Photo: jaysung

Most Excerpts are from Jocko Willnik and Leif Babin book, “Extreme ownership”

Table of contents:

  1. Extreme Ownership
  2. No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders
  3. Believe
  4. Check the Ego
  5. Simple
  6. Prioritize and Execute
  7. Decentralized Command
  8. Plan
  9. Leading Up the Chain of Command
  10. Decisiveness amid Uncertainty
  11. Discipline Equals Freedom

“All responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.”

Extreme Ownership

  • On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.

You are responsible for everything in your world

  • The leader bears full responsibility for explaining the strategic mission, developing the tactics, and securing the training and resources to enable the team to properly and successfully execute.
  • None of us are perfect. You are still learning and growing. We all are. And this is a lesson for you: if you reengage on this task, if you do a stern self-assessment of how you lead and what you can do better, the outcome will be different. But it starts here.

Accept blame, debrief and identify improvement opportunities

  • Proceeded to go through the entire operation, piece by piece, identifying everything that happened and what we could do going forward to prevent it from happening again.
  • Analyzed what had happened and implemented the lessons learned. We revised our standard operating procedures and planning methodology to better mitigate risk.
  • During the debrief after a training mission, those good SEAL leaders took ownership of failures, sought guidance on how to improve, and figured out a way to overcome challenges on the next iteration. The best leaders checked their egos, accepted blame, sought out constructive criticism, and took detailed notes for improvement.

How to deal with underperformers

  • If an individual on the team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer.
  • If the underperformer continually fails to meet standards, then a leader who exercises Extreme Ownership must be loyal to the team and the mission above any individual
  • If underperformers cannot improve, the leader must make the tough call to terminate them and hire others who can get the job done. It is all on the leader.

No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders

  • Whether a team succeeds or fails is all up to the leader
  • When it comes to performance standards, It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate

The leader’s attitude sets the tone for the entire team.

  • When Boat Crew Six was failing under their original leader, that leader didn’t seem to think it was possible for them to perform any better, and he certainly didn’t think they could win. This negative attitude infected his entire boat crew and prevented his team from looking inwardly at themselves and where they could improve.

Focus on the immediate goal

  • It was far more effective to focus their efforts not on the days to come or the far-distant finish line they couldn’t yet see, but instead on a physical goal immediately in front of them—the beach marker, landmark, or road sign a hundred yards ahead. If we could execute with a monumental effort just to reach an immediate goal that everyone could see, we could then continue to the next visually attainable goal and then the next. When pieced together, it meant our performance over time increased substantially and eventually we crossed the finish line at the head of the pack.

Believe

  • In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission. Even when others doubt and question the amount of risk, asking, “Is it worth it?” the leader must believe in the greater cause. If a leader does not believe, he or she will not take the risks required to overcome the inevitable challenges necessary to win.

Understand the why

  • When leaders receive an order that they themselves question and do not understand, they must ask the question: why? Why are we being asked to do this? Those leaders must take a step back, deconstruct the situation, analyze the strategic picture, and then come to a conclusion.

Communicate the “why” effectively

  • The leader must explain not just what to do, but why
  • Only when leaders at all levels understand and believe in the mission can they pass that understanding and belief to their teams so that they can persevere through challenges, execute and win.

Check the Ego

  • Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism. It can even stifle someone’s sense of self-preservation. Often, the most difficult ego to deal with is your own.

Humility is key

  • Implementing Extreme Ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.

Be willing to accept blame

  • It’s natural for anyone in a leadership position to blame subordinate leaders and direct reports when something goes wrong. Our egos don’t like to take blame. But it’s on us as leaders to see where we failed to communicate effectively and help our troops clearly understand what their roles and responsibilities are and how their actions impact the bigger strategic picture.

Cover and Move

  • Cover and Move: it is the most fundamental tactic, perhaps the only tactic. Put simply, Cover and Move means teamwork. All elements within the greater team are crucial and must work together to accomplish the mission, mutually supporting one another for that singular purpose.

