“Now do you see what I am talking about?” he asked.
“I do indeed,” I responded.
“They aren’t taking any initiative; they aren’t pushing things to happen—they aren’t taking ownership!” he lamented.
“That was very evident in every one of those meetings,” I noted.
“So. What do I do?” the CEO asked. “How can I get them to take Extreme Ownership?”
“The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy,” I answered. “You have to give them ownership.”
“I’m trying to—and I’m taking ownership to set the example—but they aren’t taking any ownership at all!” the CEO complained.
“Yes. That is exactly what is happening: you are taking ownership—but you are taking too much ownership,” I told the CEO.
“Too much ownership?” he asked, confused. “You didn’t even tell me that was possible.”
“It is. And yes, I should have explained that more clearly to you,” I said. “Leaders can actually take too much ownership. Yes, with Extreme Ownership you are responsible for everything in your world. But you can’t make every decision. You have to empower your team to lead, to take ownership. So you have to give them ownership.
“When a leader tries to own everything—to run every single move their team makes,” I continued, “it doesn’t work. Maybe it is the desire to make sure everything goes right. Maybe it is a lack of trust that subordinate leaders know what to do. Maybe it is ego—leaders want to feel they are the person who is critical for every little decision. But when a leader takes too much ownership, there is no ownership left for the team or subordinate leaders to take. So the team loses initiative. They lose momentum. They won’t make any decisions. They just sit around and wait to be told what to do.”
Although this was a lot to absorb, I could see it was making complete sense to the CEO.
“I’ve smothered them, haven’t I?” he said.
“Well, that’s a strong word—that implies death,” I joked. “But metaphorically, yes. That is a good description of what has happened.”
“So what do I do now?” the CEO asked.
“Give them space. Give them air,” I instructed. “Let them breathe again. You have to let them make decisions. You have to let them plot the course. You need to tell them the destination, but you need to let them figure out how to get there. You have to let them take ownership—real ownership—of their piece of the mission. Then you will have a team with a culture of true, effective Extreme Ownership and your performance will skyrocket.”
“That sounds good. But how do I actually make that happen from a tactical perspective?” the CEO inquired.
“First—let’s cut down all the meetings. That is one of the reasons things aren’t moving. Instead of finding solutions, right now they just ask you for the solution. When you do have meetings, stop being the ‘Easy Button,’” I told him.
“The Easy Button? How am I an Easy Button?” the CEO asked.
“By answering every question, solving every problem, and making every single decision,” I answered. “Why should your leaders think for themselves when they can just press the Easy Button and have you think for them and make the decisions for them as well? And they can blame you if something goes wrong because you made the decision. When you do all that for them, they don’t need to think or act, and then they won’t think or act. That’s where these guys are at.”
“But if I don’t answer their questions—” the CEO began.
I cut him off: “Then they will answer the questions themselves. They will find solutions for themselves. They will work together to solve problems at the source, instead of running them up to you.”
“So Decentralized Command is what you are talking about, right?” the CEO asked.
“Exactly,” I said. “And that is the balance you need to find, the balance between Decentralized Command and Extreme Ownership. When your team is too decentralized, no one knows in what direction to go. Too much ownership, and people won’t act with any level of initiative.”
“And I’ve gone too far in that direction. I’ve taken too much ownership,” the CEO recognized.
“Yeah,” I replied, “but it’s okay. You are recognizing the dichotomy. Now, swing the pendulum back—but make sure you don’t go too far. I see people make that mistake all the time: they overcorrect themselves. So. Make the move. Cancel some of the meetings. Let the teams and the leaders make decisions. But don’t completely check out. You don’t need to row the boat—or even steer it. You just have to make sure it is heading in the right direction.”
Over the next few weeks, the CEO adjusted his level of control. I had to restrain him a few times and ease him away from his tendency to run everything himself. But he did check himself, and the change from his subordinate leadership—and the rest of the team—came about fairly quickly. Within a few weeks, their attitude shifted. Leaders at every level of the team began to lead. They took ownership. Progress picked up and the team got the product back on target for launch.
