Four-Star General: Leadership Tactics from Battlefields to Boardrooms | General Stanley McChrystal

Stanley McChrystal (0:01)

As a leader, what you learn first is the core of it is self-discipline. If you're not out there doing a lot and failing a good percentage of the time, it means we're not doing enough. And although people sometimes worry, if I don't have my hand on every chest piece that we're going to lose, I would argue if you have your hand on every chest piece, you will lose.

Michael Gervais (0:29)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade in training a high-performance psychologist, and I am absolutely thrilled and honored to welcome one of the United States' most accomplished and well-known military leaders, General Stanley McChrystal.

So what does leadership look like in the middle of a war zone, one of the most dynamic and agile and consequential environments on the planet? General McChrystal knows. He knows it intimately what it's like, and he has been committed to teaching his hard-earned leadership insights to others. And that's really what this conversation is about. Heading up the Joint Special Operations Command, he led the US military's most elite spec ops teams against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and from there was commissioned to command the war on terror in Afghanistan. While that mission in and of itself is treacherous, General Stanley McChrystal also crashed head on with a political controversy, one that led to the end of his military career. But it opened the door to teaching leadership at Yale University, authoring multiple best sellers, founding the McChrystal Group, his well-known management consulting company, and even being portrayed by none other than Brad Pitt in the movie War Machine.

So after 34 years of service, General McChrystal retired as a four-star general, the highest rank currently achievable in the US. Army. So how does a highly touted leader like him manage the stress and sometimes fear in some of the world's most elite operators and teams? As you'll hear today, General McChrystal calls it shared consciousness and empowered execution. These two principles, he says, are the groundwork for guiding any organization from the war room to the board room to successfully carrying out any mission in your life. And you may be surprised to find that his famously tough general's approach to leadership is less about barking orders on a battlefield and more about, believe it or not, gardening.

It's a fascinating discussion that we had. It's rich with gems and insights. And so with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with General Stanley McChrystal.

General McChrystal, Stan, I am so excited to have you in this conversation. And your bodywork is incredible. And I mean, hopefully what we're going to do is cover a lot of unlocks for our community because you've been at this for a long time. And you've got a deep discernment and real exercises that you've been through that allow the insights that you've experienced to be actionable and real. So I just want to start first by saying I'm honored to have the conversation with you and I just want to check in. Like, how are you doing?

Stanley McChrystal (3:23)

I'm doing really well, Mike. Thanks for asking. And I've been looking forward to this conversation.

Michael Gervais (3:27)

Oh, awesome. OK, so you've led in highly complex and volatile environments and you've also written about it more than most people ever will. So on leadership and management and on teams, on risk. And, you know, these are topics that are tier zero when it comes to military business and sport.

And those organizations that are constantly trying to understand and integrate these practices that you've come to understand in their teams. So we could start in so many different directions, but I thought we'd start in two of your foundational ideas, which is shared consciousness and empowered execution. Can you just set the stage for our community on those two concepts, shared consciousness and empowered execution?

Stanley McChrystal (4:16)

Yeah, Mike, you started right at the core of what I think is most important. So thanks for that.

Shared consciousness and empowered execution are very carefully chosen terms, and they were chosen after the fact. And what I mean is I lived a life in the military and a series of leadership experiences that I went through and reacted to and adapted with and then only studied afterward. And I studied them and I wrote them afterward. We actually coined the term shared consciousness and empowered execution sometime after when we actually experienced creating that. But I give you a background.

It really came from when I was commanding our counterterrorist forces called Joint Special Operations Command. That's the United States' most elite special operating forces focused at things like hostage rescue, precision raids, counter hijacking. So it's a demographic of very experienced professionals, all specially selected, exquisitely trained. The organization is lavishly resourced, and so very high standards of execution are expected of it. And I grew up in the organization most of my career, but then in the fall of 2003, it became its commanding general. And that intersected with a moment for that command when we were graduating from the first 22 years of our history where we had done some great things, but fairly narrow in scope and time, and we suddenly were faced with a new problem, and it happened to be in Iraq, and it was in the face of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was an emerging terrorist group led by a young Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. What it did was it presented a bigger, more complex, constantly changing challenge than we had ever faced before. It wasn't a discrete event, a hostage crisis that you get a solution to or a single target. It was a campaign that we waged for years against this constantly morphing and constantly growing threat.