Never Enough.pdf

A NAVY SEAL COMMANDER ON LIVING A LIFE OF EXCELLENCE, AGILITY, AND MEANING  CHAPTER 4 BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TO BE WHICH Agility in the Roles You Play ack in 2007, I was second-in-command of SEAL Team BTEN...

A NAVY SEAL COMMANDER ON LIVING A LIFE OF EXCELLENCE, AGILITY, AND MEANING  CHAPTER 4 BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TO BE WHICH Agility in the Roles You Play ack in 2007, I was second-in-command of SEAL Team BTEN and the military's Special Operations Task Force in Anbar Province, Iraq. My team had arrived at the peak of the insurgency: militant Sunni extremists were terrorizing our coalition forces and the peace-wanting citizens oflraq with reg­ ularity, launching attack after attack. In our first month, thirty­ five Marines were killed in and around Fallujah alone. Our job was to embark on nightly missions to capture and eliminate this network ofinsurgent forces. We would spend each day planning operations and using intelligence to identify ter­ rorist networks, and then each night, we would take helicopters or ground vehicles to pursue our identified targets. We patrolled silently on foot in total darkness, hit our target buildings with controlled and precise violence, separated probable combatants BB NEVER ENOUGH from noncombatants, and decided who to take prisoner for fur­ ther interrogation in an effort to unravel the insurgency. We always tried to make it home before sunrise, mostly be­ cause it was safer for us to work in the dark, but also because we needed to get as much sleep as possible before waking by noon to repeat the cycle again. This was our life, night after night after night. Our excellent support personnel handled intelligence, dealt with the people we captured, fixed our broken radios and vehicles, and maintained our base camp, letting us focus entirely on the missions themselves. We saw tremendous success, but it wasn't without cost. On one mission, our forces were headed toward a target building when they passed an Iraqi family-a husband and wife with I their two children, eight and ten years old. T he parents had lived in the target building, and they confirmed for us that they had been kicked out of their house by violent Sunni extremists, who now occupied the building. As our forces approached, the terrorists opened fire and threw grenades out of the windows di­ rectly at the team and the Iraqi family. Lieutenant Jason Redman (who has written his own moving book about his experiences as a SEAL, The Trident, as well as a follow-up, Overcome) and many others on the team bravely exposed themselves to enemy fire in order to save the family and guide them to protective cover. By moving these innocent Iraqis out of the way, the pla­ toon was able to call in an airstrike, which leveled the building and eliminated all the terrorists inside. These men stepped up and took the ultimate risk for their team and for their country, guiding four innocent people to safety instead of sprinting di­ rectly toward cover for themselves. A few weeks later, our Task Force was in the central Iraqi city  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TD BE WHICH 89 of Karma. Karma was known to be filled with insurgents, and it was a risky mission. On the team's way in, they walked through a field of tall, green vegetation. Hidden in this vegetation were four or five insurgents with machine guns who were ready to become martyrs. It's not easy to fight an enemy who is so willing to die. When the insurgents opened fire,Jason immediately went down with multiple shots through his head, arm, and leg.Jason's teammate Luke saw one of the insurgents just a few meters in front of him and went down with a round through his leg that shattered his tibia and fibula just below his knee. In the com­ plete darkness and chaos of combat, the SEALs at the back of the formation were unable to shoot at the enemy, because they couldn't be sure they wouldn't hit their teammates. While those SEALs flanked the enemy, Mitch, the SEAL closest to Luke, had to make a split-second decision. As the only one who could possibly save Luke, should he move forward, putting himself at mortal risk? Or should he run for cover? It wasn't a decision. It was instinct. Mitch moved for­ ward in a hail of heavy gunfire coming from two directions in order to save Luke. He was hit in the right arm as he moved for­ ward, disintegrating a few inches of bone. He used his other arm to tuck the injured arm into his belt in order to avoid losing it completely and continued forward toward Luke. Mitch then got hit in the leg, but had Luke in his grasp and used a superhero­ size reserve of strength and determination to drag him to safety. As Jason fought to stay conscious, and with Mitch and Luke seriously injured, others had to step up. Jay, our ever-calm SEAL radioman, called in an AC-130 air­ craft as he crawled (at his own great risk)to see exactly where the insurgents were and where his teammates had found cover. Jay 90 NEVER ENOUGH gave the pilots explicit instructions about where to aim the gre­ nades from their position more than 10,000 feet in the sky. He masterfully guided them directly to the enemy positions. And while Jay knew he was within the potential blast radius, he also knew that in order to save the rest of his team, he needed the pilots to release the weapons immediately. The pilots told Jay that he was "danger close," which meant he was within the potential blast radius. The pilots required Jay to acknowledge this, and they also requested something that we usually only see in SEAL textbooks: they asked him to confirm his initials as a way of making sure with absolute clarity that he realized the gravity of the situation and what was about to hap­ pen, and to be certain it wasn't an enemy pretending to be him. They wanted to