Dealing with Conflict #3: 5 Leadership Lessons To Learn From Navy Seals (Classic)

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We are dropping a mini-series about Dealing with Conflict. We're talking about everything from respectfully disagreeing with your manager to mediating conflict and navigating competition. Consider this week's batch of episodes as a guide to handling uncomfortable situations in a corporate setting and beyond. That means instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week, we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. In today's classic episode, originally released on December 15th, 2021, I talk about extreme ownership and other principles picked up by Navy SEALs while fighting for our country. Let's hop into it.

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

So there's this book. It's called Extreme Ownership, and it's one of the best books on leadership. It's written by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. And I first heard about Extreme Ownership, probably three or four years ago. I was visiting the office of another media founder and CEO, and I walk into his office and there's a huge bookshelf in kind of like the waiting area. And what was very interesting to me is this book, Extreme Ownership, there had to have been 75 copies just in one place on this bookshelf. And what he later told me was that this book, Extreme Ownership, is the best book on leadership that he had ever read bar none and that every single new employee that starts at his company is given this book to read. Now what's interesting before even hopping into Extreme Ownership is this practice is how I often decide what I'm going to read myself, which is looking at recommendations from people I trust. So I had to get that quick plug in there about the value of curation, because it is one of my fundamental beliefs about where the internet is going and I ended up reading Extreme Ownership a week or two after talking to this founder and understanding how much of an impact it had made on his life and his business. Now, let's talk a little bit about Jocko Willink, specifically, one of the authors of Extreme Ownership. More recently, I rewatched Jocko Willink’s TED Talk from 2017, and I have a very high bar for what a great speech is. And I can confidently say that this TED Talk, I think it's 13 minutes long, by Jocko Willink is top three speech I have ever watched. And basically what Jocko Willink does is he steps up to the stage and he starts by talking about the ugliness of war and how war is hell, how it's unthinkable, the things you see. And then what he proceeds to do is he talks about his time in Ramadi, Iraq, when he was leading a team of Navy Seals, and he talks about how they were working to take control of Ramadi from terrorist insurgents. And he explains how they had planned basically the strategy of taking over the city between Navy Seals, other American military men and women, as well as Iraqi friendly soldiers. And what ends up happening is there's friendly fire. He describes how, whether it was misorganization or bad strategy, the Seals, the Iraqis, end up firing on themselves and one friendly Iraqi is killed. Several of his men are wounded, and he just provides this intense, traumatizing, just awful account of what the friendly fire was like. Now I want to talk about the leadership principles that Jocko Willink has instilled in so many people and what he was taught in the Seals. But first, before we do that, I want you to listen to this part of his talk when he talks about who owned responsibility for the friendly fire and the conversation that he had with his superiors.So take a quick listen. 

Jocko Willink [in audio clip]: I walked into the debriefing room with my commanding officer and the master chief and the investigating officer were sitting there waiting for me along with the rest of my men, including my Seal that had been wounded, who sitting in the back of the room with his head and his face, all bandaged up. And I stood up before them. And I asked them one simple question: Whose fault was this? One of my Seals raised his hand and he said, “It was my fault. I didn't keep control of the Iraqi soldiers I was with. And they left their designated sector. And that was the root of all these problems.” And I said, no, it wasn't your fault. And then another Seal raised his hand and said, “It was my fault. I didn't pass our location over the radio fast enough. So no one knew what building we were in. And that's what caused all this confusion. It was my fault.” And I said, no, it wasn't your fault either. And then another Seal raised his hand and he said, “Boss, this was my fault. I didn't properly identify my target. And I shot and killed that friendly Iraqi soldier, this was my fault.” And I said, no, this wasn't your fault either. And it wasn't yours or yours or yours. I said, as I pointed to the rest of the Seals in the room, and then I told them that there was only one person at fault for what had happened. There was only one person to blame. And that person was me. I am the commander. I am the senior man on the battlefield and I am responsible for everything that happens.

Alex Lieberman:  I'm sure as you can tell, from what Jocko Willink said, every lesson that the Seals live by is defined by this broader mantra of extreme ownership. And it's very simple, what it means in practice: The best leaders don't just take responsibility for their job, they take ownership over everything that impacts the mission of your company or of your battalion. And you taking ownership means doing it even when it's not convenient, like you getting fired or you looking bad. It is your responsibility as a leader to make someone feel empowered. It is your responsibility that someone understands the mission. It is your responsibility that someone knows what the number one priority is so they know what to focus on. It is your responsibility to understand the information that you are sharing with your team so they can understand it. It is your responsibility to believe in a decision that is being made by your superiors. So simply put, anything that goes wrong on your team or in your company is a result of your failure as a leader, full stop. That is what extreme ownership means. So now what I want to do is to dive into some of the key principles that extreme ownership has created. 

Standards are what you tolerate

The first is: standards are what you tolerate. It is such a powerful line. Standards are what you tolerate. If leaders or managers in a company tolerate substandard performance and they don't hold their team members accountable, poor performance becomes the new standard. A leader needs to enforce the standards that they expect, and they need to unite the team together around those standards and the mission. And it's yet another reason that substandard performance is your fault because you are the one that is allowing a new standard that you don't desire. And I think it's so interesting to think about, right? Because when in a company we see someone not doing their job correctly, we think about, oh, should we say something? We need to pick our battles. If we always give feedback to someone when they're not doing the right thing, they're going to end up becoming resentful. That's not a bad thought, but on the other hand, if you don't give feedback, if you don't let someone know when standards aren't being met, whatever they're doing is the new standard. And so that's the thing is it makes a lot of sense. But I think the hard part is, how do you practice this in real life? If your direct report does a substandard job, how do you make it clear that this isn't the standard, but you do so in a compassionate way? And I'd actually defer back to what I talked about in the episode on radical candor recently, where you have to challenge directly, but you have to show that you personally care about the person you're talking to. So that's, you define the standard, and if you tolerate poor performance, poor performance becomes the new standard in your company. 

