Swap the leader, not the team
A Navy SEAL training exercise proved something most managers refuse to believe about their worst-performing team.
At Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, instructors ran the same relay every week with the same boat crews. One crew, call it Boat Six, finished last almost every time. Its members bickered, blamed each other, dragged. Another crew, Boat Two, won constantly and looked sharp doing it.
So the instructors tried something petty: they swapped the two leaders and left everyone else in place. Within days, Boat Six was winning. Boat Two, now led by the demoted officer, slid toward the bottom. Same swimmers, same boat, same ocean.
Leif Babin and Jocko Willink, who lived through this as young officers, built their leadership book Extreme Ownership around that single afternoon. Their claim isn't the usual pep talk about grit or culture. It's narrower and less comfortable: when a team fails, the fastest diagnostic isn't to survey the players. It's to look at who's calling the plays.
Most of us resist this because it's easier to manage people than to manage ourselves. Swap the leader first. See what's actually broken.