“Frogman on the Roof” was the radio call that let others know that SEALs were on the high ground. Here, Task Unit Bruiser SEALs, from a combined force of Charlie and Delta platoons, maneuver on the rooftop, keeping as low as possible to minimize exposure to incoming enemy bullets. Marc Lee, at left, carries his Mark 48 machine gun. At right, in the foreground, is the SEAL operator who was later gravely wounded, as described in Chapter 1.
(Photo courtesy of Todd Pitman)
CHAPTER 3
Resolute, but Not Overbearing
Leif Babin
SOUTH RAMADI, IRAQ: 2006
Bright orange tracers streaked like laser beams just a few feet over our heads, each supersonic bullet zipping past with a thunderous crack.
Holy shit, I thought as we quickly ducked down behind the roof wall. Those are friendlies shooting at us.
I looked over at Dave Berke, who crouched down nearby. Like the other SEALs on the roof with us, we tried to stay low enough to not get our heads shot off.
Dave looked back at me and shook his head with a smile that mixed humor and concern.
“That’s not cool,” Dave said—the understatement of the year.
Dave Berke was a U.S. Marine Corps major. A fighter pilot by trade, he had been the lead instructor at the legendary U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School, better known as TOPGUN. Dave had left the cockpit behind and volunteered to serve on the ground as a forward air controller in the most dangerous place in Iraq: Ramadi. He led a Supporting Arms Liaison Team (SALT) attached to the U.S. Marine Corps 5th Air-Naval Gunfire Liaison Company. Dave and his twelve Marines from SALT 6 accompanied Charlie Platoon to coordinate with the aircraft supporting this operation in the skies overhead. They patrolled in with us on foot to spearhead the operation ahead of the U.S. Army and Iraqi Army units.
A U.S. tank two hundred yards away had fired a burst from its heavy machine gun directly over our position. It was friendly fire, a blue-on-blue in U.S. military parlance. To be killed or horribly wounded by enemy fire was one thing. To be killed by our own American forces was something much worse.
That was way too close for comfort, I thought in the seconds following as I crouched as low as possible behind the low concrete wall that was our only means of cover. We had to shut that down immediately and alert the tank that we were friendly forces. To do so, I had to contact the specific tank commander directly via radio and tell them to “cease fire.”
The tank’s heavy machine gun was the .50-caliber M2 Browning. Known as “the Ma Deuce,” it packed a hell of a punch. In U.S. military service since 1933, it had proven its deadly effectiveness in every American war since. Each massive round could take a man’s head clean off or remove the bulk of his chest cavity. It could also punch right through concrete walls, like the one we were hiding behind. We had just received a fully automatic burst of probably a dozen rounds in a matter of seconds. If I didn’t shut down that fire immediately and let the U.S. tank know we w
ere friendlies, it could mean horrible wounds and death for a number of us.
* * *
Moments before, I stood with several Charlie Platoon SEALs on the rooftop of an Iraqi house deep in enemy territory. Dave stood next to me, communicating with a U.S. Air Force AC-130U “Spooky” gunship that circled high overhead, wielding both awesome firepower and extraordinary surveillance capability from thousands of feet in the night sky above. The first U.S. troops on the ground in this volatile neighborhood, we had patrolled in on foot several hours earlier in the night and set up a sniper overwatch position to disrupt any attacks from insurgents on the main force of the operation: some fifty U.S. tanks and armored vehicles, and nearly one thousand U.S. and Iraqi troops, led by Task Force Bandit, 1st Battalion, 37th Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division. Our SEAL snipers were set up in shooting positions along with our machine guns and security teams. Dave and his Marine radioman were on the rooftop with us, relaying updates from the Spooky gunship overhead.