Clarify the why of what you’re doing

Next, if you're practicing extreme ownership, you are always clarifying the why of what you're doing. Every single team member must be bought into your mission and to be bought in, your team members need to understand the why. And when everyone knows the reason for being as in your why and the goals, they will feel bought in. If people don't understand the why, it is your fault as a leader for not communicating it directly. It reminds me of this video by Simon Sinek called “The Golden Circle” where Simon Sinek is up at the stage, he has this whiteboard, and he draws three circles: a big one, a smaller one inside of it, and a smaller one inside of that. On the outside, it says, “What?” On the second circle, it says, “How?” And on the inside circle, it says, “Why?” And basically Simon Sinek's whole point is to build a great business and to get everyone paddling in the right direction, your people must understand and believe why you are doing what you're doing and not just what or how you're doing what you're doing. Great leaders always communicate the why of their mission and they communicate it clearly so their team is never doubtful about why they're doing what they're doing. Next to be a great leader and practice extreme ownership, you have to be great at executing a plan, and there's a simple formula for success. It is a clear priority, a simple plan, an empowered team, constant communication, and a debrief. Let me walk through each of these.

The formula for executing a great plan

In the words of the Seals, the first step is to understand the mission or your number one priority and make sure all of your team members believe in that mission. This goes back to the concept of why that I just talked about. You end up determining your mission by prioritizing and asking yourself questions like, what result are we looking for? What is the ideal outcome? And what is the purpose of my team? Once you've decided your priority of your mission, then you need to understand what are the resources you need to create a simple plan? The simpler you make a plan, the more likely your team members will understand it and the more likely they are to succeed. Simple is better, but also what you need to remind your team of is simple does not mean easy. It is not going to be easy to accomplish your plan, but everyone on your team should have zero doubts about what the plan is.

So we've talked about prioritization. We've talked about simplifying. The next thing to do to execute on your plan is empowerment and trust. Your team needs to believe in the why as I talked about, and then you need to build trust with them by giving key team members the autonomy and authority to parts of the plan and its execution. You know, you may think to yourself and I've experienced this as a founder, at times you worry that someone can't execute on a plan as well as you. Well, first of all, you should put your ego to the side because that's not necessarily true, but it's also not the point. There is only one of you and a plan requires more than one person to pull it off when you're in a company or whether you're in battle and to build the trust of the people around you, they need to know that you believe in them to accomplish the mission without micromanaging their every move. And the Seals referred to this concept as decentralized command, where everyone leads and everyone understands why they're leading. One other nuance to planning is this idea of brainstorming challenges and obstacles where you think through contingencies, so that in the event things don't go your way, which oftentimes happens, you have a plan for what you would do. So we've talked about prioritizing, we've talked about planning, and we've talked about executing. The fourth part of this that happens throughout all of the steps is communication. 

Communication must be clear. It must be simple so there's less possible surface area for people to get confused or to do the wrong thing. It also has to be constant. It has to be constantly moving up the chain of command. And it has to be constantly moving down the chain of command. Whenever there's a shift in your plan or your priorities, which also changes your plan, you as the leader, need to own the responsibility to reflect that change to your boss, and then to your direct reports below you. 

Now there's one last step in executing a successful plan. And I've actually talked about it several times in Founder’s Journal episodes, but it's just been given a different name because it was in a different context. And that last part of successfully executing on a plan is what the Seals would call a debrief and what I have called in past Founder's Journal episodes, a decision journal. Regardless of whether the project succeeds or fails, you need to take time after a mission or a project within your company to reflect on the team's performance. You need to ask questions like, did our desired result occur? If it did, did it occur because we made good decisions or because of luck? If it didn't, where did things go wrong? Are there problems we should have anticipated? And how could we have communicated better than we did? 

Discipline, discipline, discipline

Now that we've talked about the recipe for executing on any plan that becomes your priority, let's talk about the final leadership lesson of the Seals, and that is discipline. The Navy Seals and specifically Jocko, Willink preach this idea that discipline creates freedom. And I totally agree with this. I think that discipline, like many things, is a muscle. And if you build it up through intentional effort, you can be the lead actor in your life versus being an observer. And the Seals specifically practice discipline in a very specific way. They always get up to the sound of their first alarm. They never snooze. For Jocko Willink, this is around 4:00 AM every day, and they always make their bed before doing anything else. It sounds like a tiny thing, but it is such an important thing to set the tone of your day in the right manner. You are doing something else that others are not willing to do or don't feel is as important to do. And that in itself means you're exerting self-discipline. I believe discipline is contagious. And if you can practice it in this way, I believe it will show up in other ways in your life, whether that's through focused work, through exercise, through kicking a bad habit, or through prioritization, and just to recap, Jocko Willink and the Navy Seals have risked their lives for our country and in doing so, they have learned so much about what it means to be an incredible leader. Their leadership mantra is defined by this idea of extreme ownership, but below that there are so many different principles that we can take with us into our everyday life. Things like standards are what we tolerate as leaders. Things like clarifying the why so everyone who's working with you understands why they are on a certain mission, and simple formulas for executing on successful plans that include prioritization, planning, empowering your team, communication, and a debrief.

Thank you

As always, thank you so much for listening to Founder’s Journal. Downloads this month have been absolutely crazy, and we want to keep the momentum going because we have a chance of close to 50% growth month-over-month on the show. And that is just because of all of you continuing to stay dedicated to listening to the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to tell a friend, a family member, or co-worker about it, and if you haven't yet done so, leave a review for Founder’s Journal on Apple Podcasts. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch you next episode.