I listened to Tim Ferriss’ interview with Jocko Wilinck, author of Extreme Ownership – a book I read at the recommendation of Susan Abelein two years ago or so.
It was a great time to check in on some of the themes from the book (and his philosophy) to refresh and see what is more salient at this point in my leadership career.
One idea that stood out to me was the concept of ownership.
Jocko relates the following story:
The story that I told in this email was that he would go around the room, because he wants to get some direct feedback from the troops. He’d ask somebody, what do you need? And these guys are my peers. Someone would say well, the boots that we have are okay in the hot weather but we’re getting ready to be in a cooler environment and we need new boots. And we need them by this date because that’s our next training block. Okay, got it.
And he’d get to the next person who’d say when we’re out at the desert training facility, there’s no WiFi internet so our guys are disconnected and we really need to get WiFi out there. Okay, got it. The next guy would say we need more helicopter training support because we don’t feel like we’re working around helicopters enough and we really need that.
And eventually, he’d get to me. The Commodore would say: Jocko, what do you need? And I would say, we’re good, sir. I was stating the obvious, which is if I have problems, I’m going to handle them. I’m going to take care of them and I’m not going to complain. I took extreme ownership of my world. the way that worked twofold was when I did need something, number one it was something significant, it was something real. And when I told the Commodore, hey boss, we need this right here, I would almost get it instantaneously because he knew that I really, truly needed it.
I think this is extremely applicable to our role as Principals. We all have teachers that are constantly asking for something or complaining about something. Likewise, we have teachers that handle their problems and only ask for assistance we they need it. If I have to choose – I’m going to hire the teachers who I can trust to run their classrooms – academically, socially, etc. – without the constant requests. I want to hire teachers who I trust and then facilitate their growth and teaching by procuring resources and enabling them to focus on the classroom themselves.
When it comes to accountability then, I struggle at times because I really do trust the majority of my staff (especially at this point) to be focused on the student learning and development and thus to make the right call when it comes to their resource (time/focus/etc allocation). My team has earned that trust and I hope my feedback shows that, because I do do less accountability then I might otherwise want or do in other situations.
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