be sure that he understood the risk. The pilots, who had been engaged in these kinds of mis­ sions night after night, did an incredible job neutralizing the insurgents, enabling our forces to call in a medical helicopter to get the wounded to the battlefield hospital in Baghdad. Jason, Mitch, Luke,Jay, several pilots, and everyone on the mission that night were heroes, stepping up to save each other and remove dangerous terrorists from the battlefield. + + + I'm often asked why people make the kinds of sacrifices I just described. Why would Jason and his team save the Iraqi fam­ ily? Why would Mitch move forward into such heavy, life­ threatening gunfire? Why would Jay step up and take on so much risk by authorizing the release of weapons "danger close"? The "why" is an important question, and the answer draws on elements that we've covered-in earlier chapters, like moving to-  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TO BE WHICH 91 ward the hardest challenges and being oriented toward others over yourself, as well as elements we've yet to cover, like the thoughts ahead about relationships and service to the world. But it's not the only question to ask, and it's not the question I want to address here. The question for. now is a more tactical one: How do people do this? How do you know when to step up and when to fall back, when to rush forward into the heavy gunfire (or the less­ deadly but still equally important equivalents in your life) and when to let the battle belong to someone else? W hen I talk about being the leader of a SEAL Team, people imagine me at the front of every mission, the first one into the building, the one barking orders at everyone behind me. That's just not true-and that's a big part of what makes the SEALs so effective at what we do. There's a line said facetiously but with real merit during Army jump school-where you first learn how to parachute from an aircraft: "YOU are the parachute com­ mander." In that situation, you have to be; it's just you and the parachute. In every other situation, who is leading the charge depends entirely on who is best equipped to do so in that mo­ ment, regardless of role and regardless of rank. A moment later, it might be someone else entirely. As I say in the title of this chapter, you have to see yourself as a leader and as a follower, and critically, you have to know when to be which. It's an idea I call "dynamic subordination." In an effective team, we all must seamlessly move forward and back depending on the demands of the situation and the skills of the people around us. We don't get locked into a particular job, a particular task, or a particular pattern: we maintain the agility to be whatever we need to be under the circumstances. Perhaps 92 NEVER ENOUGH even more important, we train just as hard to learn how to be lots of things as we train to know when to be each of those things. It applies in every sphere. Sometimes you're the leader. Some­ times you're the follower. Sometimes, in the span ofjust a min­ ute or two, you're both. High-performing teams-and not just in the military-succeed and fail together, with the best players understanding at all moments what will make the mission more successful and what role they need to play to best enable that success. As we talk about this idea of dynamic subordination, there are four principles it's important to touch on, and I'll cover each one in the rest of this chapter. The More I Hurt, the Less My Teammates Hurt Jason Redman and his team obviously understood this point, and it's a fairly clear one on the battlefield. But what sometimes gets overlooked is how much it applies in our everyday lives, no matter what we do. Taking on problems so that others don't have to, doing the hard work, bearing burdens on behalf of your organization-these are the things that make you the kind of person everyone wants to work with. When my daughter was in seventh grade, I spoke to her class about leadership. I told them to think about an assignment where they'd been paired with a partner. When there are two of you working on a project, I asked, how much do you each have to do? One of my daughter's classmates-someone good at math, I suppose-immediately called out, "Fifty percent." I asked the rest of the class to raise their hands if they thought that was right-  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TD BE WHICH 93 and every hand went up. My response? ''Absolutely wrong!"Team­ work isn't about each person doing his or her share. It's about everyone doing the most they can, giving 100 percent. Teams generate amazing results when everybody pushes themselves to their limit. That's how victories happen. We each have to own responsibility for the outcome, and take on as much of the bur­ den as we can. We each have to look for problems and then solve them, and look for opportunities to take advantage of. We have to treat the challenges of our teammates and coworkers as our challenges, too, and step in to help wherever we are able to. The entire mission belongs to all of us. W hen there's competition in a workplace, or on a team-when people have their own agendas, or find themselves sabotaging the efforts of their colleagues, doing poor work, or intentionally or subconsciously making other people's jobs harder-that work­ place is seriously broken. There is nothing more important than the team-team, then teammate, then self, I can't repeat it often enough. They drum the lesson into you over and over again as a SEAL. Yet sometimes there are still situations when ego comes into play and self-interest trumps cooperation, and missions suf­ fer because of it. + + + W hen I first arrived in southeastern Afghanistan to lead SEAL Team TWO and our Special Operations Task Force in the re­ gion, the situation was less than ideal. There was an infesta­ tion of Taliban