Constantly remind your team they are part of a larger team

  • Often, when smaller teams within the team get so focused on their immediate tasks, they forget about what others are doing or how they depend on other teams
  • It falls on leaders to continually keep perspective on the strategic mission and remind the team that they are part of the greater team and the strategic mission is paramount

Encourage collaboration and teamwork

  • These individuals and teams must instead find a way to work together, communicate with each other, and mutually support one another. The focus must always be on how to best accomplish the mission.
  • Team members, departments, and supporting assets must always Cover and Move—help each other, work together, and support each other to win. This principle is integral for any team to achieve victory.

Simple

  • Combat, like anything in life, has inherent layers of complexities. Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster. Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise.

Ensure even the lowest common denominator on the team understands

  • As a leader, it doesn’t matter how well you feel you have presented the information or communicated an order, plan, tactic, or strategy. If your team doesn’t get it, you have not kept things simple and you have failed.
  • It is critical, as well, that the operating relationship facilitate the ability of the frontline troops to ask questions that clarify when they do not understand the mission or key tasks to be performed.

Simplicity allows flexibility

  • Almost no mission ever goes according to plan. There are simply too many variables to deal with. This is where simplicity is key. If the plan is simple enough, everyone understands it, which means each person can rapidly adjust and modify what he or she is doing. If the plan is too complex, the team can’t make rapid adjustments to it, because there is no baseline understanding of it.

Prioritize and Execute

  • On the battlefield, countless problems compound in a snowball effect, every challenge complex in its own right, each demanding attention. But a leader must remain calm and make the best decisions possible. To do this, SEAL combat leaders utilize Prioritize and Execute. We verbalize this principle with this direction: “Relax, look around, make a call.

To Prioritize and Execute in any business a leader must

  1. Evaluate the highest priority problem.
  2. Lay out in simple, clear, and concise terms the highest priority effort for your team.
  3. Develop and determine a solution, seek input from key leaders and from the team where possible.
  4. Direct the execution of that solution, focusing all efforts and resources toward this priority task.
  5. Move on to the next highest priority problem. Repeat.
  6. When priorities shift within the team, pass situational awareness both up and down the chain.
  7. Don’t let the focus on one priority cause target fixation. Maintain the ability to see other problems developing and rapidly shift as needed.

Focus on one priority at a time

  • A leader who tries to take on too many problems simultaneously will likely fail at them all.
  • Even the greatest of battlefield leaders could not handle an array of challenges simultaneously without being overwhelmed. That risked failing at them all. I had to remain calm, step back from my immediate emotional reaction, and determine the greatest priority for the team. Then, rapidly direct the team to attack that priority. Once the wheels were in motion and the full resources of the team were engaged in that highest priority effort, I could then determine the next priority, focus the team’s effort there, and then move on to the next priority
  • Even the most competent of leaders can be overwhelmed if they try to tackle multiple problems or a number of tasks simultaneously. The team will likely fail at each of those tasks. Instead, leaders must determine the highest priority task and execute

Move to the next priority once the current one has been dealt with

  • A particularly effective means to help Prioritize and Execute under pressure is to stay at least a step or two ahead of real-time problems
  • My suggestion is to focus on one and when that one is completed, or at least has some real momentum, then you move on to the next one and focus on it. When that one is done, then move on to the next, and so on down the line until you have knocked them all out.”

Decentralized Command

  • Human beings are generally not capable of managing more than six to ten people, particularly when things go sideways and inevitable contingencies arise. No one senior leader can be expected to manage dozens of individuals, much less hundreds. Teams must be broken down into manageable elements of four to five operators, with a clearly designated leader.

Decentralized Command requires simple, clear, concise orders

  • I spelled out my Commander’s Intent directly to the troops so they would know exactly what the ultimate goal of the mission was. That way they would have the ability to execute on the battlefield in a manner that supported the overarching goal, without having to ask for permission.

Empower junior leaders with clear guidance and distinct boundaries

  • Decentralized Command does not mean junior leaders or team members operate on their own program; that results in chaos. Instead, junior leaders must fully understand what is within their decision-making authority—the “left and right limits” of their responsibility
  • With clear guidance and established boundaries for decision making that your subordinate leaders understand, they can then act independently toward your unified goal.
  • Every tactical-level team leader must understand not just what to do but why they are doing it.
  • It requires tremendous trust and confidence in those frontline leaders, who must very clearly understand the strategic mission and ensure that their immediate tactical decisions ultimately contribute to accomplishing the overarching goals. Frontline leaders must also have trust and confidence in their senior leaders to know that they are empowered to make decisions and that their senior leaders will back them up.

