To lead a team is to take ownership. To lead a team well requires extreme ownership – a term made popular by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, the authors and Navy SEALs behind the New York Times best-selling book leadership book Extreme Ownership.
As a leader, you are responsible for achieving results. You set the tone for the culture you want to create. You need to be proactive and take decisions on different levels. You are accountable to both your boss and reports. Taking ownership is something you have to do day in and day out without missing a beat. However, slipping up is easier than you think. Maybe you have a bad day and while you won’t say it out loud, you secretly blame your team for an outcome gone wrong. Perhaps you keep delaying an important decision because you’re unsure what to do.
When you take extreme ownership, there is no room for pointing fingers or avoiding decisions. Willink and Babin outline 12 extreme ownership concepts in their book, but if you’re going to start anywhere, start with the four principles below – they are the most crucial ones that every leader should embrace.
1. Extreme Ownership
What is extreme ownership, anyway? It’s the practice of taking responsibility for everything in your world: your actions and decisions, the actions and decisions of your team, as well as factors that you don’t control directly but that affect the overall strategic goals you are setting out to achieve.
This principle is particularly important because it’s the starting point to building and sustaining a high-performing team. When you own your work to an extreme degree, you breed the same sense of accountability in your team and foster trust, a key aspect of effective collaboration.
“Leaders who take ownership of their work are much more likely to be trusted and respected by their team members. When employees see their leaders being accountable for their actions, it inspires trust and confidence,” says Anthony Martin, founder and CEO of Choice Mutual and member of the Forbes Financial Council. “Bosses who lead by example show their employees how they want them to behave, and this sense of ownership will be transferred to the rest of the team.”
One thing we love about extreme ownership is that reinforces the fact that all great leaders are not born great leaders — they are made through failure, trial and error, analysis, time, dedication and mastering of their craft. Leadership coaching services can help business leaders elevate their skillset rapidly, and at scale, for massive business success.
2. No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders
There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. While it may be a hard pill to swallow, it’s one of the most important mindsets you can embrace while leading. In Extreme Ownership, Leif recalls a Hell Week anecdote that perfectly exemplifies this principle. During Hell Week, the most grueling part of Navy SEAL training, students are divided into boat crews and perform competitions against each other.
In one particular instance, instructors noticed a boat crew consistently winning and another crew consistently losing. The losing crew and its leader started to play the blame game and bicker about their poor performance. The instructors decided to swap leaders: They placed the winning team’s leader with the losing crew and vice-versa. Under fresh leadership, the losing team started winning every race.
Fascinatingly enough, the team that was previously winning all the races ended up in second place. That’s because their previous leader had understood how to foster high performance in a team, and the team just kept on carrying its good habits.
Remember this: If you throw in the towel and blame poor performance on your team, you’ll only keep getting poor performance out of your team. When you roll your sleeves up and decide that any team can be led towards success with effort and intention, you set yourself up for winning.
3. Prioritize and Execute
Prioritize, execute, rinse and repeat – especially when you feel overwhelmed. Taking extreme ownership of your world means taking ownership of problems to solve and opportunities to seize. Ruthless prioritization cuts through the noise. Execution translates into a focus on consistent action.
If you doubt the importance of this simple principle, consider the following common pain point in the workplace. Someone has a great idea. You talk about it and have a few meetings about it. Without ownership of priorities and execution, the idea just remains a nice thought that hasn’t been turned into a concrete reality.
4. Decisiveness amid Uncertainty
Decisiveness amid uncertainty is one of the most powerful extreme ownership principles to embrace. If the past couple of years has taught us anything, it’s that knowing how to operate and thrive during uncertain times is not only a competitive advantage but also a necessity.
As Willink and Babin explain, it’s not possible to have every single piece of information before making a decision – there will always be unknowns. Leaders who take extreme ownership master the art of being decisive in the face of these unknowns. In combat, that can be the difference between life or death. In the business world, the stakes are thankfully not that high.
