The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Kick off 20221 by Winning the War Within | PPP #64

Episode Date: January 3, 2021

I provide a brief on the first four concepts (and chapters) from Extreme Ownership in the section called...drumroll....Winning the War Within.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the People Process Progress Podcast, episode 64, kickoff 2021 by winning the war within. What do I mean by winning the war within? Well, I mean, let's take this time to look at ourselves personally and professionally after that crazy year last year and see what we can do better. What can we do in our health? What can we do in our work and our families? all those kind of things. And the outline I'm going to use for that are the first four chapters, which are four concepts of the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. I've mentioned them many times before. They have great leadership principles, and we will get into those here in a second.

Highly recommend that book. It's from 2015. I got the first dish. Thank you again to my friend, Mike, who recommended that, got me into the podcast and the book, made a big difference in my life. They have a bunch of other stuff too. So when you go to Amazon, check out Extreme Ownership, you'll see the other books too, The Dichotomy of Leadership, Field Manual,

a whole bunch of other things. So check out their products, listen to the Jocko podcast, pretty awesome. Now, for this outline that's gonna help us all win the war within as we kick into 2021. I'm going to follow the same process they do in the book. So what they do is they talk about an example, typically from combat or a Navy SEAL training scenario. Then they talk about the principle itself. Then they say, hey, how can you use this in business?

So why break the mold? That's a great outline. It was very successful. Number one, New York Times bestseller, all that good stuff. And that's what I'm going to do. So let's start with the first one, which shouldn't be a surprise because it's extreme ownership, right? In the example that they use, and I'll reference you or send you to the YouTubes, look up Jocko Willink YouTube TED Talk Extreme Ownership, and you will see the best explanation of that, which essentially in the combat example that he gives means there was a blue on blue or friendly unfriendly good guy on good guy fire incident when Iraqi was killed a couple SEALs were injured Iraqis were injured everybody was shaken up they

didn't know where each other were on the battlefield bad things happen right in business or in combat or somewhere and we know okay something the hammer's gonna come down on us right when mistakes are made in combat and that situation, he explained someone died, other people were injured. That's like the extreme version. So in the TED Talk, Jocko talks about everybody's coming together, leadership's coming in, something's going to happen, someone's going to pay. And they get into there, right? And the leaders ask the

questions, whose fault is this? And all his guys, each one by one, I should have checked my sector. I should have radioed in. I should have done this. They all start taking that ownership, right? So his team's already doing it. And Jock says, no, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. And it's not your fault. It's my fault. I'm the leader. I should have known where everybody was. I should have done all these things that you say, or I should have empowered you all to be able to do them. I own this, right? And he talks about then owning everything in your life and how that mindset makes a huge difference. So that mindset is the principle, right? It's that taking of personal responsibility for team failures, not pointing the finger and saying,

well, I gave them the order, and they didn't listen, and they didn't have enough stuff, and they didn't ask me. It's saying, did I give a clear order? Did I give them the right equipment? Did I give them enough time? Did I give my team enough to do that? As the leader, we take the blame, but we immediately present solutions. This is my fault and here's how I'm gonna fix it

in the future and here's how this team is gonna get better based on how I'm gonna help them, right? And that directly applies to business, right? The principle to me and that last part are the future. And here's how this team is going to get better based on how I'm going to help them. Right. And that directly applies to business, right? The principle to me and that, that last part are the same, right? If we take responsibility for me as a project manager and a senior project manager, right? There's an expectation that I'm going to do things to support the team. I'm going to look ahead strategically while paying attention to some of the tactical stuff while helping other people come up in their project management, by helping the varying responsibilities and experiences of the folks on the team. That's what we do when we're leaders, right?

Junior leaders or senior leaders. So if something's not going well on a team, your project team or your program team, your organization, and you're a leader, say, what am I not doing? And what am I gonna do to make what am I going to do to make it better? Sometimes you have to hold a meeting and have a, you know, come to grips moment and throw it all out there and let folks know, I should have done this. I'm sorry. I'm going to

do this better from now on. So principle one that I know I'm going to keep applying and build on for 2021 is extreme ownership. It's on page 17, by the way of the book, Extreme Ownership, How US Navy SEALs Lead and Win. The second principle, which is also the second chapter, is there are no bad teams, there are only bad leaders. And for leaders, that is a hard thing to hear, right? The SEAL example is in BUDS, or Basic Underwater Demolition School. That's the basic school that folks go to to become Navy SEALs. And during one of the training evolutions and physical activities, they're paddling boats, they're carrying boats, and there's one crew that keeps winning, and there's another crew that keeps losing.

