Transcript of 658: Dave Berke - From Top Gun to Extreme Ownership: Managing Ego, Building Humility, Emotional Detachment, Agile Planning, and Leading Teams Through Chaos

This episode is brought to you by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you want to learn more about the CEO, Bert Bain, and Chief Revenue Officer, Sam Kaufman, check out episode 424. We had a fantastic conversation talking about my partnership with the great people at Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal. Com/learningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal. Com/learningleader. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader. Com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader. Com. Now on to tonight's Featured Leader. So grateful for his service. It's American hero Dave Burke, a retired Marine F-16, F-18, F-22, and F-35 fighter pilot. Also a Top Gun Instructor, and currently Chief Development Officer at Echelon Front, also author of multiple books, including The Need to Lead: A Top Gun Instructor's Lessons on How Leadership solves Every Challenge.

During our conversation, we discuss the most important attribute in a leader, and it will probably surprise you. Then Dave talks about how to be better prepared to react when things do not go according to plan because they almost never do. Then he shares lessons for how they built trust in the military and how we can do it in our professional and personal lives. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Dave Burke. I want to go to a moment, actually, a moment in your life, and that is, it's July 2001, and you get a panicked radio call from your wingman, and that call is Showtime 11, break right. What happened next?

Yeah, I can remember that call. Showtime 11 is the way he said it. It's just burned into my head. Oh, my bad. Sorry. No, no, no. That's the nuanced pilot speak. The point of that is the way you described it is I can take myself back to that moment. I can even draw on a map where it was, where I was heading, all that thing. I'm in the last flight at Top Gun as a student. The graduation exercise It's a big deal. I was the flight lead for my classes, graduation exercise. That call where my wingman's yelling me to turn is basically the way of saying, there's a guy that stuck in behind us into our formation, which is a huge bummer. It's a massive disruption, but it's something you can't really ignore. That call, I would say, completely changed the entire flow and outcome of that entire mission.

What happened?

There's this airplane called an F-5. It's a little jet. It's a tiny little jet. It's painted like in desert brown. Was Essentially, part of the training is they want to test if they can sneak up on you, and they're testing what's called your visual look out. Are you just staring down at your radar or are you looking up and out? As you can imagine, the fact that I didn't see him gives you the answer of what I was doing. My wingman was doing a good job and saw him, and he's over my right shoulder, low, and I look, and I don't actually see him at first, but I basically turn into that direction hoping to see him. My plane just essentially has to fall out of the sky looking for this guy. Instead of being out in front of the formation, I'm now at the very back of the formation because everybody else keeps going to the target and ended up in this what's called a prolonged engagement where I'm just spinning around with this guy because I can't kill him because he's a really good pilot.

What did you learn from that experience?

It's interesting because in one sense, there was this very important tactical lesson about looking out and finding the threats. And those are all... Tupkin does a great job of teaching good tactical things. The thing I took away from that lesson was I had this image in my mind of how that day was going to go, this big exercise that we'd been planning for a couple of days. And it happened nothing like I had planned. We executed totally different from my plan, but the outcome was still really good. We fought our way into the target. We got rid of the bad guys. We had these simulated targets where it went really well, except it was nothing like I thought it was going to be. The ultimate lesson for me is what you're planning for is the success of the outcome as of achieving the mission, not how you're going to go about doing that, because things get in the way, this got in the way. One of the things I struggled with this first was the mission was a success, but I was frustrated because I didn't do the things I thought I was supposed to be doing.

I realized that's just not how life works. That was an important lesson for me, which is achieving the outcome is less about how you do it and more about what happens in the end. And the team won, and they were successful. I just wasn't out in front leading them when we did it.

How has this impacted you now? Let's go outside of the military, where essentially you could use the Mike Tyson quote, Everybody's got a plan. I got to get punched in the face or from the military. You still need to have the brief, you still need to have the plan, you still need to have objectives. And then in the debrief, you go through and say, Oh, my God. Basically, nothing in the pre-op brief happened. Fortunately, maybe we did achieve the mission, but it didn't go any way according to plan. What have you taken from those life experiences where in your case, they've been life and death experiences, right? At war, in the military, crazy stuff. What have you taken from that into your now everyday life?

I've learned that lesson repeatedly. I'd love to tell you that on that day, okay, I had it all figured out moving forward. I learned the lesson and life moved on. I relearned that lesson many times. I think the ultimate takeaway from that and where I really try to apply that in my own head in all facets of my life is you got to be really, really fluid and loose with your plans. What you really want to be deliberate in making sure you and the team, whoever that team is, your team at work, a sports team, your family, whatever it might be, is you want to get aligned on the outcome you're trying to achieve. But how you get there, man, you have got to be flexible with how you get there. In fact, the best thing you can do is if you align on an outcome, you want to We want to achieve this mission. In combat, there's an objective you want to reach. In flying, there's a place you want to get to, whatever it might be. If you get aligned on the outcome, and think about it with your families, I want to raise my kids to be productive, constructive members and be successful in their own lives, whatever that outcome is, if you can align on that, the best thing you can do is give your people, your team, the people around you, the things they need to do it the way that they want to to achieve that success.

I grew up, I was a control freak. We talked about you and I even offline. I'm a planner. I'm an OCD guy. I like steps in the process. And in life, it's just not how life works, man. It's just not how it works, especially with things like your kids and your family. I learned if you can align on the mission and align on the outcome, and you are very open-minded. There's a lot of different ways to get there. You're far more likely to be successful. I'm like, Ryan, this is how we're doing it. Step one, step two, step three, you better follow the steps. That actually makes it much less likely to achieve that outcome and get to that destination. That didn't come naturally to me. Like I said, I didn't learn it all on that day and move forward. I'm still learning that, but it's really a requirement of being open-minded to letting other people do what they need to do to get to the same end state that we're trying to achieve.

