“Does that make sense to everyone?” the CEO asked. The others nodded around the room. Realizing he needed to demonstrate ownership, the CEO continued: “I thought I had been clear as to why, but obviously it wasn’t clear to all of you.”
The explanation answered the questions that some in the room harbored about the new system, though clearly at least a handful of the company’s senior leaders had understood the reasons behind the need for a new system.
“I get the why,” one of the department leaders replied. “I’m totally on board with the need to find a better system.”
“Then why is the new program not being implemented?” I asked. “What’s the problem?”
“I think it’s because you’re all comfortable with the way we’ve always done things,” the CEO chimed in. “Change is always hard. And no one wants to change.”
“No, I’m open to change,” the department leader countered. “I know we have to change. I just don’t think that this new software system you have selected is the answer. It solves a handful of problems, but it creates even greater issues for us.”
This was a start. But the CEO couldn’t help himself and began to weigh in on the discussion.
“I don’t think that’s—” the CEO began.
I cut him off.
“Hold on,” I interjected. “This is good feedback. It’s why I am here, to help you generate these discussions. Let’s hear what he has to say.”
The CEO understood and complied, nodding to the department head to continue.
“Can you explain how the new software system creates greater issues for your team?” I asked the department head.
The department head did so, launching into detail about the negative impact of the new program on some of his most lucrative and high-profile projects. He wasn’t merely complaining. He had clearly done the research and found major flaws with the new system that could be a serious detriment to the company’s strategic mission.
Another department head added, “We feel the same way on my team. The new software seems great in theory, but in practice it is hugely problematic. Two of my trusted frontline leaders pointed out some major flaws to me a couple of weeks back when we discussed implementing the new system.”
The CEO’s face showed a look of concern. “This is the type of feedback that I need to hear,” he said.
“We tried to tell you,” the department head insisted. “Several of us tried to push back.”
“You may have,” I responded. “But it’s clear that you didn’t effectively raise the arguments as you have done just now.”
I explained that the issue for them wasn’t humility. They clearly had the humility piece down, recognized the boss’s authority and strategic insight.
“But none of you stepped up to collectively push back on the new software. You may have spoken out initially, but you’ve backed down from the authority of the CEO,” I continued. “Yes, he’s the boss. Yes, you need to execute his direction. But do you think he wants you to implement a system that would fail?
“Of course not,” I answered. “This is a time to lead up the chain of command, as we wrote about and most of you have read in Extreme Ownership, chapter ten.”
I explained to the company’s leaders that they must carefully prioritize where to push back. It can’t be for everything. If they did, their concerns would not be taken seriously when it truly mattered. But when the strategic mission or the ultimate good of the team was at risk, those were the times that a leader must push back. To not do so, I told them, was to fail as a leader; to fail the team and the mission.
“This is not a new concept,” I explained. “Over two hundred years ago, Napoléon Bonaparte addressed this very issue. In his Military Maxims, Napoléon states:
Every general-in-chief who undertakes to execute a plan which he knows to be bad, is culpable. He should communicate his reasons, insist on a change of plan, and finally resign his commission, rather than become the instrument of his army’s ruin.5
“If you’re passive, if you don’t push back,” I said, “you aren’t leading up the chain of command. The boss needs and wants your honest feedback on this. He may not even know it,” I said jokingly.
The rest of the group chuckled. The CEO also smiled. He clearly realized he had been overbearing in this situation. In his zeal to provide a strategic solution for the team, he hadn’t fully heard them, answered their questions, or investigated their legitimate concerns.
“Honestly,” the CEO said, “I thought you all were just pushing back on this because you were resistant to change. Not because you had concerns about the new system.
“I realize now I should have asked for your input with a listening ear,” he continued. “Rather than shut you down the first time I heard pushback.”
It was a huge learning point for the CEO and a big lesson learned going forward for the team. For the sake of the company and the mission, the CEO needed to seek feedback and address the concerns of his key leaders. He needed to encourage his department heads to voice their opinions and express their disagreements. The CEO had made the common mistake of not fully recognizing the power of his position. He was the boss. He held the power. And most people wouldn’t exercise the courage to confront that head-on. It was important the CEO fully recognize the power of his position and the reality of a general reluctance to confront it.
For the department heads and other key leaders on the team, it was a wake-up call that they were failing the team—they were culpable if they didn’t push back and provide clear and direct feedback up the chain to fully explain the negative impact to the company’s strategic objectives. Once the CEO understood their causes for concern, he relented and empowered the frontline leaders to develop their own solution for a new software system.
Delta Platoon commander, Lieutenant Seth Stone (center left), leads a joint patrol of Task Unit Bruiser SEALs, U.S. Marines and Soldiers, along with Iraqi Army troops through the Malaab District of eastern Ramadi. While the surrounding team members lock down potential threats, Lieutenant Stone detaches mentally and scans the area, plotting the team’s next measures.
(Courtesy of the U.S. Navy. Photograph taken by Mate Second Class Sam Peterson.)
CHAPTER 12
Focused, but Detached
Leif Babin
WESTERN RAMADI, IRAQ: 2006
YAK-YAK! YAK-YAK! YAK-YAK!
