so someone has a negative problem how do we how do we fix that put him in charge
we have someone that needs to get humble that needs to learn some humility how do
you do that put them in charge that's what you do
you put them in charge of something that they can't
barely handle and what's interesting is sometimes you get feedback like
wouldn't it be better like let's say dave has a big ego
and wouldn't it be better just to have a straightforward kind of robust
conversation with dave and say listen dave i think
your ego's a little out of control and i think you need to humble yourself
are there instances where that may work there are if dave
in addition to having a big ego looks at me as a
as a person that he can learn a lot from and he has a ton of respect for me
and that and we have a good relationship and i can approach it in a in a way
that's indirect enough that it doesn't offend him and i can sit him
down and and sometimes you can be direct with someone some of
you got a great relationship with someone if you and i have a great
relationship and i go hey man you're letting your ego
get the best of you if i think you're trying to help me i'm going to listen to
you yup yup so so there are times that that can
work here's the problem there are more times
where the reason that the person the reason that we have a problem is because
the person has a big ego in the first place that's the whole reason why we
have the problem so when we just point blank tell them
well we're attacking their ego they're going to dig in it's going to get even
worse okay so there's one example what about
when we got someone that lacks confidence
and wouldn't it be good if we could just tell them hey look dave have more
confidence guess what the reason the person doesn't
have confidence because they don't have confidence
just telling someone to have more confidence is zero effect
okay maybe it has five percent effect maybe it has an eight percent effect
but when i say hey dave you know what you lack confidence
so i want you to have more confidence that's not what we're talking about when
instead i say hey dave you know what i've been
watching you and and i'm seeing what you're doing
and it seems to me like you've got some potential here for real leadership
and what i want to do is i want to assign a couple things to you here in
fact we've got this project that we're working on
and i want you to actually take charge of this and then dave who lacks
confidence says oh boss i'm not really ready for this i go hey look
let me let me just show you what the project consists of it's this and this
it's pr it's pretty straightforward i know you've actually already done this
you just haven't been the person with the name on it
look at it look at the look at what the oh yeah yeah you see you can do this
cool this is a great place for you to start let's knock this thing out of the
park and all of a sudden dave does it and his
confidence goes up a little bit right it's real it's real
so the idea that we can just use words look it's it absolutely
hey can i have a conversation with dave and say hey dave you know what
right now you might not feel like you're ready but you're ready can that boost
his confidence yes it can i'm not saying that it can't
it can can i possibly say hey dave your ego is out of control and you need
you need to start being a little bit more humble and that can work yes it can
work but for the reasons i just gave there's
a there's the the more powerful tool
is using leadership using leadership to teach people
so got a whole section in here on that building or rebuilding
confidence and by the way you don't necessarily
need to be correcting a problem to use leadership as a as a instruction
tool you don't need that you don't you don't need it at all you
can you can actually uh use leadership to teach and build
just for your team just to make them better
like you don't need to have a problem i don't need to go to dave and think oh
dave's got a big ego or lacks confidence or a bad attitude to
say now i'm going to put him in charge no no i want to have a
an awesome team so what i'm going to do is put people in charge i'm going to use
leadership to build an awesome team these are things that
counterintuitive answer to a lot of people i i mean when somebody asked me
hey i got a person with a bad attitude and i say put him in charge right
someone says hey i got a person with a big eagle and i said put him in charge
someone says hey i've got a person that that lacks confidence and i say put him
in charge counterintuitive every time that's but
it is absolutely the best tool yeah to educate
the the difference is is the leader that actually really cares that truly cares
about his people is not i'm not doing that i'm not gonna
put jacqueline church so i can crush his ego i'm still
actually doing it to try to help him out that's the difference there
as opposed to watch this bro and then i just
roll in on jocko with the big ego because what i really want to do
is crush him and assert my authority of him the leader that actually cares about
his people that really wants the team to be successful
we'll look and then go okay this guy's got a problem it's a totally
understandable problem that most people have
i'm going to use this as a tool to help him be successful
i would like his ego to be put in check as a result but i still what i really
want is for him to grow and develop and i'm using the best way to do it
the common denominator amongst the guy that's just growing and evolving and
needs more responsibility and the dude that is out
of his head and over you know way huge ego that needs is that
i still care about both of them and so as a leader if you're listening
to this this isn't a punitive tool to destroy your people whose egos are
out of control it's a tool to help crush the biggest hindrance
this person have to being individually successful and
contribute to your team but as a leader you need to care about
that person and really want him to be successful knowing
that the best tool to do that for him is all right bro
you got a big ego hey let's put you in charge of this
you're doing a lot of subtle things and runs but if your whole thing is oh giaco
told me to just pile on this guy until i break him that's not what what this is
about yeah and by the way it doesn't start off
hey you got a big eagle i'm gonna put you in charge of this it starts off with
hey dave yeah man you've been you've been kind of
dominating and and you know what i think i think you can start stepping
up and i got some stuff here that i think's gonna be easy pie for you
here here's the next project and dave grabs and goes i got this
yeah but as you know again this is all explained in detail to the books of
how much what what level of project are you going to give
we want it to be enough that we're not crushing them with that project yeah
right totally and just for me it's eager to
get wrapped around easy to get wrapped around
the idea of of fixing this person's problem
but what a good leader really does is looks at all its people even the ones
that are doing all the things that that frustrates you
is hey i really need help it's the same thing with my kids
i got my kids doing things that drive me nuts that i want to crush
but i'm actually doing it because i want them to be successful over time
not because i just want to prove the point of overwhelming them with
responsibility to their to their breaking point
you have to know that what you're actually trying to do is make this
person get better and you use this word hindrance which
is it's so important to understand that the problem that you're trying to
fix the ego is the hindrance to why
the direct conversation isn't as effective
as real world experience same thing with someone that lacks
confidence that the the the problem is the
hindrance when i lack confidence me being told
that my confidence that i that i should have more isn't
enough to propel me past it just like when someone tells me i need to be more
humble that's not compelling enough for me to actually get humble because i
already think i'm awesome and when i lack confidence i i don't
think i'm good enough so what we need is to actually
reinforce with compelling methods how to improve people uh in this
paradigm of of problems that they have yeah
and that's why the direct approach almost never works
yeah yeah the amount of people the amount of relationships
that are so strong that this sort of hey
just gonna hit you with the direct feedback
is you know a tiny percentage tiny percentage of relationships
yeah and if your relationship actually is that strong
that problem that you're dealing with would never get to an out of control
state anyway so if you're contemplating the direct
approach it's such a narrow narrow narrow
times to use that yeah