Book: Extreme Ownership

• Book: Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

Summary

Extreme Ownership

• For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter:

  • Effective

    • and

  • Ineffective

• Extreme Ownership is a mind-set, an attitude

• On any team, 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.

• The best leaders don't just take responsibility for their job. They take Extreme Ownership of everything that impacts their mission.

• They must first look in the mirror at themselves. 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.

• Extreme Ownership requires leaders to look at an organization's problems through the objective lens of reality, without emotional attachments to agendas or plans.

• You can't make people listen to you. You can't make them execute. You have to lead them.

• With Extreme Ownership, you must remove individual ego and personal agenda. It's all about the mission. How can you best get your team to most effectively execute the plan in order to accomplish the mission? That is the question you have to ask yourself. That is what Extreme Ownership is all about.

There Are No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders

• When it comes to standards, as a leader, it's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate.

• If substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable - if there are no consequences - that poor performance becomes the new standard.

• The best teams anywhere are constantly looking to improve, add capability, and push the standards higher. It starts with the individual and spreads to each of the team members until this becomes the culture, the new standard.

• Whether or not your team succeeds or fails is all on you. 

• No matter how obvious his or her failing, or how valid the criticism, a Tortured Genius, in this sense, accepts zero responsibility for mistakes, makes excuses, and blames everyone else for their failings (and those of their team).

• There are only two types of leaders: Effective and Ineffective.

  • Effective leaders that lead successful, high-performance teams exhibit Extreme Ownership. Anything else is simply ineffective. Anything else is bad leadership.

Believe

• You have to focus the team on the Mission - and believe it was possible to achieve. Be a True Believer in the Mission.

  • To be a part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests.

• The leader must explain not just what to do, but why. It is the responsibility of the subordinate leader to reach out and ask if they do not understand

  • If you don't understand or believe in the decisions coming down from your leadership, it is up to you to ask questions until you understand how and why those decisions are being made. Not knowing the Why prohibits you from believing in the mission.

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.

  • When personal agendas become more important than the team and the overarching missions's success, performance suffers and failure ensures.

• Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.

• We must never get complacent.

Cover & Move

• Seize, Clear, Hold, Build

• The most important tactical advantage we had was working together as a team, always supporting each other.

• Cover & Move: it is the most fundamental tactic, perhaps the only tactic. Put simply, Cover and Move means teamwork. 

• Remember to engage with other teams. Build relationships with them. Explain to them what you need from them and why, and ask them what you can do to help them get you what you need. Make them a part of your team, not an excuse for your team.

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.  

  • When things go wrong, and they inevitably 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.

• People generally take the path of least resistance. It is just in our nature.

• 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 cant make rapid adjustments to it, because there is not baseline understanding of it.

Prioritize and Execute

• We verbalize this principle with this direction: "Relax, look around, make a call"

• When overwhelmed, fall back (detach emotionally) upon this principle: Prioritize and Execute

• To implement Prioritize and Execute a leader must:

  • Be decisively engaged: a term used to describe a battle in which a unit locked in a tough combat situation cannot maneuver or extricate themselves. In other words, they cannot retreat. They must win. 

  • 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

• Don't try to do everything at once or you won't be successful.

• A leader who tries to take on too many problems simultaneously will likely fail at them all.

• 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.

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

• 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

  • 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

• To be effectively empowered to make decisions, it is imperative that frontline leaders execute with confidence. Tactical leaders must be confident that they clearly understand the strategic mission and Commander's Intent. 

• Situational Awareness with clear Span of Control is key vs. Battlefield Aloofness

  • Leaders must be free to move to where they are most needed, which changes throughout the course of an operation.

  • In chaotic, dynamic, and rapidly changing environments, leaders at all levels must be empowered to make decisions. Decentralized command is a key component to victory.

• The proper understanding and utilization of Decentralized Command takes time and effort to perfect. For any leader, placing full faith and trust in junior leaders with less experience and allowing them to manage their teams is a difficult thing to embrace

• 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

  • Cover as many possible enemy ingress and egress routes as possible

  • Set up positions that mutually support each other

  • Pick solid fighting positions that could be defended against heavy enemy attack for an extended period of time if necessary

Plan

• Mission planning is all about never taking anything for granted, preparing for likely contingencies, and maximizing the chance of mission success while minimizing the risk to the troops executing the operation

• What's the mission? Planning begins with mission analysis. Leaders must identify clear directives for the team.

• 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 Commander's Intent

• 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 clarifications from every part of the team

• The test for a successful brief is simple: Do the team and supporting elements understand it? The plan must mitigate identified risks where possible

• Focus on the risks that can be controlled

• Those who will not risk cannot win

• 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. Business teams claim there isn't time for such analysis.

• Perform a "post-operational debrief", or a "retro"

  • What went right?

  • What went wrong?

  • How can we adapt our tactics to make us even more effective and increase our advantage?

• While businesses can have their own planning process, it must be standardized so that other departments within the company and supporting assets outside the company (such as service contractors or subsidiary companies) can understand and use the same format and terminology. It must be repeatable and guide users with a checklist of all the important things they need to think about.

