♪ ♪ >> business news from the capital region, this is "washington business report." with rebecca cooper. rebecca: thank you for joining us for a special summer series featuring our best and beers and stories from the past season. -- our best interviews and stories from the past season. the four-star general telling us how to use teamwork for success. how much do you get paid? can you imagine talking about that at a cocktail party? why not? we will talk about salary transparency. it should t be surprising just how much a general can teach about working we as a team to bring business success. the importance of teamwork and understanding culture, bonding among commanders and

perseverance can help you survive. the same goes for the business world. in his latest book, stanley mcchrystal shows how his work in iraq and afghanistan can translate to the ranks of any business. welcomto washington business report. your effort to teach the business wororld the strategies you use to be successful in e military world. what does it mea >> we grow up inin a world where we talk about team. alof us have been on some kind of a team. a really've been on good when you can finish each other's sentences and d things happen organically. as organanizations scale, , youn into the limits. beyond 100 people, you cannot have a team in a small team sense, you cannot know everybody, you cannot have the same culture. creatateale, , you u have t

a series of teams and connect them in ways that most organizations find difficult. it is a can threlationship between iividuals - -- create the same chemistry and same affective connection between the small tms that totogetherer fora big team. rebecca: you are doing a lot of teaching in the business world and yoyond. you talk about differerent teams that have been successful. , andottom line for you is skill, efficiency canan be the fastest way to get something done but you make the argument agaiand again or adaptability. let's take your own expeence. you came into iraq, they were doing 80 raids a day, you quicickly got it up to 300. take us through the process where you were able to use -- >> think of a military, it's

designed to as effective as you can be. you create big armies and young men with guns, you have to have some kinind of ability. you have to have a chain of command. debebi predictability. that gives you orderliness but makes you somewhat slower. generations. for in today's environment where information moves so quickly and things are so interconnected, we found our enemy was this constatantly moving network of brazilian agility. resilient agility. ouour organization was way too slow, was not noble enough, cod t run fast enough and could not execute fast enough. -- nimble eugh. we tried to use modern

technologyo o spd up our legacy processes. we fouound that does not work. the basic reality i is, if infoformation has to start at te lower level l and find its way p to the sea sc suite and directin goes down, even if it was brilliant when it was though at, it is wrong because the situation is already different. we have a cuculture of planning. you do hugely detailed plans to try to work to a problem -- three problem. one thing we are sure we are not going to execute is by planning. we know the situation is going to change the moment you begin the operation. if you are just creating this very efficient plan that is somewhwhat inflexible, youre going to be disappointed. ,ewe've built in a small t team

this organic adaptability. they go into the problem knowing it's going to be a constantly shifting situation. what they have to do becomes different. as organizations get big and they want to wire down processes and control things so theyre most efficient, it can stifle adaptability. organizations find they have an everncreasasing climate to be adaptable but their prices i is get handcuffed -- processes get handcuffed. >> you talk about the pentagon being a symbolor all -- it's a model of efficiency where everyone can go and get to another quickly. yet, you say now it does not matter how quickly you can walk across the building, the doors are locked, the information is contained, peopople are working individually or in small teams, there is none of that sharing that is essential.

teach any corporation to get over that idea that they need to hold ontonformationn a need to know basis? > there's this idea that we will only give people who knows who needs to know? people can have requiremen or have information you don't know about. if you have no idea it exists, how do you know? rebecca: i respond better if i if you tell me what the overall goals are and you let me in on the company secrets, i will feel more le a partf the team andant to contribute. -- you can't thing have eryone worrying about eryone else's job. how do you break down the mindset of people who say it's not going to work? ilitary an example of a

leader you had to ad teach how to approach the battlefield. we were first operarating in iraq, we were doing special operations raids against individual leaders. we would identify someone and they would be in a town or neighborhood somewhere and we would go in and the coronation we did with the local forces, u.s. conventional forces come intelligence and whatnot would be pretty limite coming,them that we are stay out of the way and we go and we mig capture, might kill the individual. might have a firefight in the area and come out and we had done our job, we had checked the box, we were succeful. we might have left the situatitn far worse. the people in the neighborhood were now against the uniteted states. in a vacuum identified our mission, our requiment, we did not take the larger view of the fight. -- if youe working don't have shared consciousness

this contextual understanding of the larger whole, what you do can appear to make sense. you can't tell everyone beforehand, but you can get we ststartedense -- bringing liaisons in tour headquarters. -- into our headquarters. we started sharing everything. rebecca: more battlefield lessons from stanley mcchrystal. we wilill ask him rapidfire questions. stay with us.

rebecca: welcome back to the send half of our interviewew with general mcchrystal:.

he shares his storory of what is possible and necessary to fail without being a failure. let's talk about some of the thgs you teach about leadership. one of your lessons on leadersh is you say leaders can let you fail and yet not let you believe that you were failure. you learned that early on when you were a young sdieryou were in training and there were some things he were not good at. you had a commamander who built you back up again. that suck me becauause the cicivilian side sees the militay as the commander beating you down and making sure you do feel like a failure to build the back up again. talk about that expernce. general mcchstal: it's not uncommon in the military, but my personal eerience was i was a company commander with 120 soldiers.

we were doing a big training exercise in california. we had done and on attack where you prepare all night and then at dawn you cross the line of dedeparte. ,ithin 10 minutes of crossing soon as we got here the enemy, my company was wiped out. it was my fault. i felt terrible. they showed that the controller showed what had happened and i walked out of that humiliated and i felt like i let my boss down. i went to him to say mea culpa. he could be a hard guy. he goes, i thought you did great. he knew i did not do great. , you are point was going to fail. all of us are going to fail. we feel a lot more than we are willing to admit to ourselves.

