A book report or a lesson on leadership?

By Scott Shillington

In junior high and high school, a book report assignment was akin to torture. It’s crazy to think that today, well beyond my school years, I actually look forward to extracurricular reading and writing about what I learned from it. Since I’m no longer working towards a GPA, this book report is really my way of taking notes for my own use—and hopefully yours.

The book I’m covering is Extreme Ownership: How US Navy Seals Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. In it, the authors use military scenarios and lessons to illustrate leadership principles and their everyday applications. The introductory concept of “Prioritize and Execute” is a familiar business tenet, but one worth covering again.

When any team, large or small, comes together to solve any problem, large or small, the first order of business must be to identify and prioritize the steps that will lead to the solution. Only then can the relentless execution begin—and with continual re-evaluation of priorities and actions, the probability of success grows.

Willink and Babin point out early in Extreme Ownership that “effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win.” (8) Part of this is prioritization and execution, but the other part is empowerment and accountability. Just like in the military, individual contributors are more successful when they are empowered to solve problems and held accountable for their responsibilities. At every level in the organization, every hour of the day, people need to be able to lead and make effective decisions to ensure success.

Chapter 1: Extreme Ownership

The title (and overall concept) of the book’s first chapter, “Extreme Ownership,” is one of the best I have come across. Willink writes that “Extreme Ownership requires leaders to look at an organization’s problems through the objective lens of reality, without emotional attachments to agendas or plans.  It mandates that a leader set ego aside, accept responsibility for failures, attack weaknesses, and consistently work to build a better and more effective team… That is what a leader does—even if it means getting fired.” (26)

What really resonated with me was the idea that with Extreme Ownership, the success goes to the team and the failure goes to the leader. I have started to ask myself whether I’m taking Extreme Ownership of all areas of the business I manage at the company where I work.

Chapter 2: No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders

If you know nothing else about the Navy SEALs and other Special Operations groups, you probably know that they go through extreme training to test and solidify their physical and mental mettle. In chapter 2 of Extreme Ownership, Babin tells the story of two teams and their leaders to illustrate the importance of leadership.

These two teams were performing on completely different levels. One won every challenge and the other always took last place. To demonstrate effective leadership, the head of the training program swapped the leaders of the two teams. The last-place team immediately became the first-place team, while the first-place team moved to second. Their original leader had infused Extreme Ownership and helped each team member embrace leadership, so even a poor leader from the last-place team could not derail their success.

Babin writes that “teams need a forcing function to get the different members working together to accomplish the mission, and that is what leadership is all about.” (55) As a business leader, you have a much greater chance of success if you can get your entire team to accept ownership of the goal—and if you can keep pushing them to improve. As Babin puts it, “Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mindset into the team. They must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance. Identifying weaknesses, good leaders seek to strengthen them and come up with a plan to overcome challenges.”

Chapter 3: Believe

Great leaders can’t inspire Extreme Ownership without strong belief in the mission. Wilink writes that leaders who don’t believe “will not take the risks required to overcome the inevitable challenges necessary to win. And they will not be able to convince others—especially the frontline troops who must execute the mission—to do so. Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests.” (76) This means making sure the team understands the Why and the How, so that they can believe in the mission too.

Chapter 4: Check the Ego

When everyone on the team leaves their egos at the door aligns on the mission, their chances of success are much higher. Overconfidence can kill productivity and a lot more. “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.” But you have to, for the success of the team.

If you think about challenges you face at work and ask yourself the question, “Am I demonstrating Extreme Ownership of the situation?” you can quickly diffuse your ego and get to the work of solving the problem. That doesn’t mean making the situation about you—it means making an honest assessment of how you could have contributed to the problem, and being fearless about prioritizing and executing tasks.

Chapter 5: Cover and Move

When you’re on a fast-moving, high-functioning team, it’s not uncommon for divisions to arise. Team members can get so focused on their immediate tasks that they forget where they fit into the larger picture or how others are depending on them. Blame and resentment may develop, which compromise the entire team’s performance.

“It falls on leaders,” Babin explains, “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.” It’s the leader’s job to refocus the team away from blaming and complaining to overcoming obstacles and making strategic contributions.

Chapter 6: Simple

In this chapter, Willink relates the story of a U.S. Army officer about to embark on his first major patrol in a very hostile area with an overly complicated plan. After hearing the officer’s plan and pointing out his concerns, Willink encouraged the officer to come up with a much simpler strategy.

When the patrol came under heavy fire less than 13 minutes into the mission, the Navy SEAL unit supporting the patrol communicated simply and effectively to ensure a successful rescue.  The Seal team is trained to keep operations simple to ensure they reduce complexity and drive up the probability of success.

