Retired four-star General Stanley McChrystal, CEO and chairman of the McChrystal Group, discusses his new "MasterClass" on leadership. He shares how military principles can help business leaders build stronger, more effective teams.

Retired four-star General Stanley McChrystal, now CEO and chairman of the McChrystal Group, shared his perspectives on leadership, drawing on his military experience and current work advising major companies. He emphasized the need to address underlying causes in conflicts, such as those in the Middle East, and highlighted the importance of real leadership in achieving lasting solutions.

McChrystal discussed his Masterclass on leadership, where he teaches that effective leadership in both military and business settings involves empowering teams to make decisions quickly and close to the action. He stressed the value of training for chaos rather than calm and the necessity of distributing information and authority to enable rapid and effective responses to challenges.

Gen. McChrystal on leadership lessons from battlefield to boardroom

Our next guest is a retired four-star general, Stanley McChrystal. He is also the CEO and chairman of the McChrystal Group, which helps advise Fortune 500 companies. And in a new class on Masterclass, he explains how the skills gained on the battlefield create stronger, more effective leaders. And General Stanley McChrystal joins us now. Good to see you, sir. Welcome. Thanks for having me. So I want to first talk to you before we get into your Masterclass, but I would be remiss of us to not ask you about what is happening in the Middle East and this peace plan between Hamas and Israel. As someone who's dealt with terrorist groups in your career, what are your worries in the coming weeks, specifically as it relates to one of the conditions that President Trump had in his peace plan was that Hamas has to disarm, and they have not yet responded, or at least they have not confirmed that they would do that. I mean, can you even have that if Hamas is still armed? Yeah. Well, I'd start with, first, you have to stop the killing, and hopefully this did that, at least for a period. People can't think when there's a killing around them, and so you can't move forward. I think, second, you need to address the causes. Why does Hamas exist? Why do they have fertile ground to grow? And so I think that we've got to step back, and I think all the states in the region have a vested interest in this. They've got to figure out what is long-term viable for the people there, because as long as the causes – you know, we used to talk about terrorists, and we'd get mad at terrorists, but go back and say, why are they terrorists? There's usually something mobilizing their passions. You've got to address that. And that's what I think we've got to – now that we've got a respite, thankfully got the living hostages home, we've got the chance with clear heads, maybe we could step forward to a better future. So we will need real leadership in this moment. Talk to us about your masterclass and the similarities between leaders in the boardroom and in the battlefield. Yeah, thanks for asking. My class on masterclass really is the product of 25 years of focus on this. Back when I was still in the military and I was leading the counterterrorist forces, we entered this complex environment in which we had to lead differently. And we ended up calling it a team of teams because we had to get the various teams across the capabilities cooperating. And it sounds easy until you try to do it. We had all the different government agencies and parts of our counterterrorist force. I got out 15 years ago into the civilian world, and I ran into exactly the same problem. And so it's a complex environment, and what you need to do is create a dynamic where decisions get made closer to the point of action, which means we've got to leverage information technology not to micromanage, because right now we can watch our kids and ground kids if we want to using technology, but we've got to leverage it to push information down to empower younger, less experienced people to make decisions faster, more effectively, close to where the actual client or the challenge is. You know, in your class, you say you don't train for calm, you train for chaos. And I recall when I was still a young Army ROTC cadet at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and we did this exercise where there was a supposed sniper in the woods somewhere. And you know, some of the platoons, you know, the platoon leader would say, everybody down! And then the sniper would just pick everybody off. And I remember I was like, you know, Bravo team, bound, 50 meters, 2 o'clock, and we ran straight into the sniper. But I got a sat, because the cadre guy said to me, I got a satisfactory as opposed to an unsatisfactory, because the cadre guy said to me, well, at least you made a decision. Wasn't necessarily the right one, because you ran right straight into the sniper, but all those people who just got down were sitting ducks. How does that apply to how we think about making decisions in the boardroom? Well, absolutely. If you think about it, you have that sniper shoot in a business, a little crisis occurs. If you go up the chain of command, up six levels to the CEO, by the time you get there, you're giving them information. They only know what got up to them, and you're asking them to make the perfect decision. It's a lot better for the person close to the sniper to say, we've got to do something. We've got to do something now. But the key is you've got to empower them with information and context. You've got to let them leverage with other teammates so they can respond effectively. General Stanley McChrystal, thank you so much.

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Breakdown