PDF Summary:Extreme Ownership, by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

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In Complex Environments, Your Team Needs to Take Extreme Ownership

Willink and Babin advocate for a team in which every member takes ownership of the mission and gladly fulfills the responsibilities you’ve assigned them, but also goes above and beyond instead of just following orders. In Team of Teams, former US Army general Stanley McChrystal explains why this shared ownership is so necessary and goes into further detail on the advantages of this kind of team.

McChrystal argues that most of our traditional beliefs about management originate in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, when the factory assembly line was first invented. Business leaders came to assume that the best practice was to manage people like machines, giving them simple tasks to accomplish with a focus on efficiency above all else.

However, most leaders don’t realize that these principles fail to function in systems that are more complex than an assembly line. Assembly line managers can effectively hand down orders to far larger teams than, say, the commanding officer of a military unit because assembly line tasks are far simpler than the problems a military unit has to face.

In contrast, in situations where you don’t know exactly what to do, teams that do nothing but follow orders fail. For example, in the unpredictable environment of war, if troops blindly follow commands from above, they may face disaster if the enemy can predict and counter their strategy. During his time at war, McChrystal discovered that lower-level team members could make better decisions than their bosses if they were given the power to make those decisions and take ownership.

Business, too, is a complex, unpredictable environment. Instead of trying to personally run your entire team and restrict them to their assigned responsibilities, you need to empower them to make their own decisions if you want them to adapt to unforeseen setbacks.

When Your Team Takes Ownership, Your Job Is Easier

Willink and Babin argue that when your team takes Extreme Ownership and you trust them to perform well in their individual roles, it frees you to focus your time and attention on big-picture leadership tasks. As a leader, it’s your job to make sure every one of your team’s tasks aligns with the broader mission. Other team members will be too closely involved in specific tasks to see for certain whether or not they’re successfully contributing to the mission’s progress, so it’s important that you have time to do this.

(Shortform note: To decide what important big-picture tasks to focus on once you can trust your people to handle their roles, Gary Keller (The One Thing) suggests identifying one task that will make all future tasks easier. For example, imagine you’re the director of a nonprofit with the goal of ending world hunger. Once you’ve freed up your time by delegating the day-to-day activity of your basic aid program to a team, you ask yourself: What can I do next that will make all future tasks easier? You decide to design a fundraising campaign that will make it easier for you to expand the organization—indirectly accomplishing much more than if you were to volunteer to distribute food yourself.)

When Your Team Takes Ownership, They Collaborate Better

According to Willink and Babin, your team members also need to take Extreme Ownership to collaborate effectively. When they lack Extreme Ownership, team members prioritize their ego over the mission’s success. Instead of doing everything they can to increase the team’s chance of victory, each team member only cares about doing their own job well. When other teammates are struggling, they blame them for failing instead of offering to help. In some cases, they may even compete against each other, hindering other team members to make themselves look better.

In contrast, when your team takes Extreme Ownership, they prioritize the team’s success over their own. Instead of celebrating when a teammate fails, they do everything they can to help that teammate avoid failure in the future. Willink and Babin argue that this kind of collaboration is invaluable—mutual support is often the only way to succeed.

In Life, Pivot From Competing to Collaborating

In The Courage to Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga explore this same dichotomy between competition and collaboration, and they explain why you would choose one or the other—not just at work, but in life.

Those who pursue competition do so because they base their self-worth on approval from others. They only strive for success because it makes them happy when someone recognizes that they’re “better” than someone else (and thus, they blame and hinder those they see as competitors). Other people pursue collaboration because they base their self-worth on the good that they do. They feel happy when they can make the world better by helping others (and they recognize that collaboration is the most effective way to do so).

According to Kishimi and Koga, these root motives don’t just predict how you work with others: They also shape how you approach everything in life (for instance, hobbies, friendships, and romantic relationships) and determine your overall life happiness. You can either see other people as competitors or allies, and you won’t be happy if you choose the former. It’s exhausting and unfulfilling to constantly try to prove that you’re better than others.

Collaboration Across the Hierarchy

Extreme Ownership is especially important in regard to collaboration between a leader and their subordinates. Leaders and subordinates should feel comfortable asking each other for anything they need to do their jobs, but Willink and Babin identify two collaborative goals that are especially important.

