My guest today, General Stanley McChrystal, is a retired four-star general, former commander of U.S. and International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan, and former commander of Joint Special Operations Command. He is the founder of the McChrystal Group, a senior fellow at Yale University, and the author of several New York Times bestselling books, including his latest, On Character: Choices That Define A Life.
General McChrystal joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about character in leadership and much more.
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General Stanley McChrystal On Character In Leadership
Our quote for this episode is from Sun Tzu. “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” My guest is General Stanley McChrystal is a retired four-star General, former Commander of the US and International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan and former Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC. He’s the Founder of the McChrystal Group, a senior fellow at Yale University, and the Author of several New York Times bestselling books, including his new book, Leaders: Myth and Reality and Risk: A User’s Guide.
General McChrystal’s Post-Military Journey: Leadership, Teaching, And Writing
General McChrystal, welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us again.
Thanks for having me.
I looked up your first appearance. It was episode 186. It was just coming out of COVID. I would encourage people to check out that episode to hear more about your full background. Your military service is well known, but can you briefly remind new readers what you focused your work on since ending your military career?
I left the military in the summer of 2010, after about 34 years as a military officer. I decided to do several things with a friend. I co-founded the company that is now McChrystal Group. I started teaching at Yale. I’m teaching leadership and working with the Yale football team on the same subject to develop people for the future. I started doing some public speaking and then I started writing. I started by writing my memoirs and then it has grown to five books and I’m done. That was the last one but it’s been a busy year, but a very rewarding period. I’ve learned a lot.
You probably feel a little bit like a CEO who leaves with all the chaos. I like my view from here. If I had to describe the backdrop of leadership now in one word. It would be uncertain. I was joking with someone around like Black swans are common now. The notion used to be, it seems like every week we have other self-induced or other things going on. I know you transform JSOC during a period of a lot of uncertainty. From your experience, what was the most important lesson you learned about or situations where it’s just constantly changing and a lot of the big variables often aren’t in your control?
Strategic Preparedness: Adapting To Uncertainty And Beyond Contingency Planning
The reality is, you very rarely can predict what’s coming. What you can do is prepare yourself and your organization to respond to the unexpected. That’s easy to say and hard to do. What you’re doing is an individual preparing yourself that says, “I’m going to have certain tools, certain values and certain relationships that allow me to react when things catch me off guard.” As an organizational idea, just expand that.
Organizations have got to expect that the plan that’s written won’t play out. In fact, in the military, that’s an axiom. No plan survives contact with the enemy. What you learn is there is value in planning because you learn a lot of what your capabilities and options are. You don’t expect to execute the plan in a satisfying way. In this world, to get to your initial point, we’ve got two factors that have come. The first is that the environment feels very uncertain. Things seemed to move faster. There are more variables. If I’m a business leader, the markets seem to change faster and more substantively.
No tariffs.
Affected by politics, weather and all of those things. On an individual level, senior leaders are in a more apparently tenuous position than before. We saw that couple at the Coldplay concert get outed.
The whole world came together for 48 hours. It was a very unifying event. Some of the most creative work I’ve ever seen the internet do.
The point is, a leader or suddenly not only finds their organization getting pummeled but they find themselves getting pummeled in social media or other ways. It’s made many leaders more tentative and more frightened to make decisive decisions.
What occurs to me, it’s helpful to feel in control of things even if they’re not great. Looking at a situation, let’s just say tariffs in your company. Let’s say there’s a chance that it could be zero or it could be 50% or it could be 25%. We probably should look at scenarios for all three and be ready to do all three. Now, not that the 50% one might not be unbelievably painful. Rather than sitting around and feeling like it’s happening to you, you can be like, “We talked about this. We have a 50% plan and we went through it when our emotions were calm and quiet.”
It just seems like everyone needs a multi-variant scenario planning because as you said, I can develop. Maybe it’s the negative 25%. Who knows? Whatever I’m going to guess is going to be wrong, but if I developed a zero, I developed a 20%, and then I developed the 50%, I at least have a sense of what our marching orders are for each one of those scenarios.
Cultivating Calm & Decisive Leadership: Preparing For The Unexpected
That’s true. Where I differ a little bit is when I grew up in Special Operations, we always did contingency plans. You would do these very detailed plans for, “If this happens, we will do this.” Things always went wrong, but it was never those things we planned for. The way I would slightly modify your responses, don’t get mesmerized by planning for a bunch of different specific contingencies. Plan for what if it’s completely different than we expected. How are we going to adapt to new conditions at the moment? It’s like Stockdale’s paradox.
The idea of, you’ve got to admit reality is it is but believe in the long term outcome. Building that mindset in your organization tends to get less upset if they understand that, sometimes things are just going to go terribly, but there’s going to be a day after. We’re going to survive. We’re going to sort it out. We’re going to move forward.