So one of the co-authors, Leif Babin, in this chapter is the one he wrote, Leif and Jocko alternate in the chapters. He's an instructor there, right? So they're wearing the blue and gold t-shirts, instructor shirts, and they're watching and so the the people in charge of the boat crews they're junior officers and so lave is an officer and part of his job is to help mold seal officers and get them to where they need to be because that you know they're going to go down range which means somewhere into combat right to be seals and do that kind of stuff so he's with a senior enlisted guy a senior chief and in the navy that's a senior enlisted guy, a senior chief, and in the Navy, that's a senior enlisted guy. And he says, you know what, let's switch out the boat crew leaders between this one and that one, between the good one and the bad one, essentially.

And when they do that, they immediately notice that the bad crew, previous bad crew with the new leader that was on the good crew starts winning and they win the next evolution or race of paddling. And the leader that was on the bad crew that's now was on the winning crew, they are doing poorly. So that one person was changed. A good leader was put in place and he changed the tempo and the effectiveness of the entire team, the entire boat crew. They went from last place to first place because that leader got better. So the principle is just like this said, and it comes from Colonel David Hackworth, who was an army leader. He was in the Korean War in Vietnam, and he's the inspiration. And take the Leif and Jocko, take a lot of leadership examples from him. But his initial saying was, there's no bad units, there's only bad officers.

Changed a little bit for this extreme ownership book and the concept, no bad teams, only bad leaders. But to that point, leaders must never be satisfied with what's happening with themselves. Am I always getting better? Am I making my team better? How are we pushing ourselves? How am I empowering my teams to do better? And when they're not doing well, can I stand in front of the mirror and say, that's not on them, that's on you. It's like the ownership piece, but it's always knowing if your team's not performing, let's look at the leaders that are in place. And if we need to make a change, then sometimes we need to make a change. So the business application of that, so that was the principle, right? Came from no bad units, only bad officers, from looking at units across

different wars and in the military. And when you swap out leaders, they can make a huge difference. Same thing in business, right? If you're a project manager, let's say, and you're looking at the team's performance, you say, okay, who's leading what groups?

So if you're looking at one group that's doing good, you say, cool, all right, how do we keep them going and help them keep going up? And if you have another group that's not doing well, you look at, okay, what can I change? How can I affect their improvement? Do I need to swap those people like the boat crews did? Is there a leader that's just, their attitude's poor, right?

They're just, they may be technically proficient, but their attitude is horrible and it's affecting the rest of the team. Then you, if you're their leader, their manager, need to look at them and say, hey, how can I help you, right? This is on me. How am I not helping you with your team? And at some point, it comes to,

sometimes you gotta move people or take them out of the way, but for us as project managers, let's say, that are facilitating process leading teams, or if you're a leader of another kind, always thinking of there are no bad teams, there's only bad leaders. So if your team's performance is low, it's it's not fast enough, it's not producing enough, or they're just not doing well, maybe in response times, if you're in public safety, or how they do on the fire ground, or, you know, patrol or something

like that, look at that I give them the resources and the knowledge and the capability and the time and all those things to help them be effective. So how can you all be effective in reaching me, people process progress at gmail.com people process progress.com the website little reminder here. Thanks so much for everybody that's reached out or connect on LinkedIn. It's great to connect with people all over the world have a really exciting episode coming out next week, kind of an international edition of the People Process Progress podcast. More on that soon. For now, let's get back into principle three

believe, which is on page 65 of extreme ownership. And the principle from the book from the combat was there in Ramadi, Iraq, the SEALs were given a directive. You must go out on patrol with Iraqi soldiers on every mission. What's the issue? Well, the issue is training between the U.S. Navy SEAL and some of the regular Iraqi soldiers is a big difference, right? Super highly trained special operations forces, U.S. Navy SEALs, Iraqis, some are not trained or very poorly trained, but they have to go out on missions together, which in the eyes of many SEALs was a danger, was a hazard, right? Which makes sense. If you're going out on someone that's not trained and I'm highly trained and we go on a dangerous