in the area, with one particular district, Chara, a rural town located in Uruzgan Province with a population of about three thousand, a real hotbed of activity. The main route 94 NEVER ENOU&H to Kandahar passed through Chora, and it was an important strategic location to control. But when I arrived, there were no forces there, nothing stopping the Taliban from running wild. The Colonel in charge of the conventional (non-special ops) forces in the region was less than thrilled when my SEAL Team arrived. We came with energy and conviction, looking for new ideas to improve the situation and ready to move our efforts forward. The Colonel, on the other hand, had been there for a while, and had become accustomed to the status quo. He had cautioned his men and women against taking too much risk, had seemingly accepted that this was an area the Taliban would always control and opted to stay out of their way. Faced with someone who came in wanting to do more, he became a road­ block, standing in my way and in the way of the mission. Although the Colonel was not in my direct chain of com­ mand, we were supposed to work together. Instead, he fought me at every turn. W hen I wanted to move our SEALs into Chora and set up an outpost there, he didn't want me to use his extra buildings and take advantage of the infrastructure already built. W hen I wanted to take offensive action to get rid of the Taliban presence in Chora, he said no-and not only refused to help, but asked us not to pursue our efforts, because he didn't want to upset the status quo. My team came up with some extraor­ dinary ways to improve the situation-in both a strategic sense for the overall conflict and also in a very concrete sense for the innocent Afghans living in the area. We built physical barriers­ including something we called the Great Wall of Chora, made of wire mesh and canvas flat packs that we filled with sand to make thick barricades-to create choke points and checkpoints to protect the population and keep the Taliban contained. We  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TD BE WHICH 95 ended up in gunfights, but we were prepared, we won, and we were able to drive away the Taliban presence to a huge extent. There had been a girls' school in Chora before the Taliban's arrival. Not long after the Taliban took over the town, the school closed, its classes forced to go underground. It wasn't safe to teach young girls in the area. After we cleared the Taliban out of central Chara, the school was able to reopen. The village elder and the teacher in charge came to us and brought one of my men a basket of fresh fruit as a gift for enabling them to once again teach the girls in safety. None of us had ever received a more meaningful gift. Throughout my time in the region, I fostered a relationship with the Colonel's superiors in Kandahar, demonstrating stra­ tegic alignment and a "one-team" mentality. Our efforts helped them achieve their strategic goals, and we were able to do that with or without the Colonel's help. In many ways, it was an il­ lustration of the very same "leader and follower" point, but at an organizational level, not just an individual one. We, as a SEAL Team, knew that we had to step up and lead here-success wasn't going to be achieved by merely following the wishes of the Col­ onel and stepping aside. We understood-and got the Colonel's superiors to quickly understand-that letting us be SEALs and execute our plan was going to be the smartest road to achieving the military's goals in the region. By the time the Colonel had left Chora on his regular rotation home, midway through my team's deployment, he had a compromised reputation among the SEALs and among his superiors. He was replaced by another Colonel, with whom we got along wonderfully-and together, our combined efforts were able to make even more significant progress in eliminating the Taliban from the area. 96 NEVER ENDU&H + + + That first Colonel was simply never able to get on board with our efforts. He was stuck in his belief that his plan-avoid all risk and sacrifice the chance for progress-was the only plan, and that·he was the only one whose ideas were worth listening to. Even when I had gotten support from his superiors to move forward, he could not shift his thinking to support the mission, and he was unwilling to take on any pain in order to help. He was never going to be a follower, and he was never going to make things easier for me and my team. He was never going to be a partner, and from start to finish, his attitude and behavior hurt the overall mission. I can contrast this with another story, that of a platoon com­ mander named Mark. His platoon was co-located within my Special Operations Task Force headquarters in Tarin Kowt, the birthplace of Mullah Omar, the founder of the Taliban. Mark's team was partnered with an Afghan Special Forces team, and our guys were training the Afghans to take on the risk of leading their own nation. One night, a 25-minute helicopter ride away from Mark's team, another SEAL platoon commander named Andy was leading an offensive mission against known Taliban enemies, trying to clear targets and make the region safer. Andy learned on this night that more Taliban forces were on their way, setting up to attack his team. I knew he needed reinforcements, and although he told me over the radio that he was okay, I had a gut feeling that he soon wouldn't be, and that he needed backup quickly. I reached out to Mark to let him know the situation, and before I could even finish my first sentence, he was on it. In my  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TD BE WHICH 97 role, I had to be aware of everything happening in the two dozen outstations under my command. In Mark's position, his vantage point was more limited. He didn't necessarily know what was happening with Andy's