Extreme Ownership: How US Navy SEALs Lead and Win

“We know what it means to fail—to lose, to be surprised, outmaneuvered, or simply beaten. Those lessons were the hardest, but perhaps the most important.”

The authors confess that, far from being perfect exemplars, their leadership has been tested in battle, and they’ve made humiliating mistakes and suffered scarring losses. Though unwanted, those harsh lessons tend to be the most valuable. The first lesson disasters teach is humility; the second is to get back up, fix the problem, and move forward.

“The Battle of Ramadi provided a litany of lessons learned, which we were able to capture and pass on. The greatest of these was the recognition that leadership is the most important factor on the battlefield, the single greatest reason behind the success of any team.”

Task Unit Bruiser demonstrates that well-led teams can overcome daunting obstacles and achieve victory where others might assume defeat. To them, leadership is the fulcrum of the success or failure of organized groups. That quality is important at all levels, from a two-person unit to an entire army.

There is only one person to blame for this: me. I am the commander. I am responsible for the entire operation. As the senior man, I am responsible for every action that takes place on the battlefield. There is no one to blame but me. And I will tell you this right now: I will make sure that nothing like this ever happens to us again.”

The first lesson of leadership is that it’s all on the leader. Author Willink realizes that the massive miscommunication that led to a friendly-fire incident has to land on his desk. It’s his job to make sure all units involved are so tightly coordinated that these mistakes don’t happen; if they do, he takes the blame and redesigns the system to prevent similar errors.

“As the commander, everything that happened on the battlefield was my responsibility. Everything. If a supporting unit didn’t do what we needed it to do, then I hadn’t given clear instructions. If one of my machine gunners engaged targets outside his field of fire, then I had not ensured he understood where his field of fire was. If the enemy surprised us and hit us where we hadn’t expected, then I hadn’t thought through all the possibilities. No matter what, I could never blame other people when a mission went wrong.”

Author Willink explains to a VP of manufacturing that mission failures always are on the leader. He gives specific examples of how to own and fix problems. Blaming the situation doesn’t work; meanwhile, there’s always a way for a leader to improve things so they get back on track.

“[…] as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate. When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable—if there are no consequences—that poor performance becomes the new standard.”

In the spirit of Extreme Ownership, a leader can’t rest on his instructions but must ensure they’re followed fully and correctly. This means not punishing the team but tasking members with mastering their skills and not letting up until they’ve got it right. At that point, they’ll help each other to live up to the leader’s expectations—and the right way becomes part of team culture. 

“In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission. Even when others doubt and question the amount of risk, asking, ‘Is it worth it?’ the leader must believe in the greater cause. If a leader does not believe, he or she 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.”

To those on the ground executing a task, sometimes that task seems unnecessary or ill-advised. A leader needs to learn mission rationale and impart its importance to team members. Willink realizes that taking raw, unmotivated Iraqi troops into battle is the only way to train them during busy combat operations, and it’s the only way for them to learn how to take and hold territory and protect their country from future insurgencies. Because he understands and feels confident about this difficult mission, his team members are, too, and the job gets done.

“Rapidly, the number of enemy fighters killed at the hands of our Task Unit Bruiser SEALs grew to unprecedented levels. Every bad guy killed meant more U.S. Soldiers, Marines, and SEALs survived another day; they were one day closer to returning home safely to their families. Every enemy fighter killed also meant another Iraqi soldier, policemen, or government official survived, and more Iraqi civilians lived in a little less fear of al Qaeda in Iraq and their insurgent allies.”

The authors stress that their SEAL teams were in Ramadi to protect, assist, and enhance regular Army and Marine forces in retaking the city. By decimating the enemy, the SEALs make it easier and safer for the other military units to get their work done. The goal is a city governed not by ruthless torturers but by a peaceful, home-grown civil authority so that US military units can return home to their families.

“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.”

When people put their personal pride against teamwork, both that person and their team suffer. Defensiveness and arrogance go hand in hand and prevent cooperation. The solution is for leaders to put their focus on the team and support its goals. With great results comes more than enough pride for everyone.

