Navy Seals Leadership Quotes

After all, there can be no leadership where there is no team.

We learned that leadership requires belief in the mission and unyielding perseverance to achieve victory, particularly when doubters question whether victory is even possible. As

The Dichotomy of Leadership A good leader must be: • confident but not cocky; • courageous but not foolhardy; • competitive but a gracious loser; • attentive to details but not obsessed by them; • strong but have endurance; • a leader and follower; • humble not passive; • aggressive not overbearing; • quiet not silent; • calm but not robotic, logical but not devoid of emotions; • close with the troops but not so close that one becomes more important than another or more important than the good of the team; not so close that they forget who is in charge. • able to execute Extreme Ownership, while exercising Decentralized Command. A good leader has nothing to prove, but everything to prove. APPLICATION

We learned that leadership requires belief in the mission and unyielding perseverance to achieve victory, particularly when doubters question whether victory is even possible.

leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities, between one extreme and another. The

To me, this is one of the strongest marks of great leadership. Nobody is always right. Great leaders use that to learn and improve, instead of fighting it.

Leadership is simple, but not easy.

The best predictor of success is grit. How you choose to respond to life’s trials—your uncommon moments—is everything.

Leadership isn’t one person leading a team. It is a group of leaders working together, up and down the chain of command, to lead. If

The U.S. Navy SEAL Teams were at the forefront of this leadership transformation, emerging from the triumphs and tragedies of war with a crystallized understanding of what it takes to succeed in the most challenging environments that combat presents.

Purposeful living is a strong indicator of happiness. Live big. Believe bigger. Thrive always.

We wrote this so that the leadership lessons can continue to impact teams beyond the battlefield in all leadership situations—any company, team, or organization in which a group of people strives to achieve a goal and accomplish a mission.

If you don’t understand or believe in the decisions coming down from your leadership, it is up to you to ask questions until you understand how and why those decisions are being made. Not knowing the why prohibits you from believing in the mission. When you are in a leadership position, that is a recipe for failure, and it is unacceptable. As a leader, you must believe.

leadership is the single greatest factor in any team’s performance. Whether a team succeeds or fails is all up to the leader. The leader’s attitude sets the tone for the entire team. The leader drives performance—or doesn’t. And this applies not just to the most senior leader of an overall team, but to the junior leaders of teams within the team.

Leading large groups of people, motivating and inspiring them to accomplish a common goal regardless of adversity or danger—that’s the essence of dynamic leadership.

As a leader, it is up to you to explain the bigger picture to him—and to all your front line leaders. That is a critical component of leadership,” I

Leadership doesn’t just flow down the chain of command, but up as well,” he said. “We have to own everything in our world. That’s what Extreme Ownership is all about.

The goal of all leaders should be to work themselves out of a job. This means leaders must be heavily engaged in training and mentoring their junior leaders to prepare them to step up and assume greater responsibilities. When mentored and coached properly, the junior leader can eventually replace the senior leader, allowing the senior leader to move on to the next level of leadership.

To be extraordinary is to accept and embrace repeated failings, recover as quickly as possible; that is let go of all your reasons and excuses to justify the failing; then move on to carry out your

The most impressive thing about this improvement in performance was that it did not come from a major process change or an advance in technology. Instead, it came through a leadership principle that has been around for ages: Simple.

Boat Crew Six had become comfortable with substandard performance. Working under poor leadership and an unending cycle of blame, the team constantly failed. No one took ownership, assumed responsibility, or adopted a winning attitude.

The Dichotomy of Leadership A good leader must be: • confident but not cocky; • courageous but not foolhardy; • competitive but a gracious loser; • attentive to details but not obsessed by them; • strong but have endurance; • a leader and follower; • humble not passive; • aggressive not overbearing; • quiet not silent; • calm but not robotic, logical but not devoid of emotions; • close with the troops but not so close that one becomes more important than another or more important than the good of the team; not so close that they forget who is in charge. • able to execute Extreme Ownership, while exercising Decentralized Command. A good leader has nothing to prove, but everything to prove.

