Echelon Front’s Post

Of all the humbling lessons Jocko Willink and Leif Babin learned on the battlefield, the greatest lesson they brought back is that leadership is the critical factor in whether or not a team succeeds or fails. In order to create a winning team, you must first recognize the importance of leadership to its success. By leadership, we don’t just mean just the most senior people at the top of an organization. We mean leaders at every level of the team: the mid-level managers, the front-line leaders, right down to front-line troopers—the individual contributors who aren’t in charge of anybody else but themselves and their piece of the mission. Those individuals led—they built relationships, leveraged resources, took ownership of problems, and implemented solutions to get those problems solved. And that leadership at every level made all the difference. It’s the same for any organization, company, team, business, or industry. When every team member sees themselves as a leader and moves the team forward in a positive direction to accomplish that organization’s strategic goals, that is the greatest determining factor in whether that team succeeds or fails. Understanding this fundamental truth, then it becomes imperative that organizations invest in leadership development and dedicate efforts to helping their leaders at every level learn, grow, and improve.