INTRODUCTION
THE ROOTS OF LEARNING LEADERSHIP
When I reported to SEAL Team One after completing Basic Underwater Demolition / SEAL Training (BUD/S), there was no leadership course. New SEALs were issued no books or materials of any kind on the subject. We were expected to learn to lead the way SEALs had learned for our entire existence—through OJT, or on-the-job training.
Of course, there are some advantages to OJT. It is helpful to be coached and mentored by a solid leader who trains you as you go through the real challenges of your actual job. In the SEAL Teams, that means a leader telling you exactly what to do in various scenarios as you go through them. If your leader happens to be a good leader, is willing to invest in you, and if you are smart enough to pay attention, you will eventually learn something about leadership.
But there are some major shortfalls to this method of teaching leadership. First of all, not all leaders are good leaders, and the SEAL Teams are no exception. When I got into the SEAL Teams, it was 1991. There was no war going on. The first Gulf War had just been fought, but the ground war was over in just seventy-two hours. SEALs only conducted a small number of operations, and they were relatively easy. Almost all other deployments before that, for the better part of twenty years, had been peacetime deployments. SEALs’ primary task had been training other countries’ militaries. Actually engaging in combat seemed a far-off dream to me and to most of us in the military. The reality was, the SEAL Teams—and the rest of the U.S. military—had been in a peacetime mode since the end of the Vietnam War. That meant leaders weren’t really tested. A great leader in the SEAL Teams got pretty much the same assignments and advanced just as quickly as a bad leader.
There was no guarantee that the leader in a platoon who was supposed to be mentoring young SEALs was the type of leader who should be emulated. On top of that, not all leaders are looking to mentor their subordinates. Furthermore, even the best leaders can only truly invest their time and knowledge in a handful of their people. Even during peacetime, there is a ton of administrative work to be done, and there is a good chance that leadership coaching and mentorship will slide off the schedule.
For the junior SEALs, it was incumbent upon them to pay attention. But there were also plenty of distractions. Sometimes it was difficult for a junior member of the team to understand he would not always be a new guy—that one day he would be a leader in a SEAL platoon, and he needed to learn everything he could so he would be ready.
I was lucky. I had some truly great leaders who invested in me. They took the time to explain things to me. They talked me through strategies and tactics. Some of the Vietnam SEALs told stories that held important tactical leadership lessons. I listened. Those stories and lessons sank in. Eventually, I was able to put the leadership theories I had learned to the ultimate test—in combat. I then codified those lessons and passed them to the young SEALs entering the ranks. I tried to teach them how to lead.
The goal of leadership seems simple: to get people to do what they need to do to support the mission and the team. But the practice of leadership is different for everyone. There are nuances to leadership that everyone has to uncover for themselves. Leaders are different. Followers are different. Peers are different. Everyone has their own individual characteristics, personalities, and perspectives. I often tell leaders that what makes leadership so hard is dealing with people, and people are crazy. And the craziest person a leader has to deal with is themselves. That being said, even crazy has a pattern; there are patterns to human behavior. If you can recognize the patterns, you can predict the way things are likely to unfold and influence them.
When I retired from the military, I started teaching civilian leaders the same principles of combat leadership. Eventually, I partnered with my former SEAL teammate Leif Babin and started a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front. The principles from the battlefield applied to any leadership situation. We wrote about the tenets we had learned in combat in two books about our experience as combat leaders and how the principles of combat leadership apply to business and life. The books, Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership, explain the principles in clear language and showcase the principles in stories from combat and the business world. The feedback from leaders around the world has been incredibly powerful as they apply the principles from the books to their worlds.
But applying the principles can be more challenging than it might seem. While garnering an understanding of the concepts is fairly simple, sometimes it takes more. A leader must understand the strategies and tactics needed to actually implement these principles—how to pragmatically put the principles to work. He or she must understand the strategic foundations on which the principles are built and the core tenets that comprise those principles. Then the leader must understand the tactical skills, strategic maneuvers, and communication techniques used to employ the principles of leadership. That is what this book is about.
