Article Excerpt
Decentralized command simply means that everybody leads. That’s what you want as a leader. Not just for everybody on the team to be able to lead, but for everybody on the team to be actually leading. It’s often counterintuitive, but it’s also extremely powerful.
Such minimal force is a mark of success for Dirt World leaders. Why?
“Because it means everyone on the team understands what the mission is. It means they understand what their jobs are and what they need to do to accomplish it. They’re ready to go out there and execute,” Jocko explains.
And as the old saying goes, “The less you talk, the more people listen.” You want your crew to hear your instructions and carry them out—withoutyou nagging, bribing, or coercing them to do it.
You’re not training people to take over so you get forced out of the business. You’re training them to take over the tasks of your job that are burning up all your creative energy and your ability to see the big picture.
“The more I let my team take ownership of the plan and the more I invest in them, the better that plan is going to get executed, and the safer it’s going to be executed, too,” Jocko says.
Analysis
This article explains the role of decentralized command, and how to implement it correctly from the perspective of the individual implementing said process. The author comes from a military navy SEAL background, and is speaking on how to transfer this process to a heavy civil construction team. Decentralized command is the idea of giving autonomy and control to every member of a given team so that every person has the preparation to lead.
It sounds like the key to correct implementation of this process is ironically what the process prepares for the lack of: Communication. training must be clear and simple, so when the time comes for operations to independently work, everyone is on the same page with what they’re doing and how it fits into the big picture of why their function helps. When you train a dog, you don’t explain that you want it to sit for several minutes. You simply tell it “Sit”. I think this kind of clarity is the key to execution the author is talking about. Even though everyone is leading separately and may not be presently communicating, everyone is aware of everyone’s roles and pieces within the larger puzzle.