team, and some degree of reluctance, trepidation, or fear would have been, well, human. Instead, at twenty-eight years old, Mark calmly and confidently took own­ ership of the situation. He immediately got his team together, pulled up Andy's operations plan, studied the terrain, coordi­ nated with supporting ground and air assets, and prepared the mission. As quickly as possible, he became the expert I needed him to be, and his platoon was ready to go the moment Andy confirmed that he could use backup. Out of the helicopter, they helped flank the large number of Taliban and provided neces­ sary assistance to complete the mission. Between Mark's platoon and Andy's platoon, the Taliban fighters were destroyed, and the area was cleared out-without a single scratch on the American troops. Later, after things had calmed down, I reflected on the night's events, and I realized how much we all owed Andy for taking on such a hard mission, and how much we owed Mark and his team for being so quick and willing to calmly and smartly take on mortal risk, get on a helicopter, and land in the middle of a gunfight. They embodied the idea that the more you hurt, the less your teammates hurt-and in this case, they were able to make it so that no one on our side ended up hurt at all. We all have to do what we can to make the lives of those around us easier, not harder. That's how we create a cohesive environment and turn people into true partners. That's how we win. Even when we're not talking about life-or-death gunfights, we can all try to step up when others need us, and aim to take 98 NEVER ENOUGH things off people's plates instead of piling on more weight for others to carry. We can become leaders when the situation is asking for us to lead-and in the process, build real relationships founded on truth and trust. When working in a situation where I can absorb some of a leader's burdens-whether in the military, the White House, or in business-I've tried to divide the tasks we perform into three categories: what I can do that my boss doesn't even need to think about, what I can do that I can tell my boss about later, and what I absolutely need to tell my boss about now to make sure we are on the same page. The more I can put in those first two categories and not take up his or her time in the moment, the better off the organization is. Mark went on to become a White House Fellow, and I can't wait to see how the rest of his career unfolds. I know him as someone truly able to step up when needed, and to be flexible and agile as situations change and develop. These are qualities we can all build in ourselves, no matter the roles we play. Everyone Works for You, You Work for Everyone You probably don't expect to hear this from someone who spent two decades in the US military, an organization not exactly known for its disregard of rank and title-but the truth is that at any given moment, on any particular mission, hierarchy doesn't and shouldn't matter. If hierarchy is getting in the way of the best decision being made, or precluding the best person from taking on any particular role, then something is deeply wrong. At every point along the way, you want your strongest team on the field, and you want people stepping forward and stepping back based on their competencies, not their titles.  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TO BE WHICH 99 The person first on a scene-or the first to notice a prob­ lem, just to broaden us out from the military world-should be the first one who thinks about how it can potentially get worse, and what kind of response network needs to be activated. That means you don't approach a situation assuming that it's someone else's concern or, as you hear people say sometimes, "it's above my pay grade." That's never the right kind of thinking. Nothing is above-or below-anyone's pay grade. The most junior person should be thinking about big-picture strategy if he or she has something useful to contribute, and just as critically, the most senior person shouldn't think anything going on in the organization is beneath him or her-and truly, a leader who knows what's happening on the ground is always going to be able to apply that knowledge toward making better decisions at the top of the organization. There are absolutely reasons why, just as an example, you may not want the CEO to carry his own bags to and from the train station-perhaps it's more useful to keep his hands free to use those ten minutes to make calls to clients-but the idea that he's too important, too special, or too senior to do it shouldn't be on the list. Fundamentally, seniority shouldn't be dictating decisions. What matters is if the decision is right, not who makes the decision. The higher up you are in an organization, the more you need to understand that it's not your job to make the best decision-your job is to ensure the best decision gets made. You need to be able to identify the best people to make the decision, and be open to listening to everyone up and down the hierarchy, because you never know how the best answer will emerge.. Ego too often gets in the way here. People with powerful 100 NEVER ENOUGH titles-or people who seek those titles-are frequently afraid not to be the ones seen making decisions. We feel we have to justify our role by making the important calls ourselves, or we think we'll be seen as dispensable if we're not the ones with the big idea. Being the one with the big idea is great-unless someone else had an even better idea that you pushed aside in your race to get the credit. When we're insecure about our role, our standing, or our importance-that's when we hunt for credit and think we need to prove something to anyone who's watching. When we're comfortable with who we are and what we bring to the table, we're unafraid to share the spotlight, unbothered by other