Sometimes things will go terribly, but there’s always a day after. We’ll survive, sort it out, and move forward.
Interestingly, I remember years ago, Michael Useem, who was a professor at Penn, had done some stuff with his son, Jerry. He wrote a book called The Leadership Moment. He looked at these pairings. We’ll talk about your book. It’s not dissimilar. Remember we looked at Joe Torre? One of the things he said about Joe Torre was his leadership style. When things were great, he would get on people. You didn’t run that out. You got the head and he would coach them. When things were bad, he just pat him on the butt and not yelled at him and supported him. The hardest thing is you have to prepare for this stuff when it’s sunny out. Human nature just tells us we worry about rain when it rains.
That’s exactly right. I taught some classes with Mike up there at Penn. The whole idea of building resilience before you need it is what’s so critical and yet it’s easy not to. You assume that if it’s sunny now, will be sunny forevermore.
I’ll fix the roof when it’s raining and then obviously, it’s a lot harder. Part of dealing with all the uncertainty is keeping a level head and I’m curious. What were the practices or habits to help you stay calm and decisive during tenths periods of unpredictability or even battlefield things?
There are several things. First is, as we go through our careers, we tend to develop experience. It tends not to be your first crisis. You realize, “I’ve been blindsided before. I got up and we moved forward.” That’s very helpful. The second is, you tend to understand the organization more holistically or, hopefully, you do. You understand that, although you may be working on something. You have all these different capabilities across your organization or with related supportive organizations that you can bring together that can help you do things that you may not have to do on a daily basis.
There’s another personal aspect and people don’t remember this often enough. You have to play like it’s your last game. You have to lead like it’s your last job. If you are so worried about what’s going to happen next, am I going to get promoted? What I saw in the army is that people who are worried about that tend to become very cautious and risk averse. They had gotten to a certain level of success and they could smell keys to the executive bathroom available. They didn’t want to make decisions. You’re much better to get to the point and say, “I got farther than I ever should have. I’m going to do exactly as I should do. If it works out, great. If it doesn’t work out, great too.”
Values In A Tribal World: Making Grounded Decisions Amidst Chaos
Isn’t that a little bit? You mentioned it before. The moment we’re in the world are a lot of things. It feels we’re succumbing to tribalism a lot and we’re losing values. A couple of things about and it’s the focus in my new book. Thank you for taking time to read it and endorse it, but it seems like we’re having a hard time making these grounded decisions because we’re pulled to join the latest causal team and we can’t hold these values consistently.
The other thing about values is you don’t get a lot of credit when your boat and your stream are going in the same direction. It’s when the stream is going downhill and you’re pointing the boat uphill. What I’ve seen is that the people who make these hard value decisions are usually worse for them in the short term for that reason. The measuring stick is the long term. It feels like the latest tweet is life and death. It’s very hard for people to do that. I know that’s like ten questions in one. You can take as much as you need to unpack all of that.
You’ve described it very well. We all have values and we believe we live to them. When they’re not tested, who knows? We’re just going in that direction. When they are tested, a number of dynamics happen. First is, if we’re lucky, we take a long-term view and everybody needs a metric for their long-term view. They need to have some way they internally test things. I have three granddaughters and they live next door to me. I love them to death. I want them to be able to look at every decision I’ve made, said, and done and not be bearish or ashamed about those when I’m gone.
It’s a reminder. Maybe I shouldn’t need that, but I find it helpful. You get into the moment, and your CEO will say and someone says, “This is the crisis. We’ve got to do this.” It rubs up against our values but shareholder value, we’ve got to consider that and reputation of the company, or any number of factors that can sometimes be a siren’s call to abandoning our values and we rationalize that it’s the right thing to do.
Sometimes we say we’re going to support a candidate or support something from a political standpoint because we don’t like a lot of things about them but we like certain things. We grab onto those and we go, “Alright.” That’s our reason and, therefore, it makes the rest. If we step back and think deeply about it, we go, “No, it doesn’t. It’s not.” We don’t do that enough and it’s easier if the crowd is going a certain direction.
It’s easier to get in that crowd and just move with it. The problem is that they’re not the leaders we need. We need the leaders who can remind us when it gets tough to know these are values and this is the direction we’ll go even if it costs them their job. Even if you say in the near term it costs them their reputation, and often it will.
We need leaders who, when it gets tough, can remind us of our values and direction, even if it costs them their job or reputation.
The last sentence is the most important. As I said, people confuse like, you just don’t get credit when it’s all going in the same direction in my book at least because your values decision is easy. It’s just going along with the river. The true forks almost always cost you something, and people would perceive there’s not a cost. Usually, there’s a short-term cost. There’s a long-term gain, but there’s a short-term cost. I’m working on an HBR article about this.