This may not make sense, but I want to surface thesis and maybe have you respond to it. So I've thought a lot about goal setting, both having results-based goals and process-based goals. Process being like, this is what we're going to do each day. And if we do that every day, then the result should take care of itself. So then you focus more on the process. As you just mentioned, though, you're talking about, hey, the result is to get this or the objective is this. However we get the objective, whatever. Well, if stuff is going to happen when we go to war, which you literally have done. So how do you view that in the realm of not at war, like in business, trying to achieve a revenue target or whatever, or in your life of trying to achieve some stretch goal of thinking about the process as well as thinking about the result?

Listen, I do not want to diminish the value of the process. I think it's really important. In fact, maybe the most important thing in the idea of the process Process being critical to the outcome isn't necessarily what the process ends up being, your plan versus my plan, your steps versus my steps. But the recognition that if, let's say you're working for me and we both agree on the outcome and we're talking about the process, The thing I probably need to convey to you the most isn't what that process should be, is that you need to be thinking about what it is yourself and how each step in that process. Let's see, you're going to be, All right, Dave, here's my plan. Step one, this, step two, this, step three, this. The conversation should be less about whether I agree or disagree or whether I think it's right or wrong, more about, All right, Ryan, when you talk about step one, what are you thinking here? How does this lead to step two? How does this help you contribute to the end goal? If you could walk me through the logic behind it, the intent behind it, and it may be different, but it makes sense.

It's best for me to let you build your own plan. What I don't want to have is like, I don't know, man, we'll just figure it out, or you're trying to follow someone else's process. But that doesn't mean the process is not important. I think the process is really important. It just has to be organic in its development that you understand how those steps help you achieve the outcome. If you can do that, then you are creating that, you're leading it, you own that, which means you're more likely to work through the automatic challenges you're going to deal with. Then if I'm like, Hey, I know how to do this. Here's the steps, here's the template. Follow my process. When you run into a problem, which we all will, unless you happen to have any listeners that magically have created plans that work perfectly, which I've never experienced. When you run into those It sounds if you've been creating the process, you are more likely to maneuver around the challenges to be successful. So the process is very important, but I think how you create it is really the most important element to me.

Yeah, this is why I'm a little bit biased towards team sports and military. When I was building out sales teams in corporate America, both as a manager, director, VP of sales, I know you're not supposed to have bias, but man, when I saw someone come in that they'd been in the Marine Corps for a while or they played played college sports, I was, man. I couldn't help, but I was a little bit because I know you have plans, you have objectives, you prepare like crazy, you practice, and then you go and actually do the thing, the mission, the game, whatever. And it always gets turned upside down. And I want people who in that moment go, Let's go. Let's go. I'm good. I'm good. Here we go. Let's keep going. This is just part of the plan. That's what you want. I feel like that's probably what Echelon Front has 50 of those people, because that's what you guys are built to do.

I think a great measurement of your planning process, I think you hit that perfectly, the process of planning, a great measurement is how comfortable and flexible you are when it doesn't go the way you want. Because you hit the nail on the head. There's all sorts of clichés like, no plan, survive first contact, just like you alluded to, the thing with Mike Tyson. Your plan isn't going to work. But a sign of a really good plan isn't how well you follow the plan, it's how comfortable you are reacting when the plan isn't working because some other factor or force or unforeseen scenario or some challenge revealed itself, which it will, by the way. We have this saying, too, in the military, the enemy gets a vote. You can plan all what you want. They can do whatever they want to screw up that plan. If you have a team that welcomes the deviations, that welcomes the flexibility, that is excited to see a chance to maneuver around the plan, that means it's a good plan. The team that has this deliberate plan that the minute it gets thrown off, can't respond, that's actually a bad plan.

And so part of that process is, Hey, man, this isn't going to work. And if they welcome that chaos, that fluidity, that means your team has planned well.

Yeah. You just bring me back to my college days, Dave. So I remember vividly a game. I throw an interception on a 15-yard out. I actually thought I threw it on time, threw a good ball. I get to the sideline, my quarterback coach and offensive coordinator looks at me and he goes, He's on scholarship, too. And it's like, One more, two. The enemy gets a vote, right? That guy gets a vote, yeah. Sometimes it make a play, man. You got to respond. You got to react. So this is really good. Hey, I want to get to the inside of the need to lead your most recent book. Really well done. By the way, I love the fact that your team I don't know if you even know this, your team sent me a copy of the book as a Microsoft Word document that rarely happens. I love that. I felt like, oh, I'm reading like a day's personal journal. It felt like that. Anyway, the beginning of it, you dedicate the book, and this may get a little more a series here. You dedicate the book to a couple of people, and I enjoy learning about really important people in your life.

And that is Chris, who you said made the ultimate sacrifice. You taught me what it means to be brave and to Kat, who endured the unimaginable, you taught me what it means to be strong. I hope you are both proud. Can you tell me more about Chris and Kat?

Yeah. So Chris is Corporal Chris Leon. Chris was on my team So just backing up, I left the cockpit for a year. I was a forward air controller and led an Anglico team, Air-Naval Gunfire liaison company. I was a ground combat leader whose mission for that team was to use airplanes, to call on air strikes and use air support. So I was On the ground, I had a 13-man team, and Chris was a member of that team, of this Anglico team I was leading. And he was a radio operator on June 20th, 2006. Chris was killed in Iraq. He was killed by an enemy sniper. He was the first Anglico Marine killed in Iraq, happened to be my Marine, and obviously the first time I had lost anybody in my combat experience. That represented the lowest point of my certainly professional life as a Marine, the hardest day of my life in my career, and the most challenging leadership environment I'd ever been a part of was losing a Marine in combat. But Chris's loss was a selfless act of not just selfless, but also of bravery, where he put himself in a position to be exposed.

