General Cohen's Secrets for Special Ops Leadership
1. Create the Best
To achieve the extraordinary, you need extraordinary people. Commandos, however, aren’t born but made. Creating them involves three stages: locate and recruit volunteers, screen and select the cream of candidates, train and motivate for excellence.
2. Dare the Impossible
Give your commandos demanding, high-impact jobs, and the results will blow you away. Give them anything less and not only will your resources be wasted, but your commandos will soon be off seeking challenges somewhere else.
3. Throw the Rule Book Away
Commandos thrive on innovation. As the chief innovator, you need to stay alert to opportunities and threats in your environment, encourage a shared vision with clear goals, develop a tolerance for the unusual and bizarre, and reward bold ideas that work.
4. Be Where the Action Is
A true leader leads from the front. Whether in battle or business, a special ops leader must share the risks, the hardships, and the defeats as well as the victories.
5. Commit and Require Total Commitment
If you are totally committed to a project or purpose, your commandos will follow you, regardless of the sacrifices. To show uncommon commitment to your commandos, communicate face-to-face, make commitments public, and don’t stop when the going gets rough.
6. Demand Tough Discipline
If you want your organization to succeed, you have to help your commandos develop self-discipline. Require obedience to the rules at all times, with no exceptions. Set the example by obeying rules from above.
7. Build a Commando Team
Commandos don’t work as individuals. Building an outstanding commando team happens in four stages: getting organized, fighting it out for the right course of action, getting the team to pull together, and keeping the team moving forward to get the job done, exceptionally well.
8. Inspire Others to Follow Your Vision
As a leader, you must first have a clear vision of where you want your organization to go and what you want it to be, and then make it compelling and meaningful to others. Promote your vision with a motto and other tools. Live your vision every day.
9. Accept Full Blame; Give Full Credit
You can delegate authority, but not responsibility. Hold your commandos accountable for their failures, but don’t leave them “holding the bag.” When your commandos persist and prevail, give them credit for the victory — completely, unselfishly, and publicly.
10. Take Charge!
To be the kind of leader that commandos will respect and follow, you must dominate the situation right from the outset, establish your objectives early in the game, communicate with your team, act boldly and decisively, lead by example, and follow your instincts.
11. Reward Effectively
Commandos perform above the call of duty for reasons beyond money. Recognition for jobs exceptionally well done can come in many forms. To be effective, rewards should be timely, fair (and justifiable), tied to specific accomplishments, and important to the people working to receive them.
12. Make the Most of What You Have
Leaders don’t always have the luxury of creating commandos from scratch. Yet, with the right approach, it is possible to transform virtually anyone — even so-called misfits — into a valuable commando team player. Focus on developing cohesion through pride in team membership, teamwork, and high morale, at both the individual and group levels.
13. Never Give Up
Perseverance makes all the difference. You can get high levels of performance if you imbue your commandos with mental toughness, warn them away from rigidity in their thinking, and lead them by demonstrating your own determination to see things through, regardless of adversity.
14. Fight to Win
Commandos do business to win. This doesn’t mean you have to lie, cheat, steal, or forfeit your integrity. True commandos lead the way to victory by example. In commando-run organizations, there’s an eagerness to take risks, a determination to overcome all obstacles, and a look in the eyes of every employee you just don’t find in other companies.
SPECIAL OPS PRINCIPLES OF LEADERSHIP
To achieve the extraordinary, you need extraordinary people. Commandos, however, aren’t born but made. Creating them involves three stages: locate and recruit volunteers, screen and select the cream of candidates, train and motivate for excellence.
2. Dare the Impossible
Give your commandos demanding, high-impact jobs, and the results will blow you away. Give them anything less and not only will your resources be wasted, but your commandos will soon be off seeking challenges somewhere else.
3. Throw the Rule Book Away
Commandos thrive on innovation. As the chief innovator, you need to stay alert to opportunities and threats in your environment, encourage a shared vision with clear goals, develop a tolerance for the unusual and bizarre, and reward bold ideas that work.
