Countless teams throughout history owe their success to a great leader: someone to formulate a brilliant plan, make tough decisions, and inspire their team to achieve victory. How do you become a leader like this? According to Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, the one thing that sets apart the best leaders is “Extreme Ownership”—the willingness to accept responsibility for every flaw or failure related to your mission, no matter whose “fault” it is. Only when you quit blaming others and looking for excuses will you do everything within your power to achieve victory.
Willink and Babin are both former US Navy SEALs who trained SEAL leaders and led teams of their own as officers during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Upon returning to the United States, Willink and Babin founded Echelon Front: a consulting firm dedicated to training leaders in the corporate world. By advising high-level executives in a wide range of industries, Willink and Babin gained even more expertise in what it takes to be a leader.
However, Willink and Babin emphasize that Extreme Ownership isn’t just for military officers or business executives. You could use Extreme Ownership to successfully lead your family or even just discipline yourself. Anyone can take advantage of these principles to achieve their personal goals and improve their relationships.
Why “Extreme” Ownership?
In The Dichotomy of Leadership, Willink and Babin’s sequel to Extreme Ownership, the authors explain that some readers misunderstand the title “Extreme Ownership.” They assume that it means being an “extreme” leader—for example, forcing your team to be strictly disciplined about every minute detail or to perpetually maintain manic energy and momentum while accomplishing tasks. Willink and Babin assert that doing everything as “extremely” as possible is counterproductive.
Instead, Willink and Babin use the word “extreme” to convey that you should embrace more responsibility than is logical—for things no one would expect you to take responsibility for (like the actions of others). This core message is arguably the part of the book that’s most applicable to readers not in official leadership roles. Taking more responsibility than expected is a respectable move in virtually any context. The alternative, blaming other people, is rarely helpful—it impedes empathy, causes division, and often offends others.
For example, Willink has stated that Extreme Ownership is a powerful tool to maintain a healthy marriage. When both partners refuse to blame one another, they’re more likely to see themselves as a team and resolve conflicts without trying to “win.”
First, we’ll explore how Extreme Ownership leads a team to success: It enables rapid self-improvement and inspires those around you to take Extreme Ownership. Then, we’ll explain what Extreme Ownership looks like in action, discussing Willink and Babin’s specific rules for organizing a mission with the greatest chance of success.
To achieve greatness, you must be constantly on the lookout for ways your team can improve. According to Willink and Babin, Extreme Ownership is the best way to do so. By taking responsibility for your mistakes and the mistakes of your teammates, you’re choosing to see all mistakes as problems you need to solve, not as things to blame someone for. This empowers you to continuously improve yourself and your team.
Let’s explain this process in more detail: First, we’ll explain how taking ownership of others’ mistakes is necessary for improvement, then, how admitting to your own mistakes is necessary for improvement. Finally, we’ll clarify why taking ownership of your team’s failures doesn’t mean taking credit for its successes.
A great team is made up of great team members—every person on your team needs to operate at peak performance for the best chance of accomplishing your mission. As a leader taking Extreme Ownership, it’s your responsibility to make sure this happens: Maintain high standards by taking ownership of the mistakes of others. Whenever someone on your team does something wrong, ask what you can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again, rather than blaming others for the error.
Refusing to take responsibility for your team’s mistakes prevents you from improving yourself and improving the team. Why is this the case? When you blame someone else, you’re telling yourself that the only way the team can improve is for them to do better. You ignore all the things you could be doing to improve, thereby limiting your team’s potential. In reality, there’s always something you can do to prevent your team members’ mistakes.
For example, imagine you’re in charge of a bank and your unmotivated team of tellers is driving away customers with their bad attitudes. To improve, you need to take responsibility for the situation rather than just blaming your team for being surly. You might instate new incentives that reward your tellers for treating their customers well or fire the teller with the worst attitude who may be bringing down the others.
Willink and Babin note that it’s important to fix every mistake your team makes because it’s easy to let high standards slip. If a team member is doing a task poorly and you fail to correct them, that behavior becomes your team’s new standard for success. Be diligent about taking ownership of your teammates’ mistakes or your team will slide into mediocrity over time.
(Shortform note: In Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt refers to this process of gradually-lowering standards as “entropy” and argues that all teams and organizations eventually devolve into ineffective chaos unless they actively work to prevent it. This offers more mindful leaders like you a competitive advantage—rival organizations that have been dominant for a long time become more likely to collapse as time goes on, giving you an opportunity to surpass them if you maintain high standards.)
Even if Extreme Ownership Is Unrealistic, It’s Empowering
Willink and Babin argue that there’s always something you can do to prevent your team’s mistakes, but some would argue that this extreme statement is unrealistic. There have to be some situations where there’s truly nothing you could have done to prevent failure, right?
Certainly—but, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t practice Extreme Ownership. Entrepreneur Tom Bilyeu argues that even if a disaster was truly impossible to avoid, you should still believe you could have done something to prevent it. He uses an extreme example to illustrate this concept: Bilyeu states that, hypothetically, if his wife were killed by a crashing meteor while visiting her family—ostensibly, a freak accident no one could have predicted or averted—he would still blame himself for the tragedy. He claims that he could have reached out to astronomical observatories and worked with them to predict the meteor and avert the disaster.
You may argue that it would be ridiculous for anyone to spend time tracking meteors on the slim chance that one might fall undetected and hit their loved ones—if this really happened, everyone would agree there’s nothing Bilyeu could have done.
But the accuracy of this belief isn’t the point: In his website’s manifesto, Bilyeu clarifies that he chooses to believe anything that empowers him, even if it’s probably a lie. He would claim that Extreme Ownership is worth believing purely because you’re more likely to succeed if you tell yourself you have total control over your world than if you believe some events render you powerless. As Willink and Babin explain, this is because if you ever believe there’s nothing you could have done, you stop looking for ways to improve yourself and the team.
Willink and Babin explain that Extreme Ownership means taking responsibility not only for the failures of others but also for your own failures. This is particularly difficult for leaders, whose mistakes most often cause severe consequences that impact the entire team. However, once you admit that you (and no one else) are to blame, you can learn from your mistakes and ensure you don’t make them again.
Taking ownership of your mistakes requires conquering your ego. If you prioritize feeling proud of yourself and impressing others over your mission, you’ll hide anything that makes you look bad. When you make mistakes, you’ll look for excuses and blame your teammates, feeding your ego by refusing to admit to yourself and others that you aren’t perfectly capable. However, if you never acknowledge that your flaws exist, you’ll never be able to fix them—making the team more likely to fail.
Willink and Babin suggest that the best way to control your ego is to refocus on the mission. Remind yourself that your goal is more important than your ego and Extreme Ownership is the best way to achieve that goal. You’ll be more willing to suffer through the pain of admitting your mistakes if you remember what you’re sacrificing for.
Conquer Your Ego by Redefining Success
In Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday agrees with Willink and Babin that focusing on your greater mission will help you subdue your ego. However, he also claims that this isn’t enough to fully negate ego’s negative effects. If you focus solely on your team’s mission, as Willink and Babin advise, you’ll likely base your ego on the accomplishment of that mission and only feel proud when your team succeeds. Holiday would argue that, like self-centered ego, this is a discouraging, unhelpful form of ego that hurts your chance of victory: If you fail the mission, you’ll feel like all your work was a waste and won’t feel motivated to try again.
Instead, for the greatest chance of victory, redefine success for yourself: Don’t feel proud of your team’s successes; feel proud of the effort you put into the mission, regardless of its outcome. This is the only truly sustainable type of pride since your effort is the only thing you can completely control. This way, even if you make a disastrous mistake that harms your team, you won’t feel defeated. As long as you tried your best and made the best decision you could under the circumstances, you’ll see it as a victory. Furthermore, since you won’t see mistakes as something to feel ashamed of, you’ll feel motivated to learn from them and bounce back from failure even more efficiently.
Willink and Babin offer a caveat to the principle of Extreme Ownership: Assume responsibility for your team’s failures but don’t take credit for their successes. Instead, attribute every success to your team’s good work, even if you personally contributed the most. Congratulating yourself may fuel your ego, but it won’t get you any closer to victory: Taking credit for yourself reinforces to your team that success is something that individuals achieve for themselves. In contrast, passing credit to your team members teaches them that success belongs to the entire team, encouraging them to follow your example and prioritize the mission above their egos.
(Shortform note: Passing down credit that may rightfully belong to you isn’t just useful because it motivates others to do the same: It can also be a tool to get others to do what you want. People are more likely to take your advice if they get credit for its implementation—or if they feel they came up with the idea. By offering your ideas in a way that prevents you from taking credit, you can influence others to advance your mission for you. Make suggestions casually and dispassionately, so it’s not obvious that you’re deliberately pushing your ideas. Additionally, react enthusiastically when someone considers doing something you want them to do to implicitly reinforce those ideas.)
We’ve established that Extreme Ownership empowers you to pinpoint your and your team’s flaws and do everything in your power to improve. The other main benefit of Extreme Ownership is that practicing it inspires your team to practice Extreme Ownership, too.
Willink and Babin assert that even if you lead perfectly, taking Extreme Ownership of every mistake your team makes, you likely won’t be able to accomplish the team’s mission on your own. For the greatest chance of success, you need every member of your team to be as motivated and egoless as you. In other words, every member of your team should take Extreme Ownership.
To accomplish this, lead by example. Your leadership style establishes your team’s culture. If you practice Extreme Ownership—taking responsibility for everyone’s mistakes and doing everything in your power to further the mission—the rest of your team will want to do the same.
Inspiring Extreme Ownership Is More Important Than Practicing It
While, as the authors note, practicing Extreme Ownership as a leader helps your team improve in the short term, research shows that inspiring a culture of Extreme Ownership among your team matters most for long-term success. In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras confirm this idea through a six-year study of 18 superstar companies that lasted longer and found more success than any of their competitors.
Collins and Porras state that most people associate successful leadership with charisma, persistence, and genius day-to-day oversight. However, according to their research, none of these things are unique to the world’s best leaders—many charismatic, persistent, business-savvy leaders build companies that fail. The one quality that sets apart leaders who build organizations that last is long-term vision with an eye on organizational culture. This means that no matter how good of a leader you are, your organization will fail if you don’t inspire Extreme Ownership in others.
If you want to build a lasting organizational culture, leading by example will only take you so far. Collins and Porras argue that ultimately, you want your team to feel allegiance to the values of your culture, not you as a leader. To achieve this, they advise strictly requiring your team to embody your core organizational values—in our case, Extreme Ownership—and firing anyone who doesn’t fit the culture.
Inspiring your team to take Extreme Ownership benefits you in a number of ways: Your team members perform better in their individual roles, you have more time to focus on big-picture leadership tasks, and your team is more likely to collaborate effectively. Let’s explore each benefit in detail.
When everyone on your team takes Extreme Ownership, it doesn’t mean they’ll try to control everything. Rather, team members who take Extreme Ownership make it their first priority to work as hard as they can in their individual roles.
Why do employees taking Extreme Ownership perform their tasks well? Willink and Babin argue that ideally, you’ll place every member of your team in a role that best suits their skills and allows them to contribute the most to the mission. If your team members clearly see how they fit into the broader mission plan, they’ll realize that the best way they can take Extreme Ownership is to fulfill the responsibilities you’ve assigned them (and will feel motivated to do so).
Another benefit of having team members take Extreme Ownership is that they won’t just sit passively and wait for orders—they’ll go above and beyond their individual roles. Because teammates taking Extreme Ownership understand the mission and how they contribute to it, they can recognize ways to improve the team that you’re too busy or distant to think of. By empowering your team members to take action and make decisions on their own, you ensure that every part of your organization is constantly improving itself.
In Complex Environments, Your Team Needs to Take Extreme Ownership
Willink and Babin advocate for a team in which every member takes ownership of the mission and gladly fulfills the responsibilities you’ve assigned them, but also goes above and beyond instead of just following orders. In Team of Teams, former US Army general Stanley McChrystal explains why this shared ownership is so necessary and goes into further detail on the advantages of this kind of team.
McChrystal argues that most of our traditional beliefs about management originate in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, when the factory assembly line was first invented. Business leaders came to assume that the best practice was to manage people like machines, giving them simple tasks to accomplish with a focus on efficiency above all else.
However, most leaders don’t realize that these principles fail to function in systems that are more complex than an assembly line. Assembly line managers can effectively hand down orders to far larger teams than, say, the commanding officer of a military unit because assembly line tasks are far simpler than the problems a military unit has to face.
In contrast, in situations where you don’t know exactly what to do, teams that do nothing but follow orders fail. For example, in the unpredictable environment of war, if troops blindly follow commands from above, they may face disaster if the enemy can predict and counter their strategy. During his time at war, McChrystal discovered that lower-level team members could make better decisions than their bosses if they were given the power to make those decisions and take ownership.
Business, too, is a complex, unpredictable environment. Instead of trying to personally run your entire team and restrict them to their assigned responsibilities, you need to empower them to make their own decisions if you want them to adapt to unforeseen setbacks.
Willink and Babin argue that when your team takes Extreme Ownership and you trust them to perform well in their individual roles, it frees you to focus your time and attention on big-picture leadership tasks. As a leader, it’s your job to make sure every one of your team’s tasks aligns with the broader mission. Other team members will be too closely involved in specific tasks to see for certain whether or not they’re successfully contributing to the mission’s progress, so it’s important that you have time to do this.
