Two members of the most decorated Navy SEAL team in history share stories about some of the most intense, sustained urban fighting and, more importantly, the lessons for leadership those experiences taught. Willink and Babin argue that these principles about responsibility and about achieving and sustaining victory are equally applicable to life in the civilian sector.

Most books written by Navy SEALS focus on the author’s individual contributions and winning mindset. In plenty of corporations, executives exalt their own accomplishments with similar emphasis. This book refuses to view wins outside the context of the team. No mission or leader succeeds without a group of people working effectively to accomplish the goal. Assessing a team’s leadership has become overly complicated, but only one rubric is necessary: success and failure. A team rises or falls with the quality of its leadership.

At the heart of good leadership is extreme ownership. Extreme ownership means taking responsibility for everything in your sphere of influence—absolutely everything. Good leaders don’t blame others—they accept losses, acknowledging what they failed to do well, distilling lessons from the loss, and then creating a new plan that will succeed.

When multiple units from the Army, Navy, and Marines were coordinating the takeover of the highly contested Iraqi city of Ar Ramadi, there was a friendly fire incident (“blue-on-blue,” as it’s often called) between a SEAL team and Iraqi allies. “Whose fault was it?” Willink asked the regrouped platoon after the fog of confusion had lifted. The SEAL who started the incident claimed responsibility. So did the radioman from the sniper division, for not acting sooner. So did another SEAL, for not coordinating better with Iraqi allies. None of them was to blame. The only person at fault, as Willink informed them, was himself. As the leader of Task Unit Bruiser, the buck stopped with him, and so, in front of his whole team, he accepted the blame for everything that had gone wrong that morning. He also swore that this would never happen again, apologized to the SEAL who had taken a frag grenade to the face, and began designing protocol that would better protect the company.

These moments are ego-shattering, but necessary for strong leadership. Shifting the blame would have shattered an already rattled team. Even though the friendly fire tragedy occurred in the context of a complex, multi-pronged effort, seeing the leader own it all added respect and trust to the unit. Leaders taking ownership like this is especially impactful because we’re so used to seeing leaders kick blame down the chain of command or simply chalking it up to bad luck or something circumstantial.

This concept is deceptively simple. There is plenty of opposition to extreme ownership,  ego and selfish agendas among the most common. Leaders must set those aside and keep their eyes on the mission to be accomplished, owning the team’s failures and sharing credit for successes with the rest of the team.

When the authors returned from Iraq, they created Echelon Front, LLC. The name describes a team moving as a unit at the frontlines of a battle—arguably the most dynamic and unpredictable setting in which people can find themselves. Echelon Front is a consulting firm that aims to strengthen leadership by teaching extreme ownership. When an organization’s leadership takes extreme ownership seriously, the whole organization can clarify objectives and improve team cohesiveness. Common outcomes include improved profitability and competence.

But sometimes, leaders don’t want to adjust. One of the most toxic kinds of leaders is the “Tortured Genius.” The Tortured Genius is the antithesis of extreme ownership because he refuses to accept responsibility and sidesteps or rejects any criticism—no matter how legitimate. Whatever the problem, it never lies with him; the “real problem” is that no one seems to appreciate him or the brilliant decisions he is making.

The CTO at a certain company was an especially tortured specimen. At a workshop Willink ran for the company, the CTO took issue with the idea that a leader takes complete responsibility for his teams’ losses, and if a team is losing, then leadership is not making the right decisions. He insisted that he was making all the right plays, but Willink disagreed because the company was struggling and everyone knew it. The CTO highlighted the failures of everyone around him (real and perceived), while his own reputation remained completely unscathed. Willink relayed that the same mindset sometimes creeps into some SEALS, too, who refuse to take ownership. With life and death in the balance, the results can be catastrophic.

Good leaders are clear about their expectations, and they hold the line on them. The clearest indication of what’s important to a leader is what he is or isn’t willing to tolerate. This goes farther than verbal affirmation of a certain principle. Whatever the rules are, if members of the team give subpar performances without any repercussions or feedback, then subpar performance has become the new normal. Willink encouraged the CEO to make sure his CTO was on the same page. The company’s mission couldn’t be accomplished unless the CTO took extreme ownership like everyone else. Eventually, the CEO decided to fire the CTO. The CEO had a mission to accomplish and the CTO was hampering the team’s movement toward that goal.

The CTO was blaming the quality of his team, but the bald fact of the matter is that there is no bad team—just bad leadership. The new CTO who replaced him embraced the extreme ownership ethos the company had adopted, and the department’s and the company’s performance improved dramatically.