people being celebrated, unselfish about praise. We realize, when we're secure, that the organization's success is our success, and we all rise and fall as one. + + + Reed was twenty-three years old, just out of training, when he was on my team. I had been spending time trying to advance what was known as the "power problem." Getting electric power to outstations throughout a war zone is a huge challenge. While "green energy'' wasn't exactly a concept embraced by the military from an environmental perspective-the immediate needs do tend to push longer-term issues to the side-I saw clear battle­ field benefits if we could harness alternative energy sources. Anything to be lighter, be more capable or durable, reduce risk, or save money is in the interest of the overall mission. As an example, traditionally we often use helicopters to drop countless tons of diesel to power generators that must run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is not ideal, nor is the use of expensive con­ tracted trucks to deliver diesel, traveling on incredibly risky  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TO BE WHICH 101 roads to do so. When we do have to use helicopters, we do so reluctantly, because helicopters are valuable assets. Using them to airdrop gasoline means we can't use them for transporting troops to missions or evacuating injured men and women to safety. There is also risk to the pilots and to people on the ground every time there is a fuel drop. Plus, there ends up being a 3-hour window where people have to wait for fuel, instead of doing whatever else could be done for the mission at hand. Finally, the fuel is costly and often wasted: since the generators have to run 24/7 and are typically sized for the maximum necessary load, the vast majority of the electricity they produce often goes unused. Admiral Philip Cullom is a highly distinguished (now re­ tired) Naval officer who was leading the charge at the time for green energy solutions for the entire US Navy. His task was not easy. In the military, there is often real tension between labora­ tories in the Pentagon (or elsewhere) dreaming up breakthrough ideas to advance modern warfare and support and field units only wanting to use a new development if it has already been combat-tested. It takes forward-thinking units to be willing to simultaneously be in combat and test new things. So even though Cullom and his team had developed several potential solutions to the power problem, it was challenging to get them off the ground. One of these solutions came from a company that had used new technology to link a battery bank to their generators, en­ abling field units to store power that would otherwise have gone to waste. This meant the generators no longer needed to run anywhere close to 24 hours a day, a lot less gas was consumed, many fewer helicopter hours were flown, and incredible amounts of money and time were saved. 102 NEVER ENDU&H I needed someone to help me think about technologies like these, figure out which we were interested in and able to test, and how we would do it without adding burden or increasing risk to the troops. I identified something in Reed that made me think he would understand and be excited by the challenge (not every SEAL was thinking about the power problem, or would even care, to be honest). And within a week of bringing him on board, he had become an expert, learning far more about the mechanics of energy and the range of new technologies out there than I ever would. Reed had great ideas and strategic insights about everything from solar to windmills to waterfalls. I brought Reed with me to meet Admiral Cullom in his Pen­ tagon office. It's not every day that a rookie officer-Reed was an ensign, an 01 rank at the time, the most junior an officer could be-gets an audience with an Admiral, but I trusted Reed and knew he would make a good impression. For Admiral Cullom, this was a win-win situation. To be able to share that the SEALs were on board with new green energy initiatives was a coup for him-if something is good enough for the SEALs, then surely it's good enough for the rest of the Navy. Cullom wanted me to follow up by coming to Washington and briefing the Secretary of the Navy on our efforts. I would have 20 minutes alone with the Secretary to tell him what we were doing, and how it was paving the way for a solution to the power problem going for­ ward. I told Admiral Cullom that I didn't need to be in the room with the Secretary-Reed had become the expert, and Reed should do the briefing alone. I knew that because of the military hierarchy, Reed wouldn't have felt like he could take the lead ifl was in the room, too. And I knew it would make a much bigger  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TD BE WHICH 103 impact on the Secretary to have a brand-new officer telling him about power strategy within the SEALs than to have me doing it. Indeed, the feedback I got after the session was that they talked for much longer than 20 minutes, and that the Secretary was blown away by how confident an expert Reed was, and how much good the SEALs were doing in the energy arena-not just for show, but in terms of real, combat-oriented efforts. + + + Sometimes the best thing is for the new guy to be the one in charge-both for the new guy and for the organization as a whole. I happily enabled Reed to look like a star, and Reed made us all look good. Why shouldn't he have had the privilege of taking the lead? The lesson is partly about not being afraid to let the most junior person on the team take the reins, but it's also about not even thinking about someone's rank or seniority as a factor in what they can learn or do. If Reed had been at my level instead of an 01, but was in the best position to be the expert about green energy, then he still should have been the one in