Review: Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

I was a bit skeptical from the title, but I must admit, this is a great book for learning leadership principles. The principles come from the experience of US Navy Seals, but they apply to most aspects of life. Each chapter focuses on one principle, introducing it with a real-world story from Navy Seals in the Iraq War, followed by the lessons learned, and how those lessons apply more broadly. Below are some of the core lessons I picked up from this book.

As a leader, you are responsible for everything that happens

Everything. Good or bad. It doesn’t matter what the extenuating circumstances are; it doesn’t matter if it was bad luck; it doesn’t matter if someone else acted foolishly or even maliciously. If you’re the leader, it is always on you, and you never blame anyone else.

This lesson sounds obvious, almost cliche (“the buck stops here”), but I have to admit, I never fully understood it before reading this book, nor seen any leaders really act this way. This book finally helped me understand what extreme ownership really means, and more importantly, why it’s so important. This is best explained through an example. The book includes harrowing examples from the Iraq war, which are well worth reading, but here, I’ll focus on a more benign business example.

Imagine you’re the manager at a company, and one of your employees, Mike, screwed up the order for a customer. The typical reaction is to blame Mike: “I can’t believe you screwed this up! You just cost us thousands of dollars!” All this does is put Mike on the defensive, so he’s unlikely to try to fix the problem, and it teaches Mike and his colleagues to look for others to blame when things go wrong.

Moreover, the reality is that it’s not Mike’s fault, no matter what Mike did. As the leader, it’s always on you:

• Perhaps Mike messed up the order because he wasn’t skilled enough. In that case, it’s your fault for not providing Mike with the training he needed.
• Or maybe Mike messed up because he had so many orders on his hands, he didn’t have enough time to process each one correctly. In that case, it’s your fault for not building a big enough team to handle the volume of orders you’re getting, and for designing an order delivery process without sufficient quality control.
• Even in the extreme case that Mike intentionally and maliciously screwed up the order, it’s still your fault for having hired Mike in the first place, and for not having put in safe guards for your customers and business.

Imagine instead of blaming Mike, you go to him and say, “I know you’ve had your hands overloaded with all the orders we’re getting. That’s my fault. We’re going to grow the team as soon as we can. In the meantime, here’s the new process that will help us catch problems before they reach customers.” Instead of putting Mike on the defensive, when he sees you take ownership, he’ll want to take ownership too. And so will the rest of the team. And that’s what will lead to the problems actually being solved.

“There are no bad teams. Only bad leaders.”

Performance standards

“With performance standards, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.” If you accept low performance on the team, it becomes the new standard. Therefore, as a leader, a critical part of your job is to always push for higher performance.

Know the why

Everyone on the team must know not only what they need to do, but also why. If everyone knows the underlying why, they will all be able to make good decisions, even without you there. But if they don’t, then everyone will end up working in a slightly different direction, and you’ll get nowhere. As a leader, it’s your job to make sure everyone knows why. And as a member of any team, if you don’t know why, it is your job to ask.

Put ego aside

Everyone on your team should be focused solely on the goal. However, personal egos can often get in the way. It’s your job as a leader to help avoid the ego getting in the way. For example, let’s say one of your employees ignored operating procedure, and screwed up a task. If you yell at him along the lines of “I can’t believe you ignored our procedure and screwed this up,” you’re pulling his ego into it, and he’s likely to get defensive, and the problem won’t get solved. Now, imagine that you instead said: “This is my fault. I never made it clear why we created that operating procedure in the first place. It’s there due to a bunch of constraints you may not be aware of, so let’s go through those together…” By avoiding bringing the employee’s ego into it, they will be much more likely to work with you and try to solve the problem.

Questions to ask when things go wrong

When things go wrong, as a leader, you should ask two questions:

1. Why did this happen?
2. What could I (the leader) have done to prevent this from happening?

It’s all one team

If you’re part of a larger organization, it’s always easy to blame other teams for problems, especially if you’re not in charge of those teams. But remember, you’re all part of one team, with one goal. As a leader, even if you’re not in charge of those teams, their problems are still your problems. Instead of blaming them, ask what you can do to help.

Up and down the chain

Most leaders know it’s their role to pass information down the chain, to the people who report to them. But it’s also your job as a leader to pass information up the chain to your own bosses. When your boss makes crazy requests or bad decisions, it’s easy to just call them an idiot or an asshole. But pause and ask yourself this question: do you really think your boss wants you and your team to fail? In most cases, they don’t, so if they made a wrong decision, that’s your fault, as you didn’t provide them with the information they needed to make good decisions.

How to react in overwhelming situations

In tough situations, Navy Seals are taught to: prioritize and execute. Don’t try to solve everything at once. Instead, solve one problem at a time, and then move on to the next. The process is roughly:

1. Relax
2. Look around
3. Make the call on one thing to prioritize
4. Seek input from the team on options to solve it
5. Pick one of the options
6. Communicate it up and down the chain
7. Execute
8. If priorities change part way through, send word up and down the chain

Standardized planning protocol

You should have a standardized planning protocol: a pre-defined checklist of how you do planning, so every time you need to put together a new plan, you go through the same series of steps, and don’t miss anything important.

Here’s the rough outline of a typical planning protocol:

1. Start with the mission. This defines what you’re trying to achieve.
2. Define the leader’s intent. This defines why you’re doing the mission. This is the most important part of the plan. It’s essential everyone is clear on the leader’s intent, as that way, everyone can act independently.
3. Delegate tactics to the experts on your team. As a leader, you should be focused on the high level strategy and coordination. Leave all the implementation details to the team, as that way, you get more buy-in, more involvement, and better ideas. Your role is to check what they come up with, look for holes in the plan, and stand back to make sure everything works together from a higher perspective.
4. Brief everyone of the plan. Keep it concise and clear. No one can follow long, overly-complicated plans anyway, so short and simple is the goal.
5. Assign roles. Everyone must know who is in charge of what. And everyone must know how their role connects to the bigger picture.
6. Figure out contingency plans. Take some time to figure out what to do if things don’t go according to plan.
7. Give everyone a chance to ask questions. In fact, actively encourage participation: check with each person that they understand the plan fully; flush out all confusion and concerns early. If the team is too afraid to ask questions, you’ll never know if they are on board, confused, in doubt, etc.
8. Execute.
9. After everything is done, do a post operation debrief. Record lessons learned. Update your planning protocol with these new lessons.
10. Rinse and repeat.

Rating: 5 stars