Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

company, then he was failing his team.
Over the next weeks and months, the production manager made every
effort to positively engage with the subsidiary company, to communicate
with them, and establish a better working relationship. He came to more
fully understand the myriad challenges that impacted their timelines and
caused delays and what he could do on his end to help mitigate those
issues. It wasn’t that they were “horrible,” as he had initially surmised.
They were operating with limited resources and limited manpower. Once
he accepted that they weren’t out to sabotage his team, he realized that
there were steps that he and his team could take to help the subsidiary
company become more efficient and fill in gaps that had caused their
delays. Instead of working as two separate entities against each other,
they began to work together.
With this shift in mind-set, the production manager’s encouragement
enabled his field leaders to see the subsidiary company employees in a
different light: not as adversaries but as critical resources part of the
same greater team. Most important, the production team began to work
with the subsidiary company’s field team. Within a few months, the
production team’s field leaders encouraged key personnel from the
subsidiary company to sit in on their coordination meetings. Very soon,
the “us versus them” mentality had all but disappeared. They had broken
through the silos and no longer worked against each other. The
production team’s downtime radically improved to industry leading
levels. They now worked together as one team—Cover and Move.