EXTREME OWNERSHIP
In one of my previous workplaces, I had been assigned to work in a commission for Erasmus program organized by the European Union which provides opportunities for college students to study in a different European country while completing a degree. There was an expert in the team, and I had been the second member. Attending meetings, improving new ideas, getting networks and making proposals were the behaviors and actions of the performance. The number of the students sent to and accepted from the European countries were the results and products. During this time, the expert in the team used procedural knowledge and I particularly used declarative knowledge in order to complete the task. She was knowledgeable about the program and I was knowledgeable about the college that we were working for and the students we had.
At the end of the process, the performance of the Erasmus team was not satisfactory. We had several conflicts and at the end of the semester I decided to quit the team. The main thing that was going wrong was my focus on communicative conflicts and relational challenges instead of completing the task and achieving the goals. For example, one day she asked me to go for an out of town meeting. I went, took notes, had new networks, and after coming back, I asked her several times to talk about the meeting. She behaved like not interested in what I got from this out-of-town meeting. I got angry to her because I was leaving my new-born baby for each meeting and she did not care me and my baby. I just started to think about her behaviors and attitudes instead of the mission and the vision of the team. I completely behaved very emotional and not professional. I was just struggling with her and forgot the objectives of the team.
As Aguinis (2019) pointed out that it is crucial to take the responsibility of poor performance no matter how painful this process. I accept that it was completely my fault to only focus on the other member’s behaviors and forget my responsibilities in the team. Currently, I truly know that what a huge fault I did. The team was not the place of conflicting for my personal obsession, it was the exact place of integrating for the common goal. My young baby became my obsession at that time, and I behaved extremely emotional. As Willink (2017) mentioned that I accept my fault, even though it hurts my ego, my pride, my personality, but I was the only one responsible person for the unsatisfactory performance of the team because I had counterproductive performance via conflicting with the other member and leaving the team. Today, I know that extreme ownership generates dynamism, pushes individuals to act (Hittelet, 2017), and helps to avoid counterproductive behaviors in organizational context as improved my perspective.
References
Aguinis, H. (2019). Performance management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
Hittelet, Pierre-Yves (2017), 12 Leadership Lessons to Learn From the Navy SEALs, Inc, Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/pierre-yves-hittelet/navy-seal-leadership-lessons.html
Willink, Jocko (2017), Extreme Ownership, TEDxUniversityofNevada, Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljqra3BcqWM