“If you approached it as he did something wrong, and he needs to fix something, and he is at fault, it becomes a clash of egos and you two will be at odds. That’s human nature. But, if you put your own ego in check, meaning you take the blame, that will allow him to actually see the problem without his vision clouded by ego. Then you both can make sure that your team’s standard operating procedures—when to communicate, what is and isn’t within his decision-making authority—are clearly understood.”

When capable team members err, it’s easy to blame them, but that makes them defensive, and they’ll sulk and resist the leader. If instead, a leader takes the blame and explains more clearly what they need from the team member, that member will bypass humiliation and see the reformed procedure as a way of assisting the leader. The leader thus gains much more by assuming responsibility than by arguing about who failed.

“Cover and Move: it is the most fundamental tactic, perhaps the only tactic. Put simply, Cover and Move means teamwork. All elements within the greater team are crucial and must work together to accomplish the mission, mutually supporting one another for that singular purpose. Departments and groups within the team must break down silos, depend on each other and understand who depends on them. If they forsake this principle and operate independently or work against each other, the results can be catastrophic to the overall team’s performance.”

A great lesson from the Ramadi conflict is teamwork. Groups on a mission need always to support each other in a coordinated manner to maximize their strengths. It’s worse for a team to go off on its own; worse still is to engage in infighting.

“Combat, like anything in life, has inherent layers of complexities. Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. 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.”

Oftentimes, intelligent leaders create complex plans and assume that their teams can handle the details—but this approach underestimates the obstacles that always arise during a mission. Complexity may look good on paper, but, in the field, new problems quickly add to the already complicated plan until it collapses into chaos.

“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.”

Just because leaders understand their own carefully thought-out plan, this doesn’t mean that others will catch on right away. Simplicity in planning must pair with simplicity of communication. When everyone understands and has no further questions, then the mission has the best chance for success.

“Even the most competent of leaders can be overwhelmed if they try to tackle multiple problems or a number of tasks simultaneously. The team will likely fail at each of those tasks. Instead, leaders must determine the highest priority task and execute.”

The test of a good leader is whether that person can remain calm and effectively prioritize during an emergency. This takes practice since being overwhelmed by sudden, urgent demands tends to flood a person’s mind and cause panic. One of the secrets to remaining calm in such a situation is to choose and act on a priority: This gives the mind an orderly task on which to focus and, with it, a sense of moving forward.

“Pushing the decision making down to the subordinate, frontline leaders within the task unit was critical to our success. This Decentralized Command structure allowed me, as the commander, to maintain focus on the bigger picture: coordinate friendly assets and monitor enemy activity. Were I to get embroiled in the details of a tactical problem, there would be no one else to fill my role and manage the strategic mission.”

Willink believes that giving team members full authority to make tactical decisions gives him the freedom to strategize. Where many leaders try to micro-manage a mission, Willink instead has his people respond to situations as they arise in the field, where they can see details he can’t. Thus, it’s vital for leaders in war and business to train and trust their teams to do their jobs independently so that the leaders can focus on the big picture.

“For any leader, placing full faith and trust in junior leaders with less experience and allowing them to manage their teams is a difficult thing to embrace. It requires tremendous trust and confidence in those frontline leaders, who must very clearly understand the strategic mission and ensure that their immediate tactical decisions ultimately contribute to accomplishing the overarching goals. Frontline leaders must also have trust and confidence in their senior leaders to know that they are empowered to make decisions and that their senior leaders will back them up.”

The secret to building trust is a great deal of practice, combined with full understanding of a given mission. This requires thorough communication in both directions. It also challenges top leaders to be willing to let go of the temptation to over-control, which signals a lack of trust in their teams.

“Each leader was trusted to lead and guide his team in support of the overall mission. Those junior leaders learned that they were expected to make decisions. They couldn’t ask, ‘What do I do?’ Instead, they had to state: ‘This is what I am going to do.’ Since I made sure everyone understood the overall intent of the mission, every leader worked and led separately, but in a unified way that contributed to the overall mission, making even the most chaotic scenarios much easier to handle.”