But without a team—a group of individuals working to accomplish a mission—there can be no leadership. The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails. For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not. The

Some may wonder how Navy SEAL combat leadership principles translate outside the military realm to leading any team in any capacity. But combat is reflective of life, only amplified and intensified. Decisions have immediate consequences, and everything—absolutely everything—is at stake. The right decision, even when all seems lost, can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The wrong decision, even when a victorious outcome seems all but certain, can result in deadly, catastrophic failure. In that regard, a combat leader can acquire a lifetime of leadership lessons learned in only a few deployments.

Leaders must live by the same principles and values that they expect from their teams and people. Leadership is about action: leaders must do their part before asking others to do theirs. Walk the walk; don’t just talk.

Take care of your people" is one of the principle lessons of military leadership. If we take care of our people on deployment, why should that change when we come home?

Our relations seemed poor to me, and I wasn't surprised that the US intelligence picture in the Horn of Africa was weak. Much of what I read consisted of recycled news headlines repackaged as intelligence. Real, valuable intelligence only came from real people, yet we hadn't done much to meet and work with the people.

A functioning team is more than just a group of people with a common goal. It’s a group of people who can work toward that common goal despite having different opinions about how to reach it. No, not everyone has the same say. No, not everyone’s opinion will play a part in the end. The boss makes the final decision and will live or hang by that decision.

How do successful leaders respond when someone congratulates them on a good job? They start talking about the great team they’ve got working for them. How this person or that person stepped up in the effort. Or how everyone really came together to pull through. Why? Because they know what it takes to succeed. It takes a team.

On the other hand, when you work hard, do your job, and help others on your team, you’ll make a lasting impression. People remember who was competent, who worked hard, who was fair, and who was their friend. People will remember when you came through.

The greatest enthusiasm in the world won’t make up for a business plan that doesn’t work.

Getting a job done fast is fruitless if it isn’t done right. Individuals and Teams must constantly evaluate their progress. If an individual or Team starts to lose focus, they must take a step back and review.

if there really is no way you can win, you never say it out loud. You assess why, change strategy, adjust tactics, and keep fighting and pushing till either you’ve gotten a better outcome or you’ve died. Either way, you never quit when your country needs you to succeed. As Team 5 was shutting down the workup and loading up its gear, our task unit’s leadership flew to Ramadi to do what we call a predeployment site survey. Lieutenant Commander Thomas went, and so did both of our platoon officers in charge. It was quite an adventure. They were shot at every day. They were hit by IEDs. When they came home, Lieutenant Commander Thomas got us together in the briefing room and laid out the details. The general reaction from the team was, “Get ready, kids. This is gonna be one hell of a ride.” I remember sitting around the team room talking about it. Morgan had a big smile on his face. Elliott Miller, too, all 240 pounds of him, looked happy. Even Mr. Fantastic seemed at peace and relaxed, in that sober, senior chief way. We turned over in our minds the hard realities of the city. Only a couple weeks from now we would be calling Ramadi home. For six or seven months we’d be living in a hornet’s nest, picking up where Team 3 had left off. It was time for us to roll. In late September, Al Qaeda’s barbaric way of dealing with the local population was stirring some of Iraq’s Sunni tribal leaders to come over to our side. (Stuff like punishing cigarette smokers by cutting off their fingers—can you blame locals for wanting those crazies gone?) Standing up for their own people posed a serious risk, but it was easier to justify when you had five thousand American military personnel backing you up. That’ll boost your courage, for sure. We were putting that vise grip on that city, infiltrating it, and setting up shop, block by block, house by house, inch by inch. On September 29, a Team 3 platoon set out on foot from a combat outpost named Eagle’s Nest on the final operation of their six-month deployment. Located in the dangerous Ma’laab district, it wasn’t much more than a perimeter of concrete walls and concertina wire bundling up a block of residential homes. COP Eagle’s

And they wouldn’t hold it against me, nor did I think they were infringing on my ‘leadership turf.’ On the contrary, I would thank them for covering for me. Leadership isn’t one person leading a team. It is a group of leaders working together, up and down the chain of command, to lead. If you are on your own, I don’t care how good you are, you won’t be able to handle it.