mission, you're now a liability that I have to watch and watch for bad guys. So there were SEALs that worked for Jocko. They't like it they didn't understand the big picture of it and so that's part of what he empowered them to do was really empowering others to help understand the strategic mission and his example is if we don't empower if we don't train these folks up who's going to stay here and police the country well we're going to have to right and of course we've been there for a long time now. But the point being, if we don't help them get better by showing them the right way to do what is good look like, right, that concept, then we're going to be here forever having to do this for other people. So he let folks know we are taking Iraqis with us, you know, and in ways to do that. So not maybe

the same numbers, there was a ratio of Iraqis to US Navy SEALs. And so he worked with leadership and they met the mission of empowering and training up Iraqis, but not having to take maybe a full compliment so they could balance things out. And so the biggest thing, though, is Jocko let folks know what is the strategic imperative that we're trying to meet beyond right here that what you focused on just mission by mission. So where does this concept of believe come in? Well, if you're the leader, and in this case, Jocko was, you have to believe in the greater cause to overcome those challenges or you won't take the risk, right? So the risk to them was Iraqis with our people, big difference in training. But you have to believe that at the end of the day, this is going to let us go home, right? This is going to empower these folks to run their own country to police it, you know, and being an Iraqi police officer is crazy dangerous.

So he believed, and so he had to get his people to believe too, right? And he has to align his thoughts and vision to the mission. So that's part of the principle for us as leaders is we have to align. So if there's a from on high directive that comes down, sometimes, you know, short of, you know, as we've talked about, like an unlawful order or something like that, but in business or in somewhere else, then we just have to buckle up, accept it, look at the strategic vision. And we also as leaders have to empower our junior leaders to understand here's why this makes a difference. Here's why it's important. And here's how it matters.

And to me, the principle and the business application of that, I think, are very similar. And the business example really was, I think, this new spending policy from this company, right? Which is a great example instead of me thinking one up. But nobody understood it. Like, why are we doing finance this way? It didn't make sense to the team. But the leadership thought, oh, it's a great idea. Just push it on down. Well, the team was afraid to push back and say, well, we don't understand this, right? We're not clear on what this is about. So what happened in that aspect is really a change management principle is the leader needed to know,

oh, they don't understand the vision. They don't believe like I believe. Let me share that with them. Right. And let me explain what the why is and get their buy in and let them know why the spending thing works or why I think it will work. And then it will, you know, because we can't mind read. Right. And they say that in the book as well. We can't read each other's minds, but we can communicate with each other and explain principles and concepts and why this change is being made and why we don't have to spend this much money, right? But the key is that we all have to believe in the same strategic vision, be open to asking questions of each other, and then we can all, again, keep winning that war within by communicating and believing in our

mission for ourselves and our organizations. This fourth principle is check the ego. We have talked about no egos, no silos on the show before many, many times. So for the SEAL or combat example, there was a unit and not Jocko's unit, although his example, special operations forces, higher trained, they go through a lot of hard training, they get all the cool stuff more so than conventional as they say forces. And so sometimes they're a little arrogant, they have their little cocky, you know, self admitted by by Jocko and Leif. And that was one thing he really tried to enforce is, you know, when we're with conventional forces, we're gonna dress like them and look like them and maintain the grooming standard with short hair and shaved

and anybody that's seen kind of those cool pictures of, you know, bearded, long-haired guys in kind of torn T-shirts and their weapon, you know, there's a relaxed grooming standard for a lot of special operations units. In this instance, though, Jocko's guidance is we're not going to do that. We're no better than them. We're just different, right? And so, you know, they also had great examples of Army and Marine Corps units that were just, they had been out there longer, they were in combat all the time, and they really

admired them. It was a great, you know, way to look at that from someone that's in this super elite, you know, Navy SEAL unit. So one of the examples about ego was to not let it get in your way to, you know what, we're not better than you, we're just with you, we're here. Another example, though, was there was this other special operations unit that came in with highly trained Iraqi soldiers that had higher capability than some of the Iraqi soldiers that the SEALs were with. And one of Jocko's commanders was a little jealous, maybe, or concerned that, hey, they have higher capability. They might take our missions. Jocko was like, just help them. If they take your mission, good, we'll get you another one, right? So again, supplanting or suppressing rather your ego and