we know it and people know it. the ability to allow people to fail and learn from it and to allow people to fail and just be resilient from it -- if all of us go home and sobbed quietly to ourselves every time we fail, we won't get anything done. rebecca: you are being taken to england and harvard business schohool is having you teach. mba in ary to get our few short minutes. let me ask you a few quick idea prioritizing time. general mcchryst: they need to list their priorities and track their calendar use. when you looook at what you have spent your time on afterwards, you find thapop-ups occur. you have to then delelegate down to allow you to actually spend time on what you say is important. rebecca: picking people who

truly believe in the mission versus focus on themselves. general mcchrystal: people have to be commitd to the success of the overall team. if somebodody y is worried about their batting avererage and not the score, you have a big problem. rebecca: leaders who now have eo deal with people youounger than them who know more than them. inversion of expertise general mcchrystal: allow themselves t to commit to a reverse mentoring -- it makes you quesestion your relevancy. it works beautifully and the powers your younger people. they become more engaged when given that opportunity. rebecca: leaders are not good because they are right, they are good because they learn to trust. general mcchrystal: nowadays having the right answer -- the quiremenis changing. knowing you are smart enough to de with the complexity, enough to have the collective mind d of the entire organizion. you have to trust your organization to do that. rebecca: learning what you're

not goodt and being willing to admit it. what else are you not good at that you had to learn to admit to your team and adapt? general mcchrystal: i would make snapped decisions and sometimes people would bring me information and i would make an ascension or a decision, that is a danger. you have to protect against that. i cannot assess people well on the short -- some peoplele can o a five second read of someone. withhold judgment until quite a bit more engagement. rebecca: a ceo or business leer you admire right now. general mcchrystal: : brad smith at intuit. open minded he runs a company that is already really good, but would he es an idea that can t take them from you 95 between 96 -- two in 96, he grabs that. if somebody is doing well,

sometimes you don't want to rock th bt or show vulnerability. a company doing well thatays what got us here is not going to ep us on this path is pre-self-aware andnd i admire that. -- pretty self-aware. we have to get better to do better. rebecca: stanley mcchrystal teaching us all how to do better. thank you for joining us on "washington business report." when we return, how much you earn per year. salary transparency is a new trend. whatat is driving it?

rebecca: welcome back. it is called a lary transparencycy and is not only trending right now, but becoming corpore policy in some companies. talking about what you can earn and using that to your advaage. joining us now is mary to help us break the silence of a strategic way. lotsthis startegetting of attention, we talked about it on the show in terms of the number of different companies doing it. we could not get into the details of why it's a good idea and wh you need to be careful for. there are companies now who say this is the sound rate for this job, take it or leave it and everybody is going to know. mary: when i first heard about it, i thought that is crazy. the more i reseah it, the more i learn abouit, i think it has some real merit to it. rebecca: the federal government

has done it r years. i'm comfortable witht from that point of view. i don't mind other people knowing if everybody's numbers are out there. what i'm not comfortable with is that is the salary, take it or leave it. you have to haveiggle room. you may want to compensate someone more tha-- >> there's two different ways a company can do salary transparency. making transparent the range of salary. many consulting firms do this. a managing director will make from this nge to this range. they tell you what you have to do for each range. other compmpanies are taking t t and telling you here's exactly what people make. there's always going to be room thisiggle, bubut the key is keeps corporations from getting you -- giving you ask him out than blackount more

rebecca this amount. rebecca: we know the guys are stilmaking a lotot more. it's a good thing. what arere the w ways you can dt strategically? general mcrystal: it's much easier to do it small. alslso a better idea if you are just starting out. you want to give the reason why behind the salary. you have e two say here are the requirements for making this lary. you have to show people whatat they need to do to move ahead to the next salary. that's where the greatest gains can come. if you are clear, there's no favoritism or guessing. i know what i need to do. becca: corporations like to use things to their advantage. this is not just to help with the gender gap. this is helpful in terms of

-- it isnegotiations not carmax. there is room for nenegotiation. mary: if you are going to be transparent, you have to be market-based companies doing this wel their salaries are based on what the market goes. that can be ve helpful. the salaries can be a purple skillsl, someone whose are so out of the norm, so special that there is always going to be organizations that dodon't fit t into this. rebecca: which kind of companies? it's better to start small. are there types of ministries? -- industries? what you are paying people you want, that's goining to be a

problem. you have to give rationale for what everyone is making. many companies have to go adjust salaries. that can be a different conversation. companies with a lot of millennials shouldld do this. rebecca: they love transparency for everything. >> you know what everyone makes anyway. rebecca: there are websites already giving anonymous information for people who work athose companies saying here is what i'm making at my position. those websites are helpful to use if you are trying to determine wh the pay rges. >> whakeeps people at their companies is the culture. it's a great place to work. i see salary transparency as here to stay. rebecca: with any hesitations? >> it will be uncomfortable for some people -- keeping secrets is hard work. put it all out there.

thank you for teaching us here at "washington busines report." we will be right back.

rebecca: thank you for joining us for our best of the season summer series. there's all kinds of ways stay in touch with uhere at "washingngton business report." li us on facebook. llow us on ttter or you can watch all of her interviews on -- all of our interviews o wjla.com for our youtube channel. ththank you for joining us. we hope you have a great week.

[captionining performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] morris: this week on "government matters." >> extending this to the unclassified world is something new. morris: companies should pay close attention. >> they are stealing your credentials. morris: a sophisticated cyber attack compromised and unclassified system at the joint chiefs of staff. >>y friend has an alice in wonderland strategy. whenever there is a problem in the federal government, off with your head. morris: how will congress respond to thehe opium breach? overent matters" starts right now. >> this is "government matters." morris: to our viewers around the world on the american forces network and in the nation's capital, thanks for joining us. government is the engine that runs this city. that is why "government ma