(Shortform note: To decide what important big-picture tasks to focus on once you can trust your people to handle their roles, Gary Keller (The One Thing) suggests identifying one task that will make all future tasks easier. For example, imagine you’re the director of a nonprofit with the goal of ending world hunger. Once you’ve freed up your time by delegating the day-to-day activity of your basic aid program to a team, you ask yourself: What can I do next that will make all future tasks easier? You decide to design a fundraising campaign that will make it easier for you to expand the organization—indirectly accomplishing much more than if you were to volunteer to distribute food yourself.)
According to Willink and Babin, your team members also need to take Extreme Ownership to collaborate effectively. When they lack Extreme Ownership, team members prioritize their ego over the mission’s success. Instead of doing everything they can to increase the team’s chance of victory, each team member only cares about doing their own job well. When other teammates are struggling, they blame them for failing instead of offering to help. In some cases, they may even compete against each other, hindering other team members to make themselves look better.
In contrast, when your team takes Extreme Ownership, they prioritize the team’s success over their own. Instead of celebrating when a teammate fails, they do everything they can to help that teammate avoid failure in the future. Willink and Babin argue that this kind of collaboration is invaluable—mutual support is often the only way to succeed.
In Life, Pivot From Competing to Collaborating
In The Courage to Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga explore this same dichotomy between competition and collaboration, and they explain why you would choose one or the other—not just at work, but in life.
Those who pursue competition do so because they base their self-worth on approval from others. They only strive for success because it makes them happy when someone recognizes that they’re “better” than someone else (and thus, they blame and hinder those they see as competitors). Other people pursue collaboration because they base their self-worth on the good that they do. They feel happy when they can make the world better by helping others (and they recognize that collaboration is the most effective way to do so).
According to Kishimi and Koga, these root motives don’t just predict how you work with others: They also shape how you approach everything in life (for instance, hobbies, friendships, and romantic relationships) and determine your overall life happiness. You can either see other people as competitors or allies, and you won’t be happy if you choose the former. It’s exhausting and unfulfilling to constantly try to prove that you’re better than others.
Extreme Ownership is especially important in regard to collaboration between a leader and their subordinates. Leaders and subordinates should feel comfortable asking each other for anything they need to do their jobs, but Willink and Babin identify two collaborative goals that are especially important.
First, bosses need the necessary information to give effective orders. The leaders giving orders often only have a high-level view of their team’s operations, lacking specific information and expertise that lower-level teammates have from doing their jobs. Thus, instead of assuming they know best, leaders should actively seek out the opinions of those responsible for executing their orders. Likewise, subordinates have the responsibility to keep bosses informed of all relevant information and to push back whenever leaders make poor decisions based on incomplete information.
(Shortform note: In The Effective Executive, Peter F. Drucker goes one step further than Willink and Babin in his advice: Not only should bosses seek out the opinions of others before making a decision, but they should also require disagreement and conflict before making any significant decisions. By default, subordinates avoid challenging their boss’s judgment because they have an incentive to get on their boss’s good side. But if the boss mandates productive disagreement, the only way subordinates can please the boss is by fulfilling their responsibility to voice any opinion that may improve the final decision.)
Second, the authors state, subordinates need to understand the rationale behind decisions and commands. It’s a leader’s job to continually explain the big-picture plan to their subordinates—especially detailing their individual roles in achieving that plan. If your team members don’t understand exactly how their job contributes to the mission, they won’t feel like their work matters, they’ll lack the motivation to perform, and they won’t take Extreme Ownership. For this reason, if, as a subordinate, you don’t understand why your boss is telling you to do something, it’s your responsibility to get clarity from them as to how you fit into the overall plan.
A Clear Mission Inspires Mutual Trust
In Start With Why, Simon Sinek provides additional details on why team members must understand how they fit into the mission before they can take Extreme Ownership. Sinek asserts that when leaders clarify a selfless mission and purpose to the team, their subordinates recognize the values they share with their leaders and teammates. These shared values form the basis of organizational culture, making everyone feel like they belong to the same community pursuing the same selfless, purposeful, and meaningful mission. In turn, feelings of community enable mutual trust: Team members believe that their teammates will support them emotionally and help them reach their goals.
Sinek explains that mutual trust directly leads to Extreme Ownership throughout an organization. Without mutual trust, team members feel like they need to protect themselves—they exclusively act in their self-interest because they feel it’s the only way to be safe. However, once they trust each other, team members feel secure enough to put the mission over their own desires: taking Extreme Ownership.
Compared to Willink and Babin, Sinek downplays subordinates’ ability to inspire themselves. Willink and Babin claim that followers should seek out a motivating purpose by clarifying their boss’s instructions, but Sinek would likely argue that if the organization isn’t already centered around a greater purpose that enables feelings of community, subordinates will find it difficult to motivate themselves no matter how they’re contributing.
So far, we’ve explained what it means to take Extreme Ownership and why it’s important for any leader to practice—it empowers you to continuously improve your team and inspires Extreme Ownership in other team members.
In our final section, we’ll discuss some of Willink and Babin’s general leadership tips: four rules that leaders taking Extreme Ownership must follow for the greatest chance of victory.
We’ve established that before team members can take Extreme Ownership, they need to clearly understand how their tasks contribute to the mission. Willink and Babin offer two ways to ensure your team fully understands any plan you make: Be consistently transparent with your plans, and keep them as simple as possible.
Willink and Babin present a step-by-step planning process that emphasizes transparency at every stage: First, seek input from lower-level teammates when you’re initially devising a plan. Not only will these teammates understand the plan and the thought process behind it, but if you accept their ideas, they’ll be more likely to take ownership of it.
Next, after you’ve outlined a plan, conduct a “briefing” in which you explain it to everyone involved in executing it. During the briefing, encourage team members to ask questions and voice their opinions, putting any doubts they have about the plan to rest.
Finally, after you’ve executed the plan, hold a “debriefing” to get everyone on the same page about what worked and what didn’t. When you’re transparent about any and all errors made, your team understands how to improve.
Involve the Team, but Make the Decisions Yourself
The authors of Trillion Dollar Coach offer a caveat to Willink and Babin’s transparent planning process outlined above: Giving your team agency doesn’t mean turning it into a democracy.
Every stage of Willink and Babin’s planning process involves both informing the team and encouraging them to share their perspectives. However, according to Trillion Dollar Coach, you should make it clear that the final decision rests with you. Often, your team members’ opinions will shape your decision, but in cases where they can’t reach consensus, you’ll have to override them and make the choice you believe to be right. This applies even after the decision-making stage—during your debrief, if the team can’t agree on what went wrong and how to do better next time, it’s up to you to decide how they will work to improve.
According to Trillion Dollar Coach, if you’ve chosen a good team, they should wholeheartedly commit to whatever you end up deciding. As long as your team believes that you fully considered their opinions, they will likely still feel ownership of the decision you ultimately make.
Willink and Babin’s second way to ensure your team understands your plans is to keep the plans as simple as possible. At a certain point, added complexity hits a point of diminishing returns—if your team doesn’t quickly grasp the plan, it’s probably more complex than it’s worth. Keeping your plans simple has other benefits, too: Simple plans are easier to adapt on the fly, and they force you to focus on the most important aspects of your mission.
To illustrate: Imagine you’re a grocery store manager. To keep your employees from wasting time, you create a complicated flowchart describing exactly what they should be doing in any given situation. This flowchart is likely to confuse your workers, and it may prevent them from responding to a situation you didn’t anticipate—for example, if someone starts shoplifting. The simpler and more effective solution would be to lay down a rule that keeps your workers focused on what really matters: something like, “Improve the customer experience at all times.”
(Shortform note: Another benefit of simple plans is that they’re less intimidating. For this reason, simplifying your plans may motivate you (and others) to follow through on them. For instance, in I Will Teach You to Be Rich, Ramit Sethi explains that many people see retirement saving and investing as something complicated that they don’t want to mess up, so they ignore the issue completely. To solve this problem, he created a financial system simple enough for anyone to get started—and getting started is good enough. Since investments compound over time, getting started early is beneficial no matter how you do it, even if the returns aren’t as robust as a more complex system would give.)
Next, Willink and Babin offer a piece of advice that applies equally to teams and individuals: At all times, identify the most important task and focus all your attention on getting it done. If you try to handle multiple problems at once, you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin and failing to solve any of them. Or, worse, you may start to panic and fail to even try to solve them. This is especially true when things don’t go according to plan. If something unexpected arises, you and your team need to be flexible enough to immediately refocus on the new most important task.
To prepare for situations like this, Willink and Babin recommend predicting what could go wrong and preparing your team for a potential change of plans. The difficult part of changing plans is quickly communicating new priorities to everyone on your team, but if you prepare them with contingency plans ahead of time, your team can adapt much more quickly (and may not even need your direct instructions). For example, hospitals have protocols in place in case the power goes out during surgery—protocols that involve tackling the most important tasks one at a time. Everyone in the operating room knows that first, they need to find an alternative source of light; then, ensure the patient’s blood oxygen is stable; and so on.
Balance Your Life by Focusing on the Most Important Task
The skill of prioritizing and focusing on the most important task is not only valuable at work but also as a means for life fulfillment. Willink and Babin note that when you’re trying to do too many things at once, you feel overwhelmed and fail to accomplish any of them. Similarly, in High Performance Habits, Brandon Burchard asserts that trying to simultaneously improve every area of life (your career, social life, mental health, and so on) instead of prioritizing what’s most important leads to an unbalanced life in which you fail to be happy with any area.
To create a balanced life, Burchard advises taking time once a week to chart your satisfaction with 10 different categories of life, including work, family, and well-being, among others. Set goals in each of these categories and focus on the one that will boost your life satisfaction the most. Regularly reviewing your various levels of life satisfaction helps you reprioritize in shifting circumstances and refocus on the new most important area of your life at all times.
For example, imagine someone who spends too much time at work at the expense of their health and is consequently miserable. They stop and reflect, realizing that improving their health by exercising every day is more important to them than spending a little more time at work. By focusing on this important task, they regain life balance.
Additionally, you might apply Willink and Babin’s advice to this practice and create contingency plans in advance so you can reprioritize more quickly after unexpected life events. If the person in our example anticipates that, more than anything else, losing their job would cause their overall life satisfaction to plummet, they could come up with a backup plan for this scenario: for instance, to start their own company.
Even if you’ve made contingency plans and prepared for unexpected obstacles, you’ll face situations where you don’t know what to do. Willink and Babin assert that you must become comfortable making decisions in uncertain conditions.
In some cases, you won’t have enough information to know if the decision you want to make will hurt your team or help them. When this happens, many leaders’ first instinct is to wait and gather more information. However, inaction is almost always the wrong decision. By doing nothing, you’re sacrificing the positive influence your expertise will have on the situation. You’ll never be able to know everything, so make the most logical decision you can with your current knowledge, and move on.
In other situations, there won’t even be a chance for you to do something good—often, you’ll have to choose between a set of equally painful alternatives. In these cases, too, it’s vital to act sooner rather than later and try to pick the lesser evil. If nothing else, making decisions that are painful but necessary will earn your team’s respect—they’ll see that you can perform wisely under pressure.
When Overthinking Leads to Worse Decisions
In Algorithms to Live By, Tom Griffiths and Brian Christian take Willink and Babin’s argument further: Not only does waiting for more information waste time that you could use to take action, but sometimes, the more information you gather, the worse your decisions get. Most of the time, the first factors you consider when making your decision are the ones with the greatest impact on the outcome. If you wait for additional, relatively irrelevant information, you might put too much emphasis on these details and second-guess yourself when you shouldn’t.
According to Griffiths and Christian, contrary to what you may expect, even computers sometimes make decisions before they have all the necessary information. Scientists running tests or simulations on powerful computers often trade off accuracy for speed. This highlights another benefit of uncertain decision-making that Willink and Babin imply, but don’t explicitly state: Making a decision sooner rather than later lets you immediately refocus your attention somewhere more useful. If you’re in a no-win situation, making a decisive call sooner rather than later will allow you to shift your efforts and recover more quickly from the fallout.
Willink and Babin argue that any trait of an effective leader becomes detrimental in excess. This is at the root of most persistent leadership problems. When in doubt, question whether you’ve drifted too far toward an extreme—the way forward may be to employ less of a good thing.
The primary example Willink and Babin use to demonstrate this concept is the need to balance discipline and flexibility. If your primary goal is freedom—the ability to do whatever you want—a certain amount of discipline is necessary. However, at a certain point, too much discipline limits your freedom by trapping you in rigid habits. For instance, you can’t enjoy a nice vacation unless you discipline yourself to save up the money to take it. But, if you’re too disciplined and compulsively work 80-hour weeks, saving every cent you earn, you’ll never take that vacation.
It’s possible for teams to be too disciplined, as well: Rehearsing disciplined procedures too intensely discourages team members from staying flexible in unfamiliar situations when they need to improvise.