This can have devastating consequences for the fast-growing company. Over a short period of time, say a year, the number of employees can leap from 50 to 150 in a startup, or from 150 to 500 or more during a later phase of rapid growth when the business model is promising and the funding is in the bank. Seemingly overnight, the new employees can vastly outnumber their predecessors, and this dynamic can permanently redefine the corporate culture. Brent Gleeson, a leadership coach and Navy SEAL combat veteran, writes, “Organizational culture comes about in one of two ways. It’s either decisively defined, nurtured and protected from the inception of the organization; or—more typically—it comes about haphazardly as a collective sum of the beliefs, experiences and behaviors of those on the team. Either way, you will have a culture. For better or worse.”2

One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss—your immediate leadership.

In any chain of command, the leadership must always present a united front to the troops. A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority of leaders at all levels. This is catastrophic to the performance of any organization. As a leader, if you don’t understand why decisions are being made, requests denied, or support allocated elsewhere, you must ask those questions up the chain. Then, once understood, you can pass that understanding down to your team. Leaders in any chain of command will not always agree. But at the end of the day, once the debate on a particular course of action is over and the boss has made a decision—even if that decision is one you argued against—you must execute the plan as if it were your own. When leading up the chain of command, use caution and respect. But remember, if your leader is not giving the support you need, don’t blame him or her. Instead, reexamine what you can do to better clarify, educate, influence, or convince that person to give you what you need in order to win. The major factors to be aware of when leading up and down the chain of command are these: • Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike. • If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this. • Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do. APPLICATION TO BUSINESS “Corporate doesn’t understand what’s going on out here,” said the field manager. “Whatever experience those guys had in the field from years ago, they have long forgotten. They just don’t get what we are dealing with, and their questions and second-guessing prevents me and my team from getting the job done.” The infamous they. I was on a visit to a client company’s field leadership team, the frontline troops that executed the company’s mission. This was where the rubber met the road: all the corporate capital initiatives, strategic planning sessions, and allocated resources were geared to support this team here on the ground. How the frontline troops executed the mission would ultimately mean success or failure for the entire company. The field manager’s team was geographically separated from their corporate headquarters located hundreds of miles away. He was clearly frustrated. The field manager had a job to do, and he was angry at the questions and scrutiny from afar. For every task his team undertook he was required to submit substantial paperwork. In his mind, it made for a lot more work than necessary and detracted from his team’s focus and ability to execute. I listened and allowed him to vent for several minutes. “I’ve been in your shoes,” I said. “I used to get frustrated as hell at my chain of command when we were in Iraq. They

In any chain of command, the leadership must always present a united front to the troops. A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority of leaders at all levels. This is catastrophic to the performance of any organization. As a leader, if you don’t understand why decisions are being made, requests denied, or support allocated elsewhere, you must ask those questions up the chain. Then, once understood, you can pass that understanding down to your team. Leaders in any chain of command will not always agree. But at the end of the day, once the debate on a particular course of action is over and the boss has made a decision—even if that decision is one you argued against—you must execute the plan as if it were your own. When leading up the chain of command, use caution and respect. But remember, if your leader is not giving the support you need, don’t blame him or her. Instead, reexamine what you can do to better clarify, educate, influence, or convince that person to give you what you need in order to win. The major factors to be aware of when leading up and down the chain of command are these: • Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike. • If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this. • Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do.

Everyone walking this planet has a compelling God-given purpose. It’s unique to you. No one else can pull it off. It’s yours. It fulfills your deepest need for significance.

Failure’s nothing more than an opportunity for greater success.

