Summary: The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy) by Admiral William H. McRaven

• If you are interested in how to motivate, set priorities, and lead any team to optimal achievement, you might want to read this book review of [The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy)] by [Admiral William H. McRaven].
• To learn more about the book and its insights and recommendations for leadership, please continue reading the rest of the article. You will find a summary and review of the book, as well as some suggestions for further reading and resources.

Recommendation

Admiral William H. McRaven, now retired, believes the principles of good leadership apply whether you are supervising a military maneuver or the morning rush at a coffee shop. In the US Navy, he oversaw such missions as the SEALs’ raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. McRaven discusses maxims — such as “No plan survives first contact with the enemy” — that he finds reveal the essential character traits, attitudes and habits of great leadership and a good life. He describes historical examples of principled leaders and tells personal anecdotes illustrating how he used — or failed to use — these precepts on his way to becoming “the Bull Frog,” the Navy’s longest-tenured active-duty frogman and SEAL.

Take-Aways

• The principles of great leadership may be difficult, but they aren’t complicated.
• Be honest and fair in all your activities.
• Strive to win the trust of those you lead.
• Good communication is essential up and down the chain of command.
• A leader is bold, confident and proactive.
• A leader rushes to the center of a crisis and takes charge of resolving it.
• A good commander has a high tolerance for necessary risk but strives to reduce the risk accompanying a decision.
• “When in doubt, overload.”

Summary

The principles of great leadership may be difficult, but they aren’t complicated.

Great leaders in any organization, whether it’s a business or a military unit, adhere to similar fundamental principles. These requirements, such as good communication, detailed planning and a code of honorable conduct, are simple and straightforward, but executing them can be difficult.

Consider the ideal of honorable conduct. In any situation, it may be easy to discern the “ethical, legal and moral” course of action,but carrying it out may be difficult. Doing the right thing can have unpleasant consequences, such as imperiling a personal relationship or undermining your own interests.

“A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field…he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last.” (Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield)

The importance of doing the right thing, regardless of the consequences, is a common credo in military organizations, but it also appears elsewhere, such as in the medical profession’s Hippocratic Oath and the Girl Scout and Boy Scout pledges. Military organizations have mottos and codes that offer guidance on maintaining your personal and professional integrity.

Be honest and fair in all your activities.

The US Marine Corps has an unofficial motto that says, “Death Before Dishonor.” Being honorable is a touchstone of good leadership, and leaders need a personal code of honor to handle the pressures of command. When you make mistakes or poor decisions, your code of honor serves as a north star for finding your way back to the standards you want to uphold.

“The only way to address a tough challenge is head-on.”

Unscrupulous people may achieve great material success, but their moral shortcomings often undermine their accomplishments. An unethical leader is likely to lose the trust of the rank and file and spawn a tainted corporate culture.

Strive to win the trust of those you lead.

Cultivating trust is a long-term project. You may spend years establishing your credibility by working hard, developing solid plans and keeping your promises. Earning and sustaining trust is at the core of building personal and professional relationships with your team members. You must show you care about them and value their contributions.

“Share the misery, share the dangers, share the camaraderie, listen to their stories, and you will learn about your sailors, and you will learn what they expect from you.”

Your team members want a leader who is clearly in command but is also engaged with them and their needs. A good leader cannot be aloof, insulated in the executive suite and uninvolved in the day-to-day grind of working toward a goal. As Pope Francis put it, “A shepherd should smell like his sheep.”

In the Navy, sailors most highly respect officers who lend a hand in a 120-degree boiler room, acknowledge their efforts and listen to them. But sailors — and the employees in most organizations — also want leaders to make the hard decisions and challenge them to do their best work.

A trustworthy leader develops a clear plan of action plus contingency plans. The dictum “Hope is not a strategy,” sometimes attributed to coach Vince Lombardi, underscores the need for having a clear plan and preparing a coordinated response to any potential derailment. Hope can inspire enthusiasm and reinforce tenacity, but it is not a substitute for detailed preparation. Your plan should list explicit milestones and metrics for monitoring your team’s progress toward its goals.

Good communication is essential up and down the chain of command.

Everyone in an organization must understand the intent behind the leader’s orders. When he was commander of US Special Operation Forces, author William H. McRaven shared his goals in “all-hands” meetings, video conferences and written materials. He created a “Commander’s Intent” document outlining his interpretation of the unit’s “values and goals” and had it posted in every office.