Teach junior leaders they were expected to make decisions.

  • Here, Decentralized Command was a necessity. In such situations, the leaders did not call me and ask me what they should do. Instead, they told me what they were going to do. I trusted them to make adjustments and adapt the plan to unforeseen circumstances while staying within the parameters of the guidance I had given them and our standard operating procedures
  • Additionally, they must communicate with senior leaders to recommend decisions outside their authority and pass critical information up the chain so the senior leadership can make informed strategic decisions
  • Senior leaders must constantly communicate and push information—what we call in the military “situational awareness”—to their subordinate leaders. Likewise, junior leaders must push situational awareness up the chain to their senior leaders to keep them informed, particularly of crucial information that affects strategic decision making.

Have a clear mission statement

  • A mission statement tells your troops what you are doing. But they have got to understand why they are doing it. When the subordinate leaders and the frontline troops fully understand the purpose of the mission, how it ties into strategic goals, and what impact it has, they can then lead, even in the absence of explicit orders.

Trust in the ability of your team, even when you know you might handle it more efficiently

  • Trust is not blindly given. It must be built over time. Situations will sometimes require that the boss walk away from a problem and let junior leaders solve it, even if the boss knows he might solve it more efficiently. It is more important that the junior leaders are allowed to make decisions—and backed up even if they don’t make them correctly
  • Open conversations build trust. Overcoming stress and challenging environments builds trust. Working through emergencies and seeing how people react builds trust.
  • Junior leaders must know that the boss will back them up even if they make a decision that may not result in the best outcome, as long as the decision was made in an effort to achieve the strategic objective.

Plan

  • What’s the mission? Planning begins with mission analysis. Leaders must identify clear directives for the team. Once they themselves understand the mission, they can impart this knowledge to their key leaders and frontline troops tasked with executing the mission.

A leader’s checklist for planning should include the following:

  • Analyze the mission.
    • Understand higher headquarters’ mission, Commander’s Intent, and endstate (the goal).
    • Identify and state your own Commander’s Intent and endstate for the specific mission
  • Identify personnel, assets, resources, and time available
  • Decentralize the planning process.
    • Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible courses of action
  • Determine a specific course of action.
    • Lean toward selecting the simplest course of action.
    • Focus efforts on the best course of action.
  • Empower key leaders to develop the plan for the selected course of action.
  • Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation.
  • Mitigate risks that can be controlled as much as possible.
  • Delegate portions of the plan and brief to key junior leaders.
    • Stand back and be the tactical genius.

Have a clear, simple goal

  • While a simple statement, the Commander’s Intent is actually the most important part of the brief. When understood by everyone involved in the execution of the plan, it guides each decision and action on the ground.
  • A broad and ambiguous mission results in lack of focus, ineffective execution, and mission creep. To prevent this, the mission must be carefully refined and simplified so that it is explicitly clear and specifically focused to achieve the greater strategic vision for which that mission is a part.
  • The mission must explain the overall purpose and desired result, or “end state,” of the operation. The frontline troops tasked with executing the mission must understand the deeper purpose behind the mission.

Delegate the planning process

  • Leaders must delegate the planning process down the chain as much as possible to key subordinate leaders. Team leaders within the greater team and frontline, tactical-level leaders must have ownership of their tasks within the overall plan and mission
  • Team participation—even from the most junior personnel—is critical in developing bold, innovative solutions to problem sets. Giving the frontline troops ownership of even a small piece of the plan gives them buy-in, helps them understand the reasons behind the plan, and better enables them to believe in the mission, which translates to far more effective implementation and execution on the ground
  • While the senior leader supervises the entire planning process by team members, he or she must be careful not to get bogged down in the details. By maintaining a perspective above the microterrain of the plan, the senior leader can better ensure compliance with strategic objectives
  • Doing so enables senior leaders to “stand back and be the tactical genius”—to identify weaknesses or holes in the plan that those immersed in the details might have missed. This enables leaders to fill in those gaps before execution
  • You can then see the plan from a greater distance, a higher altitude, and you will see more. As a result, you will catch mistakes and discover aspects of the plan that need to be tightened up, which enables you to look like a tactical genius, just because you have a broader view.