Promote Conflicting Ideals
In Range, David Epstein further defines the problem of “too much discipline” and offers a solution that Willink and Babin do not. He explains that the problem occurs when a tool (such as discipline) becomes so intrinsic to an organization’s culture that they feel as if they can’t operate without it. Epstein uses the real-world example of wilderness firefighters who discipline themselves to never part from their tools, then fail to outrun an advancing fire, perishing instead of dropping their heavy packs.
The counterintuitive solution is for leaders to send their team mixed messages—to build your organization’s culture around conflicting ideals. It’s impossible for your team to embody perfect discipline and perfect flexibility, but instructing your team to try gives the greatest chance for them to make prudent decisions that take multiple ideals into account. Epstein applies this logic to every value that a leader needs to balance. In a sense, this is what Willink and Babin are also doing when they advocate the balance between extremes.
Epstein’s team-centric advice applies equally to individuals—by striving to embody conflicting virtues, you reduce the chance that you’ll commit too far in any one direction. For instance, if, when raising a child, you try to be both the most nurturing parent and the most demanding parent at the same time, you may end up maintaining a healthy balance between the two.
The book’s authors, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, are both former U.S. Navy SEALs who trained SEAL leaders and led teams of their own as officers during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Willink was a lieutenant commander and Babin served under him as a ground force commander in Ramadi, Iraq, the deadly and hostile center of Iraqi insurgency. After their military careers, they went on to advise businesses in a wide range of industries through their consulting firm, Echelon Front.
Willink and Babin found combat to be a more intense, amplified version of regular life. But the principles of decision-making and leadership that they developed in combat still hold true in business and day-to-day life. Whether on the battlefield or in corporate America, Willink and Babin found one primary trait among all successful leaders: Extreme Ownership. Leaders are responsible for the direction and success of their teams, and practicing Extreme Ownership entails taking responsibility for every aspect of their team and the task they’re working to accomplish. This leaves no room for blame or excuses, only an honest assessment of what works and what doesn’t in order to constantly improve.
When a leader exercises Extreme Ownership, she puts her own ego aside for the good of the group. It sets an example and creates an environment in which everyone on the team can do the same on an individual level. Again, this discourages people from spending time and energy making excuses and placing blame on other people or circumstances, and instead puts all the focus on how to work together to achieve the task at hand.
Willink and Babin intermittently repeat the caveat that the concept of Extreme Ownership, although simple, is not easy. However, when executed, it makes for more effective leaders, more productive employees, more supportive spouses, and more successful individuals.
In this chapter we get an introduction to the concept of Extreme Ownership and several leadership principles and strategies. Each of the principles will get a more in-depth explanation in later chapters.
While many leadership books and training courses focus on developing individual habits and traits, leadership is inextricably tied to the team’s performance. There are only two types of leaders — effective and ineffective — and the only way to measure a leader’s effectiveness is based on whether her team succeeds or fails.
As the person at the top of the chain of command, everything ultimately reflects back on you. You must make decisions quickly and definitively, and accept their consequences, good or bad.
Additionally, you need to believe in your mission or plan, and have no doubt about why you and your team are working to achieve it. When a leader displays that confidence and certainty, her team will also feel confident and can carry out the plan effectively and with conviction. If someone on the team doesn’t agree with or understand the purpose — the “why” — of a plan, then the leader must be able to thoroughly explain it. We’ll explore this more in Chapter 3.
Finally, every leader will inevitably face failure. How leaders respond to failure is a key indicator of how well they will be able to adapt, improve, and move forward for ultimate success. Owning your mistakes is a critical aspect of Extreme Ownership and requires leaders to have the humility to admit and address their mistakes in order to find a better strategy for next time.
The same principles apply to leaders at every level, from senior officers to junior officers, and from C-suite executives to middle managers. Each leader has her own team to direct and supervise, and the top leaders can’t succeed unless the lower-level leaders do.
Similarly, leaders should not only accept but also encourage input from all team members, down to the lowest seniority. Each person on the team has a distinct role and insight, and they are all necessary to collectively accomplish the team’s goals.
The SEALs are on a nighttime mission in a small village near Ramadi, where intelligence reports claim a terrorist leader (and possibly his armored group of fighters) are staying. After three months spent trying to capture the terrorist, a leader for al Qaeda in Iraq, the SEALs are determined tonight to find and kill him so that he can’t orchestrate any more attacks on U.S. and friendly forces or innocent civilians.
As troops enter the house they are targeting, a SEAL spots a squirter — someone escaping from the targeted building. The SEAL and Babin, the ground force commander and leader for this operation, chase the unidentified man, unsure whether he’s the terrorist leader himself or has information about the leader’s whereabouts. They chase the man around the corner and finally catch him, but Babin realizes that not only are they now separated from their team and surrounded by buildings that haven’t been cleared for safety, but the other SEALs don’t even know where they are. Worse, a group of men are now approaching with AK-47s and other heavy weapons.
Babin’s mind is spinning with the four tasks that all need immediate action:
Babin remembers the words of his boss, Lieutenant Commander Willink: “Relax. Look around. Make a call.” He implements one of the Laws of Combat, Prioritize and Execute.
Babin’s first priority is to handle the group of enemy fighters. If he doesn’t address this first, he will likely be killed, and the enemies could move on to attack the rest of the nearby SEAL forces. He shoots at the group of men, killing and wounding some and dispersing the rest.
His second priority is to get himself and his fellow SEAL back to the rest of their force, in case the enemies who managed to escape regroup and come back with more fighters. To get back to their team, the two implement another Law of Combat, Cover and Move; on or off the battlefield, this strategy is all about teamwork. Babin provides cover while the other SEAL moves forward, then the SEAL provides cover as Babin moves ahead. Using this method, they essentially leapfrog back to the team, bringing their prisoner along with them.
Babin’s third priority is to check the captive for explosives. Now that he and his teammate are with the rest of their force, they can hand off the captive to the SEAL team responsible for dealing with prisoners.
The final priority is for Babin to resume his role as leader of the mission. He can safely turn his attention back to the operation now that the three more pressing and dangerous matters have been addressed.
By strategically prioritizing, Babin actually accomplishes everything more efficiently, as handing off the prisoner to his teammates saves him the time and trouble of checking the captive himself, while also putting the task in the hands of the experts.
The mission is not entirely successful because the SEALs don’t ultimately find or capture the terrorist leader; however, they make their presence felt and, presumably, temporarily distract the terrorist from orchestrating another attack while he finds a new place to hide.
As he does after every mission, Babin assesses what can be done better next time. He determines that he and his team can study the map more carefully to be more familiar with the area in and around the mission; in this case, that would have helped him be better oriented to his surroundings when he chased the man out of the main mission area without having his map on hand. In the future, Babin can also develop clearer guidelines to determine how far anyone should chase squirters without the rest of the team being alerted.
Babin uses several critical leadership principles to get himself and his team out safely.
Extreme Ownership is divided into three sections.
Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of Extreme Ownership, illustrating the principle in three parts:
(The authors clarify that the accounts from Iraq are not meant for historic reference and that some details have been changed or omitted as necessary. Additionally, some of the business stories have been modified or are composites of multiple similar situations.)
The first four chapters discuss the mindset a leader must have to lead her team successfully. The foundation of good leadership starts within, and a leader needs the right attitude to implement the strategies in Part II. An effective leader takes responsibility for her team’s shortcomings, establishes and maintains high standards, understands and clearly communicates the purpose of each goal, and checks her ego.
This chapter focuses on how leaders can practice Extreme Ownership by taking accountability for everything that happens under their direction. Leadership carries great responsibility, and a leader’s authority to direct her team means that she is also the one who must answer for the team’s performance.
If an employee or subordinate makes a mistake, a leader should not blame him. Instead, the leader has to question whether she adequately explained the mission and the plan, and if she gave the team member the training and resources he would need to be successful.
If a member of your team is underperforming, you must take it upon yourself to train and mentor that person for the good of the team. However, if the team member continues to fall short, the leader eventually needs to make the call to fire that person and replace him with someone more competent. The success of the team as a whole (and its goals) is always more important than any one individual, whether the boss or an employee.
Extreme Ownership calls for leaders to take full responsibility for their failures. This is one of the hardest aspects of leadership: It’s tough enough admitting your mistakes as an individual, but it’s even harder when you’ve been charged with leading a whole team of people and have to own up to leading them astray or failing them in some way. Nonetheless, this is absolutely necessary to learn, grow, and succeed.
If you deny or try to shift the blame for a failure, you can’t learn or grow from it. Taking responsibility allows leaders to unflinchingly and objectively analyze a team’s problems and challenges; this process is critical to succeeding in the long run and continually improving.
This is even harder when you have to admit your — or your team’s — shortcomings to senior leadership. It may feel like professional suicide to call attention to your mistakes, but most likely your bosses are already aware of the lacking performance and will be impressed if you can own it and commit to improving it.
Don’t let your successes cloud your ability to see your failures (or areas that could use improvement). You may develop a great plan but come up short in leading your team to carry it out, or you perhaps you avoid one pitfall but fall victim to another. You can pat yourself on the back for your good work, but don’t neglect to take an objective view of everything and fix the issues that exist or find the ways you can be more effective next time. No person or plan is perfect, and there is always room for improvement. A good leader seeks constructive criticism and constantly looks for ways to perform better.
As a leader, don’t take credit for your team’s success. Instead, pass on the credit to all the team members and lower-level leaders who made success possible. This sets the tone for everyone on the team that success is achieved as a unit, creating a culture that is entirely focused on the good of the team.
When a leader takes responsibility for failures and gives credit to her team for successes, it serves as an example to the lower leaders to adopt the same mindset of Extreme Ownership. Infecting the whole team with an attitude of Extreme Ownership causes everyone to operate with the team and its mission as the main priority, and this puts the whole organization in the best position to succeed.
It’s the spring of 2006 and Willink is leading his forces in their first major operation in Ramadi, Iraq, where they’ll be deployed for nearly six months. Their mission involves about 300 U.S. and Iraqi troops, including SEALs, Army Soldiers, and Marines. The operation aims to wrest control of a particularly dangerous, enemy-held neighborhood called Mala’ab District from the enemy insurgent fighters.
The troops are progressing from building to building, clearing each one of enemy fighters as they go. A few hours into the mission, several gunfights are blazing between U.S. troops and insurgents.
A Marine sergeant reports to Willink that he is targeting a building where he suspects that enemies are hiding and have killed and wounded several Iraqi soldiers. A U.S. tank is positioned to shoot at the building, and the sergeant is coordinating airstrikes to also drop bombs on the building. However, Willink feels that something is off.
One of the SEAL sniper teams was originally stationed nearby, abandoned its post, and was in the midst of relocating when the gunfire went off at this building. The sniper team hasn’t yet reported their new location, and Willink worries that in the confusion of battle the SEALs could be in the targeted building.
Against the advice of the Marine sergeant, Willink insists on checking out the building before attacking. When he enters, rifle drawn, he comes face to face with a fellow SEAL.
The SEAL explains to Willink what happened: The SEAL sniper team had mistakenly shot the Iraqi soldiers, not recognizing them as friendly forces in the early morning darkness. Thinking they were under attack, the SEALs then called in for backup, and the Marines and Army troops responded by attacking this building, assuming it where the enemy fighters were located. The SEALs in the building couldn’t tell that it was U.S. troops shooting at them, so they fired back, and each side was convinced they were under vicious enemy attack.
Willink’s calm, clear thinking under (literal) fire prevented a bomb from dropping on the SEAL team. However, with one Iraqi soldier dead plus a SEAL and several Iraqi soldiers wounded, there had still been blue-on-blue (the term for friendly fire, or fratricide), which he explains is the absolute worst thing that can happen in battle. As a leader, he feels guilty and gravely responsible.
Higher-ranking commanding officers get word of the blue-on-blue, shut down the operation, and come to the base in Ramadi to investigate — and likely fire whoever’s to blame. As Willink gathers information, he sees many mistakes made by various people during the planning and execution phases that led to the blue-on-blue. But at the end of the day, as the leader, he sees himself as being ultimately responsible for any and all mishaps.
When Willink presents this information to the troops and the commanding officers, he outlines what went wrong and takes full responsibility as the mission’s commander. He takes the blame (even pardoning SEALs who suggest that the failure was their fault in one way or another) and vows never to let such a mistake happen again. As a result of Willink’s humility and Extreme Ownership of the situation, his bosses actually gain more trust and respect for him. He speculates that had he blamed others instead, he would have been fired.
Willink and his team go on to analyze what happened and how to take lessons from this situation to improve procedures and missions — and hopefully prevent any more fratricide — in the future.
The vice president of manufacturing at a large company proposed a plan the previous year that aimed to cut production costs. But so far it isn’t working, and the board of directors wants an explanation and solution.
The plan includes several strategies:
The strategies seem solid, so the issue must be in the execution. The VP assesses how and why the company is facing problems carrying out the plan.
First, distribution managers worry that consolidating the manufacturing plants will curtail in-person interaction between the plants and distribution centers, and that this will hinder communication to be able to adjust orders on short notice. The VP had dismissed the concerns, reasoning that phone or video calls would suffice.
Second, plant managers and other leaders resist the bonus program, saying that it would cut employees’ earnings and prompt them to leave for other companies that pay more. The VP tried pushing harder, and in response the manufacturing managers and sales managers teamed up to oppose the plan.