Look for the best in others, even when it’s obscured. Positivity begets more positivity.

You can measure the joy in a person’s life by the amount of joy they invest in others.

Keep wise people around you who have similar goals. Iron sharpens iron.

Don’t be ordinary; strive for extraordinary. Demand excellence in everything.

We learned that leadership requires belief in the mission and unyielding perseverance to achieve victory,

leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield and the principles of good leadership do not change regardless of the mission, the environment, or the personalities of those involved. Leading is leading.

The Dichotomy of Leadership A good leader must be: • confident but not cocky; • courageous but not foolhardy; • competitive but a gracious loser; • attentive to details but not obsessed by them; • strong but have endurance; • a leader and follower; • humble not passive; • aggressive not overbearing; • quiet not silent; • calm but not robotic, logical but not devoid of emotions; • close with the troops but not so close that one becomes more important than another or more important than the good of the team; not so close that they forget who is in charge.

When I say intentional communication, I mean impeccably precise, painfully specific word choices.

We can pay now in time spent honing our language skills, or we can pay later in uncoordinated action, conflicts, and a lack of accountability.

Distinction Purpose is that which drives toward a specific end.

I’ve been reading this amazing book by a Navy SEAL who says that high-functioning teams must be clear on three things: the purpose of the team, my role within the team, and the value I bring to the team. I want to take actions that are consistently aligned with those things, but I’m not clear on what some of them are. This is what I think our team’s purpose is, what my role is, what value I bring to the team, and what valuable actions I must hold. Am I on track?

We never failed to plan, yet we always planned to fail.

Everyone led except our managers; they empowered leadership.

If the role of a manager is to create, enable, and support leaders, the next question to ask is what behaviors are critical for creating, enabling, and supporting leaders? Here are the three that deserve attention: Create and communicate a clear Desired End State. Create, support, and enable leadership. Be a safety net in case of failure.

The purest form of leadership is the ability to evoke effective action in others naturally, without force.

There was something different about this drill though—the pace. The tempo was furious. Generally, during a drill, an attack occurs approximately every eight to ten seconds. With the Steiner brothers, an attack occurred every three to five seconds. My body and mind grew tired. I hit a threshold of exhaustion, resulting in my inability to control any deliberate movements. My mind unraveled as Gable and his staff looked on. Fortunately, Coach yelled the most coveted word on the planet when extreme fatigue hits, “Time.” I was exhausted and relieved. I realized I’d barely made it through this intense and exhausting drill. Winners don’t just make it through. They thrive. The Elite thrive in the toughest environments. The Steiner’s were thriving. I wasn’t. They didn’t seem tired at all, but I was dying. My heart rate spiked to a level that caused the lack of oxygen to my brain and muscles. The Elite never want to be in scenarios where the stakes are high and their preparation is below the level of challenge. We’ll always sink to the level of our training. It’s a Navy Seal creed, but it’s also truth. Unfortunately, I lived that scenario during that training session. I

Distinction Language is a highly effective tool that humans use to coordinate action, dependent on a shared background of experience.

If you want to be an effective leader, you have to be an astute observer (and practitioner) of words and actions—both your own and those of others—because effective language is not passive. It is an active tool for action.

If you want to accomplish a lot of stuff, by all means, follow that pattern. The harder you struggle today, the more accomplishment you’ll have tomorrow. It’s true. But in the end, if you’ve struggled your entire life for a bunch of accomplishments but never felt the joy and satisfaction and experience of being truly successful…What’s the fucking point?

True success is not a future reward. It’s a daily experience. If you can let go of the struggle long enough to optimize your daily experience—not on vacation or on the rare day off, but in a way that’s truly sustainable—you can experience success right now. And not just now, but in the future as well.

Success is an optimized daily experience that’s sustainable over time.

Distinction Success is an optimized daily experience that’s sustainable over time.

