Would You Hire the Best or the Most Trusted?

What Navy SEALs can teach us about building hospitality teams that actually work

As a person whose whole idea of becoming a better human and a leader came directly from the military — after reading Jocko Willink’s eye-opening book Extreme Ownership — I tend to be attracted by the military perspective on leadership. This is how I found Simon Sinek talking about how Navy SEALs pick their candidates to become a member of the elite SEAL Team Six. In this article, I translate their method into the hospitality realm.

Think about the best manager you’ve ever worked with. Chances are, they weren’t necessarily the most technically gifted person in the room. But you trusted them — with your problems, your ideas, maybe even your career. Now think about the worst one. Odds are, they delivered results, at least on paper. And yet, somehow, everything around them quietly fell apart.

The Concept: performance vs. trust

As Sinek discovered, the Navy SEALs select their candidates based on a deceptively simple two-axis matrix (Figure 1). The vertical axis measures performance — skills on the battlefield. The horizontal axis measures trust — who you are off the battlefield. As the SEALs put it themselves: “I may trust you with my life, but do I trust you with my money and my wife?”

The model produces four quadrants. Nobody wants the low-performer with low trust (that much is obvious, quadrant 1). Everyone wants the high-performer with high trust (quadrant 2). But here is where it gets genuinely surprising: when the SEALs were forced to choose between a high-performer with low trust (quadrant 3) and a moderate or even low performer with high trust (quadrant 4), they chose trust. Every time. And they labelled that high-performing, low-trust individual something memorable: toxic

Figure 1 Navy Seals method

Translation into hospitality

Now, you might be thinking: “that’s a warzone. We’re running a hotel, not a special operations mission.” Fair point. But let’s sit with that difference for a moment, because I’d argue the stakes in hospitality are higher than we like to admit.

Annual staff turnover in hotels hovers around 70–80% in many markets, and each departure costs an organisation an average of $5,864 per employee (ForUsAll, 2024). For a property with 500 team members, that is potentially over two million dollars walking out the door every year. The Cornell Center for Hospitality Research found that properties with above-average turnover suffer up to 12% lower guest satisfaction scores (HybridPayroll, 2025). That is not a minor operational inconvenience. That is an existential threat to reputation and revenue.

And what is driving that turnover? Research consistently points to one primary culprit: leadership. Specifically, the wrong kind of it. A bad relationship with a manager undermines performance, commitment, and morale in ways that wages and rosters cannot compensate for (Roosted HR, 2024). Peer-reviewed research on resort environments found that toxic personalities are a “well-recognised and pervasive” form of deviant behaviour in hospitality workplaces, with management often inadvertently enabling these individuals because their surface-level performance metrics make them difficult to remove (Schilpzand et al., 2016, as cited in Tandfonline, 2022).

Sound familiar? We have all seen this person. The head chef who runs a flawless kitchen and a miserable brigade. The front office manager who aces every mystery guest visit and leaves a trail of tearful exit interviews behind. The F&B director whose revenue numbers shine while his team quietly unravels. We promote them because the numbers are right. The SEALs would have rejected them because the person isn’t.

Sinek’s model limitations

I admire this framework enormously. But intellectual honesty requires us to interrogate it rather than simply applaud it.

First, the measurement problem. Sinek himself acknowledges that business has countless metrics for performance and almost none for trust (Medium, 2024). How do we actually measure trustworthiness at the hiring stage? Behavioural interviewing and reference checks help, but they are imperfect instruments. Hospitality hiring is often reactive — a body-in-the-role urgency that makes nuanced trust assessment feel like a luxury.

Second, the battlefield analogy has limits. SEAL teams are small, tightly bonded units operating under extreme conditions where interpersonal trust is literally life or death. A 400-room hotel operates across multiple departments, shifts, and hierarchies where the dynamics are far messier. A low-trust, high-performing individual in a siloed back-of-house role may cause less damage than the same person leading a front-desk team.

Third, and perhaps most importantly: Sinek’s talk is inspirational rather than empirical. It is a powerful anecdote, not a peer-reviewed study. The academic literature on leadership in hospitality does support the broad principle that authentic, trust-based leadership reduces turnover and improves outcomes (Gyensare et al., 2016; Laschinger & Fida, 2014, as cited in Walden University Dissertations, n.d.). However, the binary framing — trust versus performance — can mislead. The real goal is to build systems that identify and develop both, not to treat them as a zero-sum trade-off.

What This Means Practically

The SEALs’ insight that performance can be taught but trust must be earned is perhaps the most transferable lesson for our industry. When you are hiring for a supervisory role, ask not only “can this person run a shift?” but “would their team run through a wall for them?” Speak to their former peers, not just their former bosses. Pay attention to how they talk about colleagues who made mistakes.

Crucially, stop rewarding toxic performance. Research from EHL Hospitality Insights (2023) notes that toxic leaders are often retained precisely because their visible results make removal difficult to justify. This creates a vicious cycle: they attract others with manipulative tendencies, undermine those with genuine character, and the organisation slowly hollows out from within.

Finally, consider building your own two-axis framework into your performance reviews. Map your team members not just on KPIs, but on behavioural indicators of trust: consistency, transparency, how they handle conflict, how they support colleagues under pressure. It will feel awkward at first. It will also, over time, change who you promote.

Conclusion

Hospitality has a people problem — and it has had one for decades. But the most dangerous people in our organisations are not always the ones who show up late or forget to upsell. Sometimes, they are the ones hitting every target while quietly destroying the thing that makes great hospitality possible: the trust between human beings.

The SEALs figured that out on a battlefield. It’s time we figured it out in our lobbies, kitchens, and boardrooms.

References

ForUsAll. (2024). 4 employee retention strategies for the hospitality industry. https://www.forusall.com/401k-blog/employee-retention-strategies-hospitality-industry

HybridPayroll. (2025). Employee turnover in the hospitality industry: Why it happens & how to fix it. https://hybridpayroll.com/employee-turnover-in-hospitality-industry

Hospitalityinsights.ehl.edu. (2023). Why toxic workplaces struggle with employee turnover. EHL Hospitality Insights. https://hospitalityinsights.ehl.edu/toxic-workplaces-employee-turnover

Kanban Zone. (2021, April 22). Choose the right people for your team. https://kanbanzone.com/2021/performance-vs-trust-how-to-choose-the-right-people-for-your-team

Persiano, A. (2024, June 12). Performance vs trust, from the idea to the reality. Medium. https://appersiano.medium.com/performance-vs-trust-from-the-idea-to-the-reality-ba49b05d6f5f

Roosted HR. (2024). 8 reasons for hospitality staff turnover. https://www.roostedhr.com/blog/hospitality-jobs-have-some-of-the-highest-turnover-rates

Sinek, S. (n.d.). Performance vs. trust [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJdXjtSnZTI

Tandfonline. (2022). Exploring toxic personalities in resorts: A managerial perspective. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15332845.2022.2031608

Walden University Dissertations. (n.d.). Strategies hospitality leaders use to reduce employee turnover. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7370&context=dissertations

Willink, J., & Babin, L. (2015). Extreme ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs lead and win. St. Martin’s Press.

Would you hire the best — or the most trusted?

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