One of the examples in it is the folks from Basecamp, 37 Signals. In 2002, in the midst of the height of corporate political activism, they were like, “No politics at work. We’re not doing it anymore.” They personally had beliefs that were just counterintuitive with this. Not even company beliefs. It’s just things that were divisive and that weren’t inclusive and then this was. They would rather shut down the company.
When they made this decision, the world came after them. Everyone told them they’d be on the wrong side of history. They lost a ton of people. It was a little dicey for a few months. Three years later, record profits, record happiness and tons of job applications. The rest of the people who dabbled in this performatively or otherwise are struggling, or companies that went all in.
It cements for me that it’s not. Now, everyone’s calling them who told them they’d be on the wrong side of history saying, “You were right.” They have a ton of credit because they did it when no one else was doing it. It’s easy to say that now activism at work is a bad idea when we’re in a different place. At the time, that was a dangerous thing to say.
The thing about it is, it is tempting to convince yourself that those decisions are they’re all so wrong in the short term. There’s a way to convince yourself that if so many other people are against it then maybe it is the wrong thing to do.
Am I thinking incorrectly?
I remember the old bumper sticker for George Wallace many years ago when I was young. It said, “Vote for George Wallace. Ten million Americans can’t be wrong,” because he had gotten ten million Americans. There was another bumper sticker that came out and said, “Eat feces. Ten million flies can’t be wrong.”
How do you turn out that noise to say, “Maybe I should listen and evolve my viewpoint.” Versus maybe there is a mob mentality going on and I should hold firm because this will pass. It can look similar at the moment.
It can and it can feel generational because I’m older and I’m the CEO of a company. The reality is sometimes, my views reflect my age, my experience and all that. I will feel strongly a certain way. I agonize over some of those because I don’t want to be pushing something just because it’s something I’ve always felt.
I want to be open-minded enough to consider it, but I get to a point where my intuition says, “This is my value and this is what I’ve got to go.” It may not be aligned with everyone else’s, but I’m going to have to go to my grave with the decision I make. I know that if I’m aligned with my values, even if it doesn’t work out. I’ll be more comfortable than if I did something that I didn’t.
Empowering Subordinates: Executing the Order You Should Have Given
Again, that comes first, probably long-term. Maybe sometimes not in the short-term. Things are dynamic. They’re fast. My favorite quote I’ve ever heard from you and I like to talk about it because it describes an evolution in the leadership of the military. It also describes an evolution that we need to see in leadership of different organizations.Someone did not believe you said that. I told them that and it was like, “No way. He said that?” If you get into a situation, the order I gave you doesn’t make sense. Execute the order I should have given you. I had literally someone say, “There’s no way he said that.” I’m like, “He did. I promise you.”
That’s right, because if you think about it, conditions are always different. You spread geographically, different layers and different conditions, but all of that is built on the idea that I have clearly communicated to the team. What are we trying to do? What problem are we trying to address here? If there’s a better way to do it, if what we told you to do isn’t going to get it done, we’ll get it done. If you want to come back and say, “We are solving the wrong problem or we are on the wrong side.” That’s a discussion we ought to have, but you figure out how to skin the cat because you’re the one closest to it.
If you guys go take the village in the middle of the night because everyone will be there. Suddenly, there’s a thousand civilians that are there that you didn’t expect. You don’t want someone to be like, “That was the order.” That requires, as you said, understanding your values, the intent and the strategy so that you can make a better decision in the moment.
It requires leaders to be more thoughtful and how they communicate their intent and their strategy. When I took over in Afghanistan, one of the things I wanted to do was reduce civilian casualties. Rather than just giving an order that said, “Here’s what you can and can’t do.” I wrote a two-page memorandum myself that says, “Here’s what we’re trying to do and here’s why.” I had a lawyer to help me write the second part which was this specific instructions and whatnot. I thought it was very important to let people into why we are doing this and when all else fails, try to align with this intent.
The Disinformation Age: AI, Fakes, And Maintaining Trust In Leadership
The why is important. As you said, it requires a lot more communication so that everyone understands what the goal is and the dynamics will change and the tactics need to change, but you’re still trying to meet that original objective. The last time you were on, we talked a bit about propaganda and this was before AI. It’s gotten a lot more complicated in the last few years. I would also argue that some of our largest news outlets are very susceptible to people who would share stories and things that are meant to destabilize some of our systems.
How bad is it getting in this moment of AI? What can leaders do to maintain trust when disinformation spreads so quickly? There’s a real incentive problem. As we’re doing this, there has been a picture circulating from Gaza the last few days of a severely malnourished boy on the cover of everything, snippets and this horrible and otherwise. They cut his brother and sister out who are totally fine. He has a health problem. Not that there wasn’t bad.