Distributed decision-making requires that team members accustomed to taking orders must also give them. This works when everyone understands the mission and that all decisions must contribute to that mission. Separate teams, making separate decisions but dedicated to the same goal, find that their progress moves in the same, coordinated direction. While it sounds disorganized, it tends to smooth out operations.

“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.”

The human mind can work simultaneously with only a handful of others; this is critical to the concept of the fourth Law of Combat, Decentralized Command. Willink’s SEALs are organized to give each leader only a small set of team members to monitor, and so on down the chain of command. In this way, no leader must worry about the minutiae of junior team members’ concerns, nor must a given leader struggle to manage large groups of people individually.

“‘Here’s the latest intel update,’ I passed to the troops. I told them about the reported IEDs in the yard and bunkered machine gun positions. ‘Roger that,’ came the response from several SEALs. ‘Let’s get some.’ They were fired up. That was the Task Unit Bruiser way. It wasn’t cockiness or overconfidence. On the contrary, each man knew this was a dangerous operation and that he might very well come home in a body bag. But despite the new intelligence, we were confident in our plan.’”

SEALs are selected and trained for courage. Among Babin’s platoon members, bravery isn’t the same as arrogance. They’re confident but also careful. They expect trouble—they like the challenge—and they plan for what to do when it happens.

“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.”

After his deployment ends and he returns home, Babin observes Willink’s report to the chief of Naval operations on the effectiveness of SEAL activity in Ramadi, and he realizes with a shock that he hadn’t fully appreciated the purpose of their work in Iraq. Furthermore, he hadn’t been able to pass that full understanding down the chain of command to his frontline teammates. Had he asked more questions of Willink and others above him on the command structure, he might have been better able to explain to his snipers, bomb-disposal experts, and other team members the complete purpose of their day-to-day work in Iraq, and they’d have performed more efficiently with less risk.

“As a leader employing Extreme Ownership, if your team isn’t doing what you need them to do, you first have to look at yourself. Rather than blame them for not seeing the strategic picture, you must figure out a way to better communicate it to them in terms that are simple, clear, and concise, so that they understand. This is what leading down the chain of command is all about.”

The single most important part of a battle plan, in war or business, is clarifying the purpose of the mission. The purpose orients everyone correctly toward the goal. Leaders should periodically remind everyone of that purpose, and they must explain, as needed, how changes to the plan fit into the purpose.

“The guy with a scoped weapon Chris had seen in the window was not an enemy sniper. It was a U.S. Soldier standing back from the window with a Trijicon ACOG scope on his U.S. military issued M16 rifle. Thank God, I thought, literally thanking God. I was grateful for Chris’s initial judgment—an exceptional call not to take a shot he couldn’t clearly identify. He had done exactly as he should have and notified me to ask for guidance. Others with less experience might have rushed decisions and pulled that trigger. I was thankful I had held my ground and ultimately made the right decision.”

Sometimes being decisive means resisting commands. Babin and sniper Chris Kyle can’t be sure the target is a hostile, and, despite pressure from above, they hold their fire. It turns out the SEALs and the Army are looking at different buildings, and the targeted sniper is a friendly one. Disaster is averted because Babin makes the decisive choice to wait.

“The best SEALs I worked with were invariably the most disciplined. They woke up early. They worked out every day. They studied tactics and technology. They practiced their craft. Some of them even went out on the town, drank, and stayed out until the early hours of the morning. But they still woke up early and maintained discipline at every level.”

Discipline empowers SEALs to achieve their goals. Systematic practice schedules and routines automate improvement, make the job easier, and life gets simpler. Putting in the organized preparation at the front end makes things go more smoothly at the back end.

“There was a disciplined methodology to just about everything we did. But there was, and is, a dichotomy in the strict discipline we followed. Instead of making us more rigid and unable to improvise, this discipline actually made us more flexible, more adaptable, and more efficient. It allowed us to be creative. When we wanted to change plans midstream on an operation, we didn’t have to recreate an entire plan. We had the freedom to work within the framework of our disciplined procedures.”

The irony of discipline is that it creates freedom. Doing the job informally creates inefficiencies that reduce the flexibility to adapt and innovate when it’s most needed. A disorganized work style limits a team’s options in the field, while a systematic one gives members more freedom when it counts.