Unfortunately, he gave his life in doing that. And that's something that I guarantee you has been repeated countless times. It just so happens to be my personal experience with that is having a Marine being willing to put his team ahead of himself. And he made the ultimate sacrifice in doing that. I have this incredible personal obligation to keep his memory alive. My son is named after Chris. My son is Matthew Leon Burke, took Chris's last name and gave that to my son because I wanted his legacy to continue. Obviously, this is a hard thing to talk about, and you can imagine that. But one of the amazingly wonderful things that came out of that awful tragedy was Chris's mom, Kat, and I are very close. She is aunt Kat to our family. She is a member of this family. She is someone who I've maintained a closeness with to this day and always will as a result of her losing her only son to war. I always say that I really deep down wish I didn't know Kat because that would have meant Chris came home and life just went on. But that's not what happened.

I can preserve his memory, not just for me, but also for her with my relationship with her. Chris taught me bravery because what Chris did was the ultimate act of bravery. But Kat taught me strength because she had to endure his loss and carry on her life in a way that almost seems impossible and certainly remarkable. I hold them both in the highest regard. And that dedication to me was obvious, is obviously the to Chris and what he sacrificed, but also to his mom who has endured for 20 years and as someone that I consider one of the most important people in my life as a result of what she's gone through. And it's a remarkable story.

Thank you for sharing, man. I feel like when you dedicated to them, so I would have imagined that there's a lot to it. I appreciate that.

I'm always happy to tell that story, Ryan. That means I get to keep his memory alive.

I love it. That's very cool. I'm glad you asked. Yeah, absolutely. I want to get to Top Gun. Okay. By the way, the 1986 version of Top Gun is my favorite movie of all time to this day. I love the sequel, too. But Top Gun, the type of pilot that you see in that movie, from my experience, from talking to you and talking to other pilots, whether in the Air Force or Navy, it's a cool movie, but it's not really an accurate representation of how the guys and girls who fly fighter jets actually are. Can you talk to me about the importance of the actual team team of coming together and how there aren't mavericks or lone wolves out there when it comes to flying airplanes. It's about the team. And what you learned when you became a pilot, when you went through Top Gun, when you taught at Top Gun, that it's really more about the team and the individual.

You're saying that exactly right. And I'm right there with you. The impact that the original Top Gun had in my life is, I can't overstate the impact. It is the most impactful. I watched that movie, I'm like, I want to do that. My entire life was built around the fantasy that was created by that movie on the screen when I was 14 years old. I'm there with you, and I have nothing bad to say about that movie. But to your point, in terms of what they were depicting in real life, and I actually will give credit, Ryan, the sequel did a better job of depicting more accurately the understanding of the impact of you on the team. They did that really well. If you remember that last mission was bringing that team together to go fly this incredibly difficult mission. One thing that I learned, and I even talk about it in my book a little bit, I think there's a quote that, Flying is leadership. One of the drawbacks, and pitfall might be a better way to describe it, that I had to navigate through is if you follow the path that I followed, which was a single-seat carrier-based fighter pilot, all that work in my life career goal of becoming a single-seat F-18 pilot is centered around yourself, your grades in flight school, your performance, how good you are in the jet, how well you fight it, how well you drop bombs, all these things.

And ultimately, the reward is you then get your own airplane and you go to combat and you're in that machine by yourself. A lot of it has this appearance of it being about you. And I, like most people, there's certainly ego-driven components of that. And my dream of flying fighters was at the beginning, the origins of that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to do this for myself. Something the Marine Corps does, and you've seen this in sports, you've seen this in all different organizations, is that it is not to diminish the value of the individual. In fact, we want the best individual part of that team. But ultimately, it is undeniably your contribution to the team that matters. You could take a really good single-seat fire pilot. If he's so self-centered that he thinks of himself ahead of the team, he will do more damage to the team that a slightly less capable or slightly less effective pilot that really is a team player. My guess would be, is that you've seen this, we've talked about this in sports all the time, is the best athlete is not always the best teammate.

In fact, if the best athlete is a bad teammate, he can hurt that team. If there's every team sport that's out there, it's going into combat with your team. And your job as a pilot is how you contribute to other people. It took me a long time to learn that. I'm glad that I did, but I don't want anybody to think that that somehow came naturally to me. I think the character depiction in that first movie represented the potential pitfall we fall into, which is this is about me, and it's just not. It is not. And as cliché as it sounds, it's not about you, it's about the team. Again, back to I wrote a chapter in that talking about it, just carrier landings and how it seems like you're the center of the universe by yourself in that jet, and you're just not. There's so many other things going on that is the team, that is really why you're there. That's a tough lesson that I learned. I learned it the hard way a few times, but it's really as accurate as it can be as cliché as it sounds. It's not about you, it's about the team.

I think one of the universal elements of teams, of businesses that want to have an excellent culture to go strive to make a difference in the world, to achieve their goals, et cetera, is it's got to be built on a foundation of trust. And in your case, again, you're putting your life literally in your teammates hands. You need them to do what they're supposed to do. And so there's a lot of trust involved with that. Or if you don't trust them, I can't even imagine what that would be like. What are ways that both you learned in the military, and now maybe that you do outside of the military, to help teams, to help people, a group of people, maybe even if they haven't been together for a while? But what do you do to help teams and people develop trust with each other?

You are hitting the nail on the head, and I don't think there's a more critical component to the strength of a relationship than the amount of trust trust that resides inside of it. You probably know this about our company. We are a leadership consultancy. We teach the skill of leadership, and we have a curriculum. We have a framework for that. One of the things we teach, which came out of the book Extreme Ownership that Jocko and Leif wrote, is what we call the laws of combat. The first of those four laws of good leadership is we call it cover and move, but it's about teamwork. It's just the team is more important than the individual. You got to take care of each other. But what sits underneath that is if If you want to have a good team, what you have to have is good relationships. You cannot have a good team without good relationships. What's interesting about relationships, it's a word that gets thrown around a lot. If you ask someone, Do you know what a relationship is? Most of us will say, Yeah, I know what a relationship is, and you have a sense in your mind.

