Rich Diviney
Most leadership models fail at the moment they are needed most: when the plan stops working, the team is tired, and the next decision has to be made without full information. Skills training assumes stable conditions. Selection processes filter for credentials that say nothing about who performs when uncertainty lands. The gap between hiring well and leading well under stress is where careers and quarters are lost.
Rich Diviney is a retired Navy SEAL commander and founder of The Attributes who helps organisations identify the innate traits that determine how individuals and teams perform under uncertainty.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Rich Diviney
- He brings a published, named framework, the 25 Attributes, drawn from designing and running selection for one of the most demanding assessment processes in the world. Senior teams leave with a vocabulary for talent decisions that does not collapse under pressure.
- He separates skills from attributes in a way that changes how boards and executive teams think about hiring, succession, and team composition. Skills tell you what someone has done; attributes tell you how they will behave when the script breaks.
- He has translated SEAL selection science into operating practice for Google, McKinsey, American Airlines, the San Francisco 49ers, McLaren, Adobe, Ernst & Young, Zoom, Bank of America, Lexus, and Deloitte. The frameworks have been stress-tested in commercial environments, not just military ones.
- His second book, Masters of Uncertainty (Amplify, 2025), gives leaders a method for performing through chaos rather than recovering from it. The argument moves the conversation from resilience as recovery to composure as a deliberate, trainable capability.
Biography highlights
- Retired Navy SEAL commander with more than 20 years of service and 13+ overseas deployments, 11 to Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Officer in charge of selection, assessment, and training for a specialized SEAL command.
- Led the creation of the SEALs’ “Mind Gym” for cognitive performance training in high-stress environments.
- Author of The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance (Random House, 2021), a bestselling book.
- Author of Masters of Uncertainty: The Navy SEAL Way to Turn Stress into Success for You and Your Team (Amplify Publishing, 2025).
- Featured in McKinsey’s “Author Talks” series; founder and CEO of The Attributes Inc.
Biography
Selection is where most organisations get talent decisions wrong. The candidates with the cleanest resumes wash out under stress; the ones who looked unremarkable on paper hold the team together when the plan falls apart. Rich Diviney spent the back half of his Navy career running the selection, assessment, and training pipeline for a specialized SEAL command, watching that pattern repeat at the top of one of the most demanding evaluation systems in the world.
The framework he built from that work is now in two books and a consulting practice. The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance (Random House, 2021) names the innate traits, things like adaptability, cunning, narcissism, courage, that predict performance when skills run out. Masters of Uncertainty (Amplify, 2025) extends the argument into a method for staying composed and decisive when conditions are chaotic. Both treat performance as something you can engineer in advance through how you select and develop people, not something you hope shows up on the day.
The substance has translated. Since leaving the Navy in 2017, Diviney has worked with Google, McKinsey, American Airlines, the San Francisco 49ers, McLaren, Adobe, Ernst & Young, Zoom, Bank of America, Lexus, and Deloitte. He was featured in McKinsey’s “Author Talks” series on the thesis that attributes, not skills, decide whether someone makes the cut. The pattern across his clients is consistent: they are organisations whose top teams operate at the edge of their capacity and need a sharper way to choose, build, and lead the people who get sent in first.
What makes him useful in a boardroom is not the SEAL biography. It is that he has a tested vocabulary for the part of leadership most frameworks gloss over: how human beings actually behave when certainty disappears.
Key speaking topics
- The Attributes framework for individual and team performance
- Selection, assessment, and team composition
- Performing under uncertainty and stress
- High-performing team dynamics
- Trust as an operating discipline
- Leadership in elite and high-pressure environments
Ideal for
- CEOs, COOs, and executive teams responsible for performance through volatile conditions.
- CHROs and talent leaders rethinking selection, succession, and team composition.
- Boards and senior leadership offsites focused on resilience, composure, and decision-making under pressure.
- High-stakes operating teams in financial services, professional services, sport, aviation, and defence-adjacent industries.
Audience outcomes
- A working distinction between skills and attributes that changes how leaders evaluate talent.
- A vocabulary of 25 named attributes leaders can use immediately in selection, succession, and team-building conversations.
- A method for staying composed and decisive in conditions where the plan has stopped working.
- A clearer view of what trust actually consists of inside a high-performing team, and how to build it deliberately.
- A reframe of resilience: from recovery after shock to performance through it.
Talks
A practical breakdown of what separates teams that perform under pressure from teams that only perform when conditions are stable.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between peak performance and optimal performance, and why most organisations train for the wrong one.
- Why traditional org charts under-describe how high-performing teams actually operate.
- How talent is cultivated, not just hired, inside elite teams.
A keynote drawn from Masters of Uncertainty (2025) on turning chaotic moments into operating advantage.
Key takeaways:
- The science-backed Mastering Uncertainty Method for performing through stress, not after it.
- The four domains of trust common to all high-performing teams.
- The traps that cause most teams using traditional leadership models to underperform under pressure.