The Dichotomy of Leadership (Expanded Edition)

Leaders who pushed their people to excel, to continuously learn and grow, enabled their teams to become comfortable in situations where they were previously uncomfortable. By challenging frontline leaders and junior or less experienced personnel to take on greater roles and responsibilities, the team implements proper Decentralized Command so that leaders at every level of the team step up to lead.

Humility is the most important quality in a leader. When we had to fire SEAL leaders from leadership positions in a platoon or task unit, it was almost never because they were tactically unsound, physically unfit, or incompetent. It was most often because they were not humble: they couldn’t check their ego, they refused to accept constructive criticism or take ownership for their mistakes.

When SEAL leaders had to be fired from “leadership positions in a platoon or task unit, it was almost never because they were tactically unsound, physically unfit, or incompetent. It was most often because they were not humble: they couldn’t check their ego, they refused to accept constructive criticism or take ownership of their mistakes.”

A leader should have a close relationship with her team members, but never to the point of compromising her authority or the overall team’s success.

Leaders must be humble but assertive

A leader has to be detail-oriented without losing sight of the big picture .

Leaders need to be competitive but also able to lose graciously .

Leaders must be brave but not reckless .

A leader needs to be confident but not cocky .

A leader has to balance remaining calm and showing emotion

Leaders must be aggressive but not overbearing

Dichotomy #1: Care About Each Individual, but Make Sacrifices for the Group

Leaders must be attentive to details and in touch with the front lines, but must also keep the bigger picture in mind.

The best leaders and teams acknowledge mistakes, take ownership, and make corrections to improve. Over time this adds up.

Leaders need the confidence and competence to lead, but also the humility to follow.

To become engrossed in and overwhelmed by the details risks mission failure, but to be so far detached from the details that the leader loses control is to fail the team and fail the mission.

When a leader is willing to follow, the team functions effectively and the probability of mission success radically increases.

As a leader it is critical to balance the strict discipline of standard procedures with the freedom to adapt, adjust, and maneuver to do what is best to support the overarching commander’s intent and achieve victory.

In war, this is the ultimate dichotomy: a leader may have to send his most treasured asset—his people—into a situation that gets them wounded or killed.

The foremost requirement for potent leadership is humility, so that leaders can fully understand and appreciate their own shortfalls.

The first Law of Combat: Cover and Move. This is teamwork—every individual and team within the team, mutually supporting one another to accomplish the mission.

The second Law of Combat: Simple. Complexity breeds chaos and disaster, especially when things go wrong.

We learned lessons in war, written in blood, about sorrow, loss, and pain. We also learned about the fragility of human life and the power of the human spirit. Of course, we learned about strategy and tactics. We learned how to most effectively take the fight to our enemies. We learned how to analyze targets, gather and exploit information, find our enemy’s weaknesses, and capitalize on them.

We saw how successful leaders could create victory where victory seemed impossible. We also witnessed how poor leadership could bring defeat upon teams that seemed invincible. We discovered firsthand that the principles of leadership are “simple, but not easy.” There are strategies, techniques, and skills that take time and practice to utilize effectively.

Every behavior or characteristic carried out by a leader can be taken too far. Leaders can become too extreme and upset the balance required to effectively lead a team. When balance is lost, leadership suffers and the team’s performance rapidly declines.

It was difficult to grasp, the hardest and most painful of all the dichotomies of leadership: to care about your men more than anything in the world—so much so that you’d even willingly trade your life for theirs—and yet, at the same time, to lead those men on missions that could result in their deaths.

That is the burden. That is the challenge. That is the dichotomy. That is leadership.

That’s another dichotomy: in order to help your team, sometimes you have to hurt them. Just like a doctor performing a surgery. Surgery is a brutal thing: cutting open a body and removing parts of it, then sewing it back together. But in order to save a life, a surgeon has to do just that.

The regional manager now understood this most difficult dichotomy of leadership: a leader must care about the troops, but at the same time the leader must complete the mission, and in doing so there will be risks and sometimes unavoidable consequences to the troops.

