“The best way to contend with problems, with issues, with adversity … is by taking action. The more you sit and the more you wait and the more time you spend with that adversity with the upper hand inside your head, the worse it’s going to get.”
Jocko Willink
In the book Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin share hard-hitting, Navy SEAL combat stories that translate into lessons for business and life. The difference in this book in leadership is it covers both failures and successes. As taste for the book – see this Ted Talk with Jocko:
What follows are my Kindle Highlights and related Key Lessons.
Extreme Ownership
Key Lesson: Leaders must take absolute ownership, not just of their responsibilities but everything that impacts their mission.
Quotes:
“Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.”
“Extreme Ownership is a principle that leaders are responsible for all aspects of their team, including failures and successes alike. They must claim ownership of everything that affects their mission.”
Leadership: The single most important factor
Key Lesson: Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails.
Quotes:
“For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win.”
“The single most important factor on the battlefield, and in any leadership scenario, is whether the leader is effective at leading the team to accomplish the mission.”
Admitting Failures
Key Lesson: Leaders must own their mistakes and failures to develop solutions and achieve success.
Quotes:
“The humility to admit and own mistakes and develop a plan to overcome them is essential to success. The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas.”
“Leaders must be willing to accept responsibility for failures, acknowledge them openly, and strive to develop strategies to mitigate future risks.”
Training and Mentoring
Key Lesson: Leaders must prioritize the training and mentoring of their team members, especially underperformers, to meet team standards.
Quotes:
“If an individual on the team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer, guiding them to meet the team standards. If the underperformer continually fails to meet standards, then a leader who exercises Extreme Ownership must be loyal to the team and the mission above any individual.”
“Leaders who exercise Extreme Ownership do not shy away from these hard decisions. They are loyal to the team and the mission above any individual member. If underperformers cannot improve, the leader must make the tough call to terminate them and hire others who can get the job done. It is all on the leader.”
No bad teams only bad leaders
Quotes:
When leaders who epitomize Extreme Ownership drive their teams to achieve a higher standard of performance, they must recognize that when it comes to standards, as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate. When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable—if there are no consequences—that poor performance becomes the new standard.
Believe
Quotes:
In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission. Even when others doubt and question the amount of risk, asking, “Is it worth it?” the leader must believe in the greater cause. If a leader does not believe, he or she will not take the risks required to overcome the inevitable challenges necessary to win. And they will not be able to convince others—especially the frontline troops who must execute the mission—to do so.
If you don’t understand or believe in the decisions coming down from your leadership, it is up to you to ask questions until you understand how and why those decisions are being made. Not knowing the why prohibits you from believing in the mission. When you are in a leadership position, that is a recipe for failure, and it is unacceptable. As a leader, you must believe.
Check the Ego
Quotes
Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism. It can even stifle someone’s sense of self-preservation. Often, the most difficult ego to deal with is your own. Everyone has an ego. Ego drives the most successful people in life—in the SEAL Teams, in the military, in the business world. They want to win, to be the best. That is good. But when ego clouds our judgment and prevents us from seeing the world as it is, then ego becomes destructive. When personal agendas become more important than the team and the overarching mission’s success, performance suffers and failure ensues. Many of the disruptive issues that arise within any team can be attributed directly to a problem with ego.
Cover and Move
Quotes
Cover and Move: it is the most fundamental tactic, perhaps the only tactic. Put simply, Cover and Move means teamwork. All elements within the greater team are crucial and must work together to accomplish the mission, mutually supporting one another for that singular purpose. Departments and groups within the team must break down silos, depend on each other and understand who depends on them. If they forsake this principle and operate independently or work against each other, the results can be catastrophic to the overall team’s performance.
Simple
Quotes
Combat, like anything in life, has inherent layers of complexities. Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster. Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise. Everyone that is part of the mission must know and understand his or her role in the mission and what to do in the event of likely contingencies. As a leader, it doesn’t matter how well you feel you have presented the information or communicated an order, plan, tactic, or strategy. If your team doesn’t get it, you have not kept things simple and you have failed. You must brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team understands.
Prioritise and Execute
Key Lesson: Leaders must act decisively amid uncertainty, making the best decisions with the available information.
Quotes
On the battlefield, countless problems compound in a snowball effect, every challenge complex in its own right, each demanding attention. But a leader must remain calm and make the best decisions possible. To do this, SEAL combat leaders utilize Prioritize and Execute. We verbalize this principle with this direction: “Relax, look around, make a call.”
Decentralized Command
Key Lesson: Leaders must empower junior leaders to make decisions to ensure effective team operation and mission success.
Quotes:
“The proper understanding and utilization of Decentralized Command takes time and effort to perfect. For any leader, placing full faith and trust in junior leaders with less experience and allowing them to manage their teams is a difficult thing to embrace. It requires tremendous trust and confidence in those frontline leaders, who must very clearly understand the strategic mission and ensure that their immediate tactical decisions ultimately contribute to accomplishing the overarching goals. Frontline leaders must also have trust and confidence in their senior leaders to know that they are empowered to make decisions and that their senior leaders will back them up.”