• 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 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 selection course of action

  • Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation

  • Mitigate risks that can be controlled as much as possible

  • Delegate portions of the plan and brief to key junior leaders

    • Stand back and be the tactical genius

  • Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure it still fits the situation

  • Brief the plan to all participants and supporting assets

    • Emphasize Commander's Intent

    • Ask questions and engage in discussion and interaction with the team to ensure they understand

  • Conduct post-operational debrief after execution

    • Analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning

• Establishing an effective and repeatable planning process is critical to the success of any team

• The true test for a good brief is not whether the senior officers are impressed. It's whether or not the troops that are going to execute the operation actually understand it. Everything else is just BS

• The most important part of the brief is to explain your Commander's Intent

Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command

• Any good leader is immersed in the planning and execution of tasks, projects, and operations to move the team toward a strategic goal. Such leaders possess insight into the bigger picture and why specific tasks need to be accomplished.

• 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

• The subordinate leader must use influence, experience, knowledge, communication, and maintain the highest professionalism

• One of the most important jobs of any is to support your own boss - your immediate leadership. In any chain of command, the leadership must always present a united front to the troops.

  • A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority of leaders at all levels. This is catastrophic to the performance of any organization.

• Remember, if your leader is not giving the support you need, don't blame him or her. Instead, re-examine what you can do to better clarify, educate, influence, or convince that person to give you what you need in order to win.

• The major factors to be aware of when leading up and down the chain of command are these:

  • 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

• No matter how big or bureaucratic your company seems it pales in comparison to the gargantuan US military bureaucracy :) 

• If my boss wasn't comfortable with what I was doing, it was only because I had not clearly communicated it to him.

Decisiveness and Uncertainty

• Leaders cannot be paralyze by fear. That results in inaction. It is critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty: to make the best decisions they can based on only the immediate information available. 

• 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.

• Intelligence gathering and research are important, but they must be employed with realistic expectations and must not impede swift decision making that is often the difference between victory and defeat. 

• Waiting for 100 percent right and certain solution leads to delay, indecision, and an inability to execute.

• Business leaders must be comfortable in the chaos and act decisively amid such uncertainty.

Discipline Equals Freedom

• Discipline starts every day when the first alarm clock goes off in the morning. I say "first alarm clock" because I have three, as I was taught by one of the most feared and respected instructors in SEAL training: one electric, one battery powered, one windup.

• If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win - you pass the test. 

• The temptation to take the easy road is always there. It as easy as staying in bed in the morning and sleeping in. Discipline is paramount to ultimate success and victory for any leader and any team.

• A unit that has tighter and more-disciplined procedures and processes will excel and win. The freedom to work within the framework of our disciplined procedures.

• Discipline - strict order, regimen, and control - might appear to be the opposite of total freedom - the power to act, speak or think without any restrictions. In fact, discipline is the pathway to freedom.

• A true leader is not intimidated when others step up and take charge. Leaders that lack confidence in themselves fear being outshined by someone else. 

• A leader should not seek recognition.

• A leader and follower

• A leader must be aggressive but not overbearing.

• A leader must be calm but not robotic. People do not follow robots.

• A leader must be confident but never cocky. Confidence is contagious, a great attribute for a leader and a team. 

  • Overconfidence causes complacency and arrogance, which ultimately set the the team up for failure.

• A leader must be brave but not foolhardy. 

• Leaders must have a competitive spirit but also gracious losers.

  • They must drive competition and push themselves and their teams to perform at the highest level. But they must never put their own drive for personal success ahead of overall mission success for the greater team.

• A leader must be attentive to details but not obsessed by them.

  • A good leader does not get bogged down in the minutia of a tactical problem at the expense of strategic success.

• A leader must be strong but likewise have endurance.

• Leaders must be humble but not passive; quiet but not silent.

  • They must possess humility and the ability to control their ego and listen to others.

  • They must admit mistakes and failures, take ownership of them, and figure out a way to prevent them from happening again.

  • A leader must be able to speak up when it matters.

• A leader must be close with subordinates but not too close.

  • Leaders must never get so close that the team forgets who is in charge.

• A leader must exercise Extreme Ownership. Simultaneously, that leader must employ Decentralized Command by giving control to subordinate leaders.

• A leader has nothing to prove but everything to prove.

• Generally, when a leader struggles, the root cause behind the problem is that the leader has leaned too far in one direction and steered off-course.

• The goal of all leaders should be to work themselves out of a job. 

  • This means all leaders must be heavily engaged in training and mentoring their junior leaders to prepare them to step up and assume greater responsibilities.

Leadership is simple, but not easy

• Leading people is the most challenging and, therefore, the most gratifying undertaking of all human endeavors

• You have got to listen to people. Listening to people help you connect with them, and that is what you are trying to do in a leadership position: build relationships

  • The people that really follow you are the people that you have real relationships with. Those guys will do anything for you

• You build relationships by respecting people. By being humble. By listening. By telling them the truth. By having integrity  and telling people the truth.

• It is the insecure leader you need to watch out for. The insecure leader is always worried about looking bad.

• "Every time I see someone that says, 'I have a weak leader,' I always say, 'lucky  you!' Take advantage of that. LEAD! Do what you want.