Late Shift Collaborative

This is the first in a series of posts about some of my favorite counseling, self-help, leadership, and psychology books. I want to start with Extreme Ownership: How US Navy SEALS Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Lief Babin because it has been part of my philosophy of work and leadership since I first discovered it in 2016. I cannot recommend this book enough. It summarizes principles that can be deployed in any team, and it illustrates the principles with exciting examples from combat and military training experiences that the authors observed as Navy SEALS.

There are several great principles in the book, but I want to talk about the namesake “Extreme Ownership.” I think of extreme ownership as the opposite of “blame-storming.” If you’re not familiar with blame-storming, you’ve seen it, you just don’t know the term yet. This is when a group meets after a negative event or outcome and throws out ideas about whose fault the negative outcome is. “Well, I couldn’t have fixed it because Sue was the last person who looked at the draft before it was filed.” or “Margaret was supposed to get the numbers to compliance, so this is her fault.”

What I hate about blame-storming, other than its ability to undermine a team and create a toxic environment of suspicion and c.y.a., is the inefficiency. Getting blame onto one scapegoat and off of other team members provides approximately one piece of useful information: how the cluster whoops was one person’s or one department’s fault. It doesn’t change the outcome, nothing can, and it doesn’t reveal systemic weaknesses in the processes or set a blue print for fixing processes going forward. But extreme ownership does.

Extreme ownership is a thought experiment engaged in by a team. Every person on the team buys into the following question: “knowing what I know now, how could I have prevented this outcome?”

I know what you’re saying, the premise is absurd. No one can see the future. The outputs are going to be all of the members of the team going way out of their way to do things that weren’t their jobs. But that’s the whole point. We aren’t trying to assign responsibility to those people. We are leveraging the fact that every person on a team sees the work from a slightly different perspective. If Jack could have grabbed the plans out of the outbox and gotten a second architect’s signature on them before they went out with the wrong measurements, it might not make sense to give Jack that job duty, but it might make sense to set a new policy that every set of plans needs two architect signatures. If Sally, a manger two levels above the issue had double checked with the new hire to see if he had any questions about the HIPAA training, he would not have disclosed confidential information to a third party. Maybe Sally won’t be the one who checks with the new hires, but maybe that will become something the new hire’s direct manager does in the future.

Extreme ownership requires buy-in from everyone on the team, especially the leaders. If some people are doing extreme ownership and some are doing blame-storming, the extreme ownership people just made the blame-stormers job much easier. Remember, the point of extreme ownership is not punitive, it’s system improvement. It strengthens teams rather than weakens them.

Where I have created a culture of extreme ownership as a manager, our teams have never made the same mistakes repeatedly. Communication becomes open and honest, and team members develop greater trust and support for one another. If I could suggest two things to improve a workplace, they would be implement an extreme ownership culture and hold L-10 meetings.( I will cover L-10s in another post!)

Extreme ownership can be deployed in workplaces, families, and artistic collaborations.

Check out the entire book for more insights about running a productive and healthy team.