You just can’t take these things back. It seems like people have learned that the lie travels faster than the truth. The truth comes after and no one cares. It’s amazing to me how many major outlets ran with this without any context or fact checking on it. What does this mean for leadership with this speed and ability to create fakes that no one can tell the difference?
It’s on several levels. First is, media outlets, to include individuals, have found that being more extreme and being more hyperbolic is more successful in getting likes or supporters.
They have the same problem as teenage kids.
Even major cable news and things like that are incentivized to make things more intense as it just draws people. That’s one. I don’t think that’s all evil and intent. It’s just reacting to what they see the market is.
It’s an incentive.
The next level, however, is evil in intent, I would say. That is you are trying to influence people and Adolf Hitler reminded us of a simple message repeated over and over again like an axe hitting a tree. Over time, it just starts to weaken the tree. Even a dull, not very believable message, if you say it enough time gets some residents. Now we enter the age of AI where you can make things extraordinarily timely, extraordinarily believable. You can provide context around something that requires people to be highly skeptical to try not to accept it.
It’s become almost an art and we are all vulnerable to it. Every one of us. The problem with timing is, we’ve all talked about the case some years ago when there was an internet story that President Obama had gotten injured. Suddenly, the market went down and it came right back up. Manipulating the market, elections and public opinion around a single issue, particularly something like a war is very powerful. That power of stimulating the populace then stimulates political decision makers who make big decisions.
Manipulating markets, elections, and public opinion around a single issue, particularly war, is powerful. This stimulation of the populace then stimulates political decision-makers to make big decisions.
If you think about the decision to do something, and we use the US bombing of Iran, the nuclear. On one level, there was a rationale and a decision making whether or not to do it and that’s fine. We always should have that. On the other, it was very publicly played out. The deliberations may have been behind closed doors but all the public knows what Israel has done. They know the situation. It creates this drum beat of, you got to do something. You could argue that it made the decision flexibility for the decision makers pretty narrow. There was just so much pressure to throw red meat to the people who had an opinion about it that maybe drives big decisions like that.
For leaders, if they’re faced with an untruth, do you have to address it once and convincingly, do you have to keep addressing it? It seems hard. Again, with the incentive. The one thing you said, I agree with everything. It’s a speed too. It’s fast. Be fast. Get the first news out. I’m watching how this company Astronomer is responding to the Coldplay thing. It’s just interesting. It’s hard from leadership when you’re starting from a deficit.
I even remember trying to figure out how to handle it. We do anonymous questions in the company and some of those questions would state a false premise like, how come the last twenty people have left for this reason? It’s like, that’s not true at all. Am I defensive if I attack that or otherwise? It just feels like a lot of leaders are having to start from the defensive with some of the misinformation. It’s a hard position to start from.
Truth be known, I don’t know the right answer. We go back 30 years, there was the war room created in political campaigns and the commonly held belief was you had to respond to all attacks or charges as quickly as you could punch back. They’re still a school of thought that says you have to punch back and punch back harder immediately. There’s another that says that if you explain its weakness, what you’ve got to do is deny everything, make counter accusations. That can eat up all the energy in an organization. You can spend all your time fighting that as opposed to solving problems.
AI’s Ethical Frontier: Influencing Battlefield And Strategic Decisions
It’s too easy and too cheap to create false narratives. Beyond that, what are the ethical challenges that you see as AI begins influencing even battlefield and strategic decisions?
The first one is going to be the AI is going to offer you an option, a course of action, a decision and you are not going to know how the AI reached it. You are not going to be able to open up the machine and see everything that it considers. You’re going to have to make a decision, do I accept that or do I do a parallel old school way? Which you won’t have time. You’ll be in that position. Decision makers will be forced in many cases to accept it and then they are going to look and say, “That’s what AI told me to do.”
By the way, this is all over the place. The more you rely, and they’ve shown this. There’s some study of people who use GPT all day. The neurons in their brain after four months like your own critical decision making decline if you just rely on an external device.
Why wouldn’t they? The next one is going to come with, when it starts to make predictions, not of what happened but what is going to happen. Think of a pandemic. If you want to get ahead of a pandemic, you have to make decisions before it’s apparent in the population because the exponential growth of a pandemic spreads. If you wait until it’s obviously out there and people can see people in their neighborhoods dying, that’s too late.
Decision makers have always hated this, because they’ve got to spend money, do social distancing or quarantine before people have yet accepted that there’s a problem. The question is, if you know that something’s going to happen, our decision maker is going to be put on a much more difficult decision space because they’ve got to decide. What are you going to do about that? That’s going to apply for things like World War II. Are you going to do a preemptive strike if you have a high probability that the enemy is going to do X?
