Extreme Ownership

Extreme Ownership contains useful leadership advice from two Navy SEALs who learned to stay strong, disciplined, and level-headed in high-stakes combat scenarios.

It’s 2012 and Jocko Willink finds himself in Ramadi, Iraq leading a SEAL task unit. When the team starts taking heavy fire from what they thought was the enemy, a soldier loses his life. To their horror, the group later learns that bullets from their assumed enemy were actually friendly fire from another unit. What was Willink to do seeing as he was the ranking officer in the operation?

Of all the things he could have thought about this tragedy, this man knew for certain that the accountability for what had happened rested on him. Interestingly, his level of responsibility for the event ended up saving Willink’s job. Because his superior’s knew that leaders make mistakes but the best ones take accountability for them, they let him remain in command.

In Navy SEAL training, the lowest performers in worst-case-scenarios are those that blame their subordinates or the scenario instead of carrying the burden themselves. In contrast, those who do the best not only take on the onus for mistakes but seek correction from their superiors.

The principle to remember in leadership here is that the attitude of a leader usually passes down to their team members. If management won’t take responsibility for mistakes, their employees won’t either, and nobody goes anywhere. But for those leaders that wholly take accountability for problems, their team members are willing to do the same. Everyone becomes more efficient when a leader has a positive outlook on their role in the good and the bad.

Imagine that you’re deep in enemy territory and a comrade suddenly falls 20 feet after stepping on a tarp that he thought was a roof. Now you’ve got an injured soldier and your team is at risk of being harmed. What’s more, there’s an enemy bomb at the exit of the building you’re in. What do you do? You might think “don’t panic” and you’d be right. But how do you go about that? It’s as simple as “prioritize and execute” as the SEAL training teaches. This principle is further explained by the SEAL’s mantra of “relax, look around, make a call.” The key to executing effectively under pressure is to take a look at each priority and handle them one at a time. That means your first act will be to decide what must be taken care of first. In the scenario above, Babin prioritized his team’s safety, then taking care of the soldier that fell, and finally making sure all of his men were present. His process of slowing it down and taking a step back…