When your team fails, say it was your fault
After a friendly-fire battle that killed an ally, a Navy SEAL commander found his bosses trusted him more when he stopped blaming others.
TEDx Talks · Extreme Ownership | Jocko Willink | TEDxUniversityofNevadaJocko Willink, a Navy SEAL commander in Iraq, kept his command and earned more trust after a deadly failure by telling his superiors that everything was his fault.
In the spring of 2006, Willink was in charge of an operation in Ramadi, a city in Iraq that was then a center of fighting. American troops, Marines, members of his SEAL team, and friendly Iraqi soldiers were all on the battlefield. In confusion and gunfire, American and friendly forces mistakenly fired on each other. When it ended, an allied Iraqi soldier had been killed, two other Iraqis were injured, one of Willink's men was hurt, and the rest of his men were badly shaken.
Ordered to shut down operations and explain what went wrong to his commanding officer, Willink first prepared a debrief that listed every mistake in planning, preparation, and execution, and who had made it. Willink said, "There was plenty of blame to go around."
About 10 minutes before the meeting, he changed course. He concluded he was the "only one person to blame" for the confusion, the injuries, and the death.
His approach came down to three moves. First, notice and control your ego. Second, refuse to pass blame down, even when your people offer to take it. In the debrief room, in front of his commanding officer and his men, he asked the room whose fault it was. One SEAL said he had not kept control of the Iraqi soldiers, another said he had not passed their location over the radio, and a third said he had shot the friendly soldier without properly identifying his target. Willink told each one it was not his fault.
Third, claim total responsibility and fix the system. He told them, "I am the commander, I am the senior man on the battlefield, and I am responsible for everything that happens; everything." He then laid out new tactics, techniques, and procedures to ensure it never happened again.
It hurt, Willink said. It hurt his ego and his pride. But he knew he had to keep his ego from running the decision.
He was not fired. His superior, who had braced for deflection, trusted him more after he took ownership. His men did not lose respect for him. They saw he would never pass the heavy burden of command onto them, and they adopted the same attitude.
Questions people ask
What does Willink mean by extreme ownership?
It means a leader accepts full responsibility for the outcome, including mistakes made by people under them. Willink later used the phrase extreme ownership to describe the idea that the commander owns everything that happens on a mission.
Isn't it wrong to take blame for someone else's mistake?
No. He argued that the leader sets the standards, the training, and the procedures, so a subordinate's error points to a leadership failure. In business, this does not remove accountability for employees, but it starts problem solving with what the manager can change.
What is a debrief?
A debrief is a structured review after a mission to reconstruct what happened and why. In the military, and increasingly in business and medicine, the goal is to learn and change procedures, not just to punish.