Today is ANZAC Day in Australia. Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand that broadly commemorates all Australians and New Zealanders “who served and died in all wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations” and “the contribution and suffering of all those who have served”. It seemed fitting to take the time to finish my reading of this book today.
The book is read by the authors, whose military experience adds a depth to their advice which you don’t get in most business books.
The book describes a leadership lesson from a military or training context, they then break down the principle at work, from there they demonstrate how it can be applied in a business context. I enjoyed the insights from the business stories relaying how these principles were applied. I found that the clever ways that Jocko and Leif led their clients as they coached leadership lessons intriguing. Such as teaching moment like asking “do you think that [person in conflict] is out to destroy the business?” Such a question resets the us vs. them mindset that people can adopt, and encourage alignment to the mission.
Format
The book has three parts: Winning the War Within, The Laws of Combat, and Sustaining Victory.
Winning the War Within
Winning the war within is all about the character and mindset of a good leader. This is all within the individual, as a warning and guide to those who feel called or pressed into leadership.
Extreme Ownership
This is the titular lesson of the book. The idea is simple, but not easy: As a leader, you are responsible for everything in your space. This includes the details, emergency plans, subordinate leaders below you and senior leaders above you. A mindset of ownership and a dedication to the success of the mission is what makes a leader successful.
Extreme Ownership requires owning your mistakes as well. If you acknowledge them, you can face them and come up with a new plan to overcome them and win.
No Bad Teams. Only Bad Leaders.
This drives home the hard lesson of the previous chapter. The measure of a leader is the success or failure of the team.
He describes a convicting picture of the “tortured genius,” a leader who feels that they are a good leader even though their team is not succeeding. Such a leader will display victimisation, blaming their followers understanding and motivation rather than taking ownership of their failure to lead.
It was incredibly inspiring… and convicting.
Believe
To perform at a high level, you have to believe the mission. To believe the mission, you have to understand it. To understand, you must go and get knowledge.
Part of extreme ownership is the accepting that knowledge, understanding, and strategy will not be spoon fed to you, you have the responsibility to go get it. Very rarely will someone hand you the “Why?” of the mission. You have to find it.
By understanding the mission, you can improvise, adapt, and improve.
This chapter hit home. I have often complained that I don’t understand what my leader’s strategy is and I haven’t sought to understand it. That is my responsibility.
The chapter also touches on the leader’s responsibility to make themselves available for such questions, and discusses the distance that even a friendly leader may not realise their position gives them.
Check The Ego
This chapter does a good job of listing several of the cunning ways where ego can sneak in and sabotage a leader:
- Ego prevents you from accepting advice. It can also block self preservation.
- Ego hides your own weaknesses from yourself. It lets your enemies exploit these weaknesses unchallenged.
- Ego can prevent your team from improvising and improving.
Ego is pride. It is destructive and dangerous, and I was glad to see humility be a key part of Jocko and Leif’s mindset for leaders.
The Laws of Combat
This part of the book covers the essential skills and aspects of leadership that can be focused on and developed. It addresses strategies for solving problems and dominating as a team.
Cover and Move
Cover and Move is teamwork. It has an additional advantage over the normal sports-oriented language of teamwork because in a military context, each element has a separate mission and location. They have to understand the greater strategy and communicate effectively, considering each other’s moves and needs in order to prevail.
The book lists some of the easy failures to cover and move:
- Forgetting that all of the units on your team are your team. (I have fallen prey to this pitfall in the past. I have treated some elements as “them” rather than “we”.)
- Getting so focused on your team’s task that you forget the overall strategy.
- Blaming others for your team’s failures. We are all on the same mission.
- Failing to step back and consider how to support and depend on others around us.
Make those around you a part of your team. Great lesson.
Simple
Life and combat has layers of complexity, where one small mistake can cascade into a series of problems. Simplify your communication and plans. Orders must be clear and simple so that everyone can understand their role and the backup plan. It doesn’t matter how clear you think you have been if your team does not understand, you have failed.
It is easy to be so intimate with your plan’s details that you ignore how complex it really is. If people don’t understand it, then you know the answer.