One of the most basic combat tactics is “Cover and Move.” Essentially, it is teamwork, an expression of interdependence that acknowledges that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. When a pair or a larger group is pinned in the back alley of an unsecured part of a city crawling with hostiles, the best way for them to rejoin the company is to take turns covering each other. One party moves while the other covers. Then they switch roles.

Not only is “Cover and Move” useful between individuals, but between larger groups as well. Babin was once chewed out by his commander over a tactical decision that had failed to utilize other units. Babin felt he had made the least bad decision, but by forgetting to coordinate with other units that could have provided cover, he put troops in vulnerable uncovered positions when he didn’t have to. Babin let go of his inflamed ego as he realized his commander was absolutely right, and that the better move would have been to adopt a strategy that relied on teams. Other teams could have covered while Babin’s units moved.

It is easy for teams within an organization to get siloed to such a degree that there is little to no communication or cooperation—cooperation that could save time, resources, needless aggravation, and, in some of the more extreme scenarios, human lives. These silos within an organization tend to promote divisiveness and blame shifting. We can dig in our heels so far that we forget we are working toward the same goal. The success of the mission is paramount, and petty in-fighting obscures that. We start thinking in terms of scoring points against the rival faction instead of asking the question of how we might help the other groups score points.

The “Cover and Move” tactic promotes a united front, and keeps the main thing the main thing.

The battlefield is the farthest thing from a static, predictable environment. With so many moving pieces, it can be overwhelming for the leader. It is important to know what you want to accomplish and be able to adapt when a new path to victory must be charted. The leader must learn to use the “Prioritize and Execute” technique, maintaining the presence of mind in complex, high-stakes situations to determine what the highest priority task is. As the SEALs were taught, “Relax, look around, and make a call.”

Even when the decisions aren’t a matter of life and death, there are still complex, high-stakes problems in the world of business that require the skills of stepping back, assessing, deciding which task to handle next, and then putting the team’s energies toward that objective. Notice that “task” is singular. A fatal problem in battle and in business is spreading your team too thin, trying to accomplish everything at once. What invariably happens is the team accomplishes none of the objectives because there were too many. One task at a time. Decide which is the most important and go for it. Then move on to the next-highest priority. Should the priority change, it is vital to make sure that change and the reason for it are communicated all the way down the chain of command.

Do your best to stay a few steps ahead of problems. When you decide which task requires immediate attention, anticipate a few of the most likely problems that could arise and develop contingency plans. Don’t become so fixated on the task that you get tunnel vision, forget to see the bigger picture, and lose awareness of other problems that crop up. Another problem can grow so big that the priority has to shift.

Willink had a conversation with the CEO of a struggling pharmaceutical company. The executive explained the current systems as well as the new additional projects they were about to roll out. Willink responded by inquiring about the company’s top priority, followed up by the second question of what might happen if the company devoted the next several weeks or months to tackling that problem. The CEO immediately identified strengthening and supporting the sales force as the top priority, then worked to design a multipronged strategy based on that priority—instead of trying to do everything at once. As the employees learned of the new top priority and aligned themselves with that priority, it wasn’t long before they saw improvements in performance and profits.

Leadership is just as much a mindset as a position. When you have a superior who is not taking extreme ownership, failing to articulate expectations well, or neglecting to provide the support needed to accomplish tasks, you could do what most people do, which is put the blame on the boss. But you would be missing an opportunity to exercise extreme ownership yourself. Blame yourself before you blame your boss. Ask yourself what you are not doing that you could be doing to ameliorate the situation.

If you are not communicating to your (direct) superior, asking questions and providing the feedback that would help higher-ups know where their plans are deficient, you are not yet adopting extreme ownership yourself; you are not committed to taking responsibility for everything in your world.

This “leading down” the chain of command is easier than “leading up” the chain of command. Your superior has authority over you and that can be the final word when there is a clash of intuitions. You cannot do the same with your boss. Thus, it takes far more tact and creativity to lead up than to lead down. It takes humility to acknowledge the boss’s predicament: There are a lot of plates to keep spinning and some get more attention than others at certain times, depending on what the top priority is. Don’t forget this.

A leader also must be willing to respectfully back down. If you’ve communicated your points as clearly and persuasively as you know how and your boss continues to take things in the original direction, you must accept the plan, communicate it to your team, and enact it like it was your plan: no complaints, no excuses. A leader supports his boss with honest feedback and good questions, but still follows orders even when there’s an impasse.

If you sulk and wait for a negligent boss to change and start taking extreme ownership, you might be waiting a long time. Whatever your name, rank, and serial number, the best way to help the organization you’re part of accomplish its mission is to exude the qualities of a leader yourself.