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Extreme Ownership Works for Engineering Leadership

Here are the 12 Principles of Extreme Ownership with selected quotes from the book to help understand them. They help with leadership and assist with life professionally and personally.

I’ve shared these with employees, friends, and family over the years, and now I’m putting them together here for you.

If you haven’t read the book, it’s an excellent one and easy to pick up without putting down.

Each principle receives so much more love and additional detail in the book, but these are the quotes pulled to help understand them and get you started.

1. Extreme Ownership

“The leader bears full responsibility for explaining the strategic mission, developing the tactics, and securing the training and resources to enable the team to properly and successfully execute.”

2. No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders

“Leaders must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their team’s performance. Identifying weaknesses, good leaders seek to strengthen them and come up with a plan to overcome challenge. It starts with the individual and spreads to each of the team members until this becomes the new standard.”

3. Believe

“In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission. If a leader does not believe, he or she will not be able to convince others to do so. When leaders receive an order that they themselves question and do not understand, they must ask the question ‘Why?’”

4. Check the Ego

“Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism. Often the most difficult ego to deal with is your own. When personal agendas become more important than the team, and the overarching mission’s success, performance suffers and failure ensues.”

5. Cover and Move

“Often, when smaller teams within the team get so focused on their immediate tasks, they forget about what others are doing or how they depend on other teams. They may start to compete with one another and when there are obstacles, animosity and blame develops. It falls on leaders to continually keep perspective on the strategic mission and remind the team that they are part of the greater team and the strategic mission is paramount.”

6. Simple

“Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. When things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster.”

7. Prioritize and Execute

“Even the most competent of leaders can be overwhelmed if they try to tackle multiple problems, or a number of tasks simultaneously. The team will likely fail at each of those tasks. Instead, leaders must determine the highest priority task and execute.”

8. Decentralized Command

“Junior leaders must be empowered to make decisions on key tasks necessary to accomplish that mission in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Every tactical-level team leader must understand not just what to do, but why they are doing it. They must have implicit trust that their senior leaders will back their decisions. Without this trust, junior leaders cannot confidently execute.”

9. Plan

“Giving the frontline troops ownership of even a small piece of the plan gives them buy-in, helps them understand the reasons behind the plan, and better enables them to believe in the mission which translates to far more effective implementation and execution on the ground.”

10. Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command

“If your boss isn’t making a decision in a timely manner, or providing necessary support for you and your team, don’t blame the boss. First, blame yourself. Examine what you can do to better convey the critical information for decisions to be made and support allocated.”

11. Decisiveness amid Uncertainty

“There is no 100 percent right solution. The picture is never complete. Leaders must be comfortable with this and be able to make decisions promptly, then be ready to adjust those decisions quickly based on evolving situations and new information. Intelligence gathering and research are important, but they must be employed with realistic expectations and must not impede swift decision making. Waiting for the 100 percent right and certain solution leads to delay, indecision, and an inability to execute.”

12. Discipline Equals Freedom

“Instead of making us more rigid, and unable to improvise, strict discipline made us more flexible, more adaptable, and more efficient. It allowed us to be creative. When we wanted to change plans midstream on an operation, we didn’t have to recreate an entire plan. While increased discipline most often results in more freedom, there are some teams that become so restricted by imposed discipline that they inhibit their leader’s and team’s ability to make decisions and think freely. If frontline leaders executing the mission lack the ability to adapt, this becomes detrimental to the team’s performance.”