We do this in a literal teaching sense. If I have, let's say, 30 people in a room, we talk about cover, move, teamwork, good relationships. If I say, What is a relationship? I'll get a lot of different answers because as you start to think about it, it's harder to describe than it is in your head. If I say, What's a relationship? You might throw out some words that make sense, but the person next you might use different words. In our sense of teaching it, we tried to codify it, not because we thought there was a right and wrong way, but you have to have some framework of what a relationship is. The way we teach a relationship is trust, respect, listening, and influence. The first one is trust for reasons. What you said is trust is the cornerstone. If you don't trust me, I could be good at so many things, right? I could be good at so many things. I could be the best communicator in the world. If there is a trust gap, there is a problem in the relationship, and there's going to be a problem with the team. What we teach, and you alluded to it very well, which is there's some mechanical sense is, as I'm interacting with you trying to strengthen this relationship, I have to think about the word trust.

Trust is not a description of our relationship. It's not an adjective. It's an action I I have to take. I have to earn your trust by what I do. It doesn't describe the relationship. It defines the actions you have to take to build the relationship, which means, in the example we used before, if You're working for me. We have a project. I go, You know what, Ryan? You've done this a few times. Why don't you take lead on building the plan to execute that? That's my way of showing you that I trust you. If I do the opposite, which is, Hey, listen, Ryan, I've done this longer than you I know the best way to do it. What I'm really saying is, I don't trust you. Trust isn't a description of a relationship. It's an action we take to strengthen it. I don't think there's anything more important the way you said it is, without trust, you are going to have problems.

It's a never-ending skill, a never-ending trait that needs to be a part of all relationships, all important relationships. And certainly, when you're trying to build a team and push and try to hit big goals, that's super important. You mentioned your teaching leadership. And again, I could go so deep on just like, I want to sit in the classroom and listen to you do what you do, man. Sometimes it's even hard to do this interview style because I start getting in the mode of just being a student with you, man. I love the way that you-I saw you writing things down. That's all I have. I can't help. All of a sudden, I'm like, wait a second. I forgot I'm doing a podcast here. I just want to listen to Dave talk the whole time. But there is so much noise out there with leadership. There's a million people doing the types of things that we do, right? Go out and teach leadership to others. What if you found once you actually get inside of a company, are some of the biggest leadership issues? When you're out in the real world, you're with actual companies, you and your team, what are some of the biggest leadership issues you see people facing right now?

When our company, Echelon Front, interacts with other companies, we're talking about every industry and every layer of leadership you could imagine. One thing that I have discovered is universally a challenge for all teams is, and again, I know this sounds how cliché this sounds, but when I see challenges inside organizations, it's almost always connected to someone's individual ego. We talked about the component of trust, whether they don't want to listen what other people have to say, whether they don't want to take responsibility for something, whether they don't think that someone else's idea should be listened to. Our egos tend to wreak havoc at each level of the organization. As we talk about building good leadership behaviors and good leadership skills, one of the things One of the things that we've learned we have to really unpack is the recognition that our egos from birth, our natural tendency for what our ego is saying, usually drives us down the wrong path. Our ego is really good at protecting us. If you and I, we talked about this before, we have a mission. You've got a plan, I've got a plan. We are in a little bit debate, a little discussion over who's planning we should go through.

As you and I are debating the merits of our plan, my ego in my own head is saying, You're right, he's wrong. That's what my ego is saying. Your plan is It's better than Ryan's plan. My tendency, most of our tendency, is to listen to our ego. When we listen to our egos, we run into problems. So part of building what good leadership is, is managing our egos. And that, to me, Ryan, is universal. There has not been a company in the world and an individual in the world that doesn't have the challenge of dealing with their own ego. We say, quite frankly, very simply, humility is the most important attribute in a leader. Of all the attributes, humility is number one. We don't waffle on that. We don't him and haul. We just say it, you have to be humbled to be an effective leader. In almost every case, when you see friction between teams, when you see challenging communication, when you see empowerment of other people not really happening, you're not letting other people lead, ego plays a part in almost all of that. The attribute of humility to learn that is so, so, so hard, but it is central to success no matter what you are doing and where are, and we see that everywhere.

Humility, sadly, infects almost everything. It's a problem to keep your ego in check.

It's funny. It's Chapter 2. That's the title of it, right? Humility is the most important attribute in a leader. It's interesting you say that because I think of these warriors. Literally, that's what you guys are. You're in your gear. You're going out to get the enemy. Again, life and death situations. You got to have a swagger, and you guys do. And you got to have belief and confidence that borders on arrogance. And so for you guys, the guys literally who have lived that out to say, No, it's not confidence or courage. It's humility is a little surprising.

Yeah, it's saying a lot, I think, to the value of that. What you're describing, I lived that. I left the cockpit, I go on to the ground to lead this team, and I end up working really closely with Jocko and Leif Seals, Chastun Abruzer. Basically, every major operation at the height of the insurgency that they were on, I was with them. I'm looking at the biggest, toughest, strongest, smartest, fittest. The list of attributes is long, and these guys had all of them, and they were miraculous. The thing that stands out, and I think if you had Jock on this podcast, I'm telling you, he would tell you the exact same thing. The attribute that is most critical to success is humility. That is the ability to listen, the ability to learn, the ability to be flexible, the ability to change, the ability to admit that you're wrong, the ability to go with someone else's plan. Even humility affects your fitness level, how fast you're running. Are you humble enough to say that you can get better? Should you be working out more? You can see it touches everything. It's not to diminish the value of all those other attributes, but it is humility that allows you to strengthen those attributes.

Without humility, you listen less. You don't train quite as much. You're not quite as concerned about the enemy. You find yourself getting There's a connection between humility and complacency. They're not the same, but they're linked. Humility touches all of that. It doesn't try to diminish the meaning and value of all those other attributes, but without humility, none of that stuff happens and it doesn't work. We are steadfast in our belief that humility is the attribute that is most critical to allow those other things that you need to happen.

Is that a skill that you can learn?

A hundred %.