The unmistakable sound of AK-47 fully automatic gunfire echoed with deafening blasts around the small, smoke-filled room as bullets ricocheted off the concrete floor and walls.
We’re taking fire through the door, I thought. It’s on.
We no longer had the element of surprise, having just blasted in the outer door with an explosive breaching charge that woke up the neighborhood with a thunderous boom. Clouds of dust and smoke choked the air and made it difficult to see as we entered the building, scanning for threats. But once inside the room, we realized it was only a small foyer that led to another locked door, which led to the main house. Shattered glass and debris were strewn across the floor as Charlie Platoon SEALs and Iraqi soldiers stacked up in the “train”—a line of shooters ready to make entry once the locked door was breached.
Our intelligence indicated that within this home lived an insurgent who had planned and carried out multiple deadly attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops. The latest attack was well planned and well orchestrated: insurgents had hit an Iraqi Army outpost (which contained a handful of U.S. military advisors) with machine gun fire from multiple directions. Next, they lobbed mortars into the compound with deadly accuracy. While the Iraqi soldiers manning the guard posts panicked and took cover, another insurgent drove a truck packed with explosives—a VBIED (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device)—into the compound, detonating in a gigantic fireball of death and destruction. Only through the extraordinary bravery of the U.S. Marine and Army military advisors who stood their ground and returned fire was anyone in the compound saved. Tragically, a U.S. Marine and a Soldi
er were killed, along with six Iraqi soldiers, and several others wounded. The well-fortified outpost was reduced to a shattered wreck. But the strategic damage to morale of the Iraqi troops proved even greater than the death and destruction inflicted. In the days following the attack, nearly the entire battalion of several hundred Iraqi soldiers deserted. The insurgents had dealt a crushing blow. Now, Task Unit Bruiser had the opportunity to capture or kill one of the ringleaders of that attack. We aimed to accomplish our mission.
As we waited to make entry through the next door, the sudden full-auto burst of gunfire instantly got everyone’s attention. It was without question an AK-47, the Iraqi insurgents’ primary weapon.
“They’re shooting at us through the door,” another SEAL said in a calm but loud voice. “Stand by to get some.”
He had quickly come to the same conclusion that I had—that we all had. It was a contingency for which we were well prepared. The terrorist we were after was likely armed, certainly willing and eager to kill us, as was just about everyone associated with him. The SEAL shooters in the front of the train pointed their weapons at the closed and locked door, ready to engage any threat that emerged. The next SEAL back in the train reached down to his gear and pulled out a hand grenade—an M67 fragmentation grenade (or frag grenade) in preparation to neutralize the threat. If the enemy was shooting at us, we needed to be Default: Aggressive to solve that problem. It was the commonsense thing to do, rather than enter a room where a hostile enemy waited to gun us down.
But as the SEAL operator removed the grenade from his gear pouch and unwound the tape we used to secure the pin, I sensed that something wasn’t right. Stepping out of the train, I looked around. There were enough weapons covering the potential threats in the room. I was the assault force commander, the senior leader on the assault team that entered the house to capture our primary target—or, if he was shooting at us, kill him as justified under the rules of engagement.
But the most important place I could point my weapon was not at threats. I had plenty of SEAL shooters whose primary job was to handle such threats. As the leader, I trained my weapon away from the threats and toward the ceiling, what we called “high port”—the weapon pointed to the sky. With my weapon at high port, I no longer looked down the sights with tunnel vision. Instead, I looked around—I observed everything that was going on. That gave me maximum vision: I could see what was actually happening and assess the situation.
As I did so, I observed one of our jundhis1 in the train, with a bewildered look on his face, staring down at his weapon, an AK-47. I could see where bullets had chiseled holes in the concrete floor at his feet, just behind the SEAL operator only inches in front of him. It was suddenly clear the gunfire had not come through the door ahead of us, but from behind us, from this jundhi within our own shooter train. He had had what we called an “accidental discharge,” or AD. Like an idiot, he’d taken his weapon off safety and placed the AK-47 selector switch on full auto. At the same time, he’d improperly had his finger on the trigger and, in his nervousness, squeezed off a burst of automatic gunfire. The rounds had missed one of our Charlie Platoon SEALs just ahead of him in the train by only a few inches.
Meanwhile, we were about to breach the door and toss a frag grenade into the next room, killing anyone on the other side within range of its deadly blast of shrapnel.
“Put that frag grenade away—it was an AD!” I shouted, loud enough so that everyone in the room could hear.
“What?” a SEAL operator in the back of the train responded in disbelief. “Who?”
He quickly saw me and the other SEALs next to me glaring at the offending jundhi, whose face showed a mix of terror, surprise, and guilt.
As the first shooters in the train held their weapons on the locked door, the SEAL holding the frag grenade returned it safely to the grenade pouch on his gear. A SEAL breacher quickly came forward and placed a small explosive charge on the locked door. Everybody backed up a safe distance.
BOOM.
The door popped open and the first two SEALs entered, quickly followed by the rest of our SEALs and Iraqi soldiers.
