How Leadership (Actually) Works: A Navy SEAL’s Complete System for Coordinating Teams

By Larry Yatch

Everything you've been taught about leadership is backward, beginning with the costly mistake that causes you to sacrifice money, time, and human capital day after day. It's not a calculation error or a problem with management style—it's repeatedly choosing revenue and results over connection and team.

Larry Yatch is a ten-year U.S. Navy SEAL turned business consultant who has reverse-engineered the behaviors that make the SEALs the most elite and connected teams on the planet. In How Leadership (Actually) Works, Larry shares his six-pillar system that companies of any size in any domain can use for sustainable and easier success. This practical manual will show you how to effectively structure teams, manage behavior, maximize self-regulation, and become the leader you need to be so everyone thrives.

From the largest special ops mission in U.S. history to the biggest boardrooms and smallest classrooms, follow Larry's journey to discover the missing links between effort and efficacy that will revolutionize how you perceive team success. The work isn't easy, but nothing exceptional is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781544521688

Book preview

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Advance Praise for

How Leadership (Actually) Works

A must-read for any leader. Larry gives you practical, real-world advice, along with how-tos that will help you become a great leader! —

gino wickman

, author of Traction and Entrepreneurial Leap

Larry won’t pull any punches—apparently, leadership actually works when you do a lot of work on yourself. And he will show you exactly what that process looks like and what kind of success waits on the other side. —

mark divine

, US Navy SEAL (ret), Founder of SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind, and New York Times bestselling author of Unbeatable Mind

An absolutely astonishing book. I could not put it down. Now you cannot, either. —

michael e. gerber

, Creator of The E-Myth and author of The E-Myth Series of books

"To everyone who has ever managed, led up, or attempted to guide a team or organization: I’m sorry you didn’t have this book on your desk years ago. How Leadership Actually Works is the manual we all wished we had, and the inspiration and guidance we all need now." —

kevin harrington

, an original shark on Shark Tank and author of Mentor to Millions

How Leadership

[actually]

Works

A Navy SEAL’s Complete System for Coordinating Teams

Larry Yatch

copyright © 2022 larry yatch

All rights reserved.

how leadership (actually) works

A Navy SEAL’s Complete System for Coordinating Teams

isbn

978-1-5445-2170-1 Hardcover

isbn

978-1-5445-2169-5 Paperback

isbn

978-1-5445-2168-8 Ebook

isbn

978-1-5445-2171-8 Audiobook

I would like to dedicate this book to my mother, Janicelyn. Even though she is no longer here with us, I know that she is bursting with pride that her son who would misspell the same word two different times in the same paragraph has written a book. She saw greatness in me from the beginning and was always the one safe space for me to feel.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Deconstruction

1. Upside-Down Leadership

2. How Language Actually Works

Reconstruction

3. Pillar 1: Success

4. Pillar 2: Team

5. Pillar 3: Behavior

6. Pillar 4: Self-Regulation

Application

7. Pillar 5: Leadership

8. Pillar 6: Planning

9. Leadership Implemented

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

Foreword

They Got Bombs, They Got Guns, They’re Killers!

That is the world Larry Yatch lived in. Every day, as a US Navy SEAL.

I tell you that because he will not. Not really.

And he will not tell you that, not really, because Larry does not have a large ego.

Indeed, as strange as it has been for me, Larry is one of the humblest leaders I have ever known. That is why this brief foreword has less to do with the content of this book than it has to do with the content of its author.

(Excuse me, Larry, but you asked me to write this foreword—you did not tell me what to say in it. Had you, I would not have accepted the privilege. Because had I written about the book, I would have missed the whole point, both of the book, and of the reason you wrote it.)

Indeed, a US Navy SEAL’s life was always on the line. Always in danger. Not philosophically, but literally. The decisions you were caused to make were made at extreme risk. Not only for you, but for your fellow SEALs and the people you were responsible for.

This is true in a significantly more subtle way for the folks reading this right now. And it is the in a more subtle way that makes my point: There was nothing subtle about being a US Navy SEAL. Nothing. But for the readers of this book, their lives are unfortunately filled with subtlety. With the philosophical.

With soft decisions that most often do not even feel like decisions. More like choices.

There is nothing soft about being a US Navy SEAL. This means there is nothing soft about this book. For the reader of this book, the subtle choices really are about life and death decisions.

Were it about anything less than that, I would not have agreed to write this foreword.

Which goes on to say that Larry Yatch takes you more seriously than you do.

To Larry, your life is at stake.

So read this book with that clearly in mind. That in every decision a serious human being makes, his or her life is at stake. That joy, true joy, the truly beyond belief effervescence of joy, comes from knowing the irrepressible truth of that statement. That with every decision a man or woman makes, their life truly is at stake.

Thus, the irrepressible joy of being a US Navy SEAL.

To a US Navy SEAL, the entire process of becoming one, of being one, was all about making the most serious decisions any of us are elected to make. And to pay the price for it in blood.

That is what becoming a SEAL is all about. Paying the price for it. Which is what this book is all about.

What leadership is and what it is not.

What paying the price for it is all about.

Every day, in every way.

Which is the entire point, is it not? That in every way, every day, our lives and the lives of those we lead are on the line. What that is about is what this book is all about. How to lead your life like a US Navy SEAL. How to lead others like a US Navy SEAL. How to actually lead.

An absolutely astonishing book.

I could not put it down.

Now you cannot, either.

