Combat Lessons for Leadership
At our monthly CEO group meeting, Lt. Cmdr. Leif Babin led a workshop based on his experience as a platoon leader of Navy Seals as well as his years building and delivering a training syllabus for Seals. It was a very different and worthwhile (not to mention stimulating) workshop.
Highlights of the workshop include the concept of “extreme ownership” of a task or organizational unit (no matter what happens, the owner must deal with it and not wait for instructions); “cover and move,” a life-preserving tactic that is really a form of real-time, instinctive, trusting, teamwork; “prioritize and execute,” a learned reaction to multiple threats in which you identify what must come first and deal with it before moving on to other priorities; and “real decentralization” in which higher ups set the mission and overall strategy but do not dictate to well-trained teams on the ground how to carry out the strategy. These were just a few of the notions that Cmdr. Babin brought to life with personal combat stories.
Echelon Front is his company that is conducting training sessions for C-suite executives facing challenges they may feel are beyond their ability to overcome. A fundamental of the San Dieo training program for Navy Seals is to immerse them in conditions which take them to what they think are their limits, then to take them well beyond those limits to show them their real reserve.
High performance teams need both the concepts and the discipline on which the approach is based and it is entirely applicable to civilian life.
That’s just my view. What’s yours?
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Tags: CEO, Entrepreneur, Leadership, management training, small business, supervision
Fri, Jan 11, 2013
Coaching, Entrepreneur, Faves (books, sites, experts), Leadership Development, risk, Small business, Supervision (managing direct reports)