In my previous post on Extreme Ownership I shared that I wished more technology companies would take the principles more seriously. Over the last month my wish was granted right here at my company.
Our executive team had an offsite strategy meeting last week, and one of the coolest things we did was take a deep dive into Extreme Ownership. In the weeks leading up to the summit each member of the team – managing directors, senior execs and CxOs – read Extreme Ownership and prepared homework consisting of an introspective look into how they’d individually violated or been challenged by the principles as well as which principles we wanted to focus on bringing more into the company.
We discussed our experiences over dinner in a very candid fashion. Each person shared one or two “fails” that tracked back to the principles, or challenges that could better have been solved by better applying the principles. It’s not often that very skilled and accomplished senior executives are willing to admit to failures in front of their peers, so I think that says a lot about the character of those around the table as well as their commitment to Extreme Ownership.
Some of the maxims that resonated strongly and were repeatedly mentioned:
- “There are no bad boats, only bad leaders” – the core idea here is that you have to look first at the immediate leader before blaming the team itself for underperformance.
- “It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate” – how true. How brutal true.
- “Check the ego” – as the authors note, “egos cloud and disrupt everything.” If you don’t have the discipline to keep your ego in check you don’t deserve the trust and confidence of the people you lead.
- “They don’t want me to fail” – how many times do we assume that a boss or outside organization is to purposely make our lives harder when they put an obstacle in our way? Probably quite a bit. And how often is that true? Likely very seldom. If we’d drop the assumption of hostile intent and the resulting “us vs them” attitude, business and life would be a lot easier.
One of the longer and more challenging discussions was around how to move to “Decentralized Command” – let’s face it, it’s not easy to step back and let others take charge of executing a mission that you’re accountable for. But it must be done to scale the organization and to develop the next generation of leaders. And guess what – sometime they will fail, and you’ll still own the result. Our COO made a key point here – while failure in the SEALs often results in injury or death, a business fail will have much, much lighter consequences, so we need to take an objective look at the real risk and balance with the cost of not decentralizing.
As a team we decided on three of the principles we’d like to focus on for the entire organization and each of us was assigned a buddy from within the group to challenge us grow in these areas.
I was really energized by this process and I’d recommend it to any team that wants to move in this direction. In hindsight, I recognize that our company already has a pretty solid accountable culture and a general lack of fear, which probably made this a lot easier; some teams will have to overcome much bigger culture and ego challenges. Which, in the end, means it’s even more vital.