Those are harder to do than people think because preemptive strike carries a lot of negative connotations. There’s a moral part there as well and the moral part of we talk about employment. We’re going to have machines doing and making decisions that we used to give to people. We’re just going to decide if we think that that’s okay.
I can’t remember the name of the book, but there was a dystopian book around a society that would arrest people or the movie before they committed crime because of some predictive analytics. There’s some countries that are pretty close to this with their police force. It’s amazing how these science fiction books are coming true.
When you hire Robert Glazer or Stan McChrystal, if you know that they have a medical condition that five years later is going to cost your company a bunch of health care money. The answer is, we say, “We wouldn’t let that be a factor but that would certainly be a temptation.
Character Over Legacy: A National Conversation On Integrity
For sure. The more data and the less privacy. They’re not likely to use that data once it becomes available to them. Let’s talk about the book, Leaders: Myth and Reality and Risk. It’s interesting. Did you model this book after Plutarch’s lives? Is that what it’s called?
That’s not my most new book. That was modeled on Plutarch. My most recent book is on character. It is a set of reflections or essays that are spread around just a number of subjects. It explores what character is and it gives no prescription for what people should think about character. I am advocating that they should think about character. Basically, what I’m trying to do is force a national conversation on character in our society because we’ve let it erode. We’ve normalized a lack of character. We accept that now and we do that at our peril.
I have so many thoughts on this and questions. The main one I want to ask you about because my viewpoint has evolved a little bit on this notion of ends versus means. It ties directly to this conversation of character and you started to go to this. Again, without being political. We know that Trump creates a lot of animus and this Trump derangement syndrome that people call it is a real thing. I have never been someone who says, “The ends justify the means.” I’m not comfortable with that, but there’s a separate argument and there are some people who don’t like his character, which is understandable. Which could never say that he’s made the right decision.
We have this whole other school that says if you had good intent, it doesn’t matter if the outcomes are horrible, particularly in the political realm. I’m struggling with this because I’m someone who believes in character, but what if you have a leader with a lot of character who’s just always wrong? I saw you talked about this. The character is how you do things, but how much of being right is important in the conversation around leadership?
The Dichotomy Of Leadership: Character Vs. Effectiveness
This is very complicated, so I’ll unpack my thinking a little bit. Go back to Jimmy Carter. He was accepted as a failed president. He had a tough period in the late ‘70s. It was going to be hard to be real effective, but people think that his presidency was largely a failure. Yet when he died, they celebrated his character as probably as good as we’ve had in a president ever. You have the dichotomy you described.
The other side of the coin, if you have a person who’s viewed as devoid of character, is Vito Corleone, the Godfather. Here’s a person who we would like them living next door to us because there’s not going to be a lot of street crime. If there is, his guys will take care of it. At the same time, what that person brings is an erosion of the basic values of society. It undermines the basic rule of law.
In our country, there are two levels of emotion and arguments. The first is much smaller and that’s over policies, what do we think about our economic policies, immigration policies, and all. There’s always been an argument over those and they’re always should be in a democracy. People should be resting over theirs and certainly, we’re all going to have opinions on most of them if we’re informed enough to do that.
There is another side of the coin on character and that’s a character of leaders. To your point, if we say that the policies matter a lot and the character doesn’t matter as much because they’re getting the right policies. My position is we are probably not paying enough attention to the corrosive effect of the character. I would bring out for example the signal gate that happened a few months ago. A number of our political appointees discussed an upcoming military operation on an unsecured platform. It has a level of security.
It’s just not okay.
They made a mistake putting Jeff Goldberg on there, but okay. It was a mistake. I think we can live with a mistake. They came out the next day and they looked at cameras. They spoke to you and I and said the information was not classified. They know that that was untrue. They knew that they were lying and they expected us to accept it because the strike could go on okay and so, what’s the problem?
I would argue that the corrosive effect of leaders being able to lie to the American people and asking us to accept it because we have a mandate in the last election to do certain things. That’s one example. We’ve accelerated an erosion of character that is going to be far more important than any political policy decisions. Tariffs will go up and down and all that stuff goes left and right. That’s fine, but when we erode our character, when we normalize behaviors and lack of integrity and remove military leaders for political reasons as opposed to. We are weakening the very foundation of the nation. That’s the one that can search me and that’s one we have to be laser focused on.
I agree with you 100%, but I’ll take an opposite position because I’m curious how it fits in this model. Into someone’s response, let’s say it doesn’t matter who it is. The leader that you don’t like and you think has horrible character makes a good decision or a good choice. Is your inability to say that or to twist it around, isn’t that compromising your own character? You could say, “I don’t like whatever, but I like the outcome. That has some Integrity to it.” Switching every story around to make it that the person I don’t like can’t be right.
