Extreme ownership – taking ownership for what you do

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“There are no bad teams, only bad leadership” Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

Own your actions and take responsibility for them – HoskWisdom

The book Extreme Ownership is written by two Seal officers and the core message is leaders take extreme ownership and responsibility for the actions of their team.

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

by Jocko Willink (Author), Leif Babin (Author)

There are some great quotes in the book which I’m sure many readers can empathize with

“If I shouted less and encouraged more, my team would have done better“

I believe in encouraging effort, skills and ability can be learnt but without a person putting in effort nothing gets done. Instead of criticizing, shouting or blaming individuals you should focus on encouragement and how people can get better.

Humble

“I had to take complete ownership of what went wrong. That is what a leader does — even if it means getting fired. If anyone was to be blamed and fired for what happened, let it be me.”

The leader must take responsibility for the teams actions. If someone checks in bad code this is because the person felt it was ok. If the quality of someone’s work isn’t good enough, it‘s because you have explained the standard you expect.

Implementing Extreme ownership requires checking your ego and operation with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team. Ego can prevent a leader from conducting an honest, realistic assessment of his or her own performance and the performance of the team. Jocko Willink

Standards

“When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable — if there are no consequences — that poor performance becomes the new standard. Therefore, leaders must enforce standards.” Jocko Willink

This is true for development if you don’t define the standards you expect or if you let people developers check in lower quality code, this will become the norm and other developers will follow suit.

“It‘s not what you preach, it‘s what you tolerate“ Jocko Willink

Developing CRM customisation should be focused on quality, these articles on the topic

You are responsible

The key message in the book is extreme ownership and you are responsible for the work produced by the team you work in.

You collaborate with other people and teams, sometimes the quality of work or the the time taken to produce the work can have a negative effect on the project.

It‘s easy to place the blame on other people and think you have done your work so the blame should be attributed to you. Extreme ownership says you should take responsibility for any work you have worked on.

If you are the leader of a team, you can ask yourself could you have done better. Could you

Explained things clearer
helped others resolve their pain points
given more help (resources, knowledge)
can you work differently to help others to their part of the work

If some part of the project is not working you should think what can you do better to help the team work more effectively because you are responsible for delivering the project and how can you do that better. You might be working with other people but it doesn’t mean the responsibility of the work done.

When individuals make mistakes it’s not usually the individual who is at fault but the system which let them make a mistake. The problem is not with the individual but inherent in the systems and processes.

Filed under: CRM 2011