

I knew they would act in a disciplined manner within the standards we had established - professionally, ethically, tactically, and strategically." "When Leif and the other leaders of our task unit in Ramadi were working for me, I had complete trust in them. "When individual members of the team are highly disciplined, they can be trusted, and therefore allowed to operate with very little oversight," Willink said. The idea of "discipline equals freedom" helps to avoid micromanagement. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. When he presented the plan to the platoon, they almost universally rejected it. 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. The typical behavior of ransacking a building, smashing furniture, and tearing down curtains to uncover hidden weapons or intel would no longer be acceptable.
