Rich Diviney, author and Founder of The Attributes, was a Navy Seal for 21 years, where he was put in charge of assessment and selection for a specialized Seal team. He realized the team’s performance needed to be looked at differently and discovered it relies not on visible skills but on hidden attributes.
In this episode, hear Rich’s story of how he embarked on a mission to help organizations understand the qualities necessary to build high-performing teams. Rich guides those around him in recognizing the elemental qualities that drive who they are and how they show up, especially in high-pressure situations. Read below to learn how to unlock your potential using your inherent strengths and what it takes to perform optimally at all times.
Truth You Can Act On
1. Define Optimal Performance
Optimal performance is defined as whatever looks best at the moment. Sometimes our best is head down, nagging it out, and grinding. Optimal performance allows us to do a couple of things. First, it allows us to pat ourselves on the back when we are grinding, but also to do what I call proper energy management. It allows us to modulate our performance. That’s how I can do the very best I can at the moment, whatever that looks like, but keep on moving. These attributes allow us to perform. Whether or not it’s ugly, dirty, or pretty, it’s hard, right? I can’t tell you how many missions we went on overseas, where it was ugly, but we got the job done. We were doing the best we could at the moment. That’s the key for everybody to understand.
2. Understand Your Attributes
An attribute is really defined as a quality or trait that is inherent to our nature. They are the very elemental qualities that drive our behavior at an elemental level. I’m very interested in how we show up at our most raw, so I’m always like, “Okay, what’s our most raw, and who are we really?” I had the advantage of being in a community where we were often at our most raw. We knew exactly who we were, but most people don’t have the opportunity to understand what their real engine looks like. If we start to do the work, then we start to understand how and why we perform the way we do. But especially when things go south and chaos happens, it just allows us to perform better.
3. See Yourself Through Your Team’s Eyes
Being a leader and being in charge are different. Being in charge is a position and being a leader is a behavior. The bad news is we don’t get to self-designate or call ourselves leaders. That’s like calling ourselves good-looking or funny. Other people decide whether or not we are leaders by choosing to follow us because of the way we behave. Those behaviors stem from elemental attributes like empathy, authenticity, accountability, decisiveness, and selflessness. If we behave in those ways, people tend to look at us as people they want to follow. And then finally, the team ability attributes. Again, our other teammates decide and they decide based on the way we behave. And those attributes are integrity, conscientiousness, humility, and humor that allow for good teaming.
4. Attributes + Behavior + Values = Culture
Visualize a sphere. If I were to cut a section of the sphere out or even cut it in half, the sphere is our culture. But at the center of that sphere are attributes, because attributes drive behavior and performance. Behavior and performance drive us towards our values. So, all of this is connected. Attributes drive our performance towards our values, which is our north star. That’s where we want to head that process. Attributes plus behavior plus values equals your culture. It becomes extremely important for an organization and team to understand their values and exactly what attributes are required to live and behave according to those values. If that information is incongruent inside of an organization or team, you will have an incongruent culture, right?
5. Maximize Your Recovery Time
It’s really a recognition of what energy levels are required and aiming for that. There’s another energy level required to sprint up a hill in the morning. So, the idea is to do some diligence on what is required and start to understand what you need for this and look at your day and structure it. Part of that would be to maximize recovery time. Part of optimal performance is recovering on demand, which is really critical in both growth and proper energy management. There are so many tools out there that allow us to shift our physiology and begin recovering. I do this all the time. If I want to be at a certain level of performance or energy, I make sure that I’m recovering and doing something that allows me to do it at the level I want. There are so many things we can do to understand that different energy levels are required for different scenarios. So I think it’s that recognition that helps.
Book Recommendation:
- The Attributes: https://theattributes.com/buy/
Listen to the full episode: 195: Leading Optimal Performance with Rich Diviney
