Former Navy SEAL commander explains why 'discipline equals freedom'

In the early stages of the Iraq War, US Navy SEAL officer Jocko Willink needed to find a way to get his men to comply with new standards of collecting and cataloging evidence in the battlefield.

The typical behavior of ransacking a building, smashing furniture, and tearing down curtains to uncover hidden weapons or intel would no longer be acceptable.

Willink's assistant platoon commander drew up a plan in which the platoon would split up and each SEAL would be assigned a specific room to carefully inspect before logging results.

When he presented the plan to the platoon, they almost universally rejected it; to them it felt like an overly cautious approach that was going to be too complex during the heat of battle and unnecessarily keep them in harm's way. Willink stepped in to tell his men that the adoption of a standard operating procedure would actually be perfectly suited for the chaos of a mission.

They ran a few test runs, and by the time they put it into action, they had lowered their evidence sweep from 45 minutes to under 20. It was proof to Willink that a principle he had applied to himself could be spread through the SEALs he was in charge of: Discipline equals freedom.

Willink would go on to command Task Unit Bruiser during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi, and his philosophy helped guide his unit to become the most decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War. He tells the story of learning how this apparent paradox of liberation through structure applies to leadership in his new book "Extreme Ownership: How US Navy SEALs Lead and Win," co-written with one of his former platoon commanders and current business partner, Leif Babin.

"We had standard operating procedures for everything that we did, and the SEAL teams are not always like that - the military's not always like that," Willink told Business Insider. There are basic procedures that all SEALs follow, but as the leader of two platoons, Willink and his unit established their own protocols for things like taking headcount, entering and exiting vehicles, and communicating via radio.

"And what's interesting," he said, "is that the more strict we were with our standard operating procedures, the more freedom we actually had to operate faster and more efficiently because everyone knew what to do."

Willink said he was inspired to take this approach as a new SEAL when he observed that the highest performers were those who had the most disciplined morning routines, waking up to prepare for the day's missions while others slept.

Willink retired from the SEALs in 2010 and started the management consulting firm Echelon Front the next year with Babin as a way to bring their leadership knowledge to the corporate world. The idea of "discipline equals freedom" helps to avoid micromanagement.

"When individuals members of the team are highly disciplined, they can be trusted, and therefore allowed to operate with very little oversight," Willink said. "When Leif and the other leaders of our task unit in Ramadi were working for me, I had complete trust in them. I knew they would act in a disciplined manner within the standards we had established - professionally, ethically, tactically, and strategically."

Willink said that when set correctly, parameters empower subordinates to make decisions quickly and confidently, without the need to check in.

For his unit "that meant that they could operate without my input. They already knew what was expected, and they executed accordingly," he said. "They made decisions based on the disciplined structure we had, and that meant they could execute faster and with confidence. The disciplined structure we had allowed that freedom."