First, bosses need the necessary information to give effective orders. The leaders giving orders often only have a high-level view of their team’s operations, lacking specific information and expertise that lower-level teammates have from doing their jobs. Thus, instead of assuming they know best, leaders should actively seek out the opinions of those responsible for executing their orders. Likewise, subordinates have the responsibility to keep bosses informed of all relevant information and to push back whenever leaders make poor decisions based on incomplete information.

(Shortform note: In The Effective Executive, Peter F. Drucker goes one step further than Willink and Babin in his advice: Not only should bosses seek out the opinions of others before making a decision, but they should also require disagreement and conflict before making any significant decisions. By default, subordinates avoid challenging their boss’s judgment because they have an incentive to get on their boss’s good side. But if the boss mandates productive disagreement, the only way subordinates can please the boss is by fulfilling their responsibility to voice any opinion that may improve the final decision.)

Second, the authors state, subordinates need to understand the rationale behind decisions and commands. It’s a leader’s job to continually explain the big-picture plan to their subordinates—especially detailing their individual roles in achieving that plan. If your team members don’t understand exactly how their job contributes to the mission, they won’t feel like their work matters, they’ll lack the motivation to perform, and they won’t take Extreme Ownership. For this reason, if, as a subordinate, you don’t understand why your boss is telling you to do something, it’s your responsibility to get clarity from them as to how you fit into the overall plan.

A Clear Mission Inspires Mutual Trust

In Start With Why, Simon Sinek provides additional details on why team members must understand how they fit into the mission before they can take Extreme Ownership. Sinek asserts that when leaders clarify a selfless mission and purpose to the team, their subordinates recognize the values they share with their leaders and teammates. These shared values form the basis of organizational culture, making everyone feel like they belong to the same community pursuing the same selfless, purposeful, and meaningful mission. In turn, feelings of community enable mutual trust: Team members believe that their teammates will support them emotionally and help them reach their goals.

Sinek explains that mutual trust directly leads to Extreme Ownership throughout an organization. Without mutual trust, team members feel like they need to protect themselves—they exclusively act in their self-interest because they feel it’s the only way to be safe. However, once they trust each other, team members feel secure enough to put the mission over their own desires: taking Extreme Ownership.

Compared to Willink and Babin, Sinek downplays subordinates’ ability to inspire themselves. Willink and Babin claim that followers should seek out a motivating purpose by clarifying their boss’s instructions, but Sinek would likely argue that if the organization isn’t already centered around a greater purpose that enables feelings of community, subordinates will find it difficult to motivate themselves no matter how they’re contributing.

Extreme Ownership in Action

So far, we’ve explained what it means to take Extreme Ownership and why it’s important for any leader to practice—it empowers you to continuously improve your team and inspires Extreme Ownership in other team members.

In our final section, we’ll discuss some of Willink and Babin’s general leadership tips: four rules that leaders taking Extreme Ownership must follow for the greatest chance of victory.

Rule #1: Be Transparent With Your Plans and Keep Them Simple

We’ve established that before team members can take Extreme Ownership, they need to clearly understand how their tasks contribute to the mission. Willink and Babin offer two ways to ensure your team fully understands any plan you make: Be consistently transparent with your plans, and keep them as simple as possible.

Be Transparent With Your Plans

Willink and Babin present a step-by-step planning process that emphasizes transparency at every stage: First, seek input from lower-level teammates when you’re initially devising a plan. Not only will these teammates understand the plan and the thought process behind it, but if you accept their ideas, they’ll be more likely to take ownership of it.

Next, after you’ve outlined a plan, conduct a “briefing” in which you explain it to everyone involved in executing it. During the briefing, encourage team members to ask questions and voice their opinions, putting any doubts they have about the plan to rest.

Finally, after you’ve executed the plan, hold a “debriefing” to get everyone on the same page about what worked and what didn’t. When you’re transparent about any and all errors made, your team understands how to improve.

Involve the Team, but Make the Decisions Yourself

The authors of Trillion Dollar Coach offer a caveat to Willink and Babin’s transparent planning process outlined above: Giving your team agency doesn’t mean turning it into a democracy.