—

michael e. gerber

Creator of The E-Myth

Author of The E-Myth Series of books

At Bethesda Naval Hospital with Annie, my business partner, after suffering a career-ending back injury.

Introduction

Imagine being told you could no longer access your purpose in life.

I don’t mean coming to a vague realization that you might not have a purpose. I don’t mean being fired. I’m talking about devoting your entire life to the thing you knew you wanted to be when you were a kid and then having it all taken from you in an instant.

From the time I was given a Navy SEAL sweatshirt in middle school until the day I woke up in a hospital bed in searing pain, my purpose had been clear: find a way to take down bullies and fight at the most elite levels at all costs.

Every step of my life had been devoted to this singular focus. I graduated from the United States Naval Academy, which at the time was the third-most difficult school to access in the country, based on both the sheer volume of applicants and their qualification levels. I made it through the most brutal military training in the world. I went to war multiple times and was an officer in the Navy SEALs for ten years, most of which took place during the Iraq War.

My purpose was so clear and so significant that I spent over two and a half years ignoring my broken body in service of my country’s needs. I kept going to work, kept getting beaten up, and unbeknownst to me, kept exacerbating my back injuries until they could no longer be ignored. Doctors kept giving me drugs for the pain and I kept pushing through, until eight to ten Vicodin a day—on top of any and all alcohol I drank—still couldn’t cut it. Eventually, pain turned to numbness, and I temporarily lost the use of my leg. After various surgeries on my knees, shoulders, and lower back, I was going to have to deal with this one before the damage became permanent. It was risky, as back surgeries tend to be, but I had no choice.

In the forty-five days leading up to this major surgery in 2006, I was prescribed the highest dose of morphine possible for someone my size and weight. However, that history was overlooked during recovery and I was treated as a normal patient—taken off all narcotics, instantly.

Waking up to the sensation of dying nerves was excruciating; it felt like boiling oil pouring down my leg. Going through full narcotic withdrawal while stuck in a hospital bed with a fused spine was hell. But it was the surgeon’s words that broke me.

You had done so much damage to your back that when I was cleaning it up I nicked the L4-L5 nerve root. That burning pain you feel will turn to permanent numbness and some loss of use. Your SEAL career is over.

It’s difficult to remember any of the details through the fog of pain and withdrawal. It happened so fast. When Annie, my business partner for all these rollercoaster years, tells the story, she has more to say. She talks about the doctor’s bedside manner. She talks about my reaction. Her whole body tenses when she recalls the SEAL Team 3 shirt she’d hung up in the room to encourage me, and how the surgeon assumed it was a gift for him.

Without any further explanation, he had walked in, told me my career was over, and walked out with my identity on his back like a fucking souvenir.

I had no backup plan. I expected to be a SEAL or to be dead, and that was it. That mindset was embedded in me as a tool for survival, which meant I hadn’t trained for this. There wasn’t a drill or standard operating procedure (SOP) that could help me live without a mission. And not only was my work gone, but my entire community was gone, too. We’d put ourselves in harm’s way over and over again, ready to fight and die for each other if the situation called for it. But I wasn’t fighting or dying anymore, so there was no place for me. After months in the hospital, I went home with a reassignment to a new unit, a plaque with my name misspelled, and not a word of thank you or goodbye from anyone.

I don’t blame them. I was a decommissioned weapon in a time of scarcity. If I were a tank I’d be left in the boneyard. I just didn’t realize how lonely the boneyard could be.

That was my Y in the road. Post-traumatic stress, pain, and lack of purpose could have combined to eventually cause me to take my own life. Instead, Annie took action. She leaned in, with my hands in hers, and gave me a life again.

She told me, If you can take even 5 percent of your unique perspective and experience to the world, think about how much safer you could make this country. You don’t have to fight in some remote location to make people safe. You can change one person at a time, right here where we are.

She told me that I was not just a weapon, but I was a leader and a teacher. That it wasn’t my physical strength or the SEALs or the accomplishments that mattered, but the way my knowledge and experience could influence others.

It was the first time in my career, in my entire life, that I thought of myself as a true leader—and I still didn’t fully believe it in that moment. My job in the SEALs was to manage people and blow stuff up. Defense and offense alike were rooted in destruction. It never occurred to me that I could create something. But I trusted her. Combining her master’s degree from Georgetown University in international security and anti-terrorism with my experience on the front lines, she believed we could protect the country through education instead of by force.

Our first business took shape before I left the hospital, and over time, I found a new way to live out my old purpose of protection.

The Distillation of Leadership

We started out in business turning my unique skills around technical surveillance and her knowledge of human intelligence into systems that anyone could leverage for their organization’s safety. A few years later, we saw a gap in the personal safety market around personal and family defense and launched that business model as well.

Everyone thinks the SEALs do what they do because of combat skills, but far more important is the behavior that helped us avoid conflict in the first place. No one was talking about that—so we did. We started training people on personal safety and self-defense by changing their behavior rather than just adding physical skillsets.

Through those two businesses, we trained more than a hundred thousand people individually or through their organizations. We averaged eighty to one hundred separate training sessions each month, in the form of over eighty different classes. People signed up to learn how to shoot or fight, but they walked away with a new way of looking at themselves and the world. Before long, we attracted people who didn’t even like guns, because it was about more than shooting. Every one of our students shifted from a need to defend themselves reactively to the ability to control themselves and their surroundings proactively. It was about feeling empowered and safe.

While we had kids come through our classes with their families, my primary focