[00:00:00] Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:22] Hello my friends, this is Dex and welcome to this week's episode on extreme ownership. And I don't mean who dies with the most wins. That's a separate episode. Haven't made that one yet. Only kidding, I never will. And I'm also not talking about entitlement. What I'm really talking about in extreme ownership is the ownership we choose to take for our responsibilities, speech, actions, and errors.

[00:00:53] in a work setting. Because the more responsibility we take, the more agency we have over our experience. We actually benefit more from taking responsibility than from avoiding it. Because any responsibility we shun automatically limits our control and influence over the outcome. And by taking responsibility, I mean taking responsibility for ourselves, Our performance and our work role, not for everyone else in the building.

[00:01:26] I deliberately exclude taking responsibility for people and tasks outside our remit, because that way burnout lies. Being the go to guy for everybody, whilst this puts us in a seductively powerful position, and it can be a social asset, It's unsustainable, as we overwork, overcommit, never say no, and people please ourselves into burnout.

[00:01:58] And, sometimes we stick our nose in where it's neither needed nor wanted. And, we deprive others of the learning experiences they need to increase their capacity, both as adults and as workers. Rather than using up our capacity. By rescuing everyone, tangentially dumbed down the workforce. And we don't respect them as adults.

[00:02:23] We become the bottleneck of knowledge and getting things done. Which of course, as a Type A person, we love! But, such a person becomes a liability in the end if they leave an organization, because they've siloed too much knowledge and skill inside themselves. They're not really an asset for a leader.

[00:02:45] A leader's going to more fluently rise to the surface on empowering those people around them. And you might have heard me speaking about agency before. I'm a fan, right? Because what we have agency over, when we're in burnout specifically, is often far more than meets the eye. For example, we have agency over our own attitude, behaviors, actions and responses.

[00:03:11] The work we do. Our communication and collaboration. Our professional standards. When and how we show up at work. Because we could stay at home in bed if we wanted to. We're adults, right? We could choose that and accept the consequences. But really in that list there's quite a bit of agency and a lot of it we're not using in burnout.

[00:03:33] So in burnout, also we're more likely to do the opposite than of staying home in bed. We're more likely to abandon our agency, over commit to work. And then show up tired and snarly about it and get a lot less done than we might wish. You have a little think about the agency that you have and the agency that you would like and that would serve you better. And apart from direct agency, which I just mentioned, we've also got more subtle ways to influence outcome. If we stop fighting our workmates and start looking for ways to help them achieve their goals, start trying to understand their seemingly sometimes nonsensical demand.

[00:04:19] For example, by inquiring about our boss's pressures and targets, Why he or she is making the choices they are, what they're trying to achieve and why it's important to them. Everything changes in the dynamic between us. The boss is perhaps used to being unpopular for one thing. They may not actually like the decisions that they have to hand down.

[00:04:42] Their heart might be in the right place but maybe their role shifted and they've been tasked more and more often with budget cuts and letting staff go and things like that. Potentially also they themselves. Aren't the most skillful leader. Maybe they communicate poorly, perhaps with a lack of empathy, once they're under pressure, or in fact all the time.

[00:05:06] At minimum, they're going to be trying to save their own skin, aren't they? And perhaps they too are burned out. Really, can we be more curious about people? About their beliefs, their stresses, Their fears and their problems, what they enjoy doing as well, because understanding them will soften our hearts and this will ease our experience around them.

[00:05:29] Before we go any further, I would like to point out that advocating extreme ownership at a personal level is for your benefit, but in no way absolves an organization of bad management, ducking its responsibilities and duty of care towards employees. Nor does it excuse poor decisions and behaviors on their part, nor disrespectful or inhumane communication.

[00:06:03] Taking extreme ownership is not letting them off the hook, it's just allowing you to assume more power over your own destiny. Because since most listeners here are not industry leaders and cannot easily propel that level of change, we're really looking for the power that you can deploy here, right away, to improve your own life.

[00:06:32] Rather than waiting for industry or organizational change. Which is outside your control and may never happen. I would prefer you to assume management of your life right now, not wait for an external miracle. It's really, it's about we the people and how we're able to uplift ourselves.

[00:06:55] And when we do that's really It's the gift that keeps on giving, because when you learn how to support yourself out of burnout, I'd be very surprised if you didn't naturally start supporting other people and connecting more strongly with them, which will support you even further. And if you wonder why I'm calling this episode Extreme Ownership, it is the name of a book written by Navy SEALs Jocko Willink, and Leif Babin.

[00:07:22] They wrote it in 2017. It's about seal combat and leadership principles that they applied in combat zones. And you might be surprised actually how useful it is in any leadership sphere. Jocko and Leif concluded from their combat experience that leadership was the single most important factor in safety, teamwork, and success in the combat zone.

[00:07:48] And these days, by the way Jocko and Leif work as leadership trainers, training business leaders. In the skills they themselves learned.

[00:07:56] So if you yourself are a leader, I do recommend the book. I'll put it in the show notes as ever. If you're in burnout, I also recommend the book because burnout recovery is a lot about self leadership. As you gently, but assertively, consistently, professionally, take back the power that's rightfully yours and let go the responsibilities and problems that aren't.

[00:08:28] Burnout Recovery is about finding an exercising agency in a way that supports both you and others. To feel more confident and able to do your job well, avoid unnecessary problems, failures, conflict, and go home satisfied at the end of the day. Sounds good? Because when you take this extreme ownership of yourself and the way you show up at work, you will also start saying no, setting boundaries.

[00:08:59] You'll prioritize effectively, you'll manage time and conversations better, and you'll protect your own resources and energy. That way you're going to improve your own leadership, performance, reliability and timeliness, contribution, professionalism, status, collaboration, teamwork and communication. It's all going to rise together.

[00:09:26] Quite simply, you're going to get better results and you'll create more allies and loyalty and you'll enjoy work more. It'll be more rewarding. Other people are going to respect you probably more than they do now. Whilst you're in burnout. And you will become more valuable to your organization and therefore attract better role.

[00:09:48] And all of that that I've just said. It's not theoretical. That's the journey I see my clients going on each and every one of them. So don't imagine that none of that is available to you. It is available. The other book that I think goes hand in hand with this book is Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

[00:10:06] I talk about it all the time. I know it's a book about essentializing your work contribution. Distilling it down until you're giving your highest possible value with the least amount of effort, stress, and friction to yield the biggest sense of reward for you. What's not to love? So read those two books in the show notes.

[00:10:30] But here today, I will propose a couple of the principles. from the book to whet your appetite and get you thinking about how you can reclaim ownership and improve your own work and leadership experience, whether you are a leader by job title or not. So the core principle of extreme ownership is. If you are a leader and something goes wrong under your watch, don't blame others.

[00:10:56] Take the blame onto yourself. The boys tell us there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. Okay, pause. In burnout, we privately judge and blame ourselves all day long, don't we? And it hurts like crazy and it wears us out. But we don't blame ourselves in the way that extreme ownership advocates. We just do it willy nilly, right?

[00:11:17] For real or imagined fails and anything that comes into our mind is just a habit. And at the same time as we're criticizing ourselves in our heads, we're roundly cursing, blaming and judging other people too, more or less on the same scale. So when the authors say there are no bad teams, there are only bad leaders, I see this as simply inviting us leaders to take responsibility for what goes on under our watch, to avoid blaming our team members, to uphold team cohesion, morale, and trust, and take charge of creating solutions.

[00:11:56] I don't see it as helpful at all to start cursing and judging yourself. It's going to make burnout worse. We're all human. We all make mistakes. Let's not compound them with layers of blame. It's pretty hard to motivate better performance from blame. So please don't use this against yourself as an opportunity to march around the office, calling yourself a bad leader.

[00:12:23] See, that proves I'm terrible. I can't do this. None of that. Remember your tender heart. Try to be compassionate with yourself. If for no other reason, then it produces better results.

[00:12:37] Okay, another principle from the book is cover and move. In combat, you cover your team and then you make your move. In business, it's more about breaking down silos, us versus them, and working as a team to understand interdependencies. Not just what results are required, but why they're important. Many a grand vision collapses, because of inter team communication.

[00:13:07] Didn't connect the dots with why. Ask Simon Sinek how important why is. So a few years ago, I was hired to run a software development team at a stock market company. But the development team were at war with the marketing people, and the analysts, and the sales team, and the events team.

[00:13:23] All of the teams, in fact, had fiefdoms. and were bickering amongst themselves. Production was deadlocked and failure rates were very high. Everyone blamed everyone else. Instructions between teams were flying around via email because the teams couldn't face having the same old arguments again and again with people they felt were against them and letting them down.

[00:13:47] So I had meetings with all the team leaders individually to find out what was going wrong and it turned out that the only true problem was the conflict itself. The salespeople complained, for example, that the developers Wouldn't support them and vice versa. The catch cry was they're preventing me doing my job.

[00:14:09] untangling the communication lines revealed to me that the team members actually did all want to support other teams and other team members, but they didn't understand How to break the deadlock. How to communicate better. How to understand expectations and needs. How to formulate inter team requests.

[00:14:29] What the length of the development cycle was. Or, how they should test new features they received. So really, removing silos here was just helping them realize that they had the same aim. That actually they were on the same side. But what they didn't have is enough understanding of how to serve and work with other teams.

[00:14:53] So once we got through that fairly small obstacle in the end, Harmony, for the record, was quickly restored. And we got them all on the same side and we streamlined operations quite simply after that. So it was, Astonishing how big a change we could make in that whole organization just from freeing that us and them deadlock.

[00:15:20] Another principle from the book is leading up and down the chain of command. You have thoughts about that? I do. Really it's a special skill that serves many of us very well in corporate and professional life, but usually we have to self teach, don't we? Caution, emotional intelligence advised. But remember, that boss you hate probably had about the same amount of leadership training you did.

[00:15:52] If you're a professional and you have come up through being a hands on expert, promote it to leadership. After perfecting your technical role, that could easily be none, probably no training, or maybe they bust the boss in from a different sector and they really have no idea what it's like on the cold face of the technical role either.

[00:16:12] It could be a lot of things, but seeking to understand there, I think is very helpful. you can read each of the principles chapter by chapter in the book, which goes on to apply each principle with a combat example Followed by a business leadership example.

[00:16:31] And taking these principles from life or death combat situations where tiny mistakes matter and bringing them home to business, it does make sense to me. We might not need that level of military precision, but it sure doesn't do any harm, and having this distilled and battle tested principle to apply, I think gives us an edge.

[00:16:57] Try it, you might like it. And if nothing else, take responsibility for what's in your remit, for your own self, because what you have responsibility for, you can change. And that's really what burnout recovery is all about. So that's what I have for you today. And if you'd like to restore your confidence after listening to today, try episode number 36, championing yourself.

[00:17:22] It's the flip side to responsibility- about finding, encouraging, cherishing, and celebrating the good qualities within. Remember them? Because you have so many. Be good to yourself. That's the bottom line. And if you're in burnout, I invite you to come and talk to me for free and let's make a plan for you to recover quickly and sustainably and get back to your best performance, leadership, success, and most of all, enjoyment inside work and out.

[00:17:55] You can book an appointment at DexRandall. com. If you enjoyed this episode, please help me reach more people in burnout by rating and reviewing the podcast and sharing the podcast with your friends who might be in burnout. It was lovely sharing airspace with you today. Thank you for listening. And I would love to hear from you too about extreme ownership or anything else.

[00:18:17] SMS me your thoughts via the link in the show notes.