4 Leadership Lessons from Navy SEALs

There are some important leadership lessons we take from watching how the Navy SEALs succeed.

Drawing upon what makes a good SEAL, leaders can steer their own teams towards exceptional levels of success.

4 Leadership Lessons from Navy SEALs

Here’s what makes a Navy SEAL successful.

What does is take to complete the Navy SEAL underwater demolition school?  Turns out the answer is 2/3 what you’d expect and 1/3 something every employee has the potential to develop:

  • freakishly warm blood, or the ability to endure very cold water
  • superhuman swimming skills
  • a camaraderie with co-workers

Whoa, back up…teamwork?  That’s what drives a SEAL to win?  Leaders take note: what works for SEALs will ultimately work for your team, too.

The 4 essentials for camaraderie in the workplace.

Camaraderie, teamwork…you know it’s important for the bottom line, yet it’s hard to define.  Knowing that the SEALS place such a high value on teamwork and camaraderie, though, should drive most leaders to push harder for making it happen in their own companies.

But how do you pinpoint these vague qualities in people?  What are the characteristics of a good team player?  People who make good team players will have:

  • The right personality for working in the corporate environment.  That includes temperament, which is both a natural quality and one that can be molded with the right training and experience.
  • The skills to do their jobs.  This comes from on-the-job training, previous expertise, mentoring and again: experience.
  • The right personality for working on a team.  This is different from the first item on this list.  It involves good communication skills, to start with, but a whole lot more than that.  This comes from good training and someone at the helm who possesses the right leadership skills.
  •  Good teamwork/camaraderie takes courage to step outside the boundaries of the familiar and try new things.  If employees don’t feel supported in that mission, they are more likely to fail at teamwork.

Leadership lessons takeaway: communication is key.

Finding or developing the 4 essential traits described above is a  process.  It takes time to develop a great team and bring out those qualities in everyone you lead.  But one thing rings true for all 4 essentials of teamwork: good communication skills.

With that in place, everything you do has an effectiveness multiplier applied directly to it!  Take it from the SEALs: camaraderie is everything and if there are leadership lessons to be learned here today, the key to it all is communication.