Like other books I’ve written, the experiences I describe are based on my memory, which isn’t perfect; the quotes are not verbatim, but approximations meant to convey the ideas that were spoken. Some details have been altered to protect the identities of the people involved or sensitive information.
This book does not need to be read only sequentially from cover to cover. It is written and organized to be used as a reference so that any leader can quickly understand and implement the strategies and tactics relevant to the situation he or she is facing. Leadership Strategy and Tactics is meant as a field companion to help leaders do what they are supposed to do: lead.
Who am I to try to teach leaders how to lead? Where did I learn leadership? Much of my leadership education was luck. I say it was luck because there were a few fortunate coincidences that gave me the right frame of mind, the right teachers, and the right opportunities to learn.
One of the ways I was lucky and that made me focus on leadership was the fact that I wasn’t really that naturally talented at anything in particular. As a little kid, I wasn’t the fastest or strongest or smartest. I was never great at shooting a basketball, kicking a soccer ball, or throwing a baseball. I didn’t win any races or have a shelf of trophies and ribbons from sports. My report card was never exceptional either. I might have done well in a class if I was interested, but I usually wasn’t, and my grades reflected that. I was average across the board.
Still, at the core of my personality, I wanted to do well. I wanted to leave an impression on people. I wanted to leave a mark, but my athletic and cognitive skills didn’t always allow it. So even from a young age, I needed to get others with more talent and more skill to do what I needed them to do. I needed to lead.
Of course, I didn’t think of it as leadership. I just thought I was making things happen and contributing by getting people to work together, to support one another, as we moved toward a common mission. Maybe that mission was building a fort in the woods or planning a mock military assault with squirt guns on another group of friends. Whatever the task was, I generally found myself giving direction to people who were stronger, faster, or otherwise more capable than I was. That seemed to be where I could help the most and the one area in which I could perform with a higher level of competency.
I’ve also always had a rebellious streak. Maybe it was another way for me to leave a mark; I wouldn’t conform to the way other kids acted. I acted differently, listened to hardcore and heavy metal music, and had a hardcore attitude about things. That attitude set me apart from the pack. Once on the outside of the “normal” kids, I was detached from them. So I observed. Looking in from the outside, I garnered a better understanding of the people I was watching. I saw their emotions, their cliques, and their drama unfold from a detached position. I learned.
My rebelliousness reached its pinnacle when I decided to join the navy. Many of the other kids in my small New England town were smoking pot, drinking, and listening to hippie music. After high school, many were heading away to college or going into a trade. Joining the military was one of the most radical things a kid from my town could do. I took it one step further: I tried for the SEAL Teams.
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, no one knew very much about the SEAL Teams. My navy recruiter had one bad copy of the SEAL recruiting video entitled Be Someone Special. While completely cheesy by today’s standards, at the time it provided me with a window into the SEAL Teams: machine guns, snipers, explosives, and high-speed operations. It was like a dream come true. I enlisted.
When I told my father I was joining the navy, he told me, “You are going to hate it.”
“Why?” I asked him.
“Because you don’t like authority, and you don’t like people telling you what to do.”
“But, Dad,” I responded confidently, “this is the SEAL Teams. It is a team. We don’t take orders. We work together.”
What a naïve kid I was. Actually, I was just plain stupid. I thought the SEAL Teams were just groups of guys who worked together, flat organizations where no one was really in charge. Not even close. I also had heard that the SEAL Teams had a 50 percent casualty rate and that almost no one made it to a twenty-year retirement because most SEALs were wounded or killed. Mind you, this was 1989, but other than the invasion of Panama, where combat operations lasted only about a month and a half, we weren’t at war. Looking back, I’m sure this idea of a 50 percent casualty rate was rooted in the fact that the predecessors to the SEAL Teams—the Naval Combat Demolition Units, or NCDUs—had suffered a 50 percent casualty rate during the D-day invasion of Normandy Beach. I didn’t know that at the time. I thought all SEALs had a 50 percent casualty rate, and I believed it. It made me even more eager to be a part of the SEAL Teams. Like I said, I was dumb. Tough, but dumb.
