0:00:00 – Opening: “If”, by Rudyard Kipling.
1:06:26 – Are you less of a man if you don’t like to fight?
1:15:37 – Personal intelligence VS Physical Prowess.
1:19:33 – How to give tactful criticism.
1:28:06 – Best way to combine striking and grappling.
1:40:51 – How to deal when someone is fired and you disagree with that decision.
1:48:16 – Is it always bad to be a little unapproachable?
1:50:34 – What to do if you’re ever BROKEN.
1:54:50 – Support.
2:27:18 – Closing Gratitude.
Hey Jocko, some really useful stuff this episode that speaks to my current world. I was hoping you could offer some perspective on how to take extreme ownership in a challenging situation I’ve found myself in.
After over a decade at my company, in the last year I moved into a newly created role managing a small but vital department of 30-40 artists and engineers (of which I used to be one).
My greatest responsibility in this role is to service our clients and put a team in place that will ensure success on each project (which typically last 6-18 months). Every project historically has 1-2 leadership roles in my department depending on its scale.
It has become apparent that our (mostly new to the company) senior management team has focused solely on trying to be more competitive by reducing personnel costs – which has already started to lead to a depletion of my most skilled and qualified leaders and senior people in an already understaffed department. Simultaneously, they’ve decided to remove the leads pay grade (unbeknownst to my team), and deny my requests to promote the most qualified people within the department to fill those roles on incoming projects if they’re already near the top of the previous paygrade. This has severely limited my ability to execute my responsibilities to our clients.
As we have a number of projects coming in very soon, and are now down to less than half of the necessary leadership roles to support them – I’m having difficulty getting help from management and finding ways to help them see the adverse impact this strategy will ultimately have on our business.
While myself and many colleagues at my level feel that their leadership has been tone-deaf and their strategy will result in damage to our company’s reputation and continued loss of our best people, I know that failure of my department will reflect on me and my leadership and not on senior management. So I know that it is *MY* responsibility to fix the problem and I can’t pass the blame to them.
How do I take extreme ownership here and win for my team and a company who can’t seem to act in their own best interest in this situation?
Take the most talented from that department and privately, one by one, tell them what’s going on.
Get enough on board, and start a business with them that provides the services of that department to the company.
Then charge your former employers twice as much, because now they have no leverage.
In short: fuck ’em. Just be smart about it.