Business Book Club: The Dichotomy of Leadership 3/5

In this edition

1. Dichotomy #3: Know when to push or nurture
2. Extend your learning: Set challenging yet attainable standards

Dichotomy #3: Know When to Push or Nurture

Willink and Babin argue that when you accept radical accountability for your team’s success or failure, it’s your responsibility to ensure that every team member performs at a high standard. However, if you push too hard and demand perfection, you’ll destroy morale and hinder performance. To avoid this, don’t impose too many strict rules or make training too difficult.

Only Enforce the Necessary Rules

When you impose rules for your team, keep three things in mind:?

1) The best way to discipline your team is not to force them to be disciplined about everything. For example, it’s counterproductive to set a strict rule limiting the number of bathroom breaks per work shift to strong-arm your team into being mission-focused at all times. Enforcing rules that your team knows don’t matter makes them resent you.?

2) You must enforce important rules to maintain high standards—even if your team complains. Your big-picture perspective gives you a clearer sense of what’s important than more specialized team members below you.

3) The fewer rules you impose, the more your team will respect important rules that you do enforce. Let your team work the way they want to. Then, when you do set rules, explain their rationale so it’s clear why they matter.??

Challenge Your Team to Help Them Grow

Training is necessary for your team to reach its full potential, because facing consistently difficult challenges is necessary to improve. But don’t push too hard. If you put your team in situations too difficult for their skill level, you’ll demoralize them, they won’t improve, and they’ll resent you. Instead, slowly expand your team’s comfort zones by placing them in challenging, but not overwhelming, situations.

In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that tackling increasingly difficult situations is both the best way to improve your skills and live the most fulfilling life. He distinguishes between “pleasure” and “enjoyment,” saying that the enjoyment that comes with conquering a challenging yet satisfying task (like completing a SEAL team training exercise) is far more fulfilling than the pleasure of a sensory experience (like eating food or watching TV). He calls this experience of being fully immersed in an enjoyable task “flow.”

A newsletter can't fit all our favorite insights from The Dichotomy of Leadership. Read our guide for a deeper dive into the book's key ideas.

Up Next

Next week, we’ll explore how to balance confidence in your ideas with trust in the expertise of others. To get a head-start, think about how you decide whether or not to take someone's advice.

Extend Your Learning: Set Challenging Yet Attainable Standards

Willink and Babin assert that it’s up to you to push your team to do their best work, but warn that pushing too hard will hinder their performance. Assess the standards you set for your team: Make sure you’re not overwhelming them with unnecessary rules and are assigning them tasks just difficult enough to help them grow.

1. List some of the rules and requirements you obligate your team to follow. Which of these rules contribute the most to your mission’s success, and why??
2. Which rules and requirements are unnecessary and should be removed? (Remember: Every additional requirement makes your team less likely to care about the important ones.)
3. Which of your team members do you think are the most bored by their current duties, and what gives you that impression? What challenges could you offer each one to keep them engaged and improve their skills? (For example, if your personal assistant is bored by scheduling your appointments, task them with networking and setting up meetings with potential business contacts.)
4. Which of your team members do you think are struggling the most to fulfill their current duties, and what gives you that impression? How could you temporarily ease their challenges and keep them from feeling overwhelmed? (For example, if your company’s new salesperson is struggling to meet quotas, assign a veteran employee to coach them for a couple of weeks.)

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