Every stage of Willink and Babin’s planning process involves both informing the team and encouraging them to share their perspectives. However, according to Trillion Dollar Coach, you should make it clear that the final decision rests with you. Often, your team members’ opinions will shape your decision, but in cases where they can’t reach consensus, you’ll have to override them and make the choice you believe to be right. This applies even after the decision-making stage—during your debrief, if the team can’t agree on what went wrong and how to do better next time, it’s up to you to decide how they will work to improve.

According to Trillion Dollar Coach, if you’ve chosen a good team, they should wholeheartedly commit to whatever you end up deciding. As long as your team believes that you fully considered their opinions, they will likely still feel ownership of the decision you ultimately make.

Keep Your Plans Simple

Willink and Babin’s second way to ensure your team understands your plans is to keep the plans as simple as possible. At a certain point, added complexity hits a point of diminishing returns—if your team doesn’t quickly grasp the plan, it’s probably more complex than it’s worth. Keeping your plans simple has other benefits, too: Simple plans are easier to adapt on the fly, and they force you to focus on the most important aspects of your mission.

To illustrate: Imagine you’re a grocery store manager. To keep your employees from wasting time, you create a complicated flowchart describing exactly what they should be doing in any given situation. This flowchart is likely to confuse your workers, and it may prevent them from responding to a situation you didn’t anticipate—for example, if someone starts shoplifting. The simpler and more effective solution would be to lay down a rule that keeps your workers focused on what really matters: something like, “Improve the customer experience at all times.”

(Shortform note: Another benefit of simple plans is that they’re less intimidating. For this reason, simplifying your plans may motivate you (and others) to follow through on them. For instance, in I Will Teach You to Be Rich, Ramit Sethi explains that many people see retirement saving and investing as something complicated that they don’t want to mess up, so they ignore the issue completely. To solve this problem, he created a financial system simple enough for anyone to get started—and getting started is good enough. Since investments compound over time, getting started early is beneficial no matter how you do it, even if the returns aren’t as robust as a more complex system would give.)

Rule #2: Always Focus on the Most Important Task

Next, Willink and Babin offer a piece of advice that applies equally to teams and individuals: At all times, identify the most important task and focus all your attention on getting it done. If you try to handle multiple problems at once, you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin and failing to solve any of them. Or, worse, you may start to panic and fail to even try to solve them. This is especially true when things don’t go according to plan. If something unexpected arises, you and your team need to be flexible enough to immediately refocus on the new most important task.

To prepare for situations like this, Willink and Babin recommend predicting what could go wrong and preparing your team for a potential change of plans. The difficult part of changing plans is quickly communicating new priorities to everyone on your team, but if you prepare them with contingency plans ahead of time, your team can adapt much more quickly (and may not even need your direct instructions). For example, hospitals have protocols in place in case the power goes out during surgery—protocols that involve tackling the most important tasks one at a time. Everyone in the operating room knows that first, they need to find an alternative source of light; then, ensure the patient’s blood oxygen is stable; and so on.

Balance Your Life by Focusing on the Most Important Task

The skill of prioritizing and focusing on the most important task is not only valuable at work but also as a means for life fulfillment. Willink and Babin note that when you’re trying to do too many things at once, you feel overwhelmed and fail to accomplish any of them. Similarly, in High Performance Habits, Brandon Burchard asserts that trying to simultaneously improve every area of life (your career, social life, mental health, and so on) instead of prioritizing what’s most important leads to an unbalanced life in which you fail to be happy with any area.

To create a balanced life, Burchard advises taking time once a week to chart your satisfaction with 10 different categories of life, including work, family, and well-being, among others. Set goals in each of these categories and focus on the one that will boost your life satisfaction the most. Regularly reviewing your various levels of life satisfaction helps you reprioritize in shifting circumstances and refocus on the new most important area of your life at all times.

For example, imagine someone who spends too much time at work at the expense of their health and is consequently miserable. They stop and reflect, realizing that improving their health by exercising every day is more important to them than spending a little more time at work. By focusing on this important task, they regain life balance.