You probably come across, you and your team, come across across, and this probably happened in the military, too, the opposite end of the spectrum of being humble from time to time. The CEO who is not humble. How do you help that person who has a very high thought to, I guess, the nicest way is a thought of themselves to be more humble.

These questions are so good, man. I think you're asking what I think are the central challenges we deal with all the time. Because while on one hand, we could all agree that Being humble is a good thing. Nobody ever says no to that. But let's say, hypothetically, you're the one with the ego, you're that CEO or whoever it is, and your ego is out of control. The one thing I can't do is tell you to be humble. I can't tell you that. And so as you're asking, How do you teach humility? I can't tell you your ego is a problem because your ego is such a problem. It's like, My ego is not the problem. Your ego is the problem. In fact, the way we teach it is the biggest challenge with someone else's ego is not their ego. It's your ego's response to it. And so if I challenge you, the issue with that is your response to that. So the last thing I can do to someone with a big ego is say, Keep your ego in check. It just doesn't work. And so you have to look for these very indirect, non-threatening ways to help people's egos diminish.

And the best way to do that, and this is one of the hardest things we teach and one of the biggest challenges is, if you and I have a clash of our egos, and I don't like the way your attitude and your ego, what I have to do is I have to subordinate my ego to yours. It's the absolute most counterintuitive opposite thing that your ego is saying, who does Ryan think he is? He thinks he's so smart. He thinks he knows everything, but he doesn't. I want to come at you and attack your ego. And that's the worst thing I can do to teach you humility. In fact, the best thing I can do is go, hang on. Let me try to lower my ego a little bit. And what normally happens, not always, listen, there are people that cannot learn humility. It's just a thing. But if I can lower my humility and subordinate my ego to yours and go, Hey, you know what, Ryan? I've been really pushing back hard on your ideas. I'm not listening to what you're saying, and I really need to. And I subordinate my ego and go, Hey, tell me what's on your mind.

Walk me through your plan. The natural reaction you're going to have is, Oh, this guy, Dave, he's listening to me a little bit. He's not coming at me so hard. And what will happen is your ego will start to drop down a little bit. And if I do that well, and we start to collaborate more and work a little bit more and we're less threatening to each other and we're in this process of supporting each other's egos in relationship to one another, over time, you go, You know what? Dave and I killed it on that last project. That's the best we've ever done. We had the best profit. And what you start to connect is you start to connect success to your ability to control your ego. When we say humility, it is the measurement of how much control you have over your ego. If I can subordinate mine, the natural reaction, the reciprocal reaction is, That will happen to you. That That's one of the best ways to teach you that is, Oh, that was our path to being successful. That's how we win. I'm telling you, it's not easy. It's not easy, mostly because of us.

But that is one of the best ways to teach humility is let people experience that by supporting your ego and seeing what the natural reaction is to theirs. Normally, not always, yours drops down with me a little bit. Over time, we start to learn to work better with each other. Our teams thrive, and the outcome is, Oh, this has been better than when we were going at each other the whole time in this clash of egos, which nobody wins in that.

Yeah. I mean, it's such an advanced skill, and I wonder how frequently that actually works because we all draw from our own personal experiences. I had an ego maniac for a boss back in the day, and one of the ways I dealt with it was just to make sure he always got all the credit, right? Because if not, he's just so mad. Life was miserable for all the people that reported to me, and I was in a VP role. So it was a big job. Lots of people. It stemmed from insecurity and all the things that you normally see. I don't know if I had the advanced skills to handle it that well. I just thought short term and like, all right, just give them all the credit. And if it goes bad, take the blame, but give them all the credit. Hey, this worked because of you. This worked, you did it. Remember when you said this? And he had never said it, but I was just trying to survive. That's the thing is you hope that they actually have the awareness to realize that. And unfortunately, they don't always have that.

They don't. You're right. There is no guaranteed way to get someone to learn humility. That's how strong our egos are. Listen, there are people whose egos are strong enough that they would rather lose than admit that they're wrong. They'd rather fail than be wrong. The ego is a powerful thing. By the way, that why we talked earlier, why we say humility is the most important attribute is how powerful a force that it is. The way you describe it, though, even though you might not have had success in that scenario, that's still correct. It's still the lesson you want the people to take away from it is that was an example of you subordinate your ego. Yeah. Hey, my boss is this, that. Okay, cool. I want my boss to win. I do that by going, I'm going to be supporting my ego. I'm not going to have a clash. It's a way to protect and help your team. Over time, what we say is leadership is, A, it's counterintuitive. The opposite of my intuition. My intuition says, You're coming at me. I'm going to come right back at you. Your ego is a problem. I'm going to push on that ego.

It's counterintuitive, which is like, Oh, if this dude's ego is out of control, I have to support it and lower mine. It's no different than the other attributes. If I can't get my people to listen to me, my intuition says, Talk more and talk louder. But that's wrong. If my people aren't listening to me, I need to talk less and listen more. And the natural byproduct, which is the other part, it's reciprocal. What I give is usually what I get. Does that work 100% of the time? No. There are some crazy people out there with massive egos that you can't fix. And sometimes it's best to just go get another job. But most of the time, most people, most scenarios, what you give is what you get. If you're supporting your ego, you'll get the same thing. If you listen, They'll listen. If you're respectful, they'll be respectful. If you give them trust, they'll return that trust. And so you can see the connection there, but we have to have reasonable expectations, too. People struggle with that.

The other thing is if you're in one of those middle management roles, which most people are, not many are the actual CEO or the person in charge of everybody, if it's a military unit. When your people see you working really hard to clear the path or to block them from the ego maniac, they'll run through a wall for you. They'll do whatever it takes, and you'll achieve your objectives. It might not be fun all the time because you're blocking and tackling and doing all those things in order just to keep the person away. But sometimes that's the job. Sometimes that's part of the job of saying, Hey, I got a talented team here. I've got good leaders. I've got good individual contributors. I got good soldiers. We're tough. The only thing that could get in our way maybe is ourselves, and that's somebody who's above. As a leader, I need to put my people in the best possible position to succeed. And sometimes that's blocking someone from our team from getting in their way. And when you do that, I've seen your people will literally do anything. They will go to battle for you if they see that you're trying really hard to do that for them.

