Abstract
I became the chair of my academic department on July 1, 2021. Despite having served in leadership positions at various times in my career, the department chair position presented a range of uncertainties. I questioned my capacity to take on this role with an acknowledgment I possessed no formal training in leadership principles and theory. I felt intimidated by leading a group of highly intelligent, accomplished, and experienced faculty members where I would be in the position of making tenure and promotion decisions, establishing department budget priorities; communicating and implementing university policies; and advocating for faculty, staff, and student needs and concerns. Upon receiving notice that the department faculty had voted for me to be the chair, I approached the coming July 1 start date with considerable trepidation.
During the period between the faculty vote and the start date, I began to explore resources on leadership. I came across a popular podcast hosted by Jocko Willink (along with his co-host, Echo Charles), a former Navy SEAL officer who led and participated in combat operations in the Iraq War. Willink’s podcast focuses on leadership where he frequently interviews guests and/or discusses books that address various applications of leadership principles and strategies. Willink’s approach to leadership is undergirded by his military experience, but is not limited to it. Rather, Willink applies his experience and philosophical approach toward leadership to a civilian context in such domains as business, personal development, and relationship building. In several podcasts, Willink referred to leadership concepts addressed in the book, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, which he co-authored with fellow Navy SEAL officer Leif Babin. Willink and Babin served together in SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser in the Battle of Ramadi and are the co-founders of Echelon Front, a company that provides leadership training to various industries nationally and internationally.
Reading Extreme Ownership made a deep impression on my understanding of leadership. Had I not learned about Extreme Ownership from the podcast, it is not likely I would have read the book. I am not a veteran and my assumption would be the book would not be relevant to me either personally or professionally. However, in my opinion, the book offers wide applicability to rehabilitation counseling educators (RCE) or other higher education professionals regardless of military status and knowledge. On the surface, military service and higher education would seem like distinct work environments. Upon closer examination, however, both environments share important elements. Both settings involve extensive decision-making processes along with highly bureaucratic and hierarchical organizational structures, making many of the military-specific examples offered by Willink and Babin applicable to the leadership challenges faced in higher education. The book’s relevance to a diverse audience is shared by Willink and Babin in the book’s foreword when sharing reader reactions after the publication of the first edition of the book in 2015. Willink and Babin stated (pp. xiv-xv), “A number of school teachers, educators, and coaches have told us how the concepts of this book have made them better, delivering greater impact and improving the lives of their students and athletes.” Willink and Babin drew from their collective experiences as military service members, SEALs, combat operators in Iraq, and Echelon Front consultants to crystallize core and universal leadership principles.
Reflective on the book’s title, Willink and Babin stressed the importance of assuming total responsibility for the performance of themselves, their units, and their organizations. Willink and Babin explained that problems and shortcomings in performance are ultimately leadership failures and that leaders need to continually practice self-reflection, remain humble, build and repair relationships, and engage in continual evaluation of leadership successes and shortcomings. Also, the concept of Extreme Ownership holds that all members of the organization face leadership responsibility and need to support the efforts of their colleagues and work toward the mission of the organization. Willink and Babin shared that leadership, especially from the perspective of Extreme Ownership, is a difficult undertaking. They acknowledged their perspectives are informed, in part, by their leadership failures and what they learned from their mistakes.
Willink and Babin highlighted these failures to frame each of the book’s principles. Willink or Babin served as the primary author for each of Extreme Ownership’s 12 chapters, with each chapter presenting a different leadership principle. To reinforce the book’s central theme on Extreme Ownership, Willink began the book with a Chapter 1 description of a “blue-on-blue” incident where a SEAL platoon engaged in gunfire with a group of Iraqi soldiers (working alongside U.S. military personnel), with each group assuming the others were opposing forces. It was assumed the SEAL platoon was a group of enemy combatants and was subsequently shot at by U.S. forces. In the firefight, an Iraqi soldier comrade was killed. When Willink arrived at the scene, he sensed something was off and went to the area where the SEAL platoon was secured and to his horror, realized they were not the enemy but fellow SEALs. Had he not investigated the scene, the platoon members would likely have all been killed as the surrounding U.S. military forces were planning a tank blast to the building where the SEAL platoon was based.
