Revisited: The Permissionless Command of Love 📙

"Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual"

Welcome to Selections. Where we slide a book off the shelf or a record from the stack, and talk about it. I’ve got something just for you.

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Reminded of my personal need for growth in leadership yet again, I return to this cornerstone of my personal analog metaverse. Jocko Willink may be a part of the increasingly cringe-filled Stoic Sheepdog corner of our digital realm, but I think I may be able to convince you that he’s one of the more genuine thinkers in his neighborhood. At the very least, he has personally earned far more of his observations and insights than most so-called practitioners. His work accomplishes something that few Business and Leadership Books manage: arming the reader with practical tools that resist useless sloganeering, and are out of step with the anodyne nonsense of majority corporate thought. In a world of manipulation, posturing and lies, this refreshing blast of uncompromising wisdom is bound to cause protest. Good. Our communities, organizations and families are floundering in a season of change. We exist in the liminal transit between ages, and we are beginning to suffer from a severe lack of true leaders. Perhaps it’s time to stop looking around. Take the mantle.

Photo by Chetan Menaria on Unsplash

Acting as something of a summary and implementation of several previous works, this Field Manual allows Willink to articulate his particular brand of adapted military leadership concepts for the layman. Some of these leadership principles may seem elementary or simplistic, while others are countercultural in their extremity. But the most surprising thing about the book is how completely applicable it is to almost any situation. This uncomplicated, inescapable set of drop-forged excuse-shattering hammers brings the power directly to the individual. You are free to excuse yourself from the responsibilities they entail, but at least you can’t say that you were unable to make a difference. So you see brokenness and corruption everywhere? Time to take some action. Precious few of us will receive a signed mandate, so we’re going to have to strike out into the dark.

I. Cover and Move

A leader puts themselves at the bottom of the priority list. The good of the mission and the good of the team outweigh any personal concern a true leader has for themselves. ~ Jocko Willink, Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual

If you recognize failure inside any structure, recognize also that success will be the result of coordinated effort and communication. Oh wow, so innovative. Teamwork. But the reminders wouldn’t be necessary if this was being perfectly executed. The fact is that actual transparent communication, unselfish action, and open exchange of ideas is almost unheard of in most workplaces, in many families. The Cover and Move principle refers to the method of movement used by a military fireteam when executing “bounding overwatch,” one team member providing covering fire while the other sprints forward, providing their own base of fire in turn for their teammate’s movement. What differentiates this principle from every other “work together kids, there’s no I in team” saccharide is the fact that Willink’s leadership mentality requires much more of us. This is both an intense awareness of one’s own identity, responsibilities and capabilities (there is in fact an I in team, and I am the only person I can control), while simultaneously a willingness to sacrificially risk ourselves so that the mission can succeed. It is a counter-modern approach that elevates the mission above both the team members as units (radical individualism) and also above the team as a whole (radical communalism). Blandly submitting your thoughts and drives to your manager for correction since The Team is paramount would be abject failure according to Willink. Instead, every team member must be able to critically evaluate their immediate circumstances and select a target that will enable their comrades to succeed, while trusting that their comrades will do the same for them.

If you sense the failure of your team, perhaps the simplest immediate action you could take would be to cover someone else. How can you immediately give your boss, or a subordinate or colleague or family member, room to maneuver? Doing this, and doing it selflessly, will bring an instant shot of adrenaline to the situation. Things will become clear, solutions will be uncovered, tension will at least stop ratcheting upward. Are you guaranteed to receive reward? Absolutely not. But remember that this whole thing only works when you are pressing towards a mission that you count above your own gain and ends. You are reserving your ultimate effort for people you would die for, right?

II. Simple

The easy path leads to misery. The path of discipline leads them to freedom. ~ Jocko Willink, Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual

Complication and analysis are conspiring to kill you and your team. The corner cases and exceptions aren’t your friend. They’re just comforting crannies for you to hide away from your fear. Ruthlessly demand simplicity of yourself and others so that you increase your chances of actually accomplishing your goals. This is especially true if you find yourself in a chaotic or leaderless situation. If everything is coming apart, and you are the one who sees it, then it is time to step into the breach and take radically simple actions. Ensure that the people you want to follow you can completely understand and support what you’re doing. Leave nothing to chance or assumption. Don’t allow yourself the luxury of detailed plans, obsessive self-protection, and carefully maintained lines of responsibility. The failsafe and underengineered way is the way of the crisis leader.

