Put Your Finger Down and Own It!

Extreme Ownership bears incredible fruits for your business.

Everyone faces failures – defeats – let downs.

This can take the form of a huge deal that “went south.” A major client that leaves you for a competitor. The list of detrimental, demoralizing defeats goes on and on.

The reflection process (once the shame of humiliation or the heat of anger after the lost deal wears off) typically begins generic: “What went wrong? Could it have been avoided? What did we miss?” And then turns more specific: “Who was responsible for the deal? Who dropped the ball? Who is at fault? Who can we blame?”

Why is knowing what went wrong never enough? Why do we always have to try pinpointing the blame to a specific person? Perhaps its human nature – a defense mechanism developed to survive. Maybe we are afraid to take some of the blame, to own part of the fault.

Interesting that everyone wants to win as a team, but no one wants to lose as a team. Those of us who weren’t always the superstar on the team were sure grateful for the success that came from having that superstar. And we sure as heck tried to share in the glory/celebration of the win by emphasizing our “role” in the victory. But what happened when our team lost…none of us were too quick to emphasize our “role” in the loss…

As a business owner or key team member you are a leader. You are responsible for leading the entire team, through wins and through losses. How you handle your losses does much more to define you and solidify your team’s respect than how you handle winning. You need to take ownership, extreme ownership, for your team’s decisions and results. Jocko Willink, in the book he co-authored, Extreme Ownership, articulated this perfectly:

                After asking every member of his team who’s fault the fatal Seal Team mistake was and responding to each of them that they were not at fault, he reposed the same question – everyone waited in suspense, and then he answered: “There is only one person to blame for this: me. I am the commander. I am responsible for the entire operation. As the senior man, I am responsible for every action that takes place on the battlefield. There is no one to blame but me. And I will tell you this right now: I will make sure that nothing like this every happens to us again.”

                He reflects in the book: “It was a heavy burden to bear. But it was absolutely true. I was the leader. I was in charge and I was responsible. Thus, I had to take ownership of everything that went wrong. Despite the tremendous blow to my reputation and to my ego, it was the right thing to do – the only thing to do.”

We tend to shy away from this extreme ownership because we are afraid our employees will see us as weak or incompetent, instead of as responsible and invested. If we truly care about leading our team to success, we must have faith in them, their abilities, and their training – all of which are under our prevue, and therefore we are responsible. We may not have hit “send” on the proposal, but we trained the individual who did or we approved their training method, etc., etc.

We are the leader. We desire to lead with integrity – holding ourselves responsible for our team’s results – having extreme ownership of our business.

As Jocko discovered, extreme ownership of the situation actually increased his team and commander’s trust in him. As he related, “They knew it was a dynamic situation cause by a multitude of factors, but I owned them all.”