When people come to us for help, we ask ourselves very different questions, too: Is this something that is going to lead to the emotional state that I want to feel? Is this going to lead to the emotional state that we want to feel as a couple and as a team? If the answer is no, then our answer is no. Even if it means turning down a lot of money or missing out on that next achievement.

The incredible thing is, if the money doesn’t come, who gives a shit? We’re happy every day, and we can keep being happy for the foreseeable future because we have focused on making this happiness sustainable over time. Success comes first, and if achievements follow, it’s icing on the cake.

Your success in life is 100 percent dependent on your ability to coordinate action with others.

Distinction A team is two or more individuals that coordinate action to create a different future.

Distinction Trauma results from being in an environment where I perceive that I do not have the control to keep myself safe.

Distinction Value is something of relative importance, utility, and worth.

What’s the purpose of the team? What are the purposes of your teammates? What’s your role on the team? What are the roles of your teammates? What is the assessment of worth for the fulfillment of those roles? What are the key actions necessary to produce that assessment of worth?

My perception is my reality; therefore, when I change my perception I change my world.

Distinction Behavior is represented by groups of observable and predictable actions.

The new paradigm says that focusing solely on piling up accomplishments makes it impossible for us to experience success—an optimized daily experience that’s sustainable over time.

Distinction Mindset is the filter that controls how you experience your world and act in it.

Distinction Perception is the two-way bridge between your sensing body and your understanding mind.

Distinction Mindset is the filter by which we change our perception of our world.

You can use force or influence to cause behavior change. Force is quicker but you pay for that speed with the loss of connection and sustainability

A manager’s core responsibility is to create leaders who then evoke action in others.

Distinction A Desired End State is a description from a specific perspective of the emotional states we want to create and the emotional states we want to avoid.

The meaning that we ascribe to the words we use and hear shapes the world that we experience, beginning with our relationships to other people and extending into every facet of life. Having precision with our words and listening for meaning from others makes better communication and coordination possible. Lack of intention around the words we use and listening only for what we want to hear creates confusion, struggle, and strife.

Distinction The functional level of a team is determined by the size of their commitments and their consistency in holding them. High-functioning teams make big commitments and hold them all the time and low-functioning teams don’t make commitments or fail to hold the ones they make.

In order to ensure ownership and efficiency of communication we are going to share an elegant linguistic tool: To help remove the risk that you’ve ineffectively communicated, utilize a simple follow-up question: “What did you hear me say?

Whether you are talking to your wife or your business partner, make an agreement ahead of time that each of you is allowed at any point in time to ask the other person, “What did you hear me say?

Where definitions are descriptive, distinctions are functional.

When I do reviews with my team members, I start every assessment with the same question: What do you expect from me on a consistent basis?

Distinctions Connection is represented by the link between two entities that determines their effect on each other. Authenticity is knowing your truth and acting in accordance with it. Vulnerability is knowing your limitations and having the courage to share them. Trust is living in the inherent goodness of another, choosing to act in connection instead of defense.

The primary role of a leader is to evoke effective action in others. The primary role of a follower is to be in effective action toward the Desired End State.

Distinctions Leadership is creating an environment that evokes followers into effective action.

Management is fostering an environment that creates, enables and supports lead-followers toward the Desired End State.

Distinction Management is fostering an environment that creates, enables and supports lead-followers toward the Desired End State.

Distinction Self-regulation is the use of intention to control our behavior or thoughts.

Distinction Planning is represented by all the activities that prepare us for coordinated action toward a Desired End State.

Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” That’s not true if you plan to get punched in the face.

It happened because we never failed to plan and always planned to fail,

Distinction Control is illustrated power in a given situation.

Distinction Culture is represented by groups of observable and predictable actions.

The Golden Rule of Leadership Do not lead the way you want to be led, lead to the functional level of your team.

Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities, between one extreme and another.

Passion makes others feel like they are working not for someone but, rather, with others—and working for something bigger than the individuals involved.

passionate leadership.

Last, you’ve got to do more leading and less managing. Be a visible and motivating presence.