The defining paragraph in the chapter for me is on page 140: “Combat, like anything in life, has inherent layers of complexities…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…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. You must brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team understands.”

In the professional world, a complex plan that no one understands is doomed for failure. An unnecessarily complicated compensation plan, for example, can alienate employees and make them feel disconnected from the larger mission. But a simple plan that marries employee motivations with company goals can work for—and motivate—everyone.

Chapter 7: Prioritize and Execute

Most of us will never face anything like Willink and Babin did in the military. But the crisis management lessons are the same. Even in times of utter disaster, leaders must be able to prioritize and mobilize the team to execute.  They can’t get overwhelmed by stress or emotion.

Babin lays out these actionable items anyone can implement during times of crisis:

• 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.

Chapter 8: Decentralized Command

Great leaders empower their teams and build trust among their direct reports. Do this well enough and the empowerment will come through in times of trial, like under enemy fire as Wallink describes in this chapter. It’s easy to forget about investing time in team training to position employees to make good decisions, but it’s a worthy investment that can scale and accelerate your growth as a company.

Frequent communication with team members about the Why of the mission, on the other hand, builds trust and leads to improved decision-making and empowers you (the leader) to stay focused on the big picture.

Sometimes the team is simply too big to be properly empowered. Wallink writes that “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.”

Chapter 9: Plan

If any chapter resonates with me, it’s this one. Building simple and effective plans that your team buys into and supports is critical to success. As a leader, you will need to spend significantly more time on building plans and communicating with your team members than you might expect.  Today, with little to no training for management, many leaders must take learning into their own hands.

Planning begins with mission analysis and the identification of clear directives for the team. “The mission must explain the overall purpose and desired result…of the operation. The frontline troops tasked with executing the mission must understand the deeper purpose behind the mission.”

Even better, frontline troops should be allowed some ownership over tactical-level planning. “If you are down in the weeds planning the details with your guys,” writes Babin, “you will have the same perspective as them, which adds little value. But if you let them plan the details, it allows them to own their piece of the plan. And it allows you to stand back and see everything with a different perspective, which adds tremendous value. 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.”

Chapter 10: Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command

This is the type of chapter that you know deep down you have to practice, but most often you don’t. It always seems easier to complain about something or someone and not take the time to understand the What or Why.

But as this chapter explains, by involving your team in mission planning, you make them accountable to the plans they create and provide an explanation behind the Why. This combination of ownership and context, in my experience, is what gives teams the energy and motivation to deliver great results.

“I realized that the SEALs in Charlie Platoon who suffered the worst combat fatigue, whose attitudes grew progressively more negative as the months of heavy combat wore on, who most questioned the level of risk we were taking on operations—they all had the least ownership of the planning for each operation. Conversely, the SEAL operators who remained focused and positive, who believed in what we were doing, and who were eager to continue and would have stayed on beyond our six-month deployment if they could—they all had some ownership of the planning process in each operation.” (228)

“Leadership doesn’t just flow down the chain of command, but up as well,” Babin writes. “We have to own everything in our world. That’s what Extreme Ownership is all about.” (235)

Chapter 11: Decisiveness and Uncertainty

Using the story of the shot his team did not take on a supposed enemy sniper, Babin emphasizes the importance of being able to make hard decisions with less than complete information.

“Leaders cannot be paralyzed by fear,” Babin writes. “That results in inaction. It is critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty; to make the best decision they can based on only the immediate information available.” (254) Even under intense pressure to take a shot at a suspected enemy sniper (thanks to incomplete information), Babin held his ground. He used the training framework instilled in him by Willink, and good thing he did—the suspected sniper turned out to be an American soldier.

Chapter 12: Discipline Equals Freedom – The Dichotomy of Leadership

I have never met Jocko Willink and most likely never will, but I get the sense that I would have loved to be on his team. Here are some of the highlights that resonated with me and have become part of my own leadership approach.

“If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win—you pass the test. 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.” (271)

“I realized very quickly that discipline was not only the most important quality for an individual but also for a team. The more disciplined standard operating procedures (SOPs) a team employs, the more freedom they have to practice Decentralized Command (chapter 8) and thus they can execute faster, sharper, and more efficiently.” (272)

“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.

A good leader has nothing to prove, but everything to prove.”

I have thoroughly enjoyed taking the time to put my thoughts on paper. I felt compelled to write this book report as a resource to reference with my teams, and if anyone else can benefit from it, fantastic. I commend Jocko and Leif for putting this book together and I hope they write more and share there vast leadership knowledge in the future.