There Are No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders

I hope you’re having an amazing day. 

I’ve just finished reading Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink & Leif Babin, it’s an incredible read and I highly recommend it. 

In their book, they talk about a concept which is that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

This is a super interesting concept for me, and one that I want to explore with you a little bit more in today’s post. 

This teaching element is based on the premise that every leader and every business owner needs to take absolute and extreme ownership for everything that is in their life and for everything that occurs and happens around them. 

So, if a team member or an entire team is performing poorly or fails to hit a deadline or gets a terrible outcome on a project, it is actually not the team’s fault, but the leader or business owner’s fault. 

Instead of blaming or berating the team for what went wrong, we need to stop, pause and ask ourselves “how did I let my team down here”? Or “as the leader or business owner who is ultimately and completely responsible for the performance of my team, what can I do differently next time”? 

I personally think this is an incredibly powerful concept, because if you practice it, it means that nothing is out of your control. It means everything is within your zone of influence, it means that you’re taking complete and utter responsibility for everything that happens and ultimately means the buck stops with you. 

So in order to practice this concept and to build it into your team or your business, any time something goes wrong, instead of externalising it or making it someone else’s fault or shifting the blame or responsibility to someone else, stop, pause and ask yourself “what could I have done differently here”? 

You tell yourself that the results of your team and your business are 100% your responsibility and that if something goes wrong, you need to take personal responsibility for this and then work out a plan for how to fix it. And you don’t rest until there is a strategy and an action plan in place to ensure that this failure or poor outcome never happens again. 

This can be confronting to take complete and utter ownership over everything in your team or your business (and your life in general), but that is ultimately where true success lies. 

Josh ‘Ownership’ Stone

PS: If you’re interested, here are 4 ways I can help you right now:

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