A Culture of Accountability, Part II: QMN072
Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster Newsletter, Monday, 9 December
(This week’s report is an 8 minute read)
BLUF: In their book Extreme Ownership, Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin explain their approach to a culture of accountability, starting first with the necessary traits and actions of the individual, then address the team, and then the processes (planning, communication, dealing with uncertainty & incomplete info, building discipline) required. In explaining how a leader is always accountable - always "owning” the failures and successes of their teams - Jocko and Leif provide a great primer on accountability. From there Rob Shaul’s Quiet Professional concept establishes the “how” and “why” of developing and maintaining accountability starting on a personal level, and the Green Beret planning, communication, and learning practices we explain here on The Quartermaster Newsletter show you how to involve your entire team in developing accountability while planning and executing. It’s hard work, but it’s required for the culture you seek.
Brady here. Civilian business leaders often say that their greatest obstacle to applying military planning and communication practices is a lack of a culture of accountability - specifically that it's difficult to get their people to see past their own roles and think and act as a leader of their organization. Last week we talked about the US military’s own culture of accountability and how the US military creates, grows and maintains it across the organization. This week we’ll examine how business leaders can build one along the same lines - and become more effective in the process.
Green Berets with 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) load a simulated casualty onto a UH-60 Blackhawk at Twentynine Palms, Calif., Oct. 21, 2019. Photo by Cpl. William Chockey
Perhaps the most well-known, recent attempt to impart a culture of accountability on businesses is Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s Extreme Ownership. First published in 2015, the book uses Jocko and Leif’s experiences in the 2006 Battle of Ramadi to illustrate a few major points about leadership. The book is named after the concept explained in the first chapter - “Extreme Ownership” - which is Jocko and Leif’s expression for the all-consuming level of accountability that leaders must have. In that chapter, Jocko describes a situation in Ramadi in 2006 where he discovers that two of his teams have had a “blue-on-blue” incident of fratricide where one team mistakenly shot and killed another’s Iraqi Army counterpart and injured other American servicemembers amid the “fog of war”. As in all such incidents, Jocko’s unit is taken out of combat and his chain of command makes an investigation. While building his defense to explain to his superiors and investigating officers why the incident had occurred, he comes to the realization that everything his team does is his responsibility - and instead of preparing a list of excuses or apportioning blame, he determines how to prevent it from ever happening again. He tells his superiors and investigating officers that it’s his fault. And then he explains how this not only helped grow himself as a leader, but others in the organization as well:
“As individuals, we often attribute the success of others to luck or circumstances and make excuses for our own failures and the failures of our team. We blame our own poor performance on bad luck, circumstances beyond our control, or poorly performing subordinates—anyone but ourselves. Total responsibility for failure is a difficult thing to accept, and taking ownership when things go wrong requires extraordinary humility and courage. But doing just that is an absolute necessity to learning, growing as a leader, and improving a team’s performance.”
“Extreme Ownership requires leaders to look at an organization’s problems through the objective lens of reality, without emotional attachments to agendas or plans. It mandates that a leader set ego aside, accept responsibility for failures, attack weaknesses, and consistently work to build a better and more effective team. Such a leader, however, does not take credit for his or her team’s successes but bestows that honor upon his subordinate leaders and team members. When a leader sets such an example and expects this from junior leaders within the team, the mindset develops into the team’s culture at every level. With Extreme Ownership, junior leaders take charge of their smaller teams and their piece of the mission. Efficiency and effectiveness increase exponentially and a high-performance, winning team is the result.”
Jocko goes on to describe that not only does he not get fired for the incident, he takes the lessons learned with his teams and build practices that will prevent them from happening again. In his next job as director for all SEAL training on the West Coast, he builds a “blue-on-blue” incident into training events for all teams - to prevent them in future operations and to impress upon leaders like himself the importance of taking responsibility for outcomes both good and bad.
Jocko and Leif start first with the necessary traits and actions of the individual, and then address the team, and then the processes (planning, communication, dealing with uncertainty and incomplete information, building discipline). Nearly every chapter has three parts - a Ramadi or training story, the principle illustrated therein, and then its application to business. In addition to explaining how a leader is always accountable (showing “Extreme Ownership”) - always "owning” the failures and successes of their teams, Jocko and Leif explain some other supporting principles of effective operations:
Everyone on the team truly must believe in the mission
Clarify your mission and keep plans simple, clear, and concise
Figure out your priorities, and then act on each one at a time
Engage your higher headquarters and keep them in the loop
The team must work together with other teams to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes
Be decisive, even when things are chaotic
By the time you finish the book, you realize that in order to do any of these things, the organization needs a high level of trust between leaders and the led. That trust, in Jocko and Leif’s telling, comes from leadership by example and from supporting subordinate leaders and underwriting honest mistakes.
The book itself, however, looks more like executive coaching than a how-to. All the principles within are sound and the stories themselves are illustrative, but readers are left with few tangible steps for growing accountability within the individuals and teams in their organizations. In a sense it’s a great primer, but we still need to figure out how and where to apply these ideas in our day-to-day lives. Human beings are creatures of habit that need repetition and continuous reinforcement in order to build things like a sense of accountability. This is where I think a couple different resources are very, very valuable.