“Listen to the rank and file. They have solutions to most of the problems you struggle with.”

Leaders should establish avenues for rank-and-file employees to express their views and concerns and should listen to them. Paying attention to your team members’ input demonstrates your interest in them and enables you to open a channel for important insights from the people most intimately involved in putting your plans into action.

The Army has a tradition called “trooping the line,” in which soldiers assemble on the parade ground, so the generals can inspect the troops, ask questions and establish that every soldier is aware of the general’s orders. Troops should see their leaders frequently, and such exercises ensure that contact.

In the military, high morale is essential to success, and morale tends to rise when people feel respected and appreciated. They need to see that their commander pays attention to their concerns and provides the resources they need to carry out their orders.

While he was in command in Afghanistan, McRaven did nightly “walkarounds” of his camp, inspecting the facilities and talking with soldiers. During one walk, he learned the motor pool had a shortage of mechanics and the laundromat had some broken washing machines. During the next morning’s worldwide video conference, he instructed officers to attend to these seemingly mundane issues.

Leaders sometimes think their role is to focus on the big picture, not on apparently trivial problems. However, failure to notice and address humdrum annoyances that impede your employees can degrade your workforce’s effectiveness and morale.

A leader is bold, confident and proactive.

A leader meets every challenge with an all-out effort. To prove their value, effective leaders take on every challenge with grit and fortitude. Such energy will motivate your team members and inspire them to excel.

“When confronted with a challenging decision, I almost always know the right answer. It’s just that the right answer is hard to accept, and the decisions are hard to make, because we do not live in a world of isolation.”

Admiral Chester Nimitz once said, “When in command, command.” He meant that a leader must have the confidence to make tough decisions, an assurance Nimitz displayed in the Battle of Midway during World War II. The Imperial Japanese Navy was trying to set a trap for the US Navy in the Pacific Ocean by establishing a presence offshore of the American base on Midway Island. Japan concealed most of its ships, hoping to lure US forces into what appeared to be a lopsided fight.

The Americans had partly decoded Japanese communications about the plan, but even so, it was hard to decide whether to engage. Nimitz agonized over the decision — if the battle went the wrong way, Japan could emerge victorious in the Pacific. After waiting days for a decision, Admiral Bull Halsey reminded Nimitz of his own dictum: “When in command, command.” On June 4, 1942, American forces defeated the Japanese fleet near Midway.

“Never underestimate the value of a stretch goal, of setting the bar high and challenging your employees to clear it.”

You must always demonstrate to your team that you are in command. You will face complex crises without a clear path forward, but you have to make decisions and contend with the consequences. Even when you are under great pressure, your team members need to see a composed yet passionate leader who cares about them and is equal to any obstacle.

Although a leader should present a confident public face, no leader should contend alone with the daily pressures of command. On dangerous missions, a Navy diver always has a “swim buddy,” a partner who helps guard against underwater hazards, checks a parachute before a jump and provides cover on combat patrols.When you are leading, you need a swim buddy with whom you can discuss difficulties and tough decisions, someone who helps you remain on an even keel and offers both support and criticism.

“I found, in my career, that if you took pride in the little jobs, people would think you worthy of the bigger jobs.”

Be sure that your confidence never turns to arrogance. Even if a task seems beneath your dignity or position, do it as well as you can. As a new ensign, McRaven was delighted to be summoned to meet with his commander, the skipper of his frogman team. He hoped his hard work was paying off and the skipper would ask him to lead a mission. Instead, the skipper said the top brass needed somebody to take charge of building a float to represent the frogman team in an upcoming Fourth of July parade.Overseeing the construction of an anthropomorphic “Freddie the Frog” float was not the heroic mission McRaven wanted. As he sat in the locker room dejected after getting this assignment, a team veteran told him, “Sooner or later we all have to do things we don’t want to do. But if you’re going to do it, then do it right. Build the best damn Frog Float you can!” McRaven listened, and his float won the top prize in its category.

A leader rushes to the center of a crisis and takes charge of resolving it.

