Extreme Ownership

The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it.

Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.

Leaders must possess the humility to admit and own mistakes and learn from them.

Leaders must be willing to make sacrifices to ensure the success of their team.

Leaders must be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their team and use them to their advantage.

Leaders must make decisions that are in the best interest of their team.

In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission.

Leaders must have a clear and realistic view of the situation and the environment they are in.

Leadership requires belief in the mission and unyielding perseverance to achieve victory, particularly when doubters question whether victory is even possible.

The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails.

On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame.

Total responsibility for failure is a difficult thing to accept, and taking ownership when things go wrong requires extraordinary humility and courage.

Leadership is the single greatest factor in any team’s performance. Whether a team succeeds or fails is all up to the leader.

Ultimately, they must fully accept that there truly are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mindset into the team.

The recognition that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders facilitates Extreme Ownership and enables leaders to build high-performance teams that dominate on any battlefield, literal or figurative.

Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests.

Far more important than training or equipment, a resolute belief in the mission is critical for any team or organization to win and achieve big results.

Every leader must be able to detach from the immediate tactical mission and understand how it fits into strategic goals.

In any organization, goals must always be in alignment. If goals aren’t aligned at some level, this issue must be addressed and rectified.

Leaders must accept total responsibility, own problems that inhibit performance, and develop solutions to those problems.

When personal agendas become more important than the team and the overarching mission’s success, performance suffers and failure ensues.

It’s not about you. It’s not about the drilling superintendent. It’s about the mission and how best to accomplish it.

It falls on leaders to continually keep perspective on the strategic mission and remind the team that they are part of the greater team and the strategic mission is paramount.

If the overall team fails, everyone fails, even if a specific member or an element within the team did their job successfully.

Every individual and every team within the larger team gets to share in the success. Accomplishing the strategic mission is the highest priority.

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

In the business world, and in life, there are inherent complexities. It is critical to keep plans and communication simple.

All animals, including humans, need to see the connection between action and consequence in order to learn or react appropriately.

The most impressive thing about this improvement in performance was that it did not come from a major process change or an advance in technology. Instead, it came through a leadership principle that has been around for ages: Simple.

When priorities shift within the team, pass situational awareness both up and down the chain. Don’t let the focus on one priority cause target fixation. Maintain the ability to see other problems developing and rapidly shift as needed.

A particularly effective means to help Prioritize and Execute under pressure is to stay at least a step or two ahead of real-time problems. Through careful contingency planning, a leader can anticipate likely challenges that could arise during execution and map out an effective response to those challenges before they happen.

Prioritize and Execute. Prioritize your problems and take care of them one at a time, the highest priority first. Don’t try to do everything at once or you won’t be successful.

Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism.

Implementing Extreme Ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility.

If your team doesn’t get it, you have not kept things simple and you have failed.

My ego took no offense to my subordinate leaders on the frontlines calling the shots. In fact, I was proud to follow their lead and support them.

Human beings are generally not capable of managing more than six to ten people, particularly when things go sideways and inevitable contingencies arise.

Junior leaders must be proactive rather than reactive. To be effectively empowered to make decisions, it is imperative that frontline leaders execute with confidence.

Understanding proper positioning as a leader is a key component of effective Decentralized Command, not just on the battlefield.

In chaotic, dynamic, and rapidly changing environments, leaders at all levels must be empowered to make decisions. Decentralized Command is a key component to victory.

Without a clear chain of command—people knowing who is in charge of what—you cannot have empowered leadership. And that is critical to the success of any team, including the SEAL Teams or your company here.

That is why simplicity is so important. Proper Decentralized Command requires simple, clear, concise orders that can be understood easily by everyone in the chain of command.

Junior leaders must be empowered to make decisions and take initiative to accomplish the mission. That was critical to our success on the battlefield.

Trust is not blindly given. It must be built over time. Situations will sometimes require that the boss walk away from a problem and let junior leaders solve it, even if the boss knows he might solve it more efficiently.

That complete faith in what others will do, how they will react, and what decisions they will make is the key ingredient in the success of Decentralized Command.

We had addressed and mitigated every risk that we could through planning. But every risk could not be controlled. This mission was inherently dangerous.

The mission must be carefully refined and simplified so that it is explicitly clear and specifically focused to achieve the greater strategic vision for which that mission is a part.

The best teams employ constant analysis of their tactics and measure their effectiveness so that they can adapt their methods and implement lessons learned for future missions.

The best-laid plans were worthless. Without successful execution, the best-laid plans were worthless.

