidence in someone or something other than yourself.

We go through so much training, even when we're not downrange, to make sure that we have that 100 percent confidence in each other. That is a very important element because if you don't have a high level of trust, you cannot springboard into the phases of high performing team that you need to be. No trust, no team.

Stop. As a CEO, as an executive, don't go any further. You gotta learn to build the trust. We could spend the rest of the time going through how to build trust. But the other key component. And the old days and we still have some of it in the military about command and control. One of the major shifts that happened in part with Stanley McChrystal General McChrystal back in 2006 time period is that we shifted.

How we did command and control and moved it from the hub and the spoke routine down to the mission control. And what I mean by that is who was closest to the mission had the most say of what needed to get done on the mission. And as we develop more and more fast paced environments in which to grow.

that kind of ownership of owning the mission command of, okay, we've got to build up a team on generative AI. I'm going to pick, or you guys come in together, let's swarm this and get after it. It is much more like a series of starlings coming together, flowing, and then swarming in and forming of.

Generative AI team, and then the generative AI team goes, now we need to form it in the form of a service department. And then we need to form in the form of creating product development and that kind of movement pattern. Requires one an extraordinary high level of trust because I have faith in everybody.

No one is trying to get credit taken away. It becomes as ego less as possible, and we have high levels of ownership. We get to that. That's a very powerful transferable component from SEAL team to civilian team.

[00:44:08] Mahan Tavakoli: That is an outstanding point. And I love General McChrystal's book, Team of Teams. In many respects, the Navy SEALs have done a beautiful job with that change in the full command and control structure that can be transferred.

To organizational leadership as well. You make a great point, Alden, there are a lot of aspects of military service, including in SEALs that don't easily transfer to the civilian world where you're dealing with people who can quit any day. They come for a year or two transition out the structures and organizations are very different.

The commitment is different. That's it. There are two points you made. I wanted to underline one is that trust is critical to teams of all kinds and their success. Secondarily, what I have seen that this seals in my view do much better than the vast majority of companies and organizations is exactly the point you made about the autonomy That the teams have with clarity of the mission, while they come together, they have clarity, they have boundaries set within that clarity.

Then the people closest to the field decide the tactical elements and what they need to do. So there is a balance that can be learned from the SEAL experience for teams and organizations as well. 

[00:45:43] Alden Mills: You brought up actually a good point. I didn't really touch on that much about the mission command piece of boundaries.

The boundaries are set through something called commander's intent. And commander's intent is actually a pretty simple concept that is absolutely transferable to the civilian team. Let me give you an example. Okay, you're going to go get bad guy in downtown Ramadi. Bring bad guy home alive. Do not kill or injure civilians.

If you get bad guy, but you've killed civilians, the mission is a failure. And not only that, you may be in trouble, big trouble, now that's a very loose commander's intent, but it gives you some very high levels of do this, don't do that, and it's giving you these boundaries. Now, I didn't tell you how to go get bad guy.

I might tell you have some certain assets at your disposal that you can use to get bad guy, but I gave you some very clear boundaries of where success is and where it isn't. And the idea of commander's intent is a very important thing that I coach a lot of executives on because they'll say I told them what they should do.

Actually people don't really want to be told what to do. If you tell them what to do, they don't have ownership. They just feel like, Oh, I'm just being told what to do. I'll wait for the next thing you told what to do. We knew the mission was go get bad guy. They didn't tell us how to get back. That's where the ownership comes into place.

Now we all come together, like how are we going to get bad guy and how are we going to make sure that we minimize any other harm? The same thing applies in the civilian world. Hey, how do we apply generative AI to our business? And by the way, I want to apply it while making sure. Our main business line is up and running and becomes even better because remember we have this metric that we're trying to consistently improve on.

And you pick your metric, whether it's in manufacturing or in, service industries, but now that's a commander's intent. How do we apply generative AI and how can we use it to help improve the metric that we're after? Team, activate. Let's figure this out.

Now we got a commander's intent and now we're building owners. 

[00:48:27] Mahan Tavakoli: I love that example. So with generative AI, for example, the team would be given the commander's intent using your language of testing generative AI in customer facing roles or with content creation or accessing some of the data in the organization with the limitation that we don't want the Data to be uploaded to other party providers, or responsible uses of data.

So there are things you can set, but then you don't tell them, I want you therefore to go use chat GPT 4. 5 versus Claude or whatever else the team figures out how to achieve the outcome. With the commander's intent. So how can the audience find out more about your book, Unstoppable Mindset, follow your work and connect with you, Alden. 

[00:49:28] Alden Mills: Go to alden mills. com. You can also type in unstoppablemindset. com, but everything goes to alden mills. com. And I am so proud of this book and everything that it encapsulates from what I have learned over the last 40 years of leading. 

[00:49:45] Mahan Tavakoli: It is a book that can make a difference to the individual leaders. And going back to your beautiful analogy at the beginning of That pond and the pebble in the pond is that individual leader impacting their mindset will therefore be able to impact their team and their organization as well. Thank you so much, Alden Mills. 

[00:50:12] Alden Mills: And keep doing the great work. Enjoy being on the show.