How Can I Help the Guy Next to Me?

As I sat down to read Saturday's Wall Street Journal,  I immediately noticed on the upper left hand corner, a rather forbidding set of eyes set beneath three words, The SEAL Sensibility.

Eric Greitens is a SEAL and the author of the book "The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL." (see video below)  The WSJ article highlights the intensity of SEAL training, but I was particularly interested in the following excerpt:

What kind of man makes it through Hell Week?  That's hard to say. But i do know -generally - who won't make it.  There are dozens of types that fail: the weight-lifting meatheads who think that the size of their biceps is an indication of their strength, the kids covered in tattoos announcing to the world how tough they are, the preening leaders who don't want to get dirty, and the look-at-me former athletes who have always been told they are stars but have never been pushed beyond the envelope of their talent to the core of their character.  In short, those who fail are the ones who focus on show.  The vicious beauty of Hell Week is that you either survive or fail, you endure or quit, you do - or you do not.


Some men who seemed impossibly weak at the beginning of SEAL training - men who puked on runs and had trouble with pull-ups - made it.  Some me who were skinny and short and whose teeth chattered just looking at the ocean also made it.  Some men who were visibly afraid, sometimes to the point of shaking, made it too.


Almost all the men who survived possessed one common quality.  Even in great pain, faced with the test of their lives, they had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear and ask:  How can I help the guy next to me?  They had more than the "fist" of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others, to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose.


How can I help the guy next to me?  That was the question that had me reading these few paragraphs a couple more times so  I could digest what Greitens was writing.

During the '80s I had two occasions to try to get to the top of Mt Rainier.   I failed both times.  I have two memories that have pushed aside all the others. The first is of a good friend who thought training was watching someone else run.  I had spent months trying to prepare - at sea level -  to reach the over 14,000-foot summit. And when I arrived in Seattle I still wasn't the kind of ready I needed to be. My buddy was far less ready.  We were joined by some other friends and business associates.

During our first day climb to Camp Muir, a brief rest stop - just north of 10,000 feet - before the night time summit attempt, my friend lagged badly behind.  I was afraid he wouldn't make it. I stayed back with him and we talked our way up to Muir.  Neither of us left for the summit and those who did were driven back by a summer snow storm effectively ending the attempt.  Yet, I remember us badgering each other up to Muir and for that year it was our personal victory.

In the months that followed, I trained even harder, endowed with the learning that came with that  first failed attempt.  This time, however, my friend wasn't along. Instead I was accompanied by a few of the others from the previous summer.  But we'd vowed to make sure all of us reached the summit.

I arrived in Seattle in the best shape of my life and  I flew up to Camp Muir ahead of the pack. I was well  prepared to reach the summit. Unfortunately the crampon on my left foot broke in half and became ineffective during a critical part of the mountain - around 12,000 feet - and I spent two hours effectively hiking on one crampon.  By the time we stopped for a rest I was exhausted. As I took myself off my rope team, I couldn't hide my disappointment.   The rest of them made it to the top of Rainier as three of us returned to Muir to await their return.

What I remember about the second year was no one was their to help me push through my exhaustion and fight my way to the top.  No one set aside their own personal ambition to help the three of us left behind challenge ourselves to "push beyond the envelope" of our training.  There was no one there to hang back and talk me up to the summit.  Maybe I was too exhausted and maybe this article just awoke second guessing and covered it in regret.

I learned a lot about people on that trip and while the rest of "my team" made the summit, in my mind they came down more diminished than accomplished.   The goal for all of us to get to the summit was quickly forgotten once we were on the upper reaches of Rainier.

These two episodes came back to me the minute I read How can I help the guy next to me?


Throughout my career the organizations, the people, the teams who have been most effective are those who reveled in each other's successes and always stopped to help each other when help was needed.  I was blessed with wonderful staff members when I was given the opportunity to lead an organization, but in every case, upon arrival they were neither as cohesive as they needed to be or as compassionate as they would become.  Both would took time and encouragement. There are lots of ways to accomplish both.