Preparing for likely contingencies

  • Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure it still fits the situation.
  • The plan must mitigate identified risks where possible
  • Different courses of action must be explored on how best to accomplish the mission—with the manpower, resources, and supporting assets available. Once a course of action is determined, further planning requires detailed information gathering in order to facilitate the development of a thorough plan. It is critical to utilize all assets and lean on the expertise of those in the best position to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information.

Communicate the plan effectively

  • Once the detailed plan has been developed, it must then be briefed to the entire team and all participants and supporting elements. Leaders must carefully prioritize the information to be presented in as simple, clear, and concise a format as possible so that participants do not experience information overload
  • The planning process and briefing must be a forum that encourages discussion, questions, and clarification from even the most junior personnel. If frontline troops are unclear about the plan and yet are too intimidated to ask questions, the team’s ability to effectively execute the plan radically decreases
  • Thus, leaders must ask questions of their troops, encourage interaction, and ensure their teams understand the plan.
  • Following a successful brief, all members participating in an operation will understand the strategic mission, the Commander’s Intent, the specific mission of the team, and their individual roles within that mission. They will understand contingencies—likely challenges that might arise and how to respond. The test for a successful brief is simple: Do the team and the supporting elements understand it?

Debrief after each operation to analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning

  • The best teams employ constant analysis of their tactics and measure their effectiveness so that they can adapt their methods and implement lessons learned for future missions. Often one must make time. The best SEAL units, after each combat operation, conduct what we called a “post-operational debrief.” No matter how exhausted from an operation or how busy planning for the next mission, time is made for this debrief
  • A post-operational debrief examines all phases of an operation from planning through execution, in a concise format
  • It addresses the following for the combat mission just completed: What went right? What went wrong? How can we adapt our tactics to make us even more effective and increase our advantage over the enemy.

Leading Up the Chain of Command

  • If your boss isn’t making a decision in a timely manner or providing necessary support for you and your team, don’t blame the boss. First, blame yourself. Examine what you can do to better convey the critical information for decisions to be made and support allocated.
  • Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike.
  • If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this.
  • Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do.
  • Ask those questions up the chain to clarify, so that you can understand it. Provide them with constructive feedback so they can appreciate the impact those plans or requirements have on your operations.

Decisiveness amid Uncertainty

  • It is critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty; to make the best decisions they can based on only the immediate information available.
  • There is no 100 percent right solution. The picture is never complete. Leaders must be comfortable with this and be able to make decisions promptly, then be ready to adjust those decisions quickly based on evolving situations and new information
  • Part of being decisive was knowing and understanding that some decisions, while immediately impactful, can be quickly reversed or altered; other decisions, like shooting another human being, cannot be undone
  • Waiting for the 100 percent right and certain solution leads to delay, indecision, and an inability to execute. Leaders must be prepared to make an educated guess based on previous experience, knowledge of how the enemy operates, likely outcomes, and whatever intelligence is available in the immediate moment
  • Instead of letting the situation dictate our decisions, we must dictate the situation. As a leader, my default setting should be aggressive—proactive rather than reactive.

Discipline Equals Freedom—The Dichotomy of Leadership

  • Every leader must walk a fine line. That’s what makes leadership so challenging. Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities, between one extreme and another.

A good leader must be:

  • Confident but not cocky
  • Courageous but not foolhardy
  • Competitive but a gracious loser
  • Attentive to details but not obsessed by them
  • Strong but have endurance
  • A leader and follower
  • Humble not passive
  • Aggressive not overbearing
  • Quiet not silent
  • Calm but not robotic
  • Logical but not devoid of emotions
  • Close with the troops but not so close that one becomes more important than another or more important than the good of the team; not so close that they forget who is in charge
  • Able to execute Extreme Ownership, while exercising Decentralized Command.

Discipline equals freedom.

  • Discipline starts every day when the first alarm clock goes off in the morning
  • The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day
  • The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep
  • If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail. Though it seems small, that weakness translates to more significant decisions.
  • But if you exercise discipline, that too translates to more substantial elements of your life.