Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin is about the qualities of an effective leader. The key point is that these qualities are transferrable, and an effective leader instills these qualities in his team.
There are 12 qualities and 12 chapters. Each chapter describes the quality and contains two real-world examples of a business leader and a military leader showing that quality.
An effective leader is proactive and makes her team proactive.
Excuses kill proactiveness. To defer responsibility for failure is to fail to grow. Accept responsibility for failure to take the first step in growth.
they try to figure out how to fix their problems—instead of trying to figure out who or what to blame
An effective leader recognizes if the team is bad it is his fault, if the team is good it is not necessarily his success.
It’s not what you preach - it’s what you tolerate.
An effective leader believes in her mission and inspires belief in her team. Belief in the larger goal improves performance. Explain the larger goal until everybody understands, agrees, and believes in the goals.
to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission.
An effective leader is in touch with reality. For most people realism results in humility - not ego.
Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism. It can even stifle someone’s sense of self-preservation. Often, the most difficult ego to deal with is your own.
An effective leader ensures that his team members work well together and that his team works with other teams well.
All teams must work together and in support of each other. Understand the relationships and dependencies between teams. Do not focus so much on your immediate task that you forget the priorities of other teams. Keep in mind the greater team and strategic goals of the organization.
Cover and Move: it is the most fundamental tactic, perhaps the only tactic. Put simply, Cover and Move means teamwork.
An effective leader keeps plans and communication simple.
it is critical to keep plans and communication simple
An effective leader prioritizes goals and communicates the priorities. She then directs all required resources to achieve the top goal. Any remaining resources are dedicated to the next goal, but only if doing so does not add risk to the top goal.
An effective leader is constantly re-evaluating the priority list. This means she is not fixated on a single problem.
See also the 80/20 rule.
Even the greatest of battlefield leaders could not handle an array of challenges simultaneously without being overwhelmed.
An effective leader is connected to the team but is not embroiled in the details. He communicates his goal to the team so that each person can independently pursue the goal. This is easiest to achieve with a team of 6-10 people.
It takes strength to let go. It takes faith and trust in subordinate, frontline leaders and their abilities. Most of all, it requires trust up and down the chain of command: trust that subordinates will do the right thing; trust that superiors will support subordinates
An effective leader makes plans and & evaluates the success of her plans.
The test for a successful brief is simple: Do the team and the supporting elements understand it?
An effective leader fosters good two-way communication between himself and his leaders and between himself and his followers.
if your team isn’t doing what you need them to do, you first have to look at yourself. Rather than blame them for not seeing the strategic picture, you must figure out a way to better communicate it to them in terms that are simple, clear, and concise, so that they understand. This is what leading down the chain of command is all about.
“Leadership doesn’t just flow down the chain of command, but up as well,” he said. “We have to own everything in our world. That’s what Extreme Ownership is all about.”
Don’t ask - tell.
An effective leader takes action even when the outcome is uncertain, and enables her team to do the same.
leaders cannot be paralyzed by fear. That results in inaction. It is critical for leaders to act decisively amid uncertainty; to make the best decisions they can based on only the immediate information available.
This chapter lists many more qualities of effective leaders without going into too much detail.
tags: Leadership, - booksA leader has nothing to prove but everything to prove. By virtue of rank and position, the team understands that the leader is in charge… in another respect, a leader has everything to prove: every member of the team must develop the trust and confidence that their leader will exercise good judgment, remain calm, and make the right decisions when it matters most.