We watched as the heavy phalanx of American armor—M1A2 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles—rolled in our direction, crossing the railroad bridge over the canal and following the road that led to the village where we were positioned. To clear the field of view for our snipers, our explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) bomb technicians and SEAL breachers put explosive charges in place to knock down several palm trees. We’d taken great steps to alert Task Force Bandit—the battalion, companies, and platoons—to the exact location of our sniper overwatch so they wouldn’t mistake us for enemy forces. We had also marked our position with a pre-determined signal device. But I hadn’t considered how dangerous it was for us to set off the explosions to take out the trees.
This was one of the first major operations of the “Seize, Clear, Hold, Build” strategy to take back Ramadi from the deadly insurgents who controlled the city, and it was a historic and massive undertaking. It had been meticulously planned for weeks, examining every realistic contingency we could imagine. Heavy fighting was expected, as were major U.S. casualties. The Soldiers manning the tanks were already on edge, expecting attack as they maneuvered into enemy territory. Though the key leaders had been briefed on the specific building where we planned to set up our overwatch position, that information didn’t always make it down to the forward troops on the front lines of the operation. And even if the word was passed to the frontline troops, understanding locations on the battle map and correlating this with the actual street and buildings seen from the ground level proved difficult at best. I had radioed to Jocko, who was co-located with the Army battalion at the U.S. staging point across the bridge, that we would be conducting a “controlled detonation”: a non-combat explosion of demolition charges that we’d set ourselves. The battalion acknowledged via radio they understood. But again, that didn’t guarantee that the word was passed to the tank crews or that they fully processed what that meant. The tankers had their own challenges and risks to confront: significant threats from massive IEDs buried in the road and enemy attacks with machine guns and RPG-7 rockets.
When our controlled detonations shattered the quiet and the blasts of fire momentarily lit up the dark, one of the Abrams tank commanders must have thought it was an enemy attack. Seeing our silhouettes on the rooftop and thinking we were insurgent fighters, he lit us up with a burst from his heavy machine gun. We had been casually peering over the roof wall, watching the armored vehicles crawl toward us on their tracks, when the burst of .50-caliber rounds cracked just over our heads. That sent us all diving to the deck to seek cover.
Every nanosecond counted as I reached into my gear for my radio.
Our typical radio procedures were for me to communicate directly to Jocko, who would then pass the word to the battalion staff he was standing next to, who would relay to their company, who would relay to the platoon in whose unit the tank belonged. But there was no time for that now. Every moment was crucial. I needed to speak directly to that tank immediately, or the next burst of .50-caliber machine gun rounds might chew us to bits—though the .50-cal was preferable to a massive main gun round from the tank’s 120mm smoothbore cannon, which could be next.
Quickly, I switched my radio channel dial to the tank’s company net and keyed up. “Cease fire, cease fire,” I said. “You are shooting at friendlies.”
Receipt of the radio transmission was acknowledged. The shooting stopped.
That was a close one, I thought. I wasn’t angry, but more concerned with the recognition of how easily friendly fire could happen, despite our extensive efforts to mitigate the risk of blue-on-blue.
The ability to switch my radio to a different net and talk directly to the tank from which we were taking fire may well have saved us. It was a mission-critical skill upon which I depended during nearly every combat operation, as did the other leaders in Charlie Platoon and Task Unit Bruiser. Yet, when we had first arrived in Ramadi, as SEALs, we didn’t understand the U.S. Army and Marine Corps radio networks and were unable to directly communicate with them via radio.