I don't think I could describe it any better than what you just did. The word that keeps popping in my mind as you were talking is a word that we talk all the time. We talk about relationship being trust, respect, listening, influence. The outcome of a good relationship is that you care about your team and your team cares about you. That's the outcome. As simple as that word is, is that you care about each other. That selfless act, the reason that it's such a positive thing for the team is the team goes, Oh, Ryan cares about us so much. He's willing to do these things for our benefit. That's your way of showing that you care about them more than you care about yourself. Because if you cared about yourself more, you'd go at that ego-maniac boss. You know who would lose? The team would lose because he'd push back even harder and he'd make life even more miserable. But that reciprocal nature of you showing that you care about them, that's why they're willing to do anything for you. It's that byproduct of that's how you show that you care about them more than yourself.

And that's what a leader's job is, to care about the team more than you care about yourself. That's parenting, that's marriage, that's every team you've ever been a part of. And what you typically get is you get the same thing in return. That's the reciprocal nature. They go, Man, this guy, Ryan, he'd do anything for us. And all of a sudden, you get the same thing in return. And that's how you win despite these massive egos at play. You lose when your ego won't let you do that, when your ego says, Don't let him talk to you like that. He's not smarter than you. You listen to your ego, Yeah, that's right. You go at your boss, and all of a sudden, you got friction with your boss. It's not your boss that loses. It's not just your team loses. I think you described that beautifully. I think you're exactly right, man. I think you're spot on.

The phrase or the word ownership or take ownership is highly associated with you guys at Ashtal on Front. I think Jocko helped popularize that maybe more than anybody in the world. And it's Chapter 6. It's titled Take Ownership, which is in part 2, The Actions of a Good Leader. Dave, what does it mean to you to be a leader who takes ownership?

Inside that chapter was a very humbling story of me thinking I really understood what ownership was until I read the chapter of the book Extreme Ownership that Jocco wrote in the very first chapter, which was When you take ownership, you take ownership of everything. Now, listen, I want to just caveat there real quick. If it rains, it's not your fault that it rains. We're not talking about taking ownership of things that you literally do not control. But the degree of ownership is recognizing that you have ownership over everything, even if it just means how you react to something. I think what was humbling about reading the book Extreme Ownership, and then why I felt compelled to write a story of ownership in my own book, really is twofold. One, is, I don't think you can write a leadership book without talking about ownership. But I don't want to just repeat what Janka was saying. I wanted to convey how that story of ownership affected me as a leader and something that is universal, I think, for all leaders, which is the idea that you have to take ownership of everything you possibly can. The story that I wrote about in there was the story of Chris getting killed.

One of the things I was comfortable doing when it happened in 2006, and by the way, I read the chapter 10 years later, is I reflected back on the idea that I would tell my team, Hey, listen, it is heartbreaking that we lost Chris, and it was a tragic event, and it was. But what I was willing to do then was like, Hey, that's war. That's the world we're living in. There's nothing we can do about that. I want to keep moving on and just recognize that these are external forces beyond our control. The problem with that isn't that it's not necessarily true, because that is going to happen in war, is that when I embraced the idea that it wasn't completely my responsibility, that meant I I didn't have as much to change. What I should have done is like, Hey, what is everything, every little thing we can do to make sure this doesn't happen again? Or a step further, what didn't I do that I can do next time to make sure this doesn't happen at all? The concept of ownership is a really hard thing for us to fully embrace because our egos and our minds want to tell us there's certain things that you have no control over.

While that is true, you have to be careful with that Because what you're looking for is everything you can take ownership of is a chance to fix, solve, or more importantly, prevent a problem. Our tendency is to untershoot ownership. Our tendency is not to overdo it. That's why the book is called What It Is. It's trying to take that. Is max possible? Try to take that to the extreme. Look for everything you can take ownership of. Listen, Ryan, it's not everything. I can't control certain things. People get sick. The weather changes. The world around us has a lot of influence. But if I can take ownership of everything I can control, I get more control, I get more influence, I can influence the outcome more, which is what I want. And that was a tough lesson for me. I had no choice but to write that chapter of learning that lesson well after the fact in my career as a Marine. I wish I could have gone back in time and learned it sooner, but it was a powerful lesson for me that I think it applies to all leaders.

Again, I could go with you all day on ownership. I want to get to a couple other things from the book. In part one, the Mindsets of a Good Leader, Chapter 4. I was curious to go a little bit deeper here. Detachment is a superpower. Why is detachment a superpower?

Well, you can see at Echelon Front, we have some little clichés, some catchphrases. Humility is the most supportive attribute of the leader is one of them. Detachment is a superpower. The point behind that phrase, that saying, is to convey how powerful detachment is for two reasons. One, it tells you how hard it is. Almost nobody can do that. Two, if you can do it, it can be massively influential. What we're saying about detachment is being in control of our emotions. What we know is when you put people in difficult situations and there's a lot of priorities, a lot of pressures, a lot of forces bearing down on them, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15 different priorities. People tend to get emotional when they feel overwhelmed, when there's a lot on their plate. And by the way, every employee at every company I've worked with, and by the way, my 12-year feels like this. My teenage girls feel like this. I feel like this. Everybody feels like there's too much going on because there is. There's too much to do and not have time to do it. The problem with that is, what's universal is we all tend to have an emotional reaction to that.

Some people get angry and frustrated. Some people shut down. Some people get fearful. Some people get insecure. You could see the range of emotions. Now, while the emotions may be different, what's universal is we all get emotional. When we react emotionally, we tend to make bad decisions. If I act out of frustration, chances are it won't be a good decision. Any conversation I've had with my wife where I was upset or frustrated or angry, typically wasn't my best self. And so what we teach is you have to learn the skill of detaching from that emotion. Not to be devoid of emotion. We are human beings. Human beings have emotions, and we should. But don't let those emotions dictate to you. One of the most common things we see is when we have a problem at work, we tend to focus on that problem. You've probably heard the saying, I'm putting out fires all day. I've got this plan. I come in and all of a sudden I hear down in this department, when there's a problem, people tend to go down into that problem. They focus on that problem. They get engaged and invested in that problem, which seems like a good idea, but more often than not, it's the wrong response.