Third, nearly everyone is resisting streamlining manufacturing because they don’t see a reason to change the way things have always been done.
The VP has explained all this to the board of directors. Additionally, the VP has told the board that other factors — including tough market conditions, learning curves for new technologies, and several products that pulled attention away from making these changes — are contributing to the plan’s failure so far. But after a year of little progress, these all sound like excuses and the board is getting frustrated.
The VP has to confront the fact that, despite all the legitimate barriers, he is ultimately responsible for the plan’s failure. He needs to lead his team to understand the plan, which will help them to support and successfully execute it.
First, the VP must acknowledge that he is not infallible. If he thinks that he is always right, then when something goes wrong, the only place for blame is on others. This mindset prevents him from objectively assessing what’s standing in the way of success, and considering that it could include his approach to the situation. Good leaders own their failures and constantly seek ways to improve; great leaders keep their egos in check, accept blame, consistently ask for constructive criticism, and carefully note how they can improve in the future.
Second, the VP has to tell the board that the plan’s failure thus far is his fault. Although it feels like taking the fall for others’ noncompliance, he begins to see the logic when he is confronted with a hypothetical question: If one of the manufacturing managers he oversees told him that her team is failing, would his response be to blame the team? No, says the VP, he would blame the manager.
The VP ultimately takes responsibility for the failure and presents the board with his plan to correct the issues and get everyone on track to successfully execute the plan. (Shortform note: The book doesn’t offer many details about how he will resolve the issues, but illustrates the importance of taking responsibility as a leader and implies that the resolution will involve explaining the purpose of the plan to its critics in a way that alleviates their concerns and helps them understand why this is the best approach to take for the good of the company as a whole.)
Accepting fault and admitting failure is one of the hardest things to do as a leader. Use this exercise to practice recognizing and admitting your own shortcomings in order to improve for the future.
Describe a recent incident in which you were working with at least one other person to accomplish something, and either you didn’t achieve it or things didn’t go as planned.
What are one or two major reasons the plan failed?
What was your role or involvement in each of these factors? Or — if they were based on other people’s actions — how could you have intervened to help and increase the odds of successfully achieving the goal?
Do you now feel like you are taking Extreme Ownership of this failure? Why or why not?
A leader is responsible for maintaining and enforcing high standards of performance as her team works toward its goals. The leader must not only dictate high standards, but refuse to tolerate anything less, because if poor performance is accepted without consequence, that becomes the new standard. If a team or team member completes a task that is not up to par, the leader needs to insist that task be re-done until it meets the standard.
Initial consequences for poor performance don’t need to be extreme. But if the problem is consistent and unaffected by efforts to correct it, then a leader needs to take more serious action. If a particular team member consistently performs poorly — despite the leader’s efforts to mentor and help her improve — and is holding the team back from its potential success, the leader must remove her from the team as a means to maintain high standards. Allowing her to stay means implicitly accepting her substandard performance, which indicates to the rest of the team that this is acceptable.
A leader should always be looking for ways to improve, and inspire her team to adopt the same mindset. As a leader, you can consistently raise the bar by objectively assessing your team’s and your own performance. You need to practice Extreme Ownership in order to take stock in this way, with brutal honesty and humility. When you recognize areas of weakness, develop a plan to improve them; similarly, you should recognize how individual team members can best contribute to the goal, and help everyone work together in a way that maximizes each person’s strengths to best achieve that goal.
An effective leader keeps her teams consistently focused on the next immediate, actionable goal, while she has the big-picture goal in mind. The larger goal can be daunting or too abstract for team members to grasp, so the leader must push and direct her team toward each individual goal along the way.
When an effective leader establishes a culture of Extreme Ownership throughout her team, the team can continue to perform well even in the leader’s temporary absence. Each junior leader — operating with the same mindset of Extreme Ownership — should be prepared and confident to step up in her leader’s absence to continue the team’s progress toward achieving its goal.
It’s Hell Week in SEAL training, and the students are being pushed to their limits; they are physically and mentally exhausted.
The trainees are split into seven-person teams called boat crews that work together to carry the 200-plus pound inflatable rubber boats through obstacle courses, across the beach, and into the Pacific Ocean to paddle in seemingly endless races. For the races, each group’s designated boat crew leader receives orders from the training instructors, relays the instructions to the rest of his crew, and leads his team in a race against the other boat crews to be the first to correctly carry out the mission. The winning crew gets to sit out the following race, earning a few minutes of precious rest, while the crew in last place has to endure extra exercises as punishment.
The boat crew leaders have several responsibilities resting on their shoulders.
During this particular Hell Week, two boat crews stand out: one is excelling, and the other is struggling.
Boat Crew II performs well and wins often. The crew’s leader is effective, and the crew members are all motivated and competent. The team members all work together and make up for each other’s weaknesses.
Boat Crew VI ends just about every race in last place. The team members yell and curse at each other, complain, and fail to work together. Boat Crew VI’s leader seems to think he simply has the bad luck of getting stuck with a bad team, and that their poor performance is beyond his control.
One of the training officers decides to switch the leaders for boat crews II and VI to see how it impacts each team’s performance. In the first race with the swapped leaders, Boat Crew VI actually wins; the leader gets them to work together as a team. And Boat Crew II still performs well, coming in second place.
Boat Crew VI continues to win races, and their disorganization and failure to work together is transformed, under their new leader, to smooth teamwork.
Boat Crew II also continues to do well, in spite of their new leader, because the crew members already know how to work together. Their previous leader established a culture of teamwork that they are able to maintain in his absence.
The experiment suggests that the leader is the biggest predictor of any team’s success.
Boat Crew VI’s original leader has a victim mindset. He puts all his energy on rationalizing and justifying poor performance, focusing on the hurdles without finding ways to overcome them. He and his crew get accustomed to their poor performance. This is not a winning attitude.
When Boat Crew II’s leader takes over the failing Boat Crew VI, he recognizes and accepts that the team is performing poorly without submitting to any excuses as to why they are failing. Boat Crew VI’s new leader sets a higher standard for the crew and helps the crew members reach it, not tolerating anything less. Through a firm belief that winning was possible, he is able to assess the reality and develop a plan to improve the crew’s weaknesses.
A financial services company recently launched a new product, and it essentially flopped. The company’s finances are now in the red and the company is in a critical position, so the CEO and founder calls Babin to work with the company’s department heads and other leaders.
The chief technology officer (CTO) is particularly defensive about the failed product launch because he oversaw the development of the new product line. The CTO blames the company’s senior executives, difficult market conditions, an unstable industry, incompetent members of his team, poor customer service, and ineffective communication with the sales team.
The CTO is what Babin calls a Tortured Genius: He makes excuses, blames others, and takes no responsibility for his failures because, in his mind, other people just don’t recognize or appreciate the genius of his efforts. A Tortured Genius can be toxic to a team or a company, so Babin advises the CEO to fire the CTO. Although the CTO brings knowledge and expertise, his assets are not enough to offset his negative, victimized mentality; if the CEO keeps him on board, he would be accepting the CTO’s substandard performance and refusal to improve, and that lowers the bar for the whole company.
The CEO ultimately replaces the Tortured Genius with a new CTO who embraces Extreme Ownership, and the company gets back on track to growing and profiting.
As a leader, you have to believe in a plan and its goal before you can inspire your team to work toward it. How can you effectively explain a strategy to your team, let alone expect them to carry it out, unless you understand and believe in the purpose, or the “why”?
Doubts — or anything less than full confidence and conviction — will be apparent to your team members or employees, and that will undermine their confidence in the plan. Why would they execute something that their leader clearly doesn’t believe in? Additionally, if you don’t believe in the plan or the goal, you won’t do the hard work and take the necessary risks to achieve it. That means neither you nor your team is on the path to achieving anything unless you first believe in it.
If you don’t believe in the plan, adapt it (if you have the authority to do so) to something you can stand by. If that’s not an option, talk to your boss and reach an understanding about the purpose of the mission and how it fits into the entire organization’s larger goal. It takes Extreme Ownership to ask your boss for clarification on a plan or its why; it shows that you have the humility to admit that you don’t understand, and that you own your responsibility to lead your team in fully and correctly executing the directive.
As you gain a better understanding and carry out the plan, you may find that it benefits your team in ways you didn’t expect. Furthermore, your boss will appreciate that you’re doing all you can to execute her plan, and she may be more inclined to give you and your team additional support.
With a thorough understanding of the goal, it’s especially important that a leader adequately explain each mission and its “why” to her junior leaders, so that they can do the same with their teams. Junior leaders need to ask questions when in doubt and raise concerns so that higher-ups understand potential hurdles in the execution. The junior leaders and their teams may have insights that the bosses have overlooked. This ties in with the Decentralized Command, the fourth Law of Combat, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 8.
Willink gets an order from the higher-ups that his task force unit must train and fight alongside Iraqi Army soldiers, but he feels this directive will put his SEALs at a disadvantage and could put them in danger on the battlefield. The order doesn’t make sense to him, and he doesn’t see how it could be effective.
The SEALs are exceptionally well trained and operate under universal rules and conventions, so they work together smoothly and efficiently. On the other hand, the Iraqi soldiers are poorly trained, ill-equipped and unmotivated; few job prospects mean many join the Iraqi Army as a way to earn money, and are not necessarily driven by a strong belief in the mission.
Knowing that, as a leader, his attitude and conviction in the purpose of each mission sets the tone for his team, Willink conceals his skepticism from his troops. Willink tries to step back and think about the strategy from his bosses’ perspective: What would cause them to come up with this plan? He breaks the question down into smaller pieces.
The U.S. troops need to not only help prepare the Iraqi Army to eventually defend themselves as the only force on the ground, but also defeat the insurgency enough to lower its strength and give the Iraqi Army and police a better chance at maintaining power and stability.
Now understanding the “why” of the order, Willink can effectively carry it out and explain it to his troops so that they understand and believe in its purpose. Although his troops are frustrated and wish there was an alternative option, after Willink explains the reasoning they understand the importance. And, ultimately, the Iraqi troops become assets in unexpected ways: Their knowledge of the area and the culture help the troops work more efficiently and better identify enemies.
Once convinced of the importance of including the Iraqi soldiers in their operations, Willink doubles down on the order, insisting that every mission includes the Iraqis. As a result, every operation plan his team submits to the higher-ups for approval gets the green light, and Willink’s task force unit is able to take more action and make a bigger impact in Ramadi. Because Willink came to understand and strongly believe in the importance of his bosses’ directive, he implemented it so thoroughly and effectively that his team benefitted from the support they got from the higher-ups.
The SEALs’ and Iraqi forces’ missions increasingly establish some safety and stability in Ramadi as they beat back the insurgents’ power. Seeing these effects, local residents stop passively supporting the insurgents and instead show support of the U.S. and Iraqi troops.
The senior leaders in a corporate company recently rolled out a new pay structure for the company’s sales team. The plan cuts pay significantly, especially for low performers.
The mid-level managers are confused and frustrated, saying that the new structure will make it hard to keep salespeople from leaving and working for competing companies. They don’t believe in the plan, and can’t defend it to their salespeople. The middle managers recognize that the company’s senior leadership is experienced and motivated to make strategic decisions that will ultimately bring the company success — they just don’t understand how this plan fits in. And they don’t want to ask for an explanation, for fear of looking stupid in front of their boss.
Meanwhile, the CEO feels that she has a good relationship with all her managers, and that they would undoubtedly bring up any issues with her. Although she is open to questions and concerns, she underestimates the weight of her position in the minds of the managers and employees under her. In other words, the CEO thinks she is approachable and laid-back, but her employees still see her as the big boss, and that carries some intimidation.
The CEO finally learns that her managers don’t understand the plan, and she understands that if the managers don’t understand or believe in the plan, then the salespeople won’t either, and the CEO’s plan — while very strategic in its logic — is more likely to fail. The CEO approaches the managers and asks them to share their concerns about the plan. This gives the CEO the opportunity to explain the “why,” that this plan will lower overhead and product prices, weed out low-performing salespeople, and allow successful salespeople to flourish.
The managers finally understand the plan in a way that they can explain to their sales teams. The managers ultimately acknowledge that, under the guidelines of Extreme Ownership, they were at fault for not asking the CEO to explain the plan sooner. The CEO had no idea the managers were feeling that way, and could only rectify the situation once it was brought to her attention.
Sometimes upper management issues a directive that seems to have no logic. This exercise can help you make sense of it (of course, if possible, the fool-proof way to understand it is simply to ask).
Describe an order or plan your boss recently handed down that you disagreed with or didn’t understand. What part of the plan didn’t make sense to you?
What are the company’s main overarching goals (or what were they at the time)?
Now look at it from your boss’s perspective. How could this strategy possibly have tied into the company’s larger goal(s)?
How would this perspective have impacted how you carried out the plan?
Too much ego — whether the leader’s or a team member’s — inhibits a team’s or company’s ability to succeed. You must be humble and open-minded to practice Extreme Ownership, and that requires you to check your ego.
The team and its mission must always come first; no one person can be more important than the collective team. As a leader, you set the tone for your team; establishing a culture that encourages teamwork and discourages competitiveness and ego sets your team up for success.