* * *
In the SEAL Teams, we had a different culture, different tactics, and different gear from our U.S. Army and Marine Corps brethren. Nowhere was that more apparent than in our radio communications equipment. They used an entirely different system. In order for us to talk to them, we needed to learn how to use their system. Typically, in a SEAL platoon, the radioman is the communications expert who programs the radios and troubleshoots any issues for everyone else in the platoon. We came to depend on our SEAL radioman for everything involving radios. On previous deployments, if you had a problem with a radio, you just popped it out of your gear and tossed it to the radioman to fix or swap out for a new one. Additionally, the leader depended upon the SEAL radioman for all communications back to the tactical operations center and all units outside of the SEAL squad or platoon. But in Ramadi, we often broke up into small units and there weren’t enough SEAL radiomen to go around. You might very well find yourself serving as the radioman of an element when the actual SEAL radiomen were in a different element or squad in a separate building or on a different operation altogether.
As task unit commander and a prior SEAL radioman in his enlisted days, Jocko understood that each member of Task Unit Bruiser had to be competent with our radios. He knew we all individually needed to learn how to program our radios so any one of us could talk directly to the Soldiers and Marines we fought alongside and depended on for help when we found ourselves in a jam. It was a skill critical to saving lives on the battlefield.
“Everybody make sure you know how to program your radios,” Jocko commanded during an early brief in the Charlie Platoon mission planning space. Even among SEALs, Jocko was a big, mean-looking, and intimidating guy. You might think that whatever Jocko said, we were going to do it. If not because we feared his wrath, because we respected his leadership and experience.
But we didn’t learn how to program our radios. At least, most of us didn’t. It wasn’t that we didn’t think it was important or that we didn’t respect Jocko. We did. But we simply were overtasked, and in the hectic schedule, other pressing issues always took precedence. Jocko’s order to learn how to program our radios slipped to the back burner. Most of us never got around to it.
A few days after Jocko’s decree that we had to learn to program our radios, Task Unit Bruiser put together a plan and received approval to launch on a nighttime raid to capture or kill the leaders of an Iraqi insurgent terrorist cell responsible for multiple deadly attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops in Ramadi. Charlie Platoon had the lead and came up with a plan. Just as we did prior to every operation, we gathered the troops for the mission brief, known as an “operation order,” or OPORD. The key leaders stood up and presented their respective parts of the plan. We talked through the details and answered remaining questions.
As we were wrapping up the OPORD, Jocko stood up and made some final strategic comments. Finally, he asked a question that caught us red-handed.
“Does e
veryone know how to program their radios?” Jocko asked. There were blank stares. But nobody had the courage to say, “No.”
I thought: We didn’t have time. We didn’t make the time.
But Jocko didn’t need to hear an answer. No doubt he could tell from the blank stares and lack of response that most of the SEAL operators in the room, about to launch on this combat operation, didn’t know how to program their radios themselves.
Jocko looked at one of the SEAL operators, a new guy in the platoon, whom we called “Biff” after the character from the movie Back to the Future.
“Biff, let me see your radio,” Jocko said bluntly. Biff quickly complied, unscrewed the connector to his headset, unclipped the fast-tech fastener, pulled the radio from his gear, and handed it to Jocko. There was a function on the radio that would clear its memory, requiring it to be reprogrammed. Jocko cleared the radio and handed it back to Biff.
“Reprogram that,” Jocko directed.
Biff stared back blankly. He didn’t know how to reprogram his radio. It was an uncomfortable place to be, called out in front of everyone in our SEAL platoon and task unit, having failed to comply with Jocko’s order. But he wasn’t alone, as most of us were in the same boat.
Jocko wasn’t angry. He understood that many of us in the room hadn’t learned to program our radios, not through willful disobedience but because we hadn’t fully understood its importance. Since we didn’t clearly understand the importance, we didn’t make the time to learn. Yet Jocko wasn’t backing down. He didn’t let it go. Jocko held the line, enforced the standard. Jocko knew that when we were out on the battlefield, in smaller elements beyond the reach of help or support, we had to be able to operate the radios ourselves. With Decentralized Command, it was crucial that leaders at every level be fully self-reliant, ready to step up and execute to accomplish the mission.
Turning to the Charlie Platoon’s senior SEAL radioman, he said: “Teach Biff how to reprogram his radio.”
The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win Page 7