This seems not as equally as bad as what you’re talking about, but it’s a parallel crisis where none of us can figure out upside down because I watched that too. I agree with that. I thought the thing would say, “This is not okay. We screwed up. We’re going to get down to the bottom of it and it won’t happen again.” Gaslighting, I agree. It just made it worse. You know that people would judge that differently because if it happened on a different team, they would have different answers. Sometimes, we have to admit that some of the people we don’t like get it right and I don’t even mean in politics but in leadership or otherwise. Some of the people we like get it wrong. In both of those things, I just can’t find anyone willing to say.
It’s part of the erosion of character because if you criticize everything that somebody does and yet you think some of it was right. You’re not being entirely honest. There is this dynamic we’ve created that if somebody says anything good about the opposition, that’s something that they can be criticized for. To me, denying reality. If a political leader says that they inherited an economy that was a disaster and so and so. That just wasn’t the case. That’s a problem.
Similarly, as people do now and they say, “Everything’s all screwed up because of X, Y, and Z,” when they don’t think that. Where are we? Where does integrity lie? It gets to your ends justifies the means. It starts to say, “If I’m against that person or that group, anything I do is okay.” I don’t agree with that. In war, if you abandon your values, you become unworthy of winning. You shouldn’t be the side that wins.
The Erosion Of Character: Why Integrity Matters More Than Policy
Do you think people are confused these days even on values? Values mean you have to separate from the team. Why are people so scared about that? Maybe it’s digital tribalization but it feels like we’re living in old tribal times. Where if you spoke against the tribe, you are going to be excommunicated and die alone in the woods. That’s not the case. Maybe people still feel like that in some way.
I think it’s part of that. With the simplification of the message, there’s this desire to be part of something and to be aligned with something. Often if you see your group saying something, even if you feel differently. You go, “Wow.” It gets back to the ten million flies can’t be wrong. If they all think this, I should think that. Plus, I want to be accepted. This is when I see people who do things which are unethical. They want you to imagine their positions would be. An Evangelical Christian falls in behind leadership that doesn’t know the inside of a church if they stumble into it. That’s okay, but be honest about it.
I like those policies. Do you think they are living with a dissonance that is painful in this or in these decisions or are they not? Do they go to bed not feeling good about themselves each night or they somehow normalized this and it just becomes okay?
I think they break into a spectrum but it will simplify it into two groups. The people who just believe it completely. Maybe it’s through cognitive dissonance and they’ve just come to do it but they believe it. Many of the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, believed completely that they were doing something.
Saving the nation.
I think there was another group of people who didn’t believe that, but they believed that there was value for them, opportunity for them in aligning with that idea and that action. They do live with descendants. There are a number of previously thoughtful political leaders on both sides who got to go to bed at night rationalizing that says, “I don’t like this, but I’m doing it because I have to.” Some of them are going through a torturous logic chain to reach that, “I have to do this.” It’s pretty hard to defend.
It’s hard to look in the mirror. We have a whole bunch of definitions. One of the things about character is that it’s hard to define the contracts. You have one that includes conviction and discipline. It’s a formula. Can you talk about how you arrived at that formula and why discipline? It’s interesting. That’s probably not a first word that would come to a lot of people’s minds around character.
Discipline is maybe the key part, but I have it as a mathematical equation. I say that character ultimately is the measure of who we are. It’s reflected in what we do, not what we say. It is the product of your convictions, which I define as those deeply held beliefs or values that you’re willing to live to or die for. Not just the simple superficial things somebody said, “Accept it.” The other part of the equation is the discipline you have to live by them.
You can have all the highfalutin convictions in the world but if you don’t live to them, they are zero because anything times zero is zero. Most of us fail more on discipline than we do on convictions. Now, we have a different range of beliefs for sure. There were some common beliefs that we have respect for others, fairness, equality, and integrity. The lowest common denominator of those, most of us share those but then you look at the wide range of actions.
It’s because people will just not show the personal disciplines and sometimes a courage to live to those. It applies individually and it applies to society level too, at a national level. A nation can espouse good values, but not live to them. We go into corporations and look at the values of this company and yet, people in that company know that when it comes to the difference between making a buck or not making a buck, that those values get put on the back burner. It creates cynicism.
Leaders As Symptoms, Not Causes: Raising Standards Of Character
Back to what we were just saying. You shared that the leaders that were getting these days are the symptoms but not causes of the declining character. We’re getting who he deserves. I respect Seth Godin a ton. We had him on the show the same thing about organizations. Seth has a little bit of the narratives, some type of the evil company. Companies aren’t a thing. They’re a group of individuals who come together and people who execute lay-offs. Blaming the company takes it away from the people at the end of the day.
