Navy Seals hell week is legendary for how difficult and challenging it is. You are beaten, tired, nearly broken, and have to perform at a high level. Now you are required to paddle your boat out into the rough surf zone, tip the boat over and get into the water, right the boat, get everyone back into the boat and paddle back to the beach.
Jocko Willink, the author of Extreme Ownership, tells of one boat crew dominating this event during a particular hell week; Boat Crew II.
Boat Crew II has won or nearly won every single race. They worked as a high performing team, everyone on the team worked hard and performed well and the boat also had a very strong leader. They made sure they covered others’ weaknesses, they wanted to win, which also has its rewards. During Hell Week with no rest, a couple of minutes rest would feel like heaven.
At the same time, Boat Crew VI was doing the opposite. They were losing everything. Coming in well behind the other teams. They weren’t working as a team. They were frustrated and annoyed at each other.
The Senior Chief thought of a challenging solution to Boat Crew VI’s bad performance. He would swap Boat Crew II’s leader with Boat Crew VI’s leader. Same team, different leader. Only this time one crew would be relatively fresher than the other.
Would it make a difference?
Boat Crew II’s leader was annoyed, he didn’t want to leave the team he worked so hard with, but he did not argue, he accepted the challenge.
Boat Crew VI’s leader was happy. He thought he had drawn a lucky hand. Both leaders went to their new teams, and then gave orders to their teams and off they went again into the cold rough water.
Boat Crew VI won the race. It had gone from last place to first place. Boat Crew VI went on to win most of the races, followed closely by Boat Crew II. It was a huge turnaround.
Leadership is simple, but not easy
This is an expression that appears frequently in the book. It comes from former UFC fighter and World Champion Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt Dean Lister, “Simple, not easy”.
Leadership is not about reinventing the wheel. In his book, Willink acknowledges that they didn’t create a new paradigm and that most of their ideas have existed for hundreds of years. The ideas are simple to understand in theory, the challenge is to apply them to your life. To make the theoretical, practical. It sounds simple but it is not easy.
North Star
Understanding what to do is a mixture of art and science. There is no right answer, it is always nuanced and contextual to you, your team, and your particular environment.
The burden of leadership is to provide direction where you don’t really know where you are going. You need to point the team towards your North Star.
Deciding on what your North Star is, is not easy. Of all the millions of choices you have, you have to choose one. The challenge is not picking one, but in understanding what you know, don’t know, and assume to make a decision.
With those three variables understood you can reassess your decision in the future.
The next challenge is to then make your team great and then get the hell out of their way.
Micromanagement
You hear this word all the time. It is the opposite of leadership. You don’t trust your team if you have to account for every little thing they do. You also don’t trust they are going in the right direction if you are always watching them.
Be a better leader
It is simple, but it is not easy.
What you need from the team and what your team needs to do is different things. Your job is to understand both and get the best out of your team.
Know what success looks like, then align their goals to that success, but what they care about will be different from what you care about. You have to point them in the right direction and then get out of their way.
Trust that if you give them the right direction they will follow it. It will not be perfect. Communication isn’t easy and what you say might be different from what they hear. It is a constant dance.
You won’t be perfect, you just want to keep improving over time.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 