saying, great, the mission is fight the insurgents. Who do we care? We're on the same team, right? Don't worry about it. So just like think about at work, and we'll come back to the business thing. If someone gets the job done, and it gets done correctly, do you care if your name's on it? As long as the overall mission is made? You know, That's kind of the piece there. The bad example of an ego is there was a different special operations unit that came in and didn't tell the conventional forces in this other area. Camp Corregidor, I think they were talking about where they were going. They thought they're just too high speed. We don't have to tell you.

They gave them a grid and they were anywhere within this huge area. So super dangerous and just treated the conventional forces and they were with anywhere within this huge area. So super dangerous and just treated the conventional forces like there were less to the point where the commander of that area, the army commander told him to leave. They had to leave the camp. That's, that's pretty bad, right? So that's ego to the extreme in a combat setting, which is horrible. The principle here is right. Ego clouds and disrupts everything, right? If folks can't get past their own ego, because they think their title empowers them to do X or Y, or because I've done this, you don't have to tell me anything. I can't learn anything from you because I've been doing this for

years and years, which is one of the, you know, one of the examples here we'll get into. But it prevents extreme ownership and self-assessment, right? If you have a big ego that you can't keep in check, you can't tell yourself, oh, you know what? That's on me or I'm the bad leader from my team. I need to take responsibility. Can I truly believe if my ego's in the way? Ego's a killer, man. And in public safety and incident management, we used to teach this and talk about it all the time. You know, what's on your collar, your sleeve means a lot. You earned it, right? But it shouldn't be the only driver of who you listen to and how you learn. So here, the business application or example is there's a tenured employee that's been around for a long time, many years.

It has a newer manager. And there's a process where this person's supposed to go through their manager to get approval for spend or sign off or something, right? And it doesn't happen. And so it circles back to, you know, probably the person who's been there a long time's ego or is it the manager's ego to not explain and take that ownership and say, okay, I need to make sure they understand this concept

that we have to go through approvals because the organization's policies state this or that or it affects the overall budget that maybe the employee didn't have insight into. But you can see you get in the way. And I saw this in the military and in public safety when some people make rank and other people don't. The people who don't make rank sometimes have ego toward who used to be their peers or vice versa.

Now I made rank and now my ego is boosted. So I treat you definitely just gets in the way, just like we said earlier, right? Some things to consider though. So taking ownership, even though maybe someone's ego gets in the way in this instance is, could the manager say, okay, did I explain to you all the process? How can we work better together in the future? What is the impact if we don't work together? If you don't ask for this approval, right? And get to know the person. So the person's been there a lot longer, right? And you're a newer manager, but you have processes you have to follow, things you have to do. And you need to have an understanding with that person. I hope this very brief episode,

first episode of 2021, kind of the first four chapters of extreme ownership were helpful in those principles of extreme ownership and everything you do personally and professionally. I know we talked about business examples, but apply that to your family life, to yourself exercising or not exercising, all those kinds of things. To understanding that there's no bad teams, there's only bad leaders. To believing in the strategic mission to not get lost in the tactical mission and helping your team understand that and to keep our egos out of the way. Especially as we go into this new year, vaccines are starting to roll out,

presidential inaugurations are coming up. If we as a nation in America and then largely as a world want to get back to some normalcy, to even more productivity from all the catalysts we had last year, we have to practice, I think, these four principles and more, but I think these are a good start. So as we go into this year, let's look at ourselves. Let's empower ourselves. And by that indirect nature, we will empower each other across the world. Thank you

for empowering me via this podcast to share the message that I'm sharing today and have. I look forward to bringing you more hopefully helpful content and interviews and for reaching out to me. Again, LinkedIn, Kevin Pinnell, peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com is the email address. Peopleprocessprogress.com is the website where we have templates, tools, tips. You can get in touch with me. We can talk about how maybe I can give you some advice or your organization. Thank you for everybody holding the line, whether you're in a hospital, in the service industry, in public safety. Whatever you're doing to help keep America and your respective countries going, you're essential.

Stay safe out there, wash those hands, and Godspeed.