But joining the navy was still the best thing I could have done. It gave me a blank slate and clear direction. No one in the navy cared that I didn’t have the best grades in high school. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t the best athlete. No one was concerned about where I was from, what my parents did, or about anything else in my history. They shaved my head, gave me a uniform, and told me what I needed to do to be successful. Make your bed like this, fold your underwear like that, polish your boondockers until they look like mirrors. If you could follow the rules and do what you were told to do, you would be put into a leadership position. I did follow the rules, and I did what I was told to do, and it paid off. I was made a squad leader in boot camp. What does that mean? Technically, not much at all, but it meant a lot to me. I was successful. But more important, I had found a home.
BUD/S was the same way for me. I still wasn’t great at any particular skill. Not the best runner or swimmer. Not great at the obstacle course. But I could do what I was told. I could play the game. And I wasn’t going to quit. Some people say that everyone thinks about quitting during BUD/S. I never did. Not for a second. The thought never crossed my mind. Hell Week, a five-day block of continuous physical training with almost no sleep whatsoever and which causes the highest number of people to quit, was actually relaxing for me, because during Hell Week, nothing is timed. During all other facets of BUD/S, students are constantly on the clock. Timed runs, swims, and obstacle course evolutions take place every day. If you miss the time and fail one of them, you are “on the bubble.” If you fail again, you are out. It was stressful. But during Hell Week, nothing was timed. You just had to keep going. You just had to not quit. For me, that was the easy part.
When I got done with BUD/S, I checked into SEAL Team One. I was fired up, as all of us were who were checking into that sacred place of war heroes and legends. We were proud we had graduated BUD/S and were ready for life as SEALs. There was one problem. We weren’t SEALs yet. And we had no reason to be proud, as we soon found out.
The master chief of the command, the highest-ranking enlisted SEAL at Team One, welcomed us aboard. “No one here cares that you made it through BUD/S. We all did. It doesn’t mean anything here. You have to prove yourselves to earn your trident. So keep your mouths shut, your ears open, don’t forget anything, and be on time. Any questions?” The trident was the gold insignia worn on the uniform, which indicates you are a SEAL. To receive our tridents, we had to go through a six-month probationary period and then go through a written and oral review board with the senior enlisted personnel at the team. We were all nervous about that, and the master chief provided no comfort whatsoever.
None of us had any questions for the master chief. That was a humbling moment. Despite having been through BUD/S training, and despite being told that the training was “elite” and “special,” we realized very quickly that we weren’t. The rest of the new guys and I still had a lot to prove, and somehow, I knew I always would. That is one of the underlying themes of SEAL Team culture: you can never rest on what you have achieved in the past. You always have to improve.
In the early ’90s, when I got to SEAL Team One, the training progression was different from how it is now. Back then, once on board a team, you were eventually assigned to a SEAL platoon. This is where you would actually learn to be a SEAL. Up until that point, the training wasn’t tactical. In BUD/S, you don’t learn very much at all about the actual job of being a SEAL. You learn how to be cold, wet, tired, and miserable and not to complain about any of it. But you don’t learn any of the job skills that make you into a professional operator. Those skills were taught to you once you were in a SEAL platoon. There, you learned through a fire hose. There was so much knowledge you needed, so many skills to develop, so many tactics to understand, you felt you would never know it all. But like the rest of the new guys, I listened and I learned. Every single day.
In my first three platoons, I learned a few key concepts that stuck with me for the rest of my career, and they also were the base upon which I built most of the principles I ended up teaching to the rest of the SEAL Teams and, eventually, to companies, businesses, and organizations around the globe. These are examples of the lucky moments I referred to earlier. I was in the right place at the right time, with the right frame of mind to learn what I did. Then I was lucky enough to have other experiences to overlay what I had learned and slowly, subconsciously, begin to formulate a system of leadership that I was then lucky enough to apply on one of the most challenging battlefields in the world—the Battle of Ramadi in the summer of 2006. When I returned from that deployment, I took over the training for the West Coast SEAL Teams, where I formalized, codified, and transcribed what I had learned. But the roots of everything I eventually wrote down originated in a very nontraditional but highly effective learning environment: the SEAL platoon.
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