While in Canada I had the leader of each business unit write and present  a different unit's business plan for the upcoming year.  They learned to empathize with each other's issues.

I developed a leadership program called Leadership on the Edge, a combination of experiential learning and answering challenging personal questions - I went on every trip - the first was in the remote Yukon -and I always answered the tough questions first to let them know it was safe to be open and honest.

In every case, I included spouses in our social events.  Work issues rarely - never - stay behind in the office. We made life-long friends not only with employees but with their families.

While in Canada we held our staff meetings in places as remote as Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia. On every trip and as we spent more time together we learned more about each other and found ways to work better together.

I've always found that charity is a great way to build the level of compassion and empathy in a team. I've employed it at every stop.

Most recently, after taking on the task of rejuvenating a business under a lot of stress, I found that communication, lots of it and frequently and to depths not previously employed, was a force multiplier in building a staff for whom trust was an alien concept.  During my early days on the job, we lost a young, but talented, high potential product manager. I asked her to stop by my office and help me understand why she was leaving.  She'd been in the same job for an unreasonable length of time, and her new company was offering a better opportunity to grow. Then she told me there were a lot of other talented people feeling the same frustration. I asked for a list of names, and she gave it to me.

Over the following weeks and months, I met each person for lunch or breakfast to learn more about them and for them to understand what I hoped to achieve. Eventually I was joined by members of my staff whose organizations these individuals were in.  In no time, we were learning more about each other and building trust horizontally and vertically.

Over the years there have been casualties, people who simply couldn't make the necessary changes. One business had experienced little to no growth for nearly a decade and attempts to infuse it with people outside the company were failing.  I inherited those people and despite repeated efforts, they were unable to change and had to leave. Their replacements and their teammates ultimately drove the business to  success that greatly outperformed and became the model for the entire industry.

Every one of you has experienced the work place equivalent of the "weight-lifting meatheads, the kids covered in tattoos, the preening leaders and the former athletes." These are the people you need to identify and remove to achieve success.

From my experience I'd call  them the Book Smart but Street Stupid,  the All Tag (what golfers refer to as the guys whose bag is adorned with tags from Pine Valley, Augusta, Cyprus Point, Merion, but whose game is more like Bushwood), the Manage Up Because There's Someone Up There Who Actually Believes the Crap I'm Pitching, the Couldn't Identify a Customer in a Phone Booth types and the Consultant Body Snatchers, the ones whose points of view are those of the consultant they most recently spent time with.  I don't want to leave out the Mole People, the ones who go underground when change is in the air figuring they've survived all previous change management efforts, and they can damn well survive this one.

Yet at the same time, how many of you have been surprised by someone who at first glance was the marketing equivalent of a business reply card only to turn out to be the marketing campaign of the year?
The "puking, teeth rattling shivering" guys Greitens refers to.  Only in this case, these are the solid people who've watched the Book Smart but Street Stupid types sell one nonsensical but PowerPoint laden proposal after another to management.   They've had to sit and listen to the Consultant Body Snatchers go from initiative to initiative, each one guaranteed to solve whatever problem that consultant identified.  They've scratched their heads as the All Tag types, hollow but well appointed shells,  get promotions.

When you go to find them, you have to look among the Mole People not because they've gone underground to wait out this latest leadership change, but because they've given up out of frustration and exasperation.  They take longer to convince.

I'm no Navy SEAL. In fact, about a month ago the Discovery Channel had a two-hour special on the two weeks of hell that allow the survivors to qualify for special forces training.  I was dehydrated just watching it.   But I know that the survivors of SEAL training understand that only when they've learned self sacrifice, only when they've learned compassion for each other, only when they've learned to look out for the guy next to them do they have the capacity to go into a foreign country, at night, when the only difference between success and failure is having each other's backs and succeed in their mission.

Monday, when you return to work, ask yourself:

How can I help the guy next to me?