EXTREME OWNERSHIP
Lessons drawn from the book: Extreme Ownership - How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Click here for the Amazon purchase page. However, this document also contains my own learnings and thoughts not necessarily derived from the book alone.
Contents:
Winning the war within:
This part concerns with prerequisites for success.
Laws of combat:
This part concerns with methods for reaching success.
Sustaining victory:
This part concerns with methods for maintaining success.
Leadership is about effectively guiding the pursuit of a goal as a team. An individual pursuit is about effectively guiding one’s own pursuit of a goal. In both cases, the principles of decision-making apply, except that leading a team involves other principles or a further expansion of the same principles to account for factors specific to teamwork (e.g. division of labour, chain of command, etc.). I shall point out if a principle is actually a more general decision-making principle, or if a leadership principle can be generalised for decision-making, or if a leadership principle has a counterpart in an individual context.
There is only one true test of the quality of a leader:
Are they effective or ineffective?
The team’s efforts extend from your efforts toward effectiveness.
As a leader, your purpose in the team is to organise the team’s efforts. Hence, the team’s results are, directly or indirectly, the results of your leadership. The core of any value-seeking role, such as the role of a leader, is first and foremost to strive for values, not adhere to duties; this means you must solve for your team, not merely serve your team.
If you must only serve, there is no use for a leader.
This is an extension of the principle of taking ownership of your pursuit of values, because team’s pursuit of values is the result of each member pursuing their values through a team. Here as much as anywhere else, each member is responsible for this pursuit. But as the one organising the efforts of the team, the leader is most responsible for the team’s effectiveness.
The goal is to be effective, not to avoid blame.
Effectiveness cannot be achieved by passive acceptance of fault.
A team is a means for a leader to achieve results; if the means is lacking, then, by the principle of extreme ownership, it is up to him to either solve for this lacking* or to remove its source** (e.g. ). More often than not, he may find that it is not the team that is lacking but rather his efforts in using it to achieve results.
* E.g. Raising morale or simplifying plans.
** E.g. Remove a unamendable underperformer.
A goal regarded with doubt fails to motivate effectiveness.
If a leader does not believe in the goal his team must strive for, then he cannot convince his team that it is worth doing. Since the basis of motivation is a goal you can regard worth your time and effort; thus, without belief, you and your team cannot regard their goal as worth their time and effort, and thus would not see reason to pursue it effectively.
What if you do not believe in your goal? The first step is to understand why the goal exists, i.e. how it ties to broader goals, and how it contributes to broader success. For example, if a leader is unconvinced by the orders of his higher-ups, he must (1) ask for explanations that may convince him, and (2) reflect on the motives and perspective of the higher-ups.
Lacking belief weakens your resolve you against challenges.
Note that this principle also follows extreme ownership:
Take ownership of your goals within the broader context.
Effectiveness is fundamental, self-gratification is not.
Seeking to gratify one’s self-image means to try to make an impression of one’s qualities, either for one’s own sake or for the approval of others. Now, an impression of good qualities means nothing without their actual practice, i.e. without achieving actual effectiveness through these qualities.
An impression of strength does not carry a boulder, only actual strength does. An impression of wisdom does not lead to good decisions, only actual wisdom does. This is not to say that impressions mean nothing; even a bluff can have value in some contexts. However, impressions mean nothing if they are not grounded in effectiveness. In short, never prioritise self-gratification and making impressions over effectiveness.
Effectiveness comes first; impressions are secondary.
This, too, is an extension of extreme ownership:
Never abandon ownership of the results to stroke your ego.
Teamwork.
To elaborate:
The elements of a team must be mutually supportive.
In a way, this is common sense; if a team does not work together, they are unlikely to organise their efforts in a way that best (1) utlilises their areas of focus, (2) leverages their elements’ strengths and (2) covers for their weaknesses. Often, (drawing from Willink and Babin, p. 122), when elements within the team (which could be members or teams) get so focused on their immediate tasks, they forget about what others are doing or how they depend on other members or teams.