In the investigation that followed, Willink described the myriad of emotions he felt in trying to make sense of the situation and concluding that as the commander of the area of operation in question, he needed to take responsibility for all that had happened and to be willing to face the consequences, despite how it might adversely impact his reputation and his career. Willink acknowledged his role in oversight of all under his command and with his colleagues, “We analyzed what had happened and implemented the lessons learned. We revised our standard operating procedures and planning methodology to better mitigate risk” (p. 21). Willink realized by taking Extreme Ownership, he gained the trust of senior leaders and the respect of the SEALs under his command. Willink then explained the leadership principle of Extreme Ownership learned from the experience by sharing: When subordinates aren’t doing what they should, leaders that exercise Extreme Ownership cannot blame the subordinates. They must first look in the mirror at themselves. 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. (p. 31)
Willink concluded the chapter by applying the Extreme Ownership principle to a business example. He described consulting with a company’s vice president (VP) of manufacturing whose unit was not performing to the expectations of the company’s board of directors. The VP believed the lack of performance was due to subordinates not sufficiently executing the productivity plan he had presented to the board in the previous year. Initially, the VP rejected Willink’s suggestion to adopt Extreme Ownership to address the situation, but the VP eventually accepted his leadership deficiencies in explaining the company’s lack of performance. In adopting the principle of Extreme Ownership, the VP shifted the onus of responsibility from subordinates to himself. Willink reported what the VP conveyed to the board: At the board meeting, the VP did just that. He took the blame for the failure to meet the manufacturing objectives and gave a solid no-nonsense list of corrective measures that he would implement to ensure execution. The list started with what he was going to do differently, not about what other people needed to do. Now, the VP was on his way to Extreme Ownership. (p. 39)
Willink and Babin applied this format (i.e., military leadership example, articulation of the leadership principle, and application of the principle) to each of Extreme Ownership’s 12 chapters. The book is presented in three parts, which Willink and Babin describe as follows: Part I: “Winning the War Within”; Part II: “The Laws of Combat”; and Part III: “Sustaining Victory.” “Winning the War Within” develops the fundamental building blocks and mind-set necessary to lead and win. “The Laws of Combat” covers the four critical concepts that enable a team to perform at the highest level and dominate. Finally, “Sustaining Victory” discusses the more nuanced and difficult balance that leaders must navigate in order to maintain the edge and keep the team perpetually operating at the highest level. (p. 14)
The second edition included an excerpt from Willink’s podcast and a sample chapter from a second book on leadership authored by Willink and Babin, The Dichotomy of Leadership.
The Extreme Ownership example is the primary chapter in Part I and as noted, drives the book’s narrative. A Part II example is Chapter 8’s presentation of “Decentralized Command,” which stressed the importance of delegating leadership responsibilities to subordinates and empowering and trusting them to make decisions. A Part III example is “Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command” in Chapter 10. This principle requires leaders to effectively provide those under their command with an understanding of their roles in meeting the objectives of the organization, while also helping those higher in the chain to understand the needs of the leader and the leader’s team.
RCEs might reject the content of Extreme Ownership from factors external to the book’s content. Some readers might disagree with the views expressed on Willink’s podcast. I sometimes agree or disagree with opinions on social and political issues made by Willink or his guests. I differentiate the podcast from the book, which is apolitical. I speculate that others might disagree with the legality and morality of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States and its allies. Readers might subsequently discount the opinions of Willink and Babin. It is important to remember the military does not make decisions to enter into war but rather implements the policy decisions made by elected officials. One of the central purposes (in my reading of the book) of Extreme Ownership is not to defend the Iraq War, but rather to highlight leadership lessons obtained during combat operations. Finally, given the small percentage of the population that serves in the United States military (Zucchino & Cloud, 2015), it is likely very few RCEs possess a lived military experience, and might erroneously believe the book does not apply to the mission of their programs, departments, and universities. The lack of understanding of the military and its application to leadership is reinforced by the lack of accreditation standards by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (2015) for rehabilitation counselors to possess knowledge in these domains. Therefore, RCEs are not obligated to understand and teach military-related content.