Additionally, you might apply Willink and Babin’s advice to this practice and create contingency plans in advance so you can reprioritize more quickly after unexpected life events. If the person in our example anticipates that, more than anything else, losing their job would cause their overall life satisfaction to plummet, they could come up with a backup plan for this scenario: for instance, to start their own company.

Rule #3: Make Decisions Before You’re Certain They’re Right

Even if you’ve made contingency plans and prepared for unexpected obstacles, you’ll face situations where you don’t know what to do. Willink and Babin assert that you must become comfortable making decisions in uncertain conditions.

In some cases, you won’t have enough information to know if the decision you want to make will hurt your team or help them. When this happens, many leaders’ first instinct is to wait and gather more information. However, inaction is almost always the wrong decision. By doing nothing, you’re sacrificing the positive influence your expertise will have on the situation. You’ll never be able to know everything, so make the most logical decision you can with your current knowledge, and move on.

In other situations, there won’t even be a chance for you to do something good—often, you’ll have to choose between a set of equally painful alternatives. In these cases, too, it’s vital to act sooner rather than later and try to pick the lesser evil. If nothing else, making decisions that are painful but necessary will earn your team’s respect—they’ll see that you can perform wisely under pressure.

When Overthinking Leads to Worse Decisions

In Algorithms to Live By, Tom Griffiths and Brian Christian take Willink and Babin’s argument further: Not only does waiting for more information waste time that you could use to take action, but sometimes, the more information you gather, the worse your decisions get. Most of the time, the first factors you consider when making your decision are the ones with the greatest impact on the outcome. If you wait for additional, relatively irrelevant information, you might put too much emphasis on these details and second-guess yourself when you shouldn’t.

According to Griffiths and Christian, contrary to what you may expect, even computers sometimes make decisions before they have all the necessary information. Scientists running tests or simulations on powerful computers often trade off accuracy for speed. This highlights another benefit of uncertain decision-making that Willink and Babin imply, but don’t explicitly state: Making a decision sooner rather than later lets you immediately refocus your attention somewhere more useful. If you’re in a no-win situation, making a decisive call sooner rather than later will allow you to shift your efforts and recover more quickly from the fallout.

Rule #4: Be Wary of Extremes

Willink and Babin argue that any trait of an effective leader becomes detrimental in excess. This is at the root of most persistent leadership problems. When in doubt, question whether you’ve drifted too far toward an extreme—the way forward may be to employ less of a good thing.

The primary example Willink and Babin use to demonstrate this concept is the need to balance discipline and flexibility. If your primary goal is freedom—the ability to do whatever you want—a certain amount of discipline is necessary. However, at a certain point, too much discipline limits your freedom by trapping you in rigid habits. For instance, you can’t enjoy a nice vacation unless you discipline yourself to save up the money to take it. But, if you’re too disciplined and compulsively work 80-hour weeks, saving every cent you earn, you’ll never take that vacation.

It’s possible for teams to be too disciplined, as well: Rehearsing disciplined procedures too intensely discourages team members from staying flexible in unfamiliar situations when they need to improvise.

Promote Conflicting Ideals

In Range, David Epstein further defines the problem of “too much discipline” and offers a solution that Willink and Babin do not. He explains that the problem occurs when a tool (such as discipline) becomes so intrinsic to an organization’s culture that they feel as if they can’t operate without it. Epstein uses the real-world example of wilderness firefighters who discipline themselves to never part from their tools, then fail to outrun an advancing fire, perishing instead of dropping their heavy packs.

The counterintuitive solution is for leaders to send their team mixed messages—to build your organization’s culture around conflicting ideals. It’s impossible for your team to embody perfect discipline and perfect flexibility, but instructing your team to try gives the greatest chance for them to make prudent decisions that take multiple ideals into account. Epstein applies this logic to every value that a leader needs to balance. In a sense, this is what Willink and Babin are also doing when they advocate the balance between extremes.

Epstein’s team-centric advice applies equally to individuals—by striving to embody conflicting virtues, you reduce the chance that you’ll commit too far in any one direction. For instance, if, when raising a child, you try to be both the most nurturing parent and the most demanding parent at the same time, you may end up maintaining a healthy balance between the two.