The first is Rob Shaul’s post What Does It Mean To Be A Quiet Professional? As Shaul explains in Point 4, knowing what to do is easy but actually doing it is hard. Reading them takes a few hours and some focused attention, but actually living the principles that Jocko and Leif lay out for us in Extreme Ownership is extremely difficult and takes a lifetime of focus. I say this as someone who’s known these principles for a long time from my own experience in the military, and failed at nearly all of them more than once. Jocko himself writes in the final chapter of Extreme Ownership that discipline equals freedom - and that the most effective leaders he’s ever worked with, or for, were extremely disciplined as a result of their day-to-day routines, which came from a realization that success comes from dedication and preparation. But simply getting up early and doing everything with care doesn’t cut it - you can’t sustain the growth of personal accountability simply on brute force. Shaul’s ideas are the best ways I’ve ever seen outside of military training to build a sense of accountability in yourself - and across his blog post (20 min), his podcast discussion (45 min) with Brett McKay and his whiteboard discussion (104 min) with the Denver Fire Department, you’ll get a very good sense of what it takes to develop a sense of accountability in yourself and your leaders. And it’ll give you some concrete steps to start working on today, which can carry you through the rest of your life.
The second resource is the explanations of Green Beret processes that we describe here on the newsletter. In order to spread, grow and reinforce a culture of accountability in your organization, you need to exercise everyone’s accountability muscle every single workday. The processes we’ve laid out require that the whole team take part in planning, preparation, execution and lesson-learning - and that the team has space to make mistakes, take responsibility, and learn in a safe environment:
By learning and applying these processes, everyone gets to internalize the mission and have a stake in success. Being accountable requires both things. To be clear - starting, growing and sustaining a culture of accountability is difficult even in military settings. But once it’s there your team will be able to move faster, operate more effectively, get results from its plans and learn continuously - which it sounds like every business leader wants. The good news is that it’s possible to achieve - Jocko, Leif and Rob Shaul make that clear. The bad news is that it’s going to take hard work and humility every single day. (BJM)
*****
INFORMATION WARFARE IS REAL: Myth Versus Lethality: Losing the Plot in the Information War (7 min) “Russian concepts of information deterrence and reflexive control seek to manipulate adversaries into making poor decisions, and then to second-guess those decisions once they are made. Similarly, China’s three warfares doctrine synchronizes the employment of strategic psychological operations, global media narratives, and weaponized legalist tactics to establish precedent, instill doubt, and erode international norms. On the defensive side, Russia recently re-introduced ideological commissars into its military formations to monitor its soldiers and ostensibly to defend them from malign influences. China never got rid of them in the first place. But great powers are not the only ones employing information warfare. International organizations, multinational corporations, and hyper-empowered individuals can all play significant roles in foreign affairs today. The fact that competition is increasingly digital and virtual means that a state’s size and wealth matters less than the skill of its information warriors and the reach of its networks, a fact exemplified by the outsized influence of tiny Macedonia’s infamous troll farms during the 2016 election cycle.” (BJM)
INFORMATION WARFARE IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW: Russian Trolls Are Hammering Away at NATO’s Presence in Lithuania (6 min) “On Oct. 17, Russian operators again broke into kasvyksta.lt and posted a new story about purported U.S. plans to move nuclear weapons to Lithuania. They also sent fake emails purporting to be from known journalists to Nausėda’s office and other officials, looking for official comment on the fake story. Back in Russia, the story was circulated widely across social media channels. The next day, hackers again targeted legitimate media outlets to deface them in order to carry false news. Journalists well outside of Russia were targeted with emails made to look like they were from members of the Lithuanian government. The attackers even drew up a fake tweet from U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pomepo “congratulating” the Lithuanian president on the news of the move of the nuclear weapons, despite U.S. policy not to disclose the location of nuclear weapons outside of the United States.” (BJM)
ON BIG TECH’S APPROACH TO DEFENSE: The Ethics of Defense Technology Development: An Investor’s Perspective (8 min) “The current debate frames a false choice, however. It is clear that emerging technologies will force a shift in the way wars are initiated, waged, resolved, and most importantly, deterred. The technology industry cannot divest from the defense sector without ceding ground to our adversaries, who are accelerating their investment in their own defense technologies. American technologists should not view these adversaries as our moral equivalent: Governments such as the Chinese Communist Party or Vladimir Putin’s Russia are operating illiberal and closed societies, and in the past decade, they have leveraged these same technologies to annex territories, interfere in global conflicts (and domestic elections), and systematically subjugate dissidents and minorities. These governments also require their technology industries to support their illiberal ambitions. This also makes America different — and better. American technologists are not required to work on behalf of their nation’s defense, but in choosing not to do so, they must recognize that they are ceding an advantage to illiberal rivals and putting the very freedom and openness that they cherish at risk.” (BJM)
Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.
KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)