Too much ego can cause a leader or team member to put herself and her own personal goals above the team’s mission. As soon as someone is acting in their own interest, instead of the best interest of the team, it is detrimental to the team and its success. No matter how talented a person is, having too much ego can jeopardize an entire organization’s success. Leaders need to recognize when an employee’s ego is outweighing her strengths, and they must cut her if she is holding back the team or company.
Ego impedes progress; you can’t objectively assess your performance and continually look for ways to improve in the future if your ego is telling you that you did everything right. As a leader, a dominating ego doesn’t allow you to take the blame for something that you didn’t directly do (but someone on your team did). But putting your ego aside and humbly accepting that responsibility allows you and your team to be open to constructive criticism, learn from the mistake, and move forward.
Ego also causes you to be reactive and inhibits your ability to have productive conversations. If you are approaching a subordinate, your ego can make her less receptive to your message. On the other hand, if you are taking directions from a superior, your ego will make you less receptive to hearing and benefitting from the information.
Keeping your focus on the team and its larger goal will help you keep your ego in check. Recognize others’ strengths and expertise and how they can help the team achieve its mission. Don’t let your ego lure you into seeing others’ strengths as competition, but rather appreciate them as assets.
If someone’s actions bruised your ego, consider her perspective and what might have led her to act in that way. For example, if an employee did something outside her authority or your boss seems to be questioning you excessively, think about what her motive might be and that it likely has nothing to do with trying to show you up in some way. Furthermore, Extreme Ownership calls for you to consider how you may have mistakenly contributed to those actions, by not giving your employee explicit instructions, or not providing enough information to your boss.
The U.S. troops in Ramadi — including the Army, Marines, and SEALs — must work together to successfully tamp down insurgent forces. The insurgents’ attacks are well planned and executed, so Willink tries to instill a culture among his SEALs of constantly improving and never getting cocky or complacent.
Although SEAL units have a reputation for not always keeping their hair and uniform to typical military standards, Willink makes the members of his task unit keep their uniforms neat and haircuts short. He makes this mandate out of respect for the Army and Marine forces they work with, to show that the SEALs will maintain the same standards as those who are fighting alongside them. The SEALs who are stationed at Camp Corregidor with the Army forces even wear the same Army Combat Uniform as the Soldiers, which fosters camaraderie.
A group of extremely well-trained Iraqi soldiers and American advisers are preparing to arrive at Camp Corregidor, and one of the SEAL commanders at the camp tells Willink he is worried that the new arrivals will be better than his own troops and take over the mission. The commander even considers withholding some help and information from the new arrivals. But Willink reminds the commander that the U.S. and friendly forces must all work together to defeat the outside enemy. The commander can’t let his ego get in the way of the team’s overall success and ability to complete the mission.
Unfortunately, some of the new arrivals have their own ego issues. First, several don’t abide by the same standards for neat uniforms and military haircuts as the Army Soldiers and SEALs at Camp Corregidor. This attitude sends the message that they think they are above the colonel’s grooming rules, which fosters resentment among others at the base.
Second, some of the American advisers fail to show proper respect to their colleagues at camp, talking down to the Army Soldiers and even the senior leaders.
Third, the newly arrived unit shows little interest in learning from the SEAL commander and troops, despite the fact that the SEALs’ experience in Ramadi has given them invaluable knowledge about what works and what doesn’t in this environment.
And fourth, the new unit doesn’t share details of its plans and operations with the other troops, even though it is critical that all forces are in the loop about each other’s missions for the sake of everyone’s success (and survival). Failing to coordinate could also put the other U.S. forces in danger; this unit could get itself in a sticky situation and need backup from the troops. The supporting troops — who weren’t given an opportunity before the operation to bring up possibly preventable issues — now wouldn’t have basic information about the mission they’re coming in to rescue. In a worst-case scenario, failing to share information can even lead to blue-on-blue (friendly fire), meaning that the unit’s ego and behavior could jeopardize everyone involved.
After a few weeks, the colonel orders the new unit to leave Camp Corregidor. Although the unit’s skill and equipment could have been a big help to the U.S. Army Soldiers and SEALs at the camp, the troops’ egos make them more of a risk than an asset.
Gary, a middle manager for a company’s operations department, is dealing with a superintendent who failed to consult him before making a decision that violated the company’s standard operating procedures (SOP). Gary has made it clear to the superintendent in the past how things should operate, and here the superintendent ignored it.
Gary is frustrated by the superintendent’s defiance, and also worried about confronting him. The superintendent has been in the industry longer than Gary; not only does Gary feel that the superintendent looks down on Gary as having inferior knowledge and experience, but Gary also feels that the company can’t afford to lose the superintendent.
Babin is working with Gary and points out that although his ego was bruised by the superintendent’s actions, Gary must check his ego in order to have a productive conversation with the superintendent.
Gary realizes that the superintendent is extremely knowledgeable about the hands-on aspects of the business, but doesn’t deal with the big-picture vision of the company; the superintendent probably thought he was doing what was best, without realizing how his actions would impact the rest of the business. With his insight, Gary can approach the superintendent in a constructive way, without feeling personally burned by the superintendent’s actions.
Gary must also practice Extreme Ownership and take responsibility for not adequately explaining the bigger picture to the superintendent, which allowed the superintendent to have the false impression that he was making a better choice by disregarding SOP. This approach creates space for the superintendent to understand the root of the problem without feeling that Gary is attacking him because his ego is hurt. The superintendent can then put his own ego aside and recognize that, despite his vast knowledge and experience, there is a bigger company mission that he didn’t understand when he acted.
Setting both egos aside puts the entire company and its success at a higher priority than either Gary or the superintendent.
With the appropriate mindset — one that involves taking Extreme Ownership, setting high standards, emphasizing the “why” of each goal, and checking your ego — a leader can implement key strategies to help her team achieve its goals. In chapters 5-8 we will discuss each of four critical strategies, collectively called the Laws of Combat.
Chapter 5 explores the Cover and Move strategy. On a battlefield, Cover and Move allows a team to work together to reach a destination: One group provides cover — keeping an eye out and having weapons ready to ward off enemies — as the other group advances forward. Then they switch roles, essentially leapfrogging forward, until they reach their destination.
This may not appear to have much relevance outside a warzone, but the principle of Cover and Move is teamwork. The entire team must work together, supporting and protecting each other, for everyone’s safety and success. Everyone on the team (or in the company) must be aware of everyone else’s position and objective to be able to move and act cohesively for one effort.
Leaders need to keep the bigger picture in mind to use Cover and Move most effectively. While a leader can come up with a strategy to use Cover and Move within her own team, there might be an even better way to accomplish the same goal by working with another team or department — and that strategy could be twice as effective if it mutually benefits both departments. To do this, a leader needs to be able to collaborate with other leaders, identify their common goal, and clearly communicate to both teams how working together will help everyone achieve success.
Individual teams and departments need to consider how other groups depend on them, and they depend on other groups, to accomplish the company’s larger mission. All individuals and groups within the larger organization have to do their part to contribute to the success of the greater mission. By contrast, when teams compete against each other, it creates tension and undermines the greater goal. When the group fails, everyone fails; when the group wins, everyone wins.
By keeping the entire company’s goal in mind and understanding that everyone within the company is working together to achieve it, the leader can make decisions that not only help her own team succeed but gets the whole organization closer to success.
In their efforts to take control of Ramadi from the Iraqi insurgents, the U.S. forces are using an aggressive strategy called Seize, Clear, Hold, Build. This entails forcing their way into the most strongly enemy-held neighborhoods, fighting back enemy fighters to clear the area, and then creating permanent U.S. combat outposts there.
One step in this strategy involves cordoning off a neighborhood, and then systematically searching and clearing each building in the neighborhood to ensure the area is safe. While necessary, this process is very dangerous for the U.S. troops, who risk coming face to face with enemy fighters. While U.S. forces move through the buildings, snipers are stationed strategically on a nearby rooftop to provide cover.
During one mission, the troops target a building for their sniper overwatch, but it turns out that the only clear view from the building is on a balcony where they would be exposed and visible to enemy fighters. They size up another nearby building, but find that it doesn’t offer a clear view either.
Time is running low to decide; the other teams will begin their search efforts soon and the snipers need to be in place for their safety. Babin, who is leading the team, decides the lesser of the two evils is to do the best they can from the first building.
The snipers get into position and the mission goes off successfully, with no U.S. injuries or deaths. The rest of the troops retreat back to base, while SOP calls for the sniper teams to wait until nightfall to return to camp. Although this policy is meant for the snipers’ safety — to avoid the danger of becoming walking targets as they move through the streets in broad daylight — it creates a risk in this case because they’re on a relatively exposed balcony; the building and position they’re in is not as secure as it should (and normally would) be. Hours of gunfire have already given the insurgents a decent idea of the snipers’ location, and following SOP would give them another eight to 10 hours to figure out where the snipers are and attack them.
Babin must again determine the lesser of two evils: In this case, he decides they will return to camp and not wait until darkness. The team uses Cover and Move to get there safely. With this tactic, one group positions themselves, weapons drawn, to cover and protect as the other group moves forward. Then the two groups switch roles, allowing the first group to move ahead, and they continue alternating until they safely reach the base.
Along the way, the team does encounter a spurt of attacks and gunfire, but they are still able to work together to stay safe and make it back to camp. However, when the snipers return to base, the chief angrily tells Babin that he made a mistake: He could have left a second sniper team in place at its overwatch position to cover his team as they moved back to base. Then, from an overwatch position at the base, his team could have provided cover for the other sniper team as they retreated back.
Babin had been so focused on his own team that he forgot the bigger picture. If Babin had used the same Cover and Move technique on a bigger scale involving more teams than his, it would have provided both teams better safety and coverage.
The production manager at a company is frustrated with a subsidiary company his team uses to transport their product. The manager’s team is having a hard time minimizing downtime in the production process — and downtime costs the company money. He blames the subsidiary company for making his team wait for pickups, which causes delays.
The manager feels he can’t do much to help or instruct the subsidiary company because it isn’t technically under his leadership. He has the attitude that he needs to be focused on his own team, he can’t be worried about this other company. However, Babin points out that if the subsidiary company is causing problems for his team, that this is the manager’s concern and it’s his responsibility to address the issue.
Since the parent company owns the subsidiary company, it does ultimately have the same mission as the production team. With that premise, the manager needs to find a way to work together with the subsidiary company to accomplish their joint goal, so that each team is helping and supporting each other.
The production manager looks at the bigger picture to see how each team contributes to the same overall mission. He talks with the subsidiary company and begins to understand the challenges they face that cause delays. With this understanding, the manager is able to implement Cover and Move in a business context: He figures out ways that he and his team can help things run more smoothly for the subsidiary company, so that, in turn, his workflow runs more efficiently.
When another department is creating a hurdle for your own team’s success, sometimes the best course of action is to figure out how to help them get their work done so they can do what you need from them.
Describe a current or recent situation in which another team, department, or division impeded your team’s work.
How could you approach that team’s leader to better understand their workflow and identify ways your team might be able to help them?
How can you give the other team a better sense of your team’s workflow and challenges, so that they might gain a better understanding of how they can help you achieve your goals?
What could you and your team do to help them accomplish their work more efficiently? This could be something that helps them achieve the task you need them to do, or it could help them perform another task that frees them up to do what you need.
Life always brings surprises, so you must always expect the unexpected. If you keep plans simple, you control what you can while minimizing confusion when something inevitably goes off course. Simplifying a plan also requires you to narrow your focus to the most critical priorities, which helps reinforce the overarching goal for both you and your team.
By contrast, when plans are complicated, you increase the chances of people not understanding them. If people don’t understand the basic plan, how can they execute it? Furthermore, they are less able to adapt when things go wrong with complicated plans.
A team works more effectively when communication is simple and straightforward. Everyone on the team should strive to relay information to each other simply, explicitly, and concisely, especially in times of stress. This reduces the chance of wasted time and effort due to confusion or misunderstanding.
Plans must be made to be simple, and leaders need to explain them in a simple, clear, and concise way. A leader should also encourage all team members, no matter how junior, to speak up if they have questions or concerns. (As we discussed in Chapter 3, a leader is responsible for getting every member of her team to understand a plan or goal — and conversely, team members are responsible for speaking up if they don’t understand.)
The SEALs and Army are working together on a mission to clear an enemy-held area of Ramadi and establish an outpost. Although enemy fighters are attacking the U.S. troops as they build this outpost, the U.S. and (friendly) Iraqi forces have chosen this specific location to do a presence patrol, which entails establishing a presence in enemy-held territory to show strength and to indicate to the local civilians that U.S. forces are determined to take the city back from insurgents.
A military transition team (U.S. Army Soldiers and Marines who train and advise Iraqi soldiers), known as MiTT, joins the effort by creating a plan to patrol the neighborhood with Iraqi soldiers. But when Willink hears the MiTT leader’s operation, he worries that the plan reflects a poor understanding of the reality and risks of a city as dangerous as Ramadi.
First, the route the MiTT plans to take winds through some of the most hostile areas of the city, on roads that the minesweeping teams haven’t cleared for safety.
Second, the route takes the team through several different U.S. military territories — including multiple Army and Marine Corps companies and an Army battalion — that each have distinct SOPs and radio networks. Passing through all those groups’ battle spaces would require coordinating with all of them, adding unnecessary complexity to the plan.