It’s the same with a country. The United States has no personality, except the cumulative personality of the people and what we decide it is.
The other thing you described is an interesting definition of characters, it’s a succession of choices. Why are some everyday decisions worth paying attention to more than others? You’ve talked about having this one meal a day routine. There’s a lot of specific things around the decision. We’ve got the making of the bed and book in the morning. Are there some things that just like they matter and they’re like anchors, the keystone habit concept?
People live to the level of standards and expectations in the unit. You very rarely have a unit that has mediocre standards.
It gets to the idea of habits, which you hit very well. I would call them standards or expectations. I spent much of my career in the US army rangers, which is an elite lighted unit. When I went to them, I wanted to go because I wanted to be among great men. I thought they’d be braver, stronger, taller and all of those things. I got there and they were just like everybody else in every other unit I’ve been in, except they held themselves to a higher standard. They had a set of higher expectations and they lived to it.
There was tremendous normative pressure in that organization to do that. When I got there and I saw this, it was extraordinary. I stayed there and ultimately commanded them, but I had this other unit. There was always some jealousy between units. This other commander came to me and he says, “I got Joe Blow. He came from the rangers. He’s in my unit now and he’s okay.” I responded, “That’s good.” He goes, “No, he’s just okay. He’s average.” I knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to make the point, “You guys are better because he came to me just average.”
I looked at him and I said, “That’s interesting because he was in the ranger, he was superb.” Which was true. People live to the level of standards and expectations in the unit. You very rarely have a unit that has mediocre standards. Even those of basic Integrity, where you have certain people who are just way above the line because everybody goes to the norm. The key is getting the norm up. It is raising the expectation that people are going to perform a certain way. This is my argument about character in our nation. We have started to accept this lowly norm. It’s okay to be a jerk because everybody else is.
Individual & Societal Character: The Power Of Standards And Habits
I’m sure the question everyone is thinking, they’re nodding along, “Yes, and this sucks.” What do we do? Clearly, we’ve gotten here through a succession of lowering of standards and it probably happened. It’s like the lion where it happens until you see the line. How do we turn it around?
It’s like the person who’s got to wait for a problem and says, “You’ve got to save me from myself.” Sell less snack food or whatever is going to help them. I say it doesn’t work that way. I use an example in the book of people who go to collect their checked bag after a flight and they go to the carousel. They jam up right next to the carousel shoulder to shoulder, usually too deep. Nobody else can see through them because they think that if they get close to the carousel, they get their bag first.
The reality is, if they all just stepped back 3 or 4 feet, everybody could see it. It would be orderly, but why don’t we do that? We don’t do it because we think that we’re going to be anonymous to all these people. We’ll never see them after this incident from the flight. We’re tired and we want our bag. We’ve allowed ourselves to be a jerk for a period of time because what’s it matter? It’s just luggage. It starts with individuals. It starts with each of us looking in the mirror and going, “Are we that guy or what guy do we want to be?”
Everyone has a metric that says, “What standard do I want to hold myself to?” Which means you got to think about it. You got to sit down and think about, what person do I want to be? That takes some energy and it requires you then to say, “I’ve decided I’m going to make my bed every morning. I’m going to do certain things.” You establish a standard and then a set of habits that help you get to that.
On the societal level, it’s exploded except we now have peer pressure. We now have society. Nobody should be able to run for office when they’re on the campaign trail. People can go, “Robert, you lied. Let me show you where you lied on this.” They ought to be crushed when that happens. Unless they can come back and make an argument that says, “I’ve been redeemed,” because I do believe in redemption. If they can’t, if they go, “I didn’t lie.”
Nobody should be able to run for office when they’re on the campaign trail.
That would be discrediting at some point. Interesting, because there’s a part of the book and it’s funny. I agree with this deeply. I’m not saying it’s funny, but you have this concept of character over legacy. Who am I? How will I be measured when I die? The concept of legacy has become a little narcissistic in terms of people trying to think about how I produce and manufacture my legacy. The best quote on legacy I ever heard and I’m probably going to butcher it.
It was like, “You don’t get to decide to live your legacy. You live your life how you live your life and other people decide it.” That’s aligned with what you were saying there, which is like stop thinking about what your legacy will be. Think about who you are in your character and what other people say about you. Ultimately, that’s your legacy. I find that this legacy thing has become very narcissistic.
I couldn’t agree more. Think about it. As Marcus Aurelius taught us, “The people who remember you are going to die also.” The reality is, you likely will be forgotten completely or it will be brought down, simplified and corrupted to what’s on Wikipedia about you 200 years from now. It will bear no resemblance to you, so don’t worry about it. Do worry about what you know you were to other people. What you know you were to society and then be satisfied.
