Elevating Your Team Through Extreme Ownership
In my last post, I wrote about Mindset
by Dr. Carol Dweck, the first book on serial entrepreneur Tom Bilyeu’s reading list. Now that we have the concept of the growth mindset locked in, we can start to apply it to different areas. The second book on the list is Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALS Lead and Win
, written by Navy SEAL officers Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. The book tells stories of the most important leadership principles these officers learned during their time serving in the military, and how the lessons can be applied to civilians in the business world.
If you know me, you know that I have been at VectorOne for a little over a year. It is my first software development job out of Tech Elevator, and I am not in a management position. You might be thinking “Why would I want to read what someone who has never been a manager writes about leadership?” My favorite part about this book is that the principles described can be practiced by anyone, whether you are a seasoned CEO or the most junior member of your team. Anyone can practice Extreme Ownership.
What is Extreme Ownership?
In the book, Jocko tells the story of one of his task unit’s first missions in Iraq, which concluded in a catastrophic incident of friendly fire, ultimately leading to the death of one of the soldiers under Jocko’s command. After this, several of Jocko’s superiors informed him they would need to launch an investigation, and that he would need to give a presentation detailing what went wrong. As Jocko pored over the plans drafted and training conducted by his direct reports, he concluded that there was only one person he could hold accountable for the disaster — himself. He writes, “Looking back, it is clear that, despite what happened, the full ownership I took of the situation actually increased the trust my commanding officer and master chief had in me.”
Extreme Ownership is the principle of taking responsibility for everything in your life. In business, it is the idea of taking ownership of everything you and your team touch. It’s about owning all the outcomes: the good and the bad. It is the antithesis of shifting blame. The practice of it consists of simply looking objectively at a situation that yielded a negative outcome and asking: what could I have done to make this outcome better, and what can I do in the future to make improvements?
How can I practice Extreme Ownership?
The great thing about Extreme Ownership is that everyone at every level in an organization can (and should) practice it, not just those in management positions. Putting it into action is simple, but not easy. It requires you to check your ego at the door to be able to reflect honestly and objectively. At the end of an initiative (whether it’s a code deployment, a presentation, an experiment, or anything else you do in your job), take a few moments to answer the following two-part question: what did not go well this time, and what could I have done differently that would have yielded a better result? It is important to type this answer or write it down as a reminder for the next time you start an initiative. Let’s illustrate with an example.
Imagine you are working on your first project developing a web page for another department. After weeks of work, you are finally done. You look at your monitor with pride. The page is exactly how you envisioned it would be -- the layout is perfect, it’s quick to load, and all the user stories have been satisfied. You even finished two days ahead of schedule! You publish the code to a test site and let the manager of the other department know that the site is up and ready to be inspected. Less than five minutes pass before the manager sends you a less-than-stellar email. “I can’t read half the text on my iPhone because it’s cut off on the edges. And I can’t scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen to the call to action. 95% of the viewers of this page will be using mobile devices. Fix this.”
You pull up the requirements document, and after scanning through it, you find that there is no mention of the page needing to be mobile-responsive. All of the pages you have ever developed at your previous company have only been for desktop view. If the manager needed it to be mobile-responsive, shouldn’t it have been written in the requirements? It’s not your fault that this got messed up, right?
Wrong. We’re practicing Extreme Ownership here. While it is frustrating that our product isn’t as satisfactory as we initially thought it was, let’s use this as a learning opportunity. Write down the answer to the two-pronged question we discussed before: what did not go well, and what can you do next time that will yield a better result? “There was a huge misunderstanding about how this site would be used, and as a result, it was not developed to be responsive -- only viewable on desktop. In future requirements meetings, ask what kinds of devices this page needs to be viewable on if it is not explicitly defined.” You reply to the department manager swiftly with an apology, and your plan for how to prevent this from happening again.
As a manager, practicing Extreme Ownership is extra important because in addition to owning all of your work products, you also have to own all the work produced by your team. It’s also important to model the behavior for your team. This means that if one of your team members makes a mistake, you ask yourself and that team member: what can I do to make sure this does not happen again? Let’s look at another example.
You are the manager of a marketing team, and your newest hire will be giving his first presentation today. All 100 members of the marketing department will be in attendance, including your boss, a stern man with seemingly no sense of humor. Your presenter has done a great job since he started, and you are confident that he will knock it out of the park today. He starts the presentation, and everything is going smoothly so far. Then, about halfway in, on the slide describing the results of the recent SEO campaign, a picture of a growling zombie consumes the screen! The audience gasps, then starts to laugh because they think they have just been pranked. Your boss looks unamused and shakes his head in disappointment. The presenter looks petrified, like he doesn’t know what just happened. He gathers his composure and finishes the presentation.
You approach him after the meeting and ask him to explain. He tells you that he and his friend from the IT department are both big fans of the show The Walking Dead, and they discuss it on Slack from time to time. Evidently the IT department friend did not know that the presenter was in the middle of a presentation and decided to send a GIF of the grossest zombie from the most recent episode, which unfortunately popped up in the middle of the screen.
Luckily, your team member is a practitioner of Extreme Ownership, and tells you that he has already written down that he will be sure to close out of Slack and email before every presentation now so that nothing like this happens again. You should take responsibility as well, so you decide that you will teach every new team member to do the same and will double-check before each team presentation to make sure that the presenters have closed out of social apps.
How will Extreme Ownership Elevate My Team?
When executed effectively, Extreme Ownership will elevate your team’s performance. This is because when practiced it creates two important second-order effects: improved trust among teammates and a commitment to improving on past weaknesses. Owning your mistakes is a difficult but crucial part of Extreme Ownership. But admitting failures improves trust in a group. It shows that we are humble, aware of our imperfections, and committed to improvement. When a team has a culture of Extreme Ownership, people feel safe admitting mistakes and asking peers and leaders for advice in how to improve next time. This won’t prevent mistakes from being made, but since committing to improve past weaknesses is built into the practice, teams will seldom make the same mistake twice.
As previously mentioned, practicing Extreme Ownership is fairly simple, but definitely not easy. It’s difficult because admitting mistakes damages our egos, and people will go to drastic lengths to protect their egos. It takes time to get used to practicing it, and it takes even longer for other team members to change how they feel about openly admitting shortcomings in the workplace. However, after everyone on a team has bought into the concept, you will start to produce like never before.
