Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win - By Jocko Willink & Leif Babin
Date read: 2016-09-05How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
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Good examples of how to truly own responsibility through military and business case studies. Recommend for any leader who wants to build trust with their team and get things done.
Contents:
- OWNERSHIP
- NO BAD TEAMS, ONLY BAD LEADERS
- BELIEVE
- CHECK THE EGO
- COVER AND MOVE
- SIMPLE
- PRIORITIZE AND EXECUTE
- DECENTRALIZED COMMAND
- PLAN
- LEADING DOWN THE CHAIN OF COMMAND
- LEADING UP THE CHAIN OF COMMAND
- DECISIVENESS
- DISCIPLINE
My Notes
There can be no leadership where there is no team.
Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not.
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 they forget who is in charge.
The leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything.
The leader must own everything in his or her world. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.
Set ego aside, accept responsibility for failures, attack weaknesses, and consistently work to build a better and more effective team. Do not take credit for your team's successes but bestow that honor upon your subordinate leaders and team members.
Direct responsibility of a leader included getting people to listen, support, and execute plans.
Extreme Ownership is all about the mission. How can you best get your team to most effectively execute the plan in order to accomplish the mission?
Leadership is the single greatest factor in any team's performance. Whether a team succeeds or fails is all up to the leader. The leader's attitude sets the tone for the entire team. The leader drives performance - or doesn't.
When it comes to standards, as a leader, it's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate. Leaders must enforce standards.
Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team.
Tortured Genius: accepts zero responsibility for mistakes, makes excuses, and blames everyone else for their failings (and those of their team). An individual with a Tortured Genius mind-set can have catastrophic impact on a team's performance.
A leader must be a true believer in the mission.
Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests.
Every leader must be able to detach from the immediate tactical mission and understand how it fits into strategic goals, by asking the question: why?
It is the responsibility of the subordinate leader to reach out and ask if they do not understand.
Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.
We must never get complacent.
Example: our team made a mistake and it's my fault. It's my fault because I obviously wasn't as clear as I should have been in explaining why we have these procedures in place and how not following them can cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. You are an extremely skilled and knowledgeable superintendent. You know more about this business than I ever will. It was up to me to make sure you know the parameters we have to work within and why some decisions have got to be run through me. Now, I need to fix this so it doesn't happen again.
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 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.
Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise.
Leaders must encourage communication and take the time to explain so that every member of the team understands.
Humans need to see the connection between action and consequence in order to learn or react appropriately. People generally take the path of least resistance.
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.
Relax, look around, make a call.
Determine the highest priority task and execute.
Stay at least a step or two ahead of real-time problems through careful contingency planning.
It is crucial for leaders at the top of the organization to "pull themselves off the firing line," step back, and maintain the strategic picture.
The team must maintain the ability to quickly reprioritize efforts and rapidly adapt to a constantly changing battlefield.
They must:
- Evaluate the highest priority problem.
- Lay out in simple, clear, and concise terms the highest priority effort for your team.
- Develop and determine a solution, seek input from key leaders and from the team where possible.
- Direct the execution of that solution, focusing all efforts and resources toward this priority task.
- Move on to the next highest priority problem. Repeat..
- When priorities shift within the team, pass situational awareness both up and down the chain.
- Don't let the focus on one priority cause target fixation. Maintain the ability to see other problems developing and rapidly shift as needed..
Human beings are generally not capable of managing more than six to ten people, particularly when things go sideways and inevitable contingencies arise.
Every tactical-level team leader must understand not just what to do but why they are doing it.
Junior leaders must fully understand what is within their decision-making authority - the "left and right limits" of their responsibility. 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.
Junior leaders must be proactive rather than reactive.
With clear guidance and established boundaries for decision making that your subordinate leaders understand, they can then act independently toward your unified goal.
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.
Leaders must delegate the planning process down the chain as much as possible to key subordinate leaders.
You need to brief so that the most junior man can fully understand the operation - the lowest common denominator.
The test for a successful brief is simple: Do the team and the supporting elements understand it?
A good plan must enable the highest chance of mission success while mitigating as much risk as possible.
Senior leaders explain to their junior leaders and troops executing the mission how their role contributes to big picture success.
If your team isn't doing what you need them to do, you first have to look at yourself.
Leadership doesn't just flow down the chain of command, but up as well. We have to own everything in our world.
Examine what you can do to better convey the critical information for decision to be made and support allocated.
A leader must push situational awareness up the chain of command.
One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss:
- 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.
Leaders must be comfortable under pressure, and act on logic, not emotion.
It is critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty; to make the best decisions they can based on only the immediate information available.
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.
Discipline equals freedom.
The more disciplined standard operating procedures a team employs, the more freedom they have to execute faster, sharper, and more efficiently.