You will quickly realize that it is in fact much easier for lazy and fearful leaders to cloak their lack of tactical and strategic mastery with layer upon layer of complicated cruft. That way, failure can always be attributed to anything or anyone else. But Willink constantly boils leadership down to the concept of Extreme Ownership: that which is in your control is your responsibility, and therefore failure of the team is the leader’s responsibility. Simplicity removes excuses and distractions. Clarity is difficult to attain, but there is freedom beyond the fog.

III. Prioritize and Execute

While there are many similarities between leaders and manipulators, there is one glaring difference: manipulators are trying to get people to do things that will benefit the manipulator, while leaders are trying to get people to do things that will benefit the team and the people themselves. ~ Jocko Willink, Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual

While you are waiting for someone else to lead, or for the rest of the team to get their act together, or for the situation to change in your favor, time refuses to be on your side. Act, now. Willink’s action-biased “Default Aggressive” stance is not an excuse for reckless disregard for appropriate risk, but rather a reminder that waiting for decisions to be made elsewhere is most frequently a decision to allow team failure while preserving personal lack of culpability. The Field Manual provides abundant examples of how to observe, triage and pursue solutions. The beauty here is that simply by forcing yourself to default to positive action, you will find yourself in de facto leadership almost instantly. The lack of clear and authoritative guidance in most situations we encounter leaves people desperate for a calm and reasoned voice to dispense some wise counsel. If you can let go of your prideful need for titles and positions, you will find yourself doing what Willink calls “leading up and down the chain of command.” As the rock steady pivot point for your team, you will enable and activate others by stepping back from the situation, identifying the immediate need, and moving towards the solution. Even verbalizing this process in stressful moments can unstick others, giving them the space needed to regain focus and reengage. The people around you don’t require a perfect leader, they just need a beacon to converge around.

Photo by Thomas Couillard on Unsplash

IV. Decentralized Command

Solid relationships up and down the chain of command are the basis of all good leadership. ~ Jocko Willink, Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual

This final principle immediately establishes leadership as something that must be practiced, not just at the top of the organizational chart, but at every level of any team that hopes to succeed. What you see is your responsibility. What is your responsibility is able to be executed from your position with the help of others. Leadership is convincing others to work together with you towards what you see. And absolutely none of this requires official permission or status. You are free to stop complaining, right now, and throw yourself on that brokenness in your marriage or failure in your workplace. Aggressively, decisively, ignoring the voice of fear. The excuses you are conjuring right now sound safe and reasonable, but they are all, as Willink loves to remind us, lies. The reality is that the world consists primarily in nexuses of soft power. Master the art of the gentle bit of advice, the careful observation, the perfect example that inspires imitation. Act, and trust that others are watching. Even in the most hierarchical and suffocating of structures, individual action is able to break up impasses and cause positive impact. If this is true in adverse circumstances, then the good leader’s job is to create an environment where leadership is spread across the entire team by design.

Now that you’ve taken command and begun to move forward, are you hoarding outward business and responsibilities as markers of your importance? Force yourself to step back and allow the team to function. Call others higher, expect more of them than they know is possible. Hand them the important tasks and make failure a badge of progress. Demand of yourself the humility to give the credit and spotlight to others. Let go of every goal but the true mission. The quests worth our lives are open to even the humblest among us.

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Of course the biggest secret of the whole leadership discussion is that Willink, while he does a fantastic job of explaining and exemplifying, is inventing nothing. In fact, he has essentially rediscovered the Servant Leadership ethos exemplified by Jesus Christ and, at their best, His disciples and Church. If you substitute the nomenclature, you immediately realize that there was a reason the whole thing sounded familiar. In decentralized leadership where personal responsibility and personal sacrifice are demanded in pursuit of the vital mission, the first are indeed the last. But the last are also the first. The upside-down Kingdom requires no binding power stronger than the authority of love. When all are mutually submitted to the Word of God, then no one of us dares claim unique supremacy, but all serve in positions of various responsibility to one another. And so the Spiritual War is fought. True humility is willing to suffer for the brother rather than see him suffer. By this sign, we conquer.

As usual, you are free to appropriate the software and install it wherever you feel it will operationalize. And yes, you really can put these things into practice in your own life. Today, in fact. While it may be vogueish to discount the voices of our past as simple and backwards, we would do well to heed those who have suffered for the advice they give. If it works in environments of maximum stress, do you really think your office park presents a new and insurmountable challenge? Humility teaches us the more excellent way. Look out for those around you, and accept the weight of the leader’s yoke so that they may thrive in your wake. Take up your cross daily. Many even weaker than you are watching in hope. Will you disappoint them?

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And Jesus called them to him and said to them, "You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” ~ Mark 10:42-45