“Human beings are generally not capable of managing more than six to ten people, particularly when things go sideways and inevitable contingencies arise. No one senior leader can be expected to manage dozens of individuals, much less hundreds. Teams must be broken down into manageable elements of four to five operators, with a clearly designated leader. Those leaders must understand the overall mission, and the ultimate goal of that mission—the Commander’s Intent. Junior leaders must be empowered to make decisions on key tasks necessary to accomplish that mission in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Teams within teams are organized for maximum effectiveness for a particular mission, with leaders who have clearly delineated responsibilities. Every tactical-level team leader must understand not just what to do but why they are doing it. If frontline leaders do not understand why, they must ask their boss to clarify the why. This ties in very closely with Believe”
Plan
Quotes
What’s the mission? Planning begins with mission analysis. Leaders must identify clear directives for the team. Once they themselves understand the mission, they can impart this knowledge to their key leaders and frontline troops tasked with executing the mission. A broad and ambiguous mission results in lack of focus, ineffective execution, and mission creep. To prevent this, the mission must be carefully refined and simplified so that it is explicitly clear and specifically focused to achieve the greater strategic vision for which that mission is a part. The mission must explain the overall purpose and desired result, or “end state,” of the operation. The frontline troops tasked with executing the mission must understand the deeper purpose behind the mission. While a simple statement, the Commander’s Intent is actually the most important part of the brief. When understood by everyone involved in the execution of the plan, it guides each decision and action on the ground.
A leader’s checklist for planning should include the following:
Analyze the mission.
Understand higher headquarters’ mission, Commander’s Intent, and endstate (the goal).
Identify and state your own Commander’s Intent and endstate for the specific mission.
Identify personnel, assets, resources, and time available.
Decentralize the planning process.
Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible courses of action.
Determine a specific course of action.
Lean toward selecting the simplest course of action.
Focus efforts on the best course of action.
Empower key leaders to develop the plan for the selected course of action.
Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation.
Mitigate risks that can be controlled as much as possible.
Delegate portions of the plan and brief to key junior leaders.
Stand back and be the tactical genius.
Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure it still fits the situation.
Brief the plan to all participants and supporting assets.
Emphasize Commander’s Intent.
Ask questions and engage in discussion and interaction with the team to ensure they understand.
Conduct post-operational debrief after execution.
Analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning.
Leadership Communication
Key Lesson: Effective leadership requires clear, simple communication to ensure all team members understand their roles and the mission.
Quotes:
“Communication must be simple, clear, and concise so that everyone on the team understands their role and the mission. Complex orders can lead to confusion and failure.”
“Leaders must ensure that their communication is accessible and understandable at all levels, from the highest echelons down to the front line.”
Discipline equals freedom
Key Lesson: Discipline in personal and team routines can lead to greater freedom and effectiveness.
Quotes:
“Discipline starts every day when the first alarm clock goes off in the morning. The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day.”
“Although discipline demands control and asceticism, it actually results in freedom. When you have the discipline to get up early, you are rewarded with more free time.”
“While increased discipline most often results in more freedom, there are some teams that become so restricted by imposed discipline that they inhibit their leaders’ and teams’ ability to make decisions and think freely. If frontline leaders and troops executing the mission lack the ability to adapt, this becomes detrimental to the team’s performance. So the balance between discipline and freedom must be found and carefully maintained. In that, lies the dichotomy: discipline—strict order, regimen, and control—might appear to be the opposite of total freedom—the power to act, speak, or think without any restrictions. But, in fact, discipline is the pathway to freedom.”
Leadership Dichotomy
Key Lesson: Effective leadership involves balancing opposing qualities such as confidence and humility, control and empowerment.
Quotes:
“Leadership involves finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities, between one extreme and another.”
“Leaders must be humble but not passive; quiet but not silent. They must possess humility and the ability to control their ego and listen to others. They must admit mistakes and failures, take ownership of them, and figure out a way to prevent them from happening again. But a leader must be able to speak up when it matters. They must be able to stand up for the team and respectfully push back against a decision, order, or direction that could negatively impact overall mission success.”
“A leader must be close with subordinates but not too close. The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people—their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself. Leaders must never get so close that the team forgets who is in charge.”
The Dichotomy of Leadership A good leader must be:
confident but not cocky;
courageous but not foolhardy;
competitive but a gracious loser;
attentive to details but not obsessed by them;
strong but have endurance;
a leader and follower;
humble not passive;
aggressive not overbearing;
quiet not silent;
calm but not robotic, logical but not devoid of emotions;
close with the troops but not so close that one becomes more important than another or more important than the good of the team; not so close that they forget who is in charge.
able to execute Extreme Ownership, while exercising Decentralized Command
Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command
Key Lesson: Leaders must manage both subordinates and superiors effectively to maintain team cohesion and alignment with strategic goals. This involves communicating clearly and taking responsibility for the performance at all levels.
Quotes:
“Leading down the chain of command means taking responsibility for the performance and well-being of subordinate personnel. It also means ensuring that they understand how their roles contribute to the overall mission success. Leading up the chain of command involves a leader doing everything in their power to ensure their leaders are aware of the strategic situation, have all necessary information, and support the mission effectively.”
“If your boss isn’t making a decision in a timely manner or providing necessary support for you and your team, don’t blame the boss. First, blame yourself. Examine what you can do to better convey the critical information for decisions to be made and support allocated. Pushing situational awareness up the chain of command is a critical skill every leader should develop. This ensures that decisions and resource allocation are informed by the most accurate and current understanding of the ground realities, enabling better strategic alignment and mission success.”