Third, the long proposed route in the intense heat of the Iraqi summer calls for lots of water, and its path through such hostile enemy territory requires immense amounts of ammunition.
Willink suggests that the MiTT leader simplify the plan, at least for the team’s first few operations. After some skepticism and resistance, the leader agrees to a shorter route that passes only through SEAL-controlled battlespace.
As the MiTT and Iraqi soldiers review the plan before going out on patrol, Willink notices that everyone seems a little too casual and unconcerned about the operation. He doubts that they realize the risks involved. Willink directs a team of SEAL snipers to cover the patrol from an overwatch position for extra protection.
Twelve minutes after the patrol begins, gunfire starts and the MiTT and Iraqi soldiers are attacked. Willink gets a report that two are wounded and need help. A SEAL leader relays the information to Willink — simply and clearly, despite the chaos and confusion — so that he can send help to the right location.
When the MiTT returns, Willink discovers two Iraqi soldiers have been killed. The MiTT leader is rattled by the experience, and recognizes that the operation would have been even riskier had he not agreed to simplify the plan.
A company is rolling out a new bonus program for its manufacturing plant, but the employees are baffled by it: They don’t understand how bonuses are calculated and what aspects of their performance the new plan intends to reward or punish.
The chief engineer and plant manager developed the bonus plan to maximize the production staff’s efficiency, factoring in several factors:
The engineer and manager worked so hard to create a system that reflected every level of complexity, that they overlooked how that complexity makes the system virtually useless to their employees; if the plan is too confusing for workers to understand, then it does nothing to incentivize them. The elaborate system created to maximize efficiency is not accomplishing that goal, so it’s a failed plan.
The chief engineer and plant manager simplify the bonus system to capture the main priorities of production — the demand for various products, and the quality at which they’re being produced. The engineer and manager explain the simpler plan to employees, and the workers finally have a solid understanding of how they can improve their performance to earn bonuses. As a result, the company sees an uptick in productivity almost immediately.
Additionally, as the higher-performing employees work even harder, now incentivized by the bonuses, the low-performing employees have fewer orders to fill. The company is able to identify and let go of these weak links, which helps the success of the entire team. The employees and the company as a whole benefit from having a much simpler plan that everyone can understand and execute.
There are times when it feels like everything goes wrong at once, and that there is no way to accomplish everything at the same time. In these situations, a leader has to be able to calmly take stock of the situation, decide what needs to happen first, and carry it out; this Law of Combat is called Prioritize and Execute.
Trying to address several issues at the same time is overwhelming and inefficient. Most likely, you are only dividing your attention and won’t be able to tackle any of them effectively. Instead — even when it feels like five fires are burning at once — leaders must assess which problem poses the highest risk to everything else, and attack it.
Stress and high stakes can make this even more difficult, clouding a leader’s ability to clearly take stock of the situation and make definitive decisions. Leaders must be able to keep their eyes on the big picture in order to effectively prioritize.
Thorough planning can help leaders anticipate what problems may come up while carrying out a plan, and develop responses to those issues. This allows leaders to stay a step ahead, and makes it easier to Prioritize and Execute; a leader won’t get flustered by a problem that she already considered and has a solution for. Again, controlling what you can makes it easier to deal with the uncontrollable.
If the leader then explains to her team the potential hurdles and responses before executing a plan, the team is also able to quickly adapt and respond if the problem does arise. In that event, the team might not even need guidance from leaders, which frees up leaders to continue focusing on the big picture — adjusting the larger plan, if necessary — and allows for Decentralized Command, a strategy we’ll discuss in Chapter 8.
If circumstances cause priorities to change mid-course, it’s essential that leaders communicate that change to higher-ups as well as lower leaders and team members. Everyone needs to be aware of a shift in focus and priorities to be able to successfully complete the mission and reach the goal. When priorities shift, leaders and team members alike need to be agile and willing to change course. Getting stuck on the original plan and refusing to adapt hinders the whole team’s success.
A platoon of SEALs and a group of Iraqi soldiers are carrying out a mission to push deep into enemy territory. They plan to temporarily station themselves in a building in the enemy-held area so that they can kill enemy fighters and send a message that the insurgents have no safe haven in this neighborhood.
The team is occupying an apartment building that offers excellent strategic views and a fair amount of protection from enemy gunfire. However, a single narrow stairway is the only entrance and exit, which creates the risk of enemy fighters putting an explosive near the exit and trapping the group. The group is not far from a U.S. combat outpost that could offer help if needed, but they are positioned in such a hostile area that it would be dangerous for any backup that came to their aid.
The team carries out an overall successful operation but as they prepare to leave, two bomb technicians spot something suspicious at the entrance of the building: The object looks like a silver cylinder concealed under a plastic tarp, and the likelihood that it’s an explosive is too high for the group to take the chance.
Babin, the platoon leader, tries to determine another way for the team to escape from their position on the second floor. Three sides of the building drop nearly 20 feet to the ground; without any rope and with their heavy gear in tow, this isn’t a feasible option. Plus, the street below is likely to have more explosives.
The fourth wall of the building has no windows or doors, just solid concrete. But the team decides this is the best option, and starts sledgehammering through the wall. Meanwhile, the bomb technicians work on a strategy to set off the bomb at the entrance below in a controlled way, so they don’t leave it to explode later and potentially hurt other U.S. forces or innocent civilians.
When the hole in the wall is ready for everyone to escape, Babin signals to the bomb technicians to set off their controlled explosion; once they do, the whole team will have a couple minutes to safely exit before the detonation.
The team passes through the hole in the wall to an adjacent rooftop, where they must all be on guard because they are visible and exposed to attack. Suddenly one of the SEALs falls 20 feet to the ground — what they thought was the edge of the rooftop, where the SEAL had been walking, is actually just a tarp. This leaves the rest of the team in a vulnerable position on the rooftop, with just minutes before the bomb detonates and a SEAL hurt and on the ground below.
It is a literal life-or-death situation, and Babin must stay calm to Prioritize and Execute.
Within minutes, Babin and his team address all problems, retrieve the fallen SEAL (who ultimately only needs stitches on his elbow), and exit before the bomb detonates. Babin successfully implemented Prioritize and Execute, with the help of his team, and led them all out to safety.
A pharmaceutical company has recently been losing money, and the CEO develops a plan to bring the company’s revenues back up. His plan includes several ambitious initiatives.
Each aspect of the plan carries its own challenges and risks. Executing everything at once leaves the company spread very thin and in a poor position to address problems that may come up along the way. Willink advises the CEO to determine the highest priority item and put the entire company’s efforts on that one goal until it is reached or there is significant momentum. Then, decide on the next priority and do the same, and continue on this course until every initiative has been implemented.
The CEO agrees; he puts the highest priority on the sales team’s productivity, and communicates clearly to the rest of the company that this is the primary objective. The whole company works toward this effort, and the CEO quickly sees promising progress. (Shortform note: The book doesn’t give any further information, but the implication is that the CEO stayed on this course and presumably continued to see progress in all his initiatives.)
It’s critical for a leader to clearly and decisively Prioritize and Execute when faced with curveballs and hurdles, but it can be difficult in the midst of a stressful, high-stakes situation.
Use these steps to effectively Prioritize and Execute in any situation.
You can be the best leader in the world, but you’re still human and you simply can’t do everything yourself. Decentralized Command is a form of delegating that allows leaders to stay focused on their unique job — leading the overall team in pursuit of the larger goal — by allowing each junior leader and team member under them to carry out her own unique job.
Leaders can only be effective at managing a limited number of people, generally about six to 10 people. To work efficiently, teams must be divided into smaller groups; senior leaders directly manage junior leaders, who directly manage teams of employees.
Senior leaders need to have an understanding of the larger goal and the plan to reach it. They must communicate this clearly to junior leaders, so that they, too, can understand the plan and the “why” (as we discussed in Chapter 3). Junior leaders have to understand the mission and how it ties in with the greater goal so that they can relay that to their teams and answer questions if anyone is unclear or skeptical of the plan.
With the understanding of the company’s mission and plan to achieve it, junior leaders must also be empowered to take action and make decisions that get the overall team closer to accomplishing that goal. A junior leader knows her team better than anyone else, and knows what will put her team in the best position to execute a plan. If a junior leader is empowered to act, she can keep her team moving efficiently toward the goal.
However, this doesn’t mean junior leaders should go rogue; they need to understand what falls within their authority and consult senior leaders on anything that lies beyond their authority. Furthermore, junior leaders need to keep senior leaders in the loop with important information and updates, so that the leaders — who are always responsible for keeping the big picture in mind — can make informed decisions.
The relationship between senior and junior leaders requires trust, confidence, and balance to successfully have Decentralized Command. Junior leaders must have confidence in their understanding of the mission and the “why,” and in their authority to make certain decisions. They must also trust that their senior leaders will support them and their decisions. Even if a junior leader makes a mistake in her decision making, the senior leaders can gain trust if they recognize the junior leader made that decision in an earnest effort to achieve the goal.
Senior leaders need to keep a balance between being too involved and too distanced. Leaders who are overly involved (e.g. micromanage) get too pulled into the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. Without a clear view of the broader goal and the team’s overall progress in reaching it, a leader loses the ability to direct the team and strategically adapt to changes. On the other hand, leaders who are too disconnected from the front lines are out of touch with what their team members are doing, and are unable to lead them.
Leaders need to be agile enough to move around and help where they are most needed at any given point; this means a leader’s role will change somewhat over the course of a mission, but she will also maintain a view of the team’s overall goal and progress.
The SEALs are conducting a huge operation that also incorporates two U.S. Army battalions with hundreds of soldiers each, a Marine Corps battalion, plus almost a hundred armored vehicles and military aircrafts. Willink can only lead a mission this large through Decentralized Command.
Willink has already trained and instructed the leaders under him to make decisions. He trusts their judgment to act in difficult situations, as well as their ability to empower the leaders under them to make strategic decisions. What’s more, he expects them to make decisions and not need to constantly ask what to do. Decentralized Command gives Willink the peace of mind that his junior leaders are taking care of all the details, allowing him to stay focused on the strategic mission.
Not only does Willink have confidence in his junior leaders, but those leaders also trust that Willink and other senior leaders will support their decision-making authority. That kind of mutual trust comes with time and experience. Willink has seen his junior leaders act wisely and strategically in past situations, and the junior leaders have gained confidence in themselves and in the way Willink has empowered them.
The operation entails taking hold of a major road between two especially hostile areas of Ramadi. During this mission, one SEAL platoon needs to use a different building than planned, so they alert Willink and make the necessary move, and Willink updates the rest of the cooperating forces. Sometimes, Willink’s junior leaders on the front lines need to adjust their location because the original plan is not feasible, or the map they used to plan logistics didn’t accurately show certain details (like the distance to the road or other buildings) so they need to adapt. Knowing the junior leaders will make the necessary adjustments, Wililnk can continue to focus on the overall mission.
As the mission continues, the U.S. troops detect possible enemy fighters moving into position to attack. Everyone is on high alert, and Willink gets a radio report that someone has spotted what appear to be enemy snipers on a nearby building. The forces are eager to shoot heavy fire at the building and eliminate the sniper threat, but knowing how easily mistakes and confusions can be made in the midst of urban battle, Willink calmly insists on doing his due diligence.
Willink identifies the building in which the enemy snipers are located (the U.S. forces all use a uniform map with each building in the area labeled with a number) and confirms that no U.S. troops are in that building; the platoon that moved location confirms they are in another building. But something still seems off to Willink. With time of the essence — everyone wants to take out the snipers before they have a chance to harm U.S. forces — Willink continues to delay firing at the building while he takes every precaution.
Willink asks the commander who spotted the snipers to again confirm the building by counting how many buildings between it and the next major intersection. When the commander counts the buildings, he realizes he has misidentified the building number; it is the same building where the SEAL platoon has relocated. The men they thought were enemy snipers are actually SEALs, and they had been moments away from vicious friendly fire.
If Willink had been consumed in smaller details of the operation, he might not have had the mental capacity or big-picture understanding to see the risk and avoid a disastrous mistake. The fact that his junior leaders were making the tactical decisions — and informing him of the changes — freed up Willink to keep his focus on the overall mission.
The regional president of an investment advisor group is reviewing the organizational structure of his team, including more than a thousand employees at dozens of branches. Each branch has a branch manager who is in charge of all the team members in that location. However, the large branches may have 20 or more employees, and the small branches only three.
The large branches have grown to their size because they are more successful, and that success is often owed to the strength of the manager. However, when branches grow too big, the managers can’t keep their focus on the big-picture and how the company is trying to grow; much of their attention goes to their high-performing employees and the day-to-day needs of the branch, and growth slows.
On the other hand, the smaller branches don’t generate enough revenue because they have so little staff, so the branch managers are forced to get in the field and do some sales themselves. This takes them away from their leadership and management roles, and they’re unable to focus on the bigger picture.
The regional president says that branches operate optimally with five or six employees. Willink explains the principles of Decentralized Command, and the president decides to adjust his management structure to put each leader in charge of only five to six people, possibly by inserting some junior management positions into larger branches. (Shortform note: The book does not elaborate on how the regional president will carry this out or what the outcome is once he does.)