Simplicity gives flexibility and robustness to planning and communication. You can’t adjust or compensate when the plan is too complex for each element to comprehend.
Prioritize and Execute
You can’t do everything at once. Calm down. Look around. Make a call.
In order to choose the right problems and execute with wisdom, you have to actively maintain situational awareness. This was a great point. I often accept information about the world as it comes, and don’t always seek it out actively.
You can plan, but you can’t plan for everything. A key aspect of leadership is the ability to step back, see the big picture, and tackle the most important thing with the whole team, one problem at a time.
Decentralised Command
This is about delegation, but about more than delegation. It is an understanding that there is an upper bound to the people a leader can effectively lead. It builds on the previous chapters. You can’t have decentralised command without the teamwork of Cover and Move and the clarity of keeping things Simple.
There is a lot of excellent counsel in this chapter on how to empower and coach junior leaders on your team to take ownership of their teams, and how to build an effectively network. It all comes down to being a strong enough leader to not only give direction, but to empower your leaders to carry out the mission without you. Your junior leaders should not ask “what should I do?” they should be telling you “This is what we are going to do.”
It takes strength to let go. I fail at this a lot, especially at home. Taking the long game, and slowly coaching my team at home and work to succeed without me… that’s my new mission.
Sustaining Victory
It’s not enough to have the right mindset, it’s better but not sufficient to have strategies for dealing with the day to day of leadership activities, you have to build in a thoughtful strategy for maintaining and improving.
Plan
In hearing the stories and examples I could reflect in the past at times in management where I have failed people on my team by not planning and communicating effectively.
It’s necessary to form of review of your plan after execution. Without a “post operation debrief” of some kind, you will make the same mistakes over and over again.
Another really excellent point that I will use this very week is to only focus on risks that you can actually mitigate. It doesn’t help to worry or spin in place trying to fight a risk you can’t control. In this case, simply move on and execute. I have wasted time in my planning process worrying about what I can’t control instead of focusing on what I can.
Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command
This chapter has many valuable pieces of knowledge about communication up and down your organisation.
Leading Down
As a senior leader I can support my junior leaders by showing them the strategic impact of our team.
Your team enters briefs wondering “what are we doing next”. In addition, you need to give them a “why”. Your men need help to connect their tactical missions to the greater strategic goal.
If a team member helps plan the mission, they’ll often catch the vision and increase their morale and purpose thanks to hearing their commander’s intent.
This is leading down the chain of command. Providing vision to those junior to you. Giving them ownership.
Leading Up
Before blaming the boss, blame yourself. This requires a lot more skill than leading down. You must also recognise your needs are part of a larger picture, you may not be the priority. This takes humility. At the end of the day, you must execute the plan as if it were your own.
Decisiveness Amidst Uncertainty
A leader must be decisive amidst uncertainty. Act on logic, not emotions.
There was even a section providing a heuristic for decision making under stress. It can be helpful to understand that some decisions are irrevocable and some can be changed. A wise leader knows how to resist the stress of the situation and make the best call given the information they have.
Discipline Equals Freedom / The Dichotomy of Leadership
This chapter gave rise to two more books of their own. They are so jam packed with ideas and concepts that are more developed out in their respective titles.
In the sections on discipline, Jocko articulates how the only way to excel is to systematically build discipline in your personal life and process. He describes the battle to get up on time in the morning as the first step on this journey, proclaiming that little discipline leads to discipline in greater things. He also demonstrates how being disciplined with process can lead to making time for what’s important, but personal discipline will empower you to spend that new time on the best things.
Under the dichotomy of leadership, Jocko and Leif discuss how leadership is about striking a balance between extremes. Recognising this fact will allow you to identify and more effectively balance these tension points.
Conclusion
Overall the book Extreme Ownership provides an easy to read, but difficult to implement, set of principles that all leaders, from any arena, will appreciate. While some elements are more applicable to combat, Lief and Jocko do an excellent job of applying the principles to specific corporate situations.
Demanding that leaders accept ultimate responsibility for their mission and team the authors encourage decisive and thoughtful action in the face of uncertainty. The book is packed with lessons that have been learnt the hard way this book should feature on the reading list of anyone seeking to better themselves as a leader.