The Power Of Reflection: Cultivating Character Through Self-Examination
Taking a full circle. I know the book even came about because of these nightly reflections and talking about them with your wife and clarity or blind spots. Talk about that process and then maybe how that process could help other people for a lot of what we’re talking about here. We’re in this world at speed. We don’t reflect a lot. You come from an environment in which reflection was an important part of the job. A lot of other people just keep moving forward. Talk about how the book came about from that and why more people could use some aspect of this reflection in their lives.
At first, I’d say even writing a book on character and titling it that way is a bit presumptuous. It almost presumes that I know what character is and I’m going to give you the right answer and you should listen to me, but that’s not the way it started. It started with this series of explorations that I’ve been on mostly in the last fifteen years of my life since I left the military. I thought about it before, but since I left the military, I focused much more. I’ve gone back to philosophy and whatnot. I make the point in the book again that I have not found the answers. What I do think is I found a series of pretty good questions.
If everyone were to approach those questions and force themselves to think and decide what their answer is. You’ll start to push yourself toward what you want your character to be. As I wrote these into a series of essays, most of them about 1,000 words long. I found that when I started writing about the ends justify the means. I had a very short feeling of what I thought about it. When I had to write it, I had to make an argument that convinced me.
What I thought about it was much more nuanced than that first response would have been. We all need that. We need to have the dialectic of opposing our thoughts, having them contested maybe just by ourselves or maybe by others but that’s the only way we can get to what we believe about character and what we will tend to do about it.
Writing is unbelievably clarifying and probably the problem with writing a hundred characters or something like that is, you’re not having to justify enough with yourself or this argument doesn’t make sense. This is where I find myself using ChatGPT more as a tutor. I’m like, “What’s a case study that supports this or what’s an argument against us?” As I try to sharpen my own thinking about it, which is like if you had a teacher or a tutor there.
We’re losing the longer form of writing. You’re trying to get it right on the first take on the video. It doesn’t have that depth as the writing process does. That’s probably the number one thing we could do to improve critical thinking. It’s to just have to write more and even in a journal. I always say when you talk about accountability, there’s three levels of accountability. They’re self, peer and then public. A journalist writes his personal accountability in terms of, “I’ve been writing this five weeks in a row that I need to call my son and I haven’t done it, so I’m just going to do it.” We are probably experiencing a reflection recession in our world.
We love brevity. We want to do YouTube videos that are 30 seconds long. That’s how long people watch. I have a recommendation for presidential debates in which I said, “There should be a whiteboard for each candidate and the first question should be, “Describe your character and support it with examples. Convinced us what your character is. You have ten minutes.” The other candidate can’t say a word. In fact, I probably have been to a sound proof booth because a lot of people couldn’t talk for ten minutes about their character. They could never make that argument, but they could on a tweet. “I have good character.”
Do you know what AI would be good for? Everyone’s so accused of it. It would be excellent at this if not soon. Whether you’re answering the question or not, it should go red if you’re not answering the question and cut off your mic. This is what good politicians need to do. I’m going to come to this debate with five answers and I’m just not even going to answer the question. I think AI would be good at that because it’s always accused of who’s hosting it or otherwise. Let’s fact check this in real time and let’s give them a score on the screen of your answering the question or not. That would be fascinating.
As you say, fact check it. Is what you’re saying true?
If you fact check it with AI, at least if the models are not bias. You can make an argument again that the person didn’t have any motive on it. I agree, technology can improve these debates. I would love to see a real-time score like this is truthful and this is related to the question being asked. Maybe that would help. Who knows?
There are some technologies now. I was working with a company that can use just video and tell whether the speaker believes what they are saying. You let AI make that even better and suddenly, you get to the point where it’s harder and harder to lie. I don’t think that would be bad for our system.
That would be good. Last question for you. I like to keep you on time. I figured this would be good related to the book. What’s a conviction you found most tested in recent years? How did your discipline help you meet that challenge?
The conviction is probably your courage to do the right thing when there’s a cost involved. Sometimes, that means whether you’re good to fire someone and part of your heart wants to do it. Not do it, but part of you says the organization has to happen. It’s making those tough decisions that are going to be unpopular maybe forever but you know you should make that decision and we rationalize ways to avoid it. That’s the one that I found the most.
General McChrystal, congrats on the new book, tackling an important subject at a precarious time for character. Thank you for joining us again. It’s always an honor to learn about your leadership experience and your insights.
My pleasure. Take care.
You can learn more about General McChrystal, his books, including his new one and the McChrystal Group on the episode page at RobertGlazer.com. If you like this episode or the show in general, I’d appreciate it if you could leave us a review as that’s what helps new users discover the show. Thanks again for your support. Until next time. Keep elevating.
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