how do you balance extreme ownership with holding others accountable for
their actions and avoiding them using you so this is actually a question that
I end up responding to on a fairly regular basis and there's really a
couple different angles here that are going on the one of the the points here
is the balance of extreme ownership versus holding others accountable and
what that really means and or what another way of looking at that is it's
really extreme ownership versus decentralized command so decentralized
command is it's one of the laws of combat that life and I write about in
the book decentralized command and what that means is everybody leads that means
everybody's a leader and that's what you want and that is a that is a the
complete opposite of extreme ownership so extreme ownership I'm that I own
everything decentralized command is I'm gonna let
everyone else lead so there's a real a real contradiction a real dichotomy
there so what you have to do is balance it you have to balance it's the only way
to to sort of rectify or ret or reconcile those two opposing forces
because you do but you do have to have extreme ownership of everything that is
true and at the same time you have to have decentralized commander because you
can't be everywhere at once and you have to let your frontline leaders lead so
you have to balance them so that's one part of it is that you should if you
feel yourself for instance if you feel like you can't get everything done and
you're losing control or you're you're not able to execute everything because
there's too much on your plate it means that you're not delegating enough it
means that you're not your frontline troopers aren't stepping up and leading
now so you've gone too far in one direction now if you're leaders or if
all of a sudden you're having to tell your leaders like eh
you need to get this done hey what are you doing why don't you take an
initiative then that means you've gone too far in the other direction so you
have to find the good balance and that's the that's the goal and again and I'll
say it over and over again that's what makes leadership hard leadership the
hardest thing about leadership is that there's opposing forces that you have to
balance and if you could just pick the extreme and go with it and that made you
a good leader anyone could do it but it's not it's it's the balance that
makes you a good leader it's the balance that's challenging so now the other word
so that's part of the question the other word is accountability in holding people
accountable for their actions now this is where I'm gonna throw something out
that people are not going to expect me to say because people always talk about
accountability and I hear that all the time in businesses and they say yeah we
really need accountability accountability accountability and here's
the issue I have with that you don't want to have to rely on accountability
accountability is actually a crutch it's a tool and I'm not saying you never
use it because sometimes you do have to use it you have to implement it if
people aren't doing what they're supposed to do you have to hold them
accountable but I will tell you this what you what you don't want it's people
that are doing their job only because you're holding them accountable that's
not what you want you want people that take initiative and ownership of their
job and they do it not because you want them to or because you're going to
inspect them they do it because they own it they take extreme ownership of it
that's what you want so if you were to ask people that work for me if I held
them accountable and they would be like mmm not really
I mean for instance weapons inspections so you know I'm in charge of a platoon
or I'm in charge of a task unit and there's you know a couple hundred
weapons or whatever a bunch of weapons and if you don't take care of those
weapons and people don't maintain them and clean them and lubricate them
properly they can rust very easily mm-hmm and so we know one of the things
that you may have to do is do weapons and inspections to make sure that my
guys are cleaning their weapons and I can tell you I rarely if ever conducted
actual weapons inspections the reason my guys my guys did it
my guys owned it my guys wanted to be the best they wanted to always have the
best possible reputation and so I'd have to go around inspecting their weapons
because I knew that they were gonna do it I knew that that my guys who were on
board who understood why we were doing what we were doing mm-hmm who understood
that we wanted to be the best and who were on board with trying to be the best
said you know what you know we are gonna make sure these weapons are the best
possible and I learned this when I was in my second platoon my boss was an
awesome guy and this is a guy that I've talked about before he was a huge
influence on me he was a prior enlisted SEAL who became an officer he was a
combat veteran from the warned Renata and he was a very humble guy and he's
actually the guy that inspired me to become an officer because I said to
myself well this guy's this guy made our lives so good maybe I could do that for
16 guys in a platoon someday but what I realized about him is he never held us
accountable for anything but at the same time he infused accountability on us
because what we wanted more than anything else was to do a good job for
him and for the platoon that's that's how you get true
and teams aligned not by holding them accountable when the imposed
accountability but where they are inspired themselves to hold themselves
accountable and you had a coaching call with a team the other day that was they
were saying hey you know we really we really we would like to have you you
know coach us because we're lacking in these
areas and we really need we know what to do but we really need someone to hold us
accountable to do it hmm and I was like lesson I charge a lot of money and you
guys would be stupid to give it to me you guys just simply lack the discipline
to work for the team and make it happen and I threw this example I said you know
if you were competing against another team and what I did was I moved into
your house and I woke you up in the morning and I held you accountable for
what you were supposed to do and I made you do it so we put the ultimate in
accountability on top of them I said who would do better you guys with me waking
you up in the morning and beating you until you accomplished what you were
supposed to do I held you to the up the highest standard of accountability or a
team that was hungry themselves that was gonna go the extra mile that was gonna
do more work that was gonna stay up later that was gonna get up earlier not
because somebody was holding them accountable but because they had the
desire for victory who's gonna win that contest and the answer is very simple
those with the innate and intrinsic desire to win will win over those that
have imposed discipline and accountability put on top of them now
because there's a dichotomy to everything and because there's a balance
to everything there are times where in a leadership position you do need to
inspect and make sure that you hold people accountable and an example I have
that is we had when we got to Ramadi we had our radios and generally the radio
men knew how to program the radios and and
get them synched up so they could talk to other radios and all that and I told
the guys I'm like listen everybody in the troop needs to know how to program
your radio yourself and if it says oh okay
and it was so critical that they know how to program these radios because if
you're out in the field and you get separated from your unit and all of a
sudden your radio gets zero eyes or it has a problem and you don't know how to
fix it yourself what are you gonna do you can't talk to anybody and you're
doomed you're gonna die so because it was that
critical I actually after the first briefing I called a couple guys up and I
said give me a radio and I zero eyes their radios and I said okay reprogram
it now and a couple of them didn't know how to do it and I said okay listen up
guys no one is going on operation if you
can't reprogram your radio and so the guys had to sit down and go and figure
out how to do it so there's times where you you do have to hold people
accountable and in that situation I knew that even though I was saying hey it's
important they didn't realize how important it was because you know it was
all you got to know how to work your gear they kind of took it like that
I knew that guys didn't really understand the nature of how important
it was to be able to operate and reprogram your entire radio and sync it
with the army radios and all that I knew that they didn't quite understand how
important it was and so I had to I had to hold them accountable but generally
ninety-eight percent of the stuff I didn't have to hold people accountable
I didn't inspect things I expected things and they delivered yeah and and
that's that's people will follow your lead if you take ownership that's how my
guys have always been they've always seen that and and known what the
expectations were and finally if if you're sitting there and you keep saying
here so if I gotta hold people accountable I gotta hold people
accountable most likely you don't need to hold them accountable you need to
lead them you to make them understand why they're
doing what they're doing why it's important how it impacts the strategic
mission how it impacts the team how it impacts them that's leadership non
accountability its leadership accountability is just a tool and it is
a a it's a crude tool compared to real leadership so use it if you have to but
try and use leadership instead