The true test for a good brief is not whether the senior officers are impressed. It’s whether or not the troops that are going to execute the operation actually understand it.

We need to look at ourselves and see what we can do better. We have to write more-detailed reports that help them understand what we are doing and why we are making the decisions we are making.

One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss—your immediate leadership. In any chain of command, the leadership must always present a united front to the troops.

If your boss isn't making a decision in a timely manner or providing necessary support for you and your team, don't blame the boss. First, blame yourself.

Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike.

No matter how big or bureaucratic your company seems, it pales in comparison to the gargantuan U.S. military bureaucracy.

If my chain of command had questions about my plans or needed additional information or more detailed paperwork, it was not their fault, it was my fault.

Leaders must not shy away from responsibility but embrace it.

That’s ‘leading up the chain of command,' I explained. The field manager came around to this realization. He accepted that he needed to do better in pushing situational awareness, information, and communication up the chain.

Leaders must be comfortable under pressure, and act on logic, not emotion. This is a critical component to victory.

In order to succeed, leaders must be comfortable under pressure, and act decisively amid uncertainty.

There is no 100 percent right solution. The picture is never complete. Leaders must be comfortable with this and be able to make decisions promptly, then be ready to adjust those decisions quickly based on evolving situations and new information.

Leaders must be prepared to make an educated guess based on previous experience, knowledge of how the enemy operates, likely outcomes, and whatever intelligence is available in the immediate moment.

As a leader, my default setting should be aggressive—proactive rather than reactive. This was critical to the success of any team.

A leader must lead but also be ready to follow.

A leader must be calm but not robotic. It is normal—and necessary—to show emotion.

A leader must be confident but never cocky.

A leader must be strong but likewise have endurance, not only physically but mentally.

A good leader has nothing to prove, but everything to prove.

With a mindset of Extreme Ownership, any person can develop into a highly effective leader.

Leading people is the most challenging and, therefore, the most gratifying undertaking of all human endeavors.

We learned that leadership requires belief in the mission and unyielding perseverance to achieve victory, particularly when doubters question whether victory is even possible.

You can’t make people listen to you. You can’t make them execute. You have to lead them.

Only when leaders at all levels understand and believe in the mission can they pass that understanding and belief to their teams.

When leaders receive an order that they themselves question and do not understand, they must ask the question: why?

If a leader does not believe, he or she will not take the risks required to overcome the inevitable challenges necessary to win.

The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame.

Discipline equals freedom.

Leadership doesn’t just flow down the chain of command, but up as well. We have to own everything in our world. That’s what Extreme Ownership is all about.

These leaders cast no blame. They made no excuses. Instead of complaining about challenges or setbacks, they developed solutions and solved problems.

Relax. Look around. Make a call.

The principles are simple, but not easy. Taking ownership for mistakes and failures is hard. But doing so is key to learning, to developing solutions, and, ultimately, to victory.

Leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield and the principles of good leadership do not change regardless of the mission, the environment, or the personalities of those involved.

We wrote this book for leaders everywhere to utilize the principles we learned to lead and win.

There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

The leader’s attitude sets the tone for the entire team.

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.

A team could only deliver exceptional performance if a leader ensured the team worked together toward a focused goal and enforced high standards of performance.

If frontline leaders and troops understand why, they can move forward, fully believing in what they are doing.

Leadership isn’t one person leading a team. It is a group of leaders working together, up and down the chain of command, to lead.

When you are in a leadership position, that is a recipe for failure, and it is unacceptable. As a leader, you must believe.

We were simply fortunate enough to experience an array of leadership challenges that taught us valuable lessons.

With Extreme Ownership, you must remove individual ego and personal agenda. It’s all about the mission.

The best leaders checked their egos, accepted blame, sought out constructive criticism, and took detailed notes for improvement.

Good leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get it done and win.

If you aren’t winning, then you aren’t making the right decisions.

It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.

If you don’t understand or believe in the decisions coming down from your leadership, it is up to you to ask questions until you understand how and why those decisions are being made.

If you don’t ask questions so you can understand and believe in the mission, you are failing as a leader and you are failing your team.

It takes courage to go to the CEO’s office, knock on her door, and explain that you don’t understand the strategy behind her decisions.

Everyone has an ego. Ego drives the most successful people in life—in the SEAL Teams, in the military, in the business world. They want to win, to be the best.

Listen: the senior leadership at corporate headquarters wants you to succeed. That’s a given. It’s up to you to inform them and help them understand some of the challenges you are dealing with here on the ground.