As a department chair, I apply the leadership principles in Extreme Ownership. I accept the obligation of Extreme Ownership to answer for the performance of my department as a unit as well as for individual faculty members, staff, and students. If there are problems, challenges, or performance issues, I evaluate how I have contributed to the issue and what, as department chair, can I do to address the situation. I also apply specific strategies presented in Extreme Ownership, aligned with Willink’s and Babin’s implementation suggestions. For example, with Decentralized Command, I regularly confer with and task department program coordinators to direct efforts in such areas as recruitment, student conduct, admissions, and commencement planning rather than micromanage those responsibilities. A key reason for doing so is recognizing their in-depth program knowledge and respecting their competence in making decisions specific to their programs. Also, with Leading Up and Down the Chain of Command, I work toward explaining (i.e., Leading Down the Chain of Command) to department faculty why rules, policies, and requests are made from upper levels of administration and our need to be diligent in meeting these requests. I also (i.e., Leading Up the Chain of Command) provide feedback to upper administrators on how faculty feel about upper administration rules, policies, and requests and advocate for department needs tactfully and respectfully. I try to be proactive in sharing information about department issues and trends with upper administration to reduce their need to make requests to obtain these types of data. When making requests to upper administration, I try to be emphatic about their challenges and understanding of limitations they face in meeting department needs and requests.
The book provides an intellectual framework to think about leadership on a broader, conceptual level. Much like the business examples described by Willink and Babin (where they consulted with nonmilitary or non-veteran-based organizations), there is a benefit to viewing leadership from perspectives external to higher education in that readers can apply universal principles to a wide array of contexts and challenges. A limitation of receiving training from leadership experts within higher education is that knowledge sometimes becomes narrower and context-specific. Training can be confined to the norms, practices, and assumptions of working in a college or university setting rather than applying “out of the box” thinking to solve leadership challenges. Another strength of the book is its simplicity. The principles of leadership in Extreme Ownership are easy to understand; the difficulty however is execution, such as the example of Willink in Chapter 1 of taking ownership of the blue-on-blue exchange in Ramadi. Willink and Babin acknowledged this point by stating (p. 286), “Leadership is simple, but not easy.” The authors also noted they are not the inventors of the leadership principles in the book. However, Extreme Ownership is written from their lived experiences in testing and refining the principles shaped by combat and Echelon Front consulting.
In conclusion, Extreme Ownership is a powerful and impactful resource for leadership. I found Willink’s and Babin’s writing to be compelling, interesting, honest, and thought-provoking. The use of combat-informed examples applied to leadership contexts was an influential, innovative, and creative means of explicating leadership principles. Willink and Babin seemed aware most of their readers were likely not current or former military service members and took care to describe military concepts and define (p. 19) obscure terms such as “PK,” which refers to the Pulemet Kalashnikova Russian-made machine gun. Regarding suggestions, while Willink and Babin indicate taking Extreme Ownership takes moral courage, they should highlight the different levels of risk those in the workplace face when applying this principle as a function of position and personal variables such as disability, age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity. A second limitation is that all of the civilian applications of leadership are based in business (e.g., software company, investment firm, and pharmaceutical business), with the civilian section of each chapter titled, “application to business.” Willink and Babin noted (p. xi) in the book’s foreword they consult with clients outside of the business sector including “. . . healthcare, and also military, police, fire departments, and emergency first responders.” Extreme Ownership’s applicability to higher education would be enhanced by discussing their work in these nonbusiness settings. Despite these limitations, I highly encourage my fellow educators in the rehabilitation counseling profession to read this book and apply its principles in administration, supervision, and teaching.