the room with the Secretary. Our knowledge,.passion, and ability matters-not our position in the hierarchy. It goes the other way, too. As Commander, I would sometimes go on missions with my teams, partly to observe them in action, partly to keep up my skills and comfort in combat, and partly be­ cause it's important for a leader to be willing to take on the same risk he's asking his people to take on. In some scenarios, these missions could be uncomfortable for the rest of the team-it's like any situation when the boss is suddenly around where he typically isn't. Everyone else might feel a little more guarded, a little less open. I tried hard not to make my team feel that way. 104 NEVER ENOU&H There was a running joke among the SEALs that some "strap­ hangers," or people not fighting nightly in the SEAL platoon, would try to go out on a single mission so they could qualify for an award or two, while the real operators were going out night after night. So whenever I walked into the room on a night that I was going out with the guys, I'd just tell them, "Fellas, I've already written my award for heroism for tonight. Now we just have to go out and do the mission!" I knew (and they knew) that I wasn't really needed. They could absolutely do their mission without me. On these missions, I'd plan to be the guy most out of the way, in the back, with the command-and-control element-usually the next most senior officer and the radio guy. Of course, on the ground, the back can quickly become the front. On one par­ ticular mission when I went out with the guys in Iraq, we had planned to take down an insurgent cell known to be located in three or four buildings in a village overrun with Sunni ex­ tremists. I was one of four SEALs on the outskirts, making sure the area was clear before establishing the command-and-control position. Suddenly, through my grainy, green night-vision gog­ gles, I saw a family-a mom, a dad, a ten-year-old kid, and a baby-sleeping outside a shack on a 2-foot-high platform. This wasn't entirely unusual; given the middle-of-the-night heat in Iraq, families often slept outside. But something about this sit­ uation felt off to me. Twenty-one feet, we learn in training, is a magic number. If someone starts to pull a gun on you and you're unarmed and within 21 feet of them, you are actually better off running toward them than running away, because you can po­ tentially reach them before they can reach their weapon. I was about 20 feet away when I noticed the family (but of course, in  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TO BE WHICH 105 this case, I had my rifle and pistol on me). I saw the father start to reach for something. Instinct told me this was bad. I spoke firmly and clearly to the guy behind me, calling his name-"Joel,Joel,Joel"-so he would know that I was about to make a move and could cover me, and I held the Iraqi man in my crosshairs, ready to shoot him at any moment, as I rushed as fast as I could toward him before he could grab what did turn out to be a weapon. He was reaching for an AK rifle just as I put my foot on his arm so he wouldn't be able to point the weapon at me or any of my teammates. Then I quickly put my muzzle on his chest and subdued him, and enlisted Joel's help to properly detain him with flex cuffs (plastic handcuffs). I could have shot him at any time, but as I first approached him, I didn't know for sure that he was armed, and my instant and instinctive calculation made me confident that I would be fast enough to get to him before he could take a shot at me or anyone else if he did have a weapon. It turned out that the AK was fully loaded and he had three magazines... and after we got him cuffed, his family under our control, and our targets secured, we realized through our interro­ gation process that he was in fact the number two most wanted enemy in western Iraq at the time. ''Anytime you need something done," I joked (loudly and obnoxiously) to my team afterward, "just ask the officer." Of course, we all knew it was pure luck that had put me in the position to subdue him. Everyone else on the team would have done exactly the same. The other guys had captured literally hundreds, if not thousands, of more dangerous insurgents and terrorists than I had. But it hammered home the lesson that anyone can be the lead actor at any given time. We dynamically adjust based on the situation. We rewrite the map. 106 NEVER ENDU&H + + + I would regularly emphasize to the newest and most junior SEAL that on any given operation, he could find himself in the front, with the best vantage point and plan, and how it would be his job to step up and tell people what he needed them to do­ but I would also remind the most experienced SEALs on my team that tonight might be their night as well. Anyone can be the leader at any time. Being able to react to current situations on the ground is not easy, and of course you always need to make sure there aren't multiple teammates trying to go in different directions, turning the situation into anarchy and undirected chaos. That's where training comes in, but it's also a place where attitude and expectations play a huge role. If no one expects to automatically be in charge based on position or seniority, then it's far easier to give up control when you see that someone else is better positioned to lead in the moment. How you create an organization that can support this kind of dynamic subordination-this constant forward and back­ ward movement-is a cultural issue, and depends on the kind of organization-level agility we'll talk more about in chapter 6. But on an individual level, it means you must always be pre­ pared to take the reins, and just as prepared to hand them off Great leaders must know how to lead and how to follow, but most important, they have to know when to do which. That's what differentiates them from the rest of the pack. In the busi­ ness world, I've spoken about this issue to two different top­ five banks, explaining that in a crisis, they didn't need to have a playbook-because every situation is always going to play out differently, and we can never know all the details in advance.  