How to Be a Good Commander – Jocko Willink

i’m just gonna we i’m gonna rap through this whole thing because there’s so much to talk about hey let me pause this is what i find interesting and he’s going to come back to it but i’ll give you a foreshadowing he’s going to come back to it i think that as he looks back at his career you got to remember this guy joined the when he was when he was a kid and he was in world war one and think about how things changed by his own admission in between world war one and world so when he was world war one and post-world war one he was in his mind this leader right that was gonna lead from the front that was gonna make things happen as the nature of war became more dispersed all of a sudden you had to have a little something that we call decentralized command he can’t be in front of his unit the whole time and that would be the same and i think as he became more mature and as he got older hey look when you took a well well it’s kind of hard well i talk about this with life life will say like hey what you know i wish i would have done x y and z when i was uh when when i was the assistant platoon commander leif leif could write a book about the things he wish it would have changed when he was assistant platoon commander for sure he was fresh out of the fleet you know naval academy fleet and now it’s on he’s he’s in a seal platoon right do you think that do you think that if he went back and did that right now do you think he would do things a little bit differently sure absolutely we all would yeah we all would do that and so here we have a guy that went through the entire rank structure of the army the entire thing and as he got older and got better and got more experienced i would think he’d say this is what i should have done when i was a platoon commander but i didn’t and here’s what i would do differently but maybe because the wars were different and it was more centralized and it wasn’t dispersed everyone was together so there’s a there’s a i think what i see is him is him saying listen it was it’s a different thing whereas i look at it now and say wait a second it might have been a different thing for you but if you could go back knowing what you learned eventually you might say hey i actually would have led differently and i’ll tell you right now even in a platoon even in a freaking squad even in a fire team the techniques that he’s going to talk about what what’s better if you’re in charge of a platoon what’s better grabbing the grabbing the reins and pulling them down or is it better to guide them and let them run yeah the answer’s so obvious [Music] but he digs in a little bit chain of responsibility and also you must realize as you go up in various echelons of organization of the army from the squad on up you become increasingly removed from the individual soldiers and your influence on the individual soldier is no longer carried by an eyeball-to-eyeball approach it is carried on through the echelons of your command down to him and you become increasingly just an image to him which you develop in several ways but you get to the field of proper staff organization and staff relationship because that is very important part of commandership and generalship what is that saying what it’s saying is when you’re in a leadership position as you go up in ranks you’re right you don’t have eyeball to eyeball any all the time guess who you do have eyeballed eyeball ball with your subordinate leaders and your subordinate leaders have to nurture those close personal relationships with their troops so that that influence that you have as the commander is felt all the way down through the front lines back to the book in your recent military review there’s an article on faulty staff relationships i hope it will cause you to give a little thought to that problem because it is important one you come to one of the most important parts of commandership and leadership and that is establishing a chain of responsibility so that every man in your organization knows who he works for and who works for him that’s cool i get that we let’s call the chain of command that is basic how many organizations have you been in where that wasn’t known i’ve been in several i had no idea who i worked for or who out who or or who made out my efficiency report after all and this is one of those things where i i get a little cringy as my kids as my daughters would say after all there’s one basic rule in the army that you can’t violate and i over a period of 44 years have tried to violate many of them i’ve been successful in a few but this one i have never been successful in and that is you work and devote your loyalty to the man who makes out your efficiency report and the man who endorses it if you don’t do that you’re never going to be a general so to me this is wrong to me relationships are stronger than the chain of command yeah and luckily he’s going to counter this he’s going to counter his own statement later of course establishing a chain of responsibility is just as important in years and look this is proven out by hackworth who built these incredible relationships and that’s how he ran things establishing a chain of responsibilities just as important in your staff as it is in your command if you don’t have that your headquarter your headquarters mills around and creates what i call command and staff inertia that is a state of frustration and lack of purpose that exists in many military staffs okay people got to know what’s people got to know the chain of command for sure yep then of course it comes down to the art of commandership or generalship as to how you issue your directives or how you project your desires and will down through the chain of command oh does i i read that wrong as to how you issue your directives or how you project your desires and will down through the chain of command it comes out in directives and so forth which is an art within itself and which i am sorry to say we sometimes don’t do very well we could do a lot better when we’re when we’re doing that in the field i’ve worked at times for a commander for whom i felt i wasn’t doing a good job because the truth of the matter was i didn’t know what he wanted me to accomplish okay second law of combat simple simple clear and concise if i don’t know what you want me to do there’s no way i can accomplish it and by the way whose fault is that it’s my fault if i don’t know what my boss wants me to accomplish what do i do i raise my hand and ask my boss what do you want me to accomplish what’s the mission here what are we going to get done what’s the end state what’s your intent next section improving your unit now we get to the point of making progress as a commander i can’t conceive of anybody who takes over a com a company a battalion a brigade or division a corps a field army who doesn’t sit down and say to himself how i impress upon my superiors the men who make out my efficiency report that i am a good commander once again you know you get a little bit of that i’m looking to get promoted which i don’t like how do i do that i’ve seen it done every way that you can think of in my career but i would suggest to you that the best way to do it in the military organization is through a little exercise of what i call is through the exercise of what i call little pluses of making a little progress in every field every day over a period of time if you do that your organization will tighten up your organization will become good and you’ll gradually come up with the understanding and the reputation of really being a good commander you will also not create turbulence which detracts from the effectiveness of your unit so i like this idea doing little things get a little bit better every day but then he goes into this with that that thing when he talks about turbulence he goes into it i’ve seen people walk into an organization and immediately start to make headlines i would like to point out to you a great truth in the military that he who lives by headlines is destroyed by headlines remember that if you start seeking headlines and creating images of yourself as a superman pretty soon somebody will find a hole in your armor and when he does he will certainly give it to you that follows from the rule about the monkey who climbs up a pole the higher he gets the more of his rear he shows the people who are below him and that often goes for a person who upped the chain of command in the echelons of the army so good that’s i totally agree with that