In the next room, just on the other side of the door, we encountered a military-age male, the head of the household and his entire family—his wife and four young children. He was not armed and made no effort to resist. Like most of the muj we captured, they glorified jihad in public, but when rough men with weapons broke down their door in the night, they cowered in fear behind women and children. We detained the prisoners and the train moved on.
As our assault force cleared the rest of the building, I heard Jocko’s voice on the radio net.
“Leif, this is Jocko,” he said. “Heard shots fired. You good?”
Jocko, the ground force commander in charge of two separate assault forces (including ours) and the mobility element of Humvees, was outside our building with the vehicles. He had heard the gunfire and recognized it as an AK-47. Assuming we had encountered resistance from armed enemy fighters, he was waiting patiently for an update, knowing that I had my hands full and would update him when I could.
“Jocko, this is Leif,” I replied. “It was an AD. An Iraqi soldier.”
“Roger,” Jocko responded simply. While other bosses might have asked for more information, such as why it had happened and who had the AD and if there were casualties and if the target was secure, Jocko trusted that I had the situation under control—and that if I needed help, I would ask for it.
While the rest of the assault force cleared the last rooms in the building, one of my most trusted SEAL enlisted leaders, serving as the assault chief for this operation, confronted the jundhi who had accidentally discharged his weapon. This SEAL leader happened to be the one who had nearly been hit by the Iraqi soldier’s errant bullets, and he wasn’t happy. The SEAL ripped the AK-47 out of the jundhi’s hands, removed the magazine, and cleared the weapon. He grabbed the bewildered Iraqi soldier and unleashed a verbal tirade on him. The jundhi spoke no English, but from the SEAL’s demeanor and gestures, the message was clear: he had screwed up royally and could have seriously wounded or killed some of us. He had also nearly caused us to employ a grenade that would have inflicted some horrific civilian casualties.
As we still had work to do, I intervened before things could escalate further.
“Let’s get him outside,” I said. After calling over an interpreter, who translated the order into Iraqi-dialect Arabic, I told the jundhi to sit and wait in the back of a vehicle outside. A SEAL escorted him, AK-47 rifle now empty, out to the truck to ensure he complied.
Once the target was secure, I passed the word over the radio to inform Jocko and the other SEALs in the mobility element.
I followed up with our prisoner-handling team, which was in the process of identifying the military-age male. The prisoner soon proved to be the insurgent ringleader we were looking for.
Jocko made his way through the front door and into the target building to see what we had found and if we needed any support.
“We got him,” I said, giving Jocko a thumbs-up as he entered the room. “Here’s our man.” I pointed at the prisoner. The insurgent’s hands were cuffed with zip ties and he had been thoroughly searched.
“That was a close one,” I told Jocko.
“Yeah,” Jocko said. “I heard some AK fire just after you breached. And I thought, Oh, you guys are gonna get some,” he said with a smile.
“I thought we were taking fire through the door,” I explained. “We were just about to toss a frag grenade into the next room. Had we done so, we likely would have killed or horribly wounded the woman and her young children. That would have been a disaster.”
Scary, I thought, contemplating just how easily something like that could happen in the chaos of combat. Had it occurred, it would have been a heavy burden for each of us to carry on our conscience. It would have also served as significant propaganda for our insurgent enemies, who already tried to paint us and other American troops as butche
rs in order to dissuade the local populace from siding with us and the government of Iraq against the insurgency. This would have had major negative repercussions on the strategic counterinsurgency mission.
“Thank God you didn’t let that happen,” Jocko said.
I literally said a quick mental prayer of thanks to God for sparing us from such a horrific outcome.
Immersed in the chaos of the scene—the smoke, dust, and bullet ricochets—it was perilously easy to get sucked into the details, unable to recognize the initial conclusions as false and unmindful of the tragic consequences of getting it wrong. While in the train and focused on the threat at the next entry door, I had a hard time seeing the bigger picture and understanding what had happened. But as soon as I detached, from the moment I took just one step out of the shooter train and looked around, I immediately saw what had happened. It was a profound lesson: leaders must be detached, must pull back to a position above the fray where they can see the bigger picture. That was the only way to effectively lead. Otherwise, the results could be disastrous.
This was but the latest reminder of the same lesson I’d learned on one of our first combat operations in Ramadi. I’d been too immersed in the details and lost track of the strategic picture.
Shortly after Task Unit Bruiser’s arrival in Ramadi, our intelligence shop handed me our first target package, with details on a suspected insurgent, his associations, and where he was believed to be located. This would be my first real-world operation as an assault force commander on a capture/kill direct action raid. I shared the target package with Jocko and informed him of our intention to launch on the operation that night. Jocko had extensive experience leading such missions from his previous deployment to Iraq. He let me and my key leaders run with the tactical planning and helped us get the wheels in motion to receive the necessary approvals through our chain of command. Getting the operation approved required an immense amount of paperwork: a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation of several detailed slides and an extensive Microsoft Word document several pages long. Additionally, we had to coordinate with the U.S. Army unit that owned the battlespace—the real estate where we planned to conduct the operation. We also needed approval through the Iraqi soldiers’ chain of command so that they could accompany us.
The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win Page 27