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TO BE WHICH 107 They needed to have a meta-playbook, a plan for making the playbook on the fly, for people moving forward and back and enabling great leaders to step up. ( Of course, when I say "great leaders," I don't mean just the people at the top of the hierarchy-I mean everyone. Because if there's one point I'm trying to make here, it's that everyone is a leader-or at least they're only one moment away from finding themselves in the circumstances where they ought to become one.) The SEAL mindset is fundamentally one where you see yourself with the power and ability to control things that most people believe are uncontrollable, while at the same time having the humility not to force your own way on the world. Everyone can work for you, but you also have to be willing and eager to work for everyone. Succeed at Your Assigned Mission, Not the Mission You Want There is inevitably unpleasant work to be done on any SEAL mission. There are people who have to hide themselves on a roof for three days in extreme heat with limited water, in order to watch for anything that might be going on in the town below. In those long, slow hours, you find yourself counting the bugs around you, studying the environment, playing card games with­ out the actual cards. You know that at any given moment, things could turn messy and you could find yourself in the middle of a gunfight-but until that point, it's just boredom. Not every job feels meaningful at every point along the way-although the best leaders will connect even the smallest tasks to the larger mission and make everyone understand how they are valuable 108 NEVER ENOUGH (and valued) parts of the team. Bigger picture, not everyone al­ ways agrees with every mission. There are going to be choices made that each of us may have decided differently, benchmarks we don't believe are the right ones, strategies we don't fully trust or understand. We can and should push back against them, but sometimes we fail, and then we find ourselves on a mission we don't fully connect with, or playing a role we don't truly want to play. And then there are times that you can be tempted to bring your organization on a mission that turns out to be selfish, and isn't in the best interest of the team. From the first day of mili­ tary training, you learn that securing your weapon is critical. You lose your weapon, it's like losing a limb. We had a guy, a senior enlisted, who was typically an excellent performer, a team player, and everything you want in a partner, who lost his pistol at one I point. He realized it must have fallen out while he was in the door of a helicopter the previous night as part of a quick reaction force. This team would routinely fly a preplanned distance around a target, waiting in reserve in case an ongoing mission went side­ ways, ready to get called quickly into action at high speed and at a high angle. I found out the next day that he was trying to get his team to repeat the previous night's mission and go out in the same general area so he could look for his missing gun. I was furious when I heard about this. How could he risk the lives of his teammates on an unnecessary mission simply because he wanted to avoid looking like he was irresponsible and careless? You can never let your own personal desires distort the decision-making process. The truth is that while it's never ac­ ceptable to lose your weapon, it's even less acceptable to put your team at risk. In this particular situation, it wasn't like the guy just  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, ANO KNOW WHEN TD BE WHICH 109 dropped his weapon on his way to breakfast and didn't know where it was.To go back and search an active battlefield is an incredibly poor decision. Obviously not all situations have this kind oflife-or-death stakes, but that he would consider putting people at risk when it wasn't absolutely necessary was shocking and upsetting to me, far more upsetting than the fact that he had lost his weapon in the first place. In another situation, someone smuggled a dog out of the combat zone.We are not supposed to bring animals out ofthe field, for the same reason that international travelers aren't sup­ posed to bring home plants or produce of any kind: we don't want to introduce nonnative species or diseases back in the US. But this soldier had fallen in love with a stray dog, and at the end of his deployment, he snuck it onto the plane in his bag. The flight landed back in the US, the customs agent boarded, and the dog was found...which meant that the whole entry process for everyone on the plane had to come to a stop.The dog had to be quarantined, examined, and given its shots, and for everyone else on the plane, that meant hours of waiting. Normally we think of extra hours in the airport as an annoying inconvenience, but in this case, these were men and women who had just spent months away from their loved ones in service to their country and were finally getting to go home and see them.Adding hours to their long-awaited and much-deserved reunions felt pretty unconscionable to me. + + + These were not hard cases.These were rules or norms that de­ served to be in place, and the people causing problems were, in those moments, bad actors. (We all have our moments of 110 NEVER ENOD&H poor judgment, for sure, but we should aim to minimize them.) W here the situations get harder is when there are rules that you truly believe deserve to be broken, or where your organization may not be