What you should do if there's a problem is get away from it, detach from it, because what getting away from it lets you look around and see what's really causing it. So solving that little fire might be good in the short term tactically, but it's not a good strategic because you don't know what caused that fire. You don't know what caused the problem. It's the skill of detachment that lets you see that. There's a very simple military example that we teach all the time, which is if I see an enemy position and they're shooting at me, which happens in combat, my tendency is to focus on that. I get emotional. That guy's shooting at me. He's pointing his gun at me. That team is pointing to my team, and I'll focus on that, which is normal emotional reaction. But it's usually a bad one because what that team is actually hoping happen is I do focus on you. Because the minute I focus on you, Ryan, guess what you're going to do with another member of your team? You're going to send them on a little, we call it a little flanking maneuver, a little end run, a little maneuver to get me from the side.

They're banking on me, focusing on you. But if I can detach, you go, Hang on, hang on. Let me step away from this. Let me take a step back. I'll still see you, but I'm going to look around. I'll go, Oh, I see Ryan in that little group out there in a little flanking maneuver. What I'm able to do is if I'm detached from that, I can actually see the future. That's the superpower. I go, Oh, if I do nothing in about 30 seconds, that team is going to be on our left flank. I go, I'm not going to let the, Hey, team, I know what's about to happen. I can see the future. That flanking maneuver, it's coming our way. Get a team, go up on the left side, get ready for them. We're going to flip the script on them a little bit. That comes from the skill of detachment. You can apply it in all aspects of life. When you get emotional, you tend to look down and in, you make bad decisions. When you detach from emotion, you look up and out, you see the big picture, you see what's happening, and you can do a better job planning and preparing for it.

We say that as a superpower because so few people can detach because emotions are so overwhelming. But when you do, you see so much more and your decisions are so much better. We teach that skill of detaching from those emotions.

Is that more like... I'll make it personal for a second. You have a disagreement with your wife, or in my case, this happened recently, one of your kids leaves a dirty dish in the sink, and that's not a cool thing to do in my house. Like, either put it, wash it yourself or put it in the dishwasher. If you use it, clean it. Leave it better than you found it. Very basic stuff. So when it happens, there have been times when if there was a video camera on me, I would be very embarrassed If you were to watch that video of how I reacted, not responded, how I did not detach and got emotional, even though it's in the grand scheme of life, it is nothing. It's a dirty dish in the stink, right? But you wouldn't think that by the way I reacted. So In those situations, what's an actual tactical thing you would do if you're having a disagreement with your wife or you reacted bad to something that actually isn't that big of a deal, but my reaction then caused a much bigger deal than it should have been. How would you better handle that?

Well, listen, I can't really relate, Ryan. That's never happened to me. I've heard of other people struggling with that. Obviously, I'm totally joking. I can put myself in literally the exact same scenario in the same situation, the dirty dish on the table or the sink. I think we can all relate to that normal. By the way, I think it's magnified at home dramatically. You are much more likely to have a hard time controlling your emotions, ironically, with the people you care about the most.

So true, man.

Dude, you are in good company. I'm right there with you. I think everybody watching and listening knows exactly what you're talking about. In that case, I think about one of the things that we teach, and it's easy to do it in retrospect, is if I were to just say, Hey, Ryan, and I could ask myself the same question, you could ask me, it's going to be the same answer is, how often do those emotional reactions, get the outcome you're looking for. And the answer is, it's hardly ever, right? Listen, there are times you want to heighten up that emotion. If your kid's making bad decisions, like running across you without looking, you heighten that emotion, tells them, Hey, this is a problem. You want to be really careful with how often you do that because you don't want to desensitize them to dad's emotional reaction. Sometimes it's required to go, oh, dad's not happy about that. I better pay attention. And if you're like that with everything, you lose the ability to be compelling in that time. Where I struggle, and I think something that we teach is what you have to be able to do is understand where you are in that escalation of your emotions.

What I'm telling you, I think, is also like, is there time to convey emotionally? Yes. But you should be aware that it's happening. Not that you're out of control and your emotions have gotten the best of you. The best way to recognize that is know what your own personal red flags are. Most Most people don't go from zero to 100. They have steps along the way. Maybe they came in, they had a long day at work. Maybe their flight was delayed coming back. Maybe they didn't do well in a meeting. Maybe they had to get gas. Little things have ticked up that your steady-state of zero is actually a four or a five, which means that dirty dish is likely to put you to a seven than if you came in and everything was good to go. You have to have this running meter in your own head of where you are on this emotion scale. Quite frankly, one of the things we have to admit to ourselves is as adults, we should be better at it than we're not. When I ask the question, we talk about this with clients, is, hey, what people can't control their emotions?

The answer is children. Children can't control their emotions. They're not capable of doing it. Any parent seeing a child throw a full-on temper tantrum. They do it in private, they do it in public. They cannot control their emotions. But adults are supposed to be in control of their emotions. Now, you and I both know it doesn't happen all the time. You and I both know that. But one of the skills is Ryan know what Ryan's scaling looks like. You should know, and I know, when I start getting frustrated, my traps start to tighten up. I tend to tense up a little bit. I have seen people like their nose turns red, their ears turned red. They have these little indicators. I think the reason those indicators are so important, those red flags are so important, is if you're in a level eight and you're taking that dish and you're yelling at your son, which, hey, no shame in that because we've all been there. If I go, Oh, hey, Ryan, just calm down and detach from your emotions right now, it's going to make it worse. And anybody who's ever told their wife to calm down when she's upset knows exactly what I'm talking about.

