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The first Law of Combat: Cover and Move. This is teamwork—every individual and team within the team, mutually supporting one another to accomplish the mission.
if the team fails, everybody fails.
The second Law of Combat: Simple. Complexity breeds chaos and disaster, especially when things go wrong.
The third Law of Combat: Prioritize and Execute.
The fourth Law of Combat: Decentralized Command. No one leader can manage it all or make every decision.
That’s another dichotomy: in order to help your team, sometimes you have to hurt them. Just like a doctor performing a surgery.
“You train how you fight and you fight how you train.”
“One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss.”
When the debate on a particular course of action ends and the boss makes a decision—even if you disagree with the decision—“you must execute the plan as if it were your own.”
Under normal circumstances, a good leader must follow and support the chain of command.
Leaders who fail to be good followers fail themselves and their team. But when a leader is willing to follow, the team functions effectively and the probability of mission success radically increases. This is the dichotomy to balance: be a leader and a follower.
you should strive to have the same relationship with every boss you ever work for, no matter if they are good or bad. Whether they are an outstanding leader whom you admire, a mediocre leader who needs improvement, or a terrible leader for whom no one on the team has respect, you must strive to form the same relationship with all of them.”
I explained that the relationship to seek with any boss incorporates three things: 1) They trust you. 2) They value and seek your opinion and guidance. 3) They give you what you need to accomplish your mission and then let you go execute.
For planning, there is a dichotomy within which leaders must find balance. You cannot plan for every contingency. If you try to create a solution for every single potential problem that might arise, you overwhelm your team, you overwhelm the planning process, you overcomplicate decisions for leaders.
It is important, however, that leaders manage the dichotomy in planning by not straying too far in the other direction—by not planning enough for contingencies.
At every level of the team, leaders must fight against complacency and overconfidence. Nothing breeds arrogance like success—a string of victories on the battlefield or business initiatives.
It is difficult to balance the dichotomy between these two extremes. But it is critical for every leader to understand that in order to be successful, he or she must plan, but not overplan.
Principle Humility is the most important quality in a leader.
Humility is essential to building strong relationships with others, both up and down the chain of command, as well as with supporting teams outside the immediate chain of command.
But being too humble can be equally disastrous for the team. A leader cannot be passive. When it truly matters, leaders must be willing to push back, voice their concerns, stand up for the good of their team, and provide feedback up the chain against a direction or strategy they know will endanger the team or harm the strategic mission.
Leaders must be humble enough to listen to new ideas, willing to learn strategic insights, and open to implementing new and better tactics and strategies. But a leader must also be ready to stand firm when there are clearly unintended consequences that negatively impact the mission and risk harm to the team.
But when the strategic mission or the ultimate good of the team was at risk, those were the times that a leader must push back. To not do so, I told them, was to fail as a leader; to fail the team and the mission.
“If you’re passive, if you don’t push back,” I said, “you aren’t leading up the chain of command. The boss needs and wants your honest feedback on this. He may not even know it,”
Principle Naturally, leaders must be attentive to details. However, leaders cannot be so immersed in the details that they lose track of the larger strategic situation and are unable to provide command and control for the entire team.
Leaders cannot allow themselves to get so obsessed by the details that they lose focus on the bigger picture.
This is the dichotomy that must be balanced: to become engrossed in and overwhelmed by the details risks mission failure, but to be so far detached from the details that the leader loses control is to fail the team and fail the mission.
The narrow view isn’t the leader’s job. The leader’s job is to look around and see the bigger picture.
“All of you, as senior leaders, should be striving to detach so you can stand back, gain perspective, and recognize where your priorities should be focused.
“You have to detach. But you can’t be so detached that you don’t know what is going on. Because if you don’t know what’s going on, you can’t help your team; you can’t lead.”