on the mission you'd like it to be. I'd be lying ifl said there were always easy answers. You do what you can to change an organization, and to move a team in the right direction. But in the moment, you have to play your role, and you have to be the best team member you can be. I've certainly stepped into roles that weren't my first choice, to help out the greater mission and fill a gap that needed to be filled. We owe it to our orga­ nizations to try our best to understand and connect with their missions, and then do what makes the organization better, not what makes us feel the best. An Individual Can Fail-An Organization Can't We have to have room for people to fail. W henever we are be­ ing pushed to our maximum capacity, doing hard things, facing uncomfortable situations, extending the limits of what we think we are capable of, there will always be a chance of failure at the individual level. That's okay-if we never fail, we're clearly not pushing ourselves hard enough. But a good organization sets itself up so that the failure of an individual does not mean the failure of the organization. Other people have to step forward when one person falls back. I remember a situation during a reconnaissance mission where my team snowshoed in subzero temperatures. During the day, we were hiding in brutal conditions along the steep slope of a mountain. One of my teammates, Danny, a superb SEAL, was horribly sick with a virus during this ordeal. We were all miser-  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TO BE WHICH 111 able, but Danny, fighting a high fever and looking like someone who ought to be home in bed, was clearly much worse off than the rest of us. Seeing what terrible shape he was in, I approached him and told him that we could cancel the mission if he needed us to, and I was fully open to that possibility. It was not worth risking his life to complete the mission, which was to confirm or deny the presence of illicit activity at one particular site in one random three-day window. Danny; sick as he was, refused to let us quit. He refused to let the team down, no matter how he felt. Danny looked at me and said that as long as we could deal with him stepping back and not taking his turns "on the glass" (looking through binoculars and other optical equipment), he could absolutely deal with his misery on his own and suffer in silence. He was not willing to be the reason we couldn't complete the task. Most people would have gladly taken me up on my offer to quit, especially if they were in the condition Danny was obvi­ ously in. But even though he knew he wasn't in a position to step up and lead, or even to do his assigned job, he didn't want to bring us down. Fortunately, we had others who could step in and take his place, and Danny's calculation in this particular situation was right: we had sufficient manpower, and sufficient agility, to let him fail. We could support him and keep the mission going without suffering as an organization. (Of course, if Danny had needed medical attention, or if his condition had gotten worse, we would have absolutely aborted the mission to get him the help he needed. Same thing ifl had felt his diminished capabil­ ity was going to put us at any increased risk. It was only because Danny was so insistent that he could handle it-and because I 112 NEVER ENOU&H knew he would be honest with me ifhe couldn't-that I contin­ ued the mission.) Sometimes the best thing we can do is let someone else take the reins, whether we're sick or, more often, we simply realize that someone else is better positioned to bring us success. But the lesson of this chapter isn't really to step back, at least not often. The lesson is to step up, whenever you can, to make your life and the lives of those around you better. Being ready to do whatever is needed at any given moment is what makes the world stronger. If we think about tragedies that we read about in the news each day, there are often heroes who step forward and end up saving lives. The definition of a hero, in a lot of people's eyes, is just an ordinary person who steps up to do something extraordinary. These are people who didn't wake up that morning expecting to lead, but when circumstances presented themselves, they did, and others ended up so much better off for it. We only have to look at the opposite situations-times when no one steps up and outcomes turn out worse-to know how true that really is. This is no less relevant for slow-moving issues, whether it's local governmental policies or budget decisions in any organiza­ tion. There are things we disagree with, or that can be done bet­ ter, but that no one is sufficiently acting upon. Ifwe see ourselves as capable ofleading, or sometimes following, even when no one is asking us to, we can exert far more power than we realize, and change the world for the better. + + + As you see from these lessons, agility is key when it comes to the roles we all play. We have to be able to move forward and move back in a dynamic process, based on ever-changing cir-  BE A LEADER AND A FOLLOWER, AND KNOW WHEN TD BE WHICH 113 cumstances. Sometimes we lead and sometimes we follow. Sometimes we're the ones making the important decisions-and sometimes we have to either delegate or accept that the decision is not ours to make, and then do the best we can with the plan that has been put in place. But the next chapter is about the decisions that we own, the choices we are empowered to make, either for ourselves or for our teams and organizations. When I ran SEAL Team TWO, we spent months with at least one unit in direct combat with the Taliban, and sometimes more than five units were in gunfights at the same time. We didn't harm anyone we shouldn't have. Why? Luck, certainly, but also an agile decision-making process. That process is the piece I want to turn to next.