When a leader tries to own everything—to run every single move their team makes, it doesn’t work. Maybe it is the desire to make sure everything goes right. Maybe it is a lack of trust that subordinate leaders know what to do. Maybe it is ego—leaders want to feel they are the person who is critical for every little decision. But when a leader takes too much ownership, there is no ownership left for the team or subordinate leaders to take.

Micromanagement fails because no one person can control multiple people executing a vast number of actions in a dynamic environment, where changes in the situation occur rapidly and with unpredictability. It also inhibits the growth of subordinates: when people become accustomed to being told what to do, they begin to await direction. Initiative fades and eventually dies. Creativity and bold thought and action soon die as well.

The hands-off leader with a laissez-faire attitude is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Such a leader fails to provide specific direction—in some cases almost no clear direction whatsoever. Instead of a lack of thought like a team that is micromanaged, a team with a hands-off leader thinks too much.

You don’t need to row the boat— or even steer it. You just have to make sure it is heading in the right direction.

There is a time to stand firm and enforce rules and there is a time to give ground and allow the rules to bend. Finding that balance is critical for leaders to get maximum effectiveness from their team.

With Decentralized Command, it was crucial that leaders at every level be fully self-reliant, ready to step up and execute to accomplish the mission.

With such variation in individuals on the team, the challenge for any leader was to raise the level of every member of the team so that they could perform at their absolute best.

Most underperformers don’t need to be fired, they need to be led.

Most underperformers don’t need to be fired, they need to be led. But once every effort has been made to help an underperformer improve and all efforts have failed, a leader has to make the tough call to let that person go. This is the duty and responsibility of every leader.

Leaders are responsible for the output of the individuals on their team. The goal of any leader is to get the most out of every individual—to push each individual to reach his or her maximum potential so that the team itself can reach its maximum potential.

The dichotomy in this situation is balancing between taking care of individuals by keeping them around even if they lack the skill set to do the job properly and protecting the team by removing people from positions where they negatively impact the team and the mission.

Leadership—at every level—is the critical factor in whether a team succeeds or fails.

The strategic goal of training must always be to build capable leaders at every level of the team. For this, hard training is essential. But if training is too hard, it will break the team and minimize learning and growth. So there must be balance: train hard, but train smart.

We expected our SEALs to operate with an aggressive mind-set. We expected them to lean forward, maneuver quickly, see opportunities, and capitalize upon them—to aggressively execute to solve problems, overcome obstacles, accomplish the mission, and win. But of course there is a dichotomy with being aggressive that must be balanced: aggression is not always the answer. Aggression must be balanced with logic and detailed analysis of risk versus reward.

Problems aren’t going to solve themselves—a leader must get aggressive and take action to solve them and implement a solution.

The aggression that wins on the battlefield, in business, or in life is directed not toward people but toward solving problems, achieving goals, and accomplishing the mission.

Seth now understood that standard operating procedures were not fixed, inflexible laws with no room for variation. They were guidelines that needed to be balanced with adaptability and common sense. Balancing that dichotomy was required for everyone, especially leaders.

Disciplined procedures must be balanced with the ability to apply common sense to an issue, with the power to break with SOPs when necessary, with the freedom to think about alternative solutions, apply new ideas, and make adjustments to processes based on the reality of what is actually happening.

Every leader must be ready and willing to take charge, to make hard, crucial calls for the good of the team and the mission. That is inherent in the very term “leader.” But leaders must also have the ability to follow. This was a difficult dichotomy: in order to be a good leader, you must also be a good follower. Finding that balance is key.

A leader must be willing to lean on the expertise and ideas of others for the good of the team. Leaders must be willing to listen and follow others, regardless of whether they are junior or less experienced.

It was a profound lesson: leaders must be detached, must pull back to a position above the fray where they can see the bigger picture. That was the only way to effectively lead. Otherwise, the results could be disastrous.

Getting angry at others is ineffective, losing temper is a sign of weakness. The aggression that wins in the battlefield, in business or in life is not directed towards people, but towards solving problems, achieving goals and accomplishing the mission.