But if you're at a level one or two and I go, Oh, I see where this is going to go, and you can intervene then You are in control of your emotions, not the other way around, and you're more likely to not let that scenario push you over the edge. So what it does is learns, okay, I'm an emotional guy. I tend to get frustrated in certain things, but I have the to know where I am on that scale. If I'm a four, you got to intervene then. Because if I am at the end, I will absolutely... Detaching is not going to happen at a level 10. You got to do that early on. That's the difference between kids and adults is you should know and you have to learn what are your red flags, and you can be a good partner, too, with your wife or your kids and see where they're escalating up and try to intervene earlier.

Sometimes I've learned to even use specific words to myself, words like pause and breathe, breathe. If you actually take a big breath, it's helped me. Little things like that can become a big thing of, Dude, it's not that big of a deal. Little things like that can be quite a bit different than when you're at war. I get that. But we're talking about life now, and those little things can turn into really big, bad things. I think what you're saying is super helpful to help us not get to that point. Let's cut it off before we get there. Dave, one more before we run, man. Let's say you're meeting with somebody who's, I don't know, right out of college, early to mid-20s. They want to leave a positive dent in the world, but they're not really sure how they're going to do that. What are some general pieces of life/ career advice you'd give to them?

Yeah, there's probably two things that immediately pop into mind. We, as you can imagine, get this question a lot because Jocko has done this amazing job. He's got an entire kid series of leadership books called The Way of the Warrior Kid. We have people at a really young age asking us leadership questions where it used to be an adult, older, professional-level type environment. Now we got kids in middle school, high school, college that are asking those really insightful questions. I love that you're asking that. I think two things really matter to me that I'm trying to convey, and I'm trying to do this to my kids, too. And by the way, it's easier said than done, and so it's no automatic answer. But there's two things. One is you want people to do something that has meaning to them. You have to believe in what you're doing. I had come from this place of, and I'm sure you have similar thing, this convenience of, Oh, I was a fighter pilot on the Marine Corps. Who wouldn't love to do that? I think what made me good as a Marine Corps fighter pilot is I really believed in that.

I really loved and wanted to do that, and I found value in that. What I've discovered is there is meaning and value in all sorts of things, and it really doesn't matter what it is as long as it's something you find meaning in. My point to that is, if you're doing a job that seems like it's really cool or really impressive or something people would want and you don't believe in it, you are going to struggle. I don't care what it is. I went to flight school with guys whose heart just wasn't in flying airplanes, and they struggled. What is powerful and important and meaningful to you is unique to yours, and you want to help them explore that and be confident that no matter what it is, if they believe in that, that's a really critical attribute. You have to believe in what you're doing. There's meaning and value in all sorts of things. The second is as simple and as cliché as this sound, is that the skill of leadership is the ultimate difference maker in all aspects of your life. All the things that you and I have talked about today, all the things you're talking about with the people you're engaged with, and mine too, is the skill of leadership, building good relationships, being a good communicator, staying in control of your emotions, helping your people be successful.

Those are leadership skills that apply everywhere. It dispels the myth like, is combat different? I guess the environment a little bit, but the attributes are the same. The conversation with your son about the plate, in some ways, is exactly what it's like to be in a firefight when you're getting overwhelmed. But it's exactly the same. The skills that we teach to make someone a good leader will apply in every aspect of their life. There is a myth, there's a misrepresentation that leadership is about you get to a certain place and now you're a director or a manager or a certain rank and you have people, now you become a leader. That is not true. All people are leaders, all of us, no matter where we are and no matter what job we have. If we learn to embrace the concept that leadership is the difference maker and it will apply to everything, the earlier they figure that out, the better, that this is a skill they can learn. If they learn those skills, their life will get better no matter where they are, what they're doing, or who they're doing it with. Those two things that I think combined can be really powerful to put someone on the path of discovering for themselves whatever they want, whatever they think is important, but the skills needed to be successful or universal in all aspects of life.

So good, man. The book is called The Need to lead. A Top Gun Instructors' Lessons on How Leadership Solves Every Challenge. So well done, Dave. Thank you to you and your team for sending me a copy. I'm pumped for you, man. I am a massive fan of all that you do and just love the way you show up with authenticity, whether we're recording or not, emailing, texting, whatever, man. I'm just a big fan. I love that you guys are crushing it. It shows the importance of leadership. And to me, It's so easy to root for good people, to have good things happen to them. And that's what you and your company does, man. So thank you for doing this. I know we're going to continue our dialog as we both progress, man.

I can't thank you enough, man. The feeling is absolutely mutual. And just being in a space where we get to have this impact and contribution, and you being a part of that. I love our connection, man, and I'm super grateful for this.

Thank you so much, Dave. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, rian@learningleader. Com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Dave Burke. A few takeaways from my notes. The most important attribute in a leader is humility to be effective. We must be able to listen, learn, be flexible, admit when we're wrong sometimes. One of the biggest issues that Dave and his team deal with when working with leaders is ego and/or the inability to be humble. As leaders, we need to be self-aware enough to realize when our ego is getting the best of us. We also have to surround ourselves with people who will help us know when that's happening. Then remember, the enemy gets a vote. Or as my college offensive coordinator would say to me, Hey, they're on scholarship, too. How comfortable How are you responding when it doesn't go according to plan? Because it almost never does. Again, it's on us as leaders to develop the skills to adapt and respond when it doesn't go like we want it to.

Then we want deep on detachment. Detachment is a superpower. When we react emotionally, it almost always makes it worse. We need to know our red flags and how to respond early to them before we blow up. We've all, unfortunately, done that. We got to pause, breathe, create a personal system for yourself so you do not react emotionally. Instead, You respond and keep your emotions in check. You got to detach. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, Hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Dave Burke. I think He'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. You also go to Spotify and Apple podcast. You subscribe to the show, you rate it, hopefully five stars. You write a thoughtful review by doing all of that. You are continually giving me the ability to do what I love on a daily basis. For that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.