Even with the right knowledge and strategies in place, leadership comes with many challenges. In the next four chapters, we’ll explore the hurdles leaders need to navigate and the balance they must keep in order to use their tools and strategies effectively.
This chapter discusses the importance of planning. It may sound obvious, but a leader has to be able to develop a clear and well-thought-out plan; with a whole team of people following you, you can’t simply wing it. There are several steps to developing an effective plan.
In order to craft a plan, the leader needs a clear understanding of what the overarching mission or goal is. The mission must be simple, concise, and explicit, targeting a very specific goal that gets the team or company one step closer to the larger strategic vision. A mission that is too broad or vague leads to a lack of focus and prevents a team from successfully achieving the goal.
Furthermore, the mission needs to incorporate the larger purpose and goal, so that everyone, from the leader down to the lowest level employees, understands the “why.”
A leader should explore different possible ways to achieve the mission before determining the best course of action. Once decided, the leader needs to flesh out the details of the plan in a way that uses the resources available and takes advantage of various team members’ expertise.
Leaders should involve junior leaders and other employees to give input and help develop the plan. An employee’s on-the-ground perspective will be different than the big-picture lens of a manager, and both are valuable to bring up different considerations and concerns. Additionally, involving the whole team gives everyone a sense of ownership of the plan, which makes them more invested in the mission and helps them to better execute it.
During this process, the leader should be supervising the development of the plan and keeping a focus on the bigger picture and mission. Stepping back in this way allows her to see any weaknesses or issues and steer the team to correct them.
Not all risks can be avoided, and many aggressive and innovative plans will necessarily involve some inevitable risks; as the saying goes, no risk, no reward. But an effective leader balances the necessary risks by planning for risks that she can control. A well-developed plan should include contingency plans for risks that the team and leader can anticipate. Contingency plans help everyone involved to be prepared and know how to react if something goes wrong, so the plan can continue smoothly.
When the plan has been entirely fleshed out and checked over, the leader needs to explain the course of action to everyone involved. This explanation needs to be clear, concise, and simple to avoid any misinterpretations and ensure thorough understanding for everyone involved — down to the most junior team member. The brief doesn’t need to include every exhaustive detail of the plan, only pertinent information that helps the team members execute their roles in the plan.
While briefing the team on the plan, an effective leader encourages discussion and questions from everyone; as we discussed in Chapter 3, Extreme Ownership means a leader is responsible for equipping all members of her team with the information and resources they need to execute a plan. The leader can also use techniques to reinforce understanding, such as pausing at various points during the briefing and asking team members questions about what’s been explained so far.
After a team executes a plan, a successful leader makes time for the entire team to meet and debrief. This allows the team to review the whole process — from planning to execution — and discuss what worked well, what didn’t work, and how they can be more effective next time. This constant self-assessment helps a successful team continue to grow and constantly improve.
Standardizing the planning process (including the format and terminology used) across a business creates even more success. A standardized process allows every department as well as supporting assets (e.g. contractors and subsidiary companies) to speak the same language with their plans and save time, since they don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every plan or project. Everyone in the company should be briefed on the standardized planning process, and it needs to be designed to be repeatable and include some sort of guide or checklist to help employees implement it.
Babin is leading a team of SEALs on a mission to rescue the teenage nephew of an Iraqi police colonel, who is being held hostage by a terrorist group connected to al Qaeda. Intelligence reports say that the hostage is in a house in an extremely dangerous, enemy held neighborhood, where the roads are littered with explosives. Babin has to develop a plan that carefully mitigates as much risk as possible while giving his team the greatest chance of success.
Babin plans to lead SEALs, a bomb technician, and Iraqi soldiers into the house to clear it for safety, while Willink will command the assault force, armored vehicles, and aircraft that will provide support for the mission. Babin discusses the plan with Willink as well as a U.S. Army officer who is very familiar with the neighborhood where the hostage is being held. The officer is able to offer some advice to fine-tune the plan.
Babin quickly and thoroughly briefs everyone involved in the operation. It’s a lot of information in a short amount of time, so he closes the brief with the three most important takeaways: implement the element of surprise when entering the house, focus on getting in and out as quickly as possible, and be careful not to hurt the hostage or mistake him for a captor.
After the brief, as the team is preparing to start the mission, Babin and Willink get a new intelligence report that there are explosives buried in the front yard of the house and machine guns inside. Despite the new information and the increased risk, Babin and his troops are confident in their plan and know they have mitigated every risk they could anticipate. The new intelligence doesn’t force Babin to change his plan because his planning is so thorough that he has already prepared for that possibility; every operation carries the risk that the enemy could be armed and have explosives ready.
Babin and his team successfully carry out the mission, and ultimately they find no explosives in the yard or machine guns in the house. They credit their success to detailed and thorough planning, with helpful input from the Army officer, and an effective briefing that helped every man fully understand his role and responsibility in the operation.
The vice president of emerging markets for a retail business credits much of the company’s success to having experienced, successful employees lead expansion in new areas. Planning is crucial in the company’s expansion, but as the business continues to grow and enter new markets, he recognizes the need to develop a standardized planning process.
Some members of the VP’s team feel that documenting their planning process and teaching it to other leaders is tedious and unnecessary; the company is doing well, so why fix what’s not broken? But the vice president knows the value of taking the time to do this.
To explain the importance of standardized planning Babin shares a story from his time in SEAL officer in training.
Babin’s training program included a 96-hour planning practice, which gave the SEALs-to-be four days to plan for a combat mission, and the officers in training would create a PowerPoint presentation of more than 70 slides to brief their teams on the operation. Instructors and officers always sat in on the presentations, and would inevitably tear apart virtually every detail of the plan. They seemed to want more PowerPoint slides, more charts — essentially, more production. But it seemed to Babin like too much time and effort was going to creating the slides and taking away from actual planning.
During the final stage of his training, Babin and his platoon had to develop another mission and brief, and it wasn’t going well; the plan was complex and unclear, but it did have lots of PowerPoint slides. With time running out, Willink (Babin’s boss) advised Babin and his team to forget about the PowerPoint and forget about impressing the officers. Instead, he said to focus on making sure the troops understood the mission and their individual tasks.
Willink explained that briefs need to communicate at the lowest common denominator, to make the plan clear to the most junior people involved. In theory, everyone should understand the plan well enough that they can execute it without any guidance (though things often come up or circumstances change, which is why the leader must be there to help everyone adapt).
Babin simplified the plan — and the presentation — to focus on the aspects that the troops would need to know to successfully execute it. Babin asked the troops to stand around the map during the brief, to clearly point out where the operation was happening. Babin stopped periodically to ask questions and make sure everyone was following him, and asked team members to repeat back pieces of the plan to ensure they understood it thoroughly. At the end of the brief, the officers complimented Babin and his team for having the most clear and understandable brief of any team.
Babin carried this experience into his deployment in Iraq, remembering to keep each plan and brief clear and simple. Additionally, he developed the habit of holding a debrief with his platoon after every operation so the whole team had a chance to analyze how they could be more efficient and effective in future missions. Babin credits this routine for his platoon’s success and constant improvement in one of the most hostile and dangerous areas of U.S. military occupation at the time.
Hearing that story, the emerging markets VP wants to emulate the SEALs’ example by developing a planning SOP that is replicable across the company. Babin shares a workbook with the VP and his team that outlines military mission planning and to adapt it to the corporate world. The VP uses the workbook to develop a standardized planning process and presents it to his key leaders.
The leaders perform a planning exercise, developing and revising plans using the SOP. The company actually executes one of these plans, and discovers that the contingencies that were built in — per the planning procedure — end up saving the company business and revenue. As a result of having the planning SOP and ensuring the team thoroughly understands the company’s larger vision, the VP discovers that his employees are able to act and make decisions in the field without wasting time running every question by senior leaders.
A successful initiative starts with a well-thought-out plan. Follow these steps to develop an effective plan for your team or business.
A leader needs to coordinate the efforts of her team as well as her senior leaders in order to accomplish any goal. This is called leading up and down the chain of command, and requires careful balance of your role as both a leader and a subordinate, effective communication, and Extreme Ownership. In order to successfully lead up and down the chain of command, keep three things in mind.
First, take ownership of leading everyone in your world, from the junior team members below you to the bosses above you. It is your responsibility to inform everyone of your plan, how that fits into the larger vision and goal, and what you need to accomplish that.
An effective leader makes a point of interacting with her team members and observing the challenges and reality that employees face in the field. Understanding employees’ roles and challenges can be a huge asset in making future plans and decisions for the team. However, leaders don’t need to know every detail of frontline employees’ jobs, and junior employees don’t need to know every aspect of the big picture; it can distract and overwhelm them. Having a whole team of people who all know the same insight and information is not helpful.
Second, if you aren’t getting what you need from either a boss or an employee, first look at what you can do to help them help you. Did you clearly explain what you need? Does this person have all the information and resources she needs to deliver what you want? Does she understand how her contribution affects the success of the overall mission?
When directing her team, a leader must make sure all team members understand their duties in the plan and how they’re contributing to the larger goal. (Shortform note: This overlaps with what we discussed in Chapter 3 about ensuring that team members thoroughly understand the “why” of each plan they execute.)
In order to effectively lead her team, a leader also needs to have the information and resources she needs from her higher-ups. If you aren’t getting the information or support you need to lead your team, Extreme Ownership requires you to take responsibility and talk to your boss about what you need and what you can do to make it easier for your boss to provide it to you (e.g. deliver information more efficiently so she can make key decisions, or communicate more clearly what support you need for your team).
A leader needs to be able to tactfully communicate with her boss to explain her needs and give the boss situational awareness. This requires more finesse than leading down the chain of command, when the leader’s authority over her employees holds a lot of persuasive power in its own right. When leading up the chain of command, a leader needs to demonstrate her skill, knowledge, experience, and professionalism to get what she needs from her boss.If done well, your boss will appreciate that you are doing what you can to help her do what you’re asking, and she may be more inclined to provide support and resources in the future.
Third, instead of asking your boss what to do, tell her what you plan to do. Be proactive and show your boss that you have the knowledge and confidence to effectively lead. This shows that you are doing everything you can within your authority to make things run smoothly, taking some weight off the boss’s shoulders and hopefully freeing up her energy to do what you need from her.
However, as a leader, you must also keep in mind that your boss has to consider the bigger picture when making decisions — just as you do with your own team — and you should respect your boss’s decision whether or not it comes down in your favor. Even when you disagree with your boss, it’s critical to the entire company’s success that leadership presents a united front; therefore, you should relay all decisions and plans to your team as if they were your own.
Willink and Babin have just returned home from Iraq, and Willink is tasked with creating a presentation for the head of the U.S. Navy to explain what his task unit achieved in Ramadi. Willink takes a map of Ramadi and overlays a visual representation of all the areas where the team pushed out the enemy and built a combat outpost to spread the presence and power of U.S. and Iraqi forces; when Babin sees the illustration, it’s the first time he grasps the breadth of their impact.
During their deployment, Babin was involved in just about every mission represented on the map, but he had been so caught up in the details of each operation that he never took a step back to see the big picture of what they were accomplishing. He realizes that if he didn’t recognize the full impact of their efforts, there was no way his troops had. As a leader, he should have kept a better sense of the big picture, and in turn imparted that to his team.
Leaders often overestimate their teams’ understanding of how a plan or their individual duties tie in with the overarching goal. A leader is responsible for helping her team connect the dots between their performance and the larger organization’s success, for the sake of their morale, conviction, and quality of work.
Upon reflection, Babin feels he should have taken more time to explain the “why” to his team and delegated more planning to his troops so that they would have more ownership of the mission. A strong sense of investment in each mission and conviction that their work was making a significant difference in the region was essential for the SEALs to endure the difficult and extreme conditions they faced in Ramadi — from the intense desert heat to the constant threat of death.
Babin receives an email from higher-ups with questions about a mission he’s planning to begin in a few hours. He’s frustrated and furious that he has to spend precious time explaining details to officers who are in another city and don’t understand the day-to-day reality of the conditions he and his team face in Ramadi.
Babin vents to Willink, who is stationed with him in Ramadi and holds the position above Babin and below the commanding officer who sent the email. Willink has also been frustrated by the never-ending — and often seemingly obvious — questions, but he reasons with Babin that the senior leaders aren’t trying to make things more difficult. Granted, the officers don’t fully understand life and battle in Ramadi. But they are part of the same organization and have the same overall goals.
Willink points out the officer’s perspective: He is in charge of the larger-scale operation and has to green-light every mission, so he can’t know all the details of every unit’s frontline experience. Instead of blaming the officer for his lack of understanding, Babin and Willink can make a point of providing all the information he’ll need to approve their missions and allow them to move forward; they need to lead up the chain of command. The officer needs to feel confident in each mission before he can approve it, so Babin and Willink’s best course of action is to work with him — not against him — to make him feel comfortable and confident. If the officer still has questions, it’s their own fault for not offering enough or the right kind of information.
