“Our egos don’t like to take blame.”

If mistakes happen, effective leaders don’t place blame on others. They take ownership of the mistakes, determine what went wrong, develop solutions to correct those mistakes and prevent them from happening again as they move forward.

The U.S. Navy SEAL Teams were at the forefront of this leadership transformation, emerging from the triumphs and tragedies of war with a crystallized understanding of what it takes to succeed in the most challenging environments that combat presents.

Cover and Move, Simple, Prioritize and Execute, and Decentralized Command.

The most impressive thing about this improvement in performance was that it did not come from a major process change or an advance in technology. Instead, it came through a leadership principle that has been around for ages: Simple.

Establishing an effective and repeatable planning process is critical to the success of any team.

The test for a successful brief is simple: Do the team and the supporting elements understand it?

Staying ahead of the curve prevents a leader from being overwhelmed when pressure is applied and enables greater decisiveness.

A good leader does not get bogged down in the minutia of a tactical problem at the expense of strategic success.

His realistic assessment, acknowledgment of failure, and ownership of the problem were key to developing a plan to improve performance and ultimately win.

There is only hard work, late nights, early mornings, practice, rehearsal, repetition, study, sweat, blood, toil, frustration, and discipline.

Leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities, between one extreme and another.

A mission statement tells your troops what you are doing.

People do not follow robots.

A good leader has nothing to prove, but everything to prove.

If we could execute with a monumental effort just to reach an immediate goal that everyone could see, we could then continue to the next visually.

I can remember many times when my boat crew struggled. It was easy to make excuses for our team’s performance and why it wasn’t what it should have been. But I learned that good leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get it done and win.