4. Be Where the Action Is
A true leader leads from the front. Whether in battle or business, a special ops leader must share the risks, the hardships, and the defeats as well as the victories.
5. Commit and Require Total Commitment
If you are totally committed to a project or purpose, your commandos will follow you, regardless of the sacrifices. To show uncommon commitment to your commandos, communicate face-to-face, make commitments public, and don’t stop when the going gets rough.
6. Demand Tough Discipline
If you want your organization to succeed, you have to help your commandos develop self-discipline. Require obedience to the rules at all times, with no exceptions. Set the example by obeying rules from above.
7. Build a Commando Team
Commandos don’t work as individuals. Building an outstanding commando team happens in four stages: getting organized, fighting it out for the right course of action, getting the team to pull together, and keeping the team moving forward to get the job done, exceptionally well.
8. Inspire Others to Follow Your Vision
As a leader, you must first have a clear vision of where you want your organization to go and what you want it to be, and then make it compelling and meaningful to others. Promote your vision with a motto and other tools. Live your vision every day.
9. Accept Full Blame; Give Full Credit
You can delegate authority, but not responsibility. Hold your commandos accountable for their failures, but don’t leave them “holding the bag.” When your commandos persist and prevail, give them credit for the victory — completely, unselfishly, and publicly.
10. Take Charge!
To be the kind of leader that commandos will respect and follow, you must dominate the situation right from the outset, establish your objectives early in the game, communicate with your team, act boldly and decisively, lead by example, and follow your instincts.
11. Reward Effectively
Commandos perform above the call of duty for reasons beyond money. Recognition for jobs exceptionally well done can come in many forms. To be effective, rewards should be timely, fair (and justifiable), tied to specific accomplishments, and important to the people working to receive them.
12. Make the Most of What You Have
Leaders don’t always have the luxury of creating commandos from scratch. Yet, with the right approach, it is possible to transform virtually anyone — even so-called misfits — into a valuable commando team player. Focus on developing cohesion through pride in team membership, teamwork, and high morale, at both the individual and group levels.
13. Never Give Up
Perseverance makes all the difference. You can get high levels of performance if you imbue your commandos with mental toughness, warn them away from rigidity in their thinking, and lead them by demonstrating your own determination to see things through, regardless of adversity.
14. Fight to Win
Commandos do business to win. This doesn’t mean you have to lie, cheat, steal, or forfeit your integrity. True commandos lead the way to victory by example. In commando-run organizations, there’s an eagerness to take risks, a determination to overcome all obstacles, and a look in the eyes of every employee you just don’t find in other companies.
SPECIAL OPS PRINCIPLES OF LEADERSHIP
1. PURPOSE
As a leader, you can’t present a clear understanding of what needs to be done if you don’t understand it yourself. Achieving the extraordinary with a commando edge starts with having a definite mission and concrete goals.
2. REPETITION
Commandos repeat the actions to be accomplished for a particular raid prior to the operation, just like actors practice before a performance of a play. In business, the commando principle of repetition takes on a broader sense: mastering and consistently applying a successful method of operating.
3. SPEED
Speed allows a commando to achieve his objective before adversaries can effectively counter-attack. Business commandos must be able to react rapidly to changing tactical conditions. Speed in adapting and responding can have a major advantage in successfully winning out over the competition.
4. SURPRISE
In all fields of human endeavor, as well as on the battlefield, surprise is one of the commando’s greatest weapons in helping to overcome the advantage of a competitor who is stronger in numbers and resources.
5. SECURITY
Just as in the military, every leader of a commando organization faces security threats. For example, businesses that rely on direct-response advertising to sell their products have a unique challenge, since their success or failure is publicized and available to anyone monitoring their advertising.
6. SIMPLICITY
Commandos know the drill: everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Reducing the number of things that can go wrong works by reducing the number of elements that must fit together to make the plan successful.
posted by Pete at 11:34 AM
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