Babin and Willink explain to the team leaders below them that their course of action going forward will be to provide as much detailed information as possible to the commanding officer to help build his understanding of their efforts in Ramadi. They invite the officer and other senior leaders to Ramadi to accompany them on combat operations. Through these efforts, the officer gains not only a better understanding but also more trust in what the SEALs are doing in Ramadi; from that point forward, he approves every mission they submit.
A field manager is frustrated that his company’s corporate leaders don’t seem to understand what his team is dealing with in the field. He feels he is forced to spend so much time submitting paperwork and fielding questions from the higher-ups, who are located in headquarters hundreds of miles away, that it pulls him and his team away from doing their job.
Babin asks the manager if he thinks the company leaders want his field leadership team to fail. The manager realizes that his bosses obviously aren’t trying to impede him, being that his team’s performance in the field essentially determines the business’s success or failure. Then, Babin goes on, the senior executives must need information.
Ultimately, it’s the field manager’s fault for not providing adequate information if his bosses are asking for more. The manager needs to effectively lead up the chain of command — working with senior leadership instead of resenting them — for the sake of his team’s performance; the power is in his hands, not his bosses’. In order to do this, he has to let go of the “us versus them” mentality that is so common and easy to fall into.
The field manager takes the advice to heart: He finds out what kind of information the corporate executives specifically need, goes above and beyond to provide them with that information, and even hosts them for a field visit to see his team in action. As a result, the field leadership team develops a camaraderie with the senior leaders, and the senior leaders gain a better understanding of the field team’s challenges.
Although sometimes it feels like your boss is creating hurdles for you to do your job, Extreme Ownership requires you to analyze what you can do to break down that barrier.
Describe a recent occasion when you felt your superiors were impeding your work more than supporting it. Specifically, how were they creating roadblocks?
Ideally, what kind of support did you need from them to help you be successful?
Step into your bosses’ shoes: What would have helped them provide that support (e.g. more information or a better understanding of your workflow)?
What could you have done to provide them with what they needed to better support you? What could you have communicated?
Part of a leader’s responsibility is to lead her team courageously and decisively, no matter what stress and confusion is happening around her; presumably, this is part of the reason she has earned her position as the head of the team. Sometimes, a leader will only have limited information available to make a critical decision, and in these cases she must be comfortable making the best decision possible with what she has.
At times an educated guess will be the best option available, and this is when a leader’s knowledge and experience is especially critical to compensate for missing information. But leaders or not, there are times in life when we all must make decisions based on an incomplete picture — for example, in healthcare decisions when you know only the likelihood of a risk but not its certainty, or in deciding whether to evacuate before a forecasted severe storm.
Leaders can’t afford to waste time with too much deliberation, waiting on further research or hoping to reach the absolute right solution. They need to be able to make decisions quickly, and to adapt those decisions just as quickly if new information or circumstances arise.
Additionally, it’s important that a leader be decisive to reinforce her team’s confidence in her ability to lead. If a leader appears indecisive or unconfident, her employees are more likely to start questioning her competence.
Babin is leading a team of SEALs on a Seize, Clear, Hold, Build mission with U.S. Army and Marine Corps battalions. Babin’s team comes into the enemy-held neighborhood early in the morning and the SEAL snipers set up an overwatch position to cover the U.S. Army troops that are coming to create a new combat outpost.
After the soldiers move into the area, a SEAL sniper named Chris Kyle (who went on to write the bestselling book American Sniper that later inspired the Hollywood movie) alerts Babin that he’s just seen a dark figure in the window of another building, and he’s unsure whether to take the shot. Normally, if Kyle can positively identify an enemy — if he has no doubt that the person he sees through his scope is an insurgent — then he can take the shot without asking permission. If the target is an enemy sniper, it’s even more urgent he shoots before the enemy has a chance to harm a U.S. soldier or SEAL.
U.S. Soldiers are clearing buildings in the same area, so both Kyle and Babin are apprehensive about shooting in case the target turns out to be part of U.S. forces. Babin radios the U.S. Army commander to confirm none of his men are in the building where the target was spotted (all the American forces in Ramadi operate on the same map, which labels each building with a number). The commander confirms his soldiers are not in the building, and urges Kyle to take the shot; the commander feels certain the target must be an enemy, and doesn’t want to allow any time for an enemy sniper to hurt any U.S. troops.
Kyle gets another glimpse of the target in the window before he disappears again, but he’s still can’t positively identify him. Despite the Army commander’s urging for Kyle to shoot, Babin asks the commander to have his men clear the building where the target is located. Impatient and frustrated, the commander initially pushes back, but finally relents at Babin’s insistence; the Army soldiers are ordered to clear the building while Kyle covers them from his overwatch position.
With only limited information available — unable to positively identify the target and knowing that friendly forces are nearby — Babin has to make the best decision he can, based on logic and not emotion. Babin can’t risk authorizing Kyle to take the shot because the prospect of friendly fire is worse than the risk of missing the chance to take out an enemy sniper. He makes the decision and stands firmly by it, regardless of the Army commander’s urging.
As soon as the commander calls for his men to clear the building, Babin sees his error: He and Kyle misidentified the building on the map. The soldiers who are heading out to clear the building with the target actually come out of the building where Kyle saw the target — meaning the man Kyle saw was a U.S. Soldier and not an enemy sniper. Despite the mistake with the map, Babin is grateful that both he and Kyle listened to their gut and didn’t succumb to pressure to shoot the target. The commander, too, is relieved that Babin didn’t give in to his pressure.
Babin and Willink are working with Jim, the CEO of a software company, and Darla, the CEO of a subsidiary engineering company. The CEOs are dealing with challenges, even though the software company has seen impressive growth and revenues in the five years since its launch. Their primary issue is that competitors are trying to recruit their top talent, namely the five senior engineers; if the engineers leave, their teams could leave with them, and that would jeopardize the company’s future.
What’s more, the senior engineers have created a culture of being competitive — rather than collaborative — and even trying to outperform each other. Two senior engineers in particular, Eduardo and Nigel, often bicker and blame each other for problems on their own projects. Darla has tried to resolve the issue, but nothing has worked and Eduardo’s and Nigel’s hostility has become detrimental to the entire team.
Eduardo and Nigel each insist that the other should be fired because they can no longer work together. Darla and Jim are both at a loss. Darla feels that losing either Eduardo or Nigel would hurt the company, and carries the risk of also losing some key people from their teams; losing both, she says, would be disastrous.
Darla thinks it over and concludes that she wants to let the situation play out; she doesn’t know who, if anyone, to believe. However, Babin points out that a leader needs to be proactive and make decisions, rather than letting a situation dictate decisions. Babin asks Darla to think through what will likely happen if she lets things play out. Darla predicts that if she keeps both Eduardo and Nigel, one will end up leaving out of discontent; he will quickly get a job offer from a competitor, and will likely take a few talented team members with him.
The alternative is to fire one of the senior engineers, but Darla can’t decide which one because she doesn’t know who to believe. She feels she doesn’t have enough facts to make an informed decision — but Willink thinks that if Darla knows enough to predict how things would likely unfold, then she has the information she needs to make a decision. Babin explains that Darla needs to be perceived as decisive, even in the face of difficult choices and uncertain outcomes, in order to be an effective leader.
Willink suggests Darla fire both Eduardo and Nigel. Despite Darla’s protests, Willink makes the argument that they aren’t great leaders, they aren’t working together, they could already be interviewing elsewhere, and they are trying to undermine each other in a way that is destructive to the overall company’s success.
Darla worries about how losing two senior engineers at once would impact their teams, and the technical knowledge and expertise the company would lose with them. Willink counters that even if a couple team members leave with the engineers, the company ultimately doesn’t need employees who are loyal to such destructive leaders; the small loss from making the tough decision wouldn’t be as bad as the detriment of failing to act. And as for the question of who would replace the engineers, the team members are most likely the ones with the valuable in-depth knowledge of the projects, and among them there may be a well-qualified candidate for promotion.
Darla and Jim agree with Babin and Willink’s reasoning. Darla discusses the plan with her lead developer, who wholeheartedly agrees and immediately suggests candidates from each team who could step into the senior engineer positions. Darla and Jim go over details for the plan, fire both Eduardo and Nigel, and look forward to a bright future for their company without the cancerous influence of the bickering engineers.
Leaders set the tone and example for their teams, and as they navigate challenging situations leaders must constantly keep a careful balance of seemingly opposite forces. When a leader struggles or is ineffective, it is typically a sign that she has veered too far to either side of one of these dichotomies; in this way, a leader’s greatest strength can become her weakness if she doesn’t keep it balanced.
It seems counterintuitive that exercising discipline in turn gives you freedom, but, as with all of the dichotomies described above, this requires balance. If you are strategic and deliberate, you can create a regimented approach that ultimately gives you more freedom.
For example, setting your alarm early (and having the discipline to get out of bed when it goes off) gives you more time and freedom to do the things you want to fit in your day. Willink explains that this was the only way to carve out time for anything — whether to study, clean, or stretch his muscles — in the tightly structured schedule of SEAL training.
This also translates to a team setting: When a team implements disciplined SOPs, they have more freedom within those parameters. When each team member knows her role and duties as well as the goal of the mission, she can quickly and easily adapt to changing circumstances without having to constantly get leaders’ approval (this is critical for Decentralized Command, as we talked about in Chapter 8).
If the team needs to adjust a plan, disciplined SOPs make it possible to change that aspect of the plan without throwing the entire operation out of whack; when everyone knows the procedure inside and out, it’s easy to explain which piece of it is changing and what is staying the same. And when things get confusing and chaotic — whether on the battlefield or in a business operation — everyone can fall back on the SOP.
However, leaders must be careful that their teams don’t become so rigid and stuck on the SOP that they lose that flexibility. Leaders and teams need to be able to look at disciplined structures as a framework, while maintaining their adaptability.
Willink is leading a SEAL platoon on a targeted raid during his first deployment to Iraq. During these missions, he receives intelligence information about the location of a terrorist or group of terrorists, then leads his platoon on an operation to break into the building, detain the terrorists, and gather information from them and from the building (such as evidence of bomb-making material).
The SEALs did not train specifically on how to search buildings and collect evidence, so they typically ransack them. But this method creates chaos and confusion: They don’t have a system assigning people to search certain rooms or collect evidence, so they sometimes miss a room by accident or leave evidence behind because no one is designated to gather it. The helter-skelter method also takes a long time, creating more opportunity for nearby enemies to attack.
After the SEALs conduct several missions this way, the Iraqi courts impose stricter guidelines for collecting and documenting evidence. Forced by the court’s ruling, the SEALs have to create a more disciplined searching procedure. Willink assigns the task to his assistant platoon commander (Decentralized Command).
The assistant commander develops a system that assigns some SEALs to systematically search the building and others to collect evidence. His plan seems complex at first glance, but it breaks down into simple, individual roles and responsibilities. The new system designates SEALs to draw a layout of the building, assign a number label for each room, take photos and videos of evidence, and assign “room owners,” who are responsible for overseeing the searching and evidence collection in their particular room. Additionally, the plan requires SEALs to search rooms from the ground up, so that evidence doesn’t wind up buried on the floor. The plan also lays out how collected evidence should be documented and then organized once back at camp. With everyone assigned a task under the new, disciplined system, all the work can be done simultaneously and the team can accomplish the task much more efficiently.
When Willink and his assistant commander brief the platoon on the new system, they face resistance; the SEALs don’t see why they need to change their current approach, and insist it will take more — rather than less — time. So Willink explains the “why.” He gives the SEALs examples of how their current, undisciplined search method had failed them: Nearly everyone acknowledges there have been times when the mess of ransack-searching led them to search a room twice, or not at all.
With everyone now on board (if reluctantly), they put on their full gear and do dress rehearsals of the new system. With each run, they get faster and more convinced of the new system’s efficiency and effectiveness. By the end, they do an entire search in 10 minutes (much less than the 45 it took them with the old method).
The platoon successfully implements the new system in a mission, and even develops ways to further improve it. They now search buildings faster and leave with higher-quality evidence; this gives them the ability to search multiple buildings in a single night. In this way, paradoxically, the discipline they imposed ends up creating more freedom.
The chief financial officer of a business reveals to Willink that the company’s electrical division is losing money and he doesn’t understand why the CEO, Andy, isn’t pulling the plug on it. It turns out that the CEO of the electrical division, Mike, is an old friend of Andy’s, and it appears Andy doesn’t want to harm his friend by shutting down the division — but keeping it open is detrimental to the whole company. Andy is prioritizing one team member above the well-being of the entire organization.
Andy is convinced that Mike’s experience and knowledge is an asset to the company, but he acknowledges that it could be another three to five years before the electrical division is profitable. With some probing, Andy admits that this isn’t the best course for the company — they would be in a tight spot if unexpected costs come up or they hit a hurdle — but he’s reluctant to shut down his friend’s division.
Willink further explains how important it is that leaders balance the difficult dichotomies they face in order to lead the entire team to success. Although one of Andy’s strengths may be that he has close, valuable relationships with members of his team, he can’t let that closeness impede him from making tough decisions.
Andy finally relents and decides to shut down the electrical decision. Happily, Mike completely understands and even expected Andy’s decision, and Andy is able to move Mike to another department where his knowledge and experience are still assets to the company. Having the discipline to make the hard decision to shut down the electrical division gave Andy the freedom to put his energy and resources into more profitable departments.