This harms the ability to coordinate and cooperate. Moreover, it has the potential to create friction through competitiveness or animosity that may arise when other members or teams are not viewed as parts of one mission but as parts of non-mutual, competing or conflicting missions or motivations.
This is where extreme ownership comes in: 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. As always, the focus must always be on how to best accomplish the mission. Accomplishing the strategic mission is the highest priority. Team members, departments, and supporting assets must always cover and move — help each other, work together, and support each other, since their success or failure is tied to each other.
Reference: Willink, Jocko; Babin, Leif. Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
If something is too complex to deal with as a whole, it means it cannot be dealt with as a whole since it cannot be kept in focus at once. Hence, trying to deal with such complexity without any effort at simplification is going to lead to a poor ability to retain the essentials and thus identify the priorities.
To draw from Willink and Babin (p. 140-141), combat, like anything in life, has inherent layers of complexities. Simplifying as much as possible is key to success. When plans and orders are too complex, we or others in our team may not understand them, and when things go wrong, complexity together with the lack of understanding compounds challenges.
Hence: Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear and concise. Everyone that is part of the mission must know and understand his or her role in the mission and what to do in the event of likely contingencies.
This is where extreme ownership comes in: As a leader, it does not matter how well you feel you have presented the information or communicated an order, plan, tactic, or strategy. If your team does not get it, you have not kept things simple and you have failed. You must brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team understands. It is critical to keep plans and communication simple. Following this rule is crucial to the success of any team in any combat, business or life.
NOTE: To this end, communication must be maintained and encouraged, both by the leader and his suboordinates, about the goals, the plan and the mission. It is the responsibility of every member, most of all the leader, to maintain and encourage this communication and achieve purposeful clarity.
Reference: Willink, Jocko; Babin, Leif. Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
NOTE: This ties especially strongly with “simple”.
No two values are equal; seek and follow their hierarchy.
Alternatively:
Do not try to do everything at once or you will not be successful.
To pursue a purpose effectively, we must organise both knowledge and objectives based on relevance and complexity. To be relevant is to be a significant factor (at least in our knowledge) in achieving our purpose; hence, to favour less relevant considerations is to favour less signficant factors, which is sheer irrationality.
Moreoever, at any given time, your focus, ability to act and ability to think are limited; to clog them with a disorganised mess of considerations leads to a complexity-ridden state of focus, violating the principle of “simple”. Moreover, it is to waste of one’s limited time, energy and resources, inviting failure or even disaster.
Drawing from Willink and Babin (p. 157), multiple challenges can compound, every challenge complex in its own right, each deserving and demanding attention. Hence, even the most competent of leaders can be overwhelmed if they try to deal with multiple challenges or tasks together at once, which would likely lead to them and their team failing at each of those challenges or tasks. Instead:
We must determine the highest priority task and execute.
Thus, in line with the broader principle of extreme ownership, a leader must take ownership of identifying priorities and ensuring the execution of these priorities. This principle can be verbalised as:
“Relax, look around, make a call.”
This principle is strongly tied to:
Firstly, prioritisation is a means to achieve simplicity in focus. Secondly, planning ensures that the mental work needed to resolve potential complexities is handled beforehand, when we have the time, energy and focus to consider these complexities more. Hence, when under the pressure of a real-life situation, when the focus becomes much narrower to deal more effectively with the present moment, we already know what can be done to be effective.
A good plan enables simpler focus.
Finally, communication. This is simple: if a plan, the broader goal or the priorities are not clear, it is the responsibility of each member of the team, and most of all the leader, to facilitate and encourage clarifying communication.</p></details>
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**NOTE**: _Priorities can shift and change, which is why simplicity of the broader goals, good planning and solid communication are vital in maintaining the ability to effectively prioritise and execute despite such shifts and changes. Furthermore, drawing from Willink and Babin (p. 163) do not let the focus on one priority cause target fixation. Maintain the ability to see other problems developing and rapidly shift as needed._
## Decentralised command
**NOTE**: _This follows logically from the last two sections._
_A team must engage with goals at different levels of abstraction._
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