If you’re faced with an emergency, take a cue from Civil War commander Joshua Chamberlain and “run to the sound of the guns.” In July 1863, Chamberlain, a college language professor before the war, was commanding Union soldiers defending a hill west of Gettysburg. A larger Rebel division attacked, and as probable defeat loomed, Chamberlain led his soldiers on a charge down the hill directly into the approaching Confederate forces, compelling them to retreat. Historians believe his courageous maneuver saved the Union troops at Gettysburg.

Leaders sometimes fail this test because getting involved in a situation too quickly can seem to imply that they played a role in creating the problem. The CEO of BP, the company responsible for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and spill in the Gulf of Mexico, flunked this test by remaining in London and showing up late. He tried to spin the costly, extensive damage as a relatively minor event.

“Instead of accepting responsibility and confronting the issue head on, [BP’s CEO] became exasperated…he told a reporter, ‘You know, I’d like my life back.’ Needless to say, in light of all the other lives ruined by the explosion, his tone-deaf response didn’t land well. He was out as the CEO soon thereafter.”

Like Chamberlain, rush to be in a position where you can most accurately assess an emergency and direct your team’s response. Empower your team members to take the initiative when they see a problem that needs immediate attention. Although they may make mistakes in such situations, that’s less detrimental to the organization than a culture of being indecisive or ignoring problems.

A good commander has a high tolerance for necessary risk but strives to reduce the risk accompanying a decision.

Extensive planning can mitigate the risk in even the most audacious venture. While a good plan outlines the tactics of an operation in detail, it also anticipates what could go wrong and establishes responses for each contingency.

“No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter of the enemy’s main force.” (Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke the Elder)

Knowing that “in every risk, there is an opportunity,” McRaven oversaw the planning of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. After the raid began, every part of the initial plan fell apart. The first helicopter crashed into the compound’s courtyard; the second helicopter had to abandon its planned insertion point rapidly and land outside the compound. Fortunately, the planners had considered this contingency plus any other possible snafu they could imagine, and the SEALs were able to adjust to the new conditions and complete the mission.

“When in doubt, overload.”

Navy frogmen on Underwater Demolition Teams have a guideline for determining the volume of explosives they need to destroy any obstacles that impede an amphibious landing. Their rule is that if they don’t know how much to use, they use more.

“Truly great leaders…do what needs to be done, whether ordered to do so or not.”

The same principle applies to how much energy to apply to your leadership role. When McRaven was a vice admiral, he proposed and planned a mission to capture five al-Qaeda fighters. When the operation disintegrated into an unwanted firefight, his superior officers began to question his competence as a Special Ops commander. He even doubted himself. In response, he applied the “overload” concept to repairing his reputation, bringing an extreme commitment to his work. He began his workday earlier and ended it later. He participated in more tactical operations and tirelessly analyzed battlefield details. His reputation recovered, confirming his belief that “hard work creates opportunity.”

About the Author

Admiral William H. McRaven (Ret.) is a former Navy SEAL and Commander of US Special Operations Forces. After retiring, he served as the Chancellor of the University of Texas System. He also wrote Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe the World; Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations; The Hero Code: Lessons Learned from Lives Well Lived; Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare and for children, Make Your Bed with Skipper the Seal.

Genres

leadership, management, business, self-help, motivation, productivity, performance, teamwork, military, nonfiction

Review

The book is a collection of leadership lessons that Admiral McRaven learned from his four decades of service as a Navy SEAL and a university chancellor. The title “Bullfrog” is given to the Navy SEAL who has served the longest on active duty, and McRaven was honored to receive this honor in 2011. The book draws on his experiences from commanding combat operations, such as the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Phillips, and the raid for Osama bin Laden, as well as dealing with crisis situations, management debates, organizational transitions, and ethical dilemmas.

The book provides a Make Your Bed-like parable for each leadership trait, such as energy, creativity, attitude, character, intentionality, and resilience, and shows how to develop and apply these traits to achieve optimal performance and success.

The book is a useful and insightful resource for anyone who wants to improve their leadership skills and results. The author writes with clarity, authority, and enthusiasm, and he draws from his extensive experience and research in the field of leadership. He provides a balance of theory and practice, and he presents his concepts and methods in a simple and accessible way.

He also challenges the readers to rethink their assumptions and habits, and to adopt a new mindset and approach to leadership. The book is not only informative, but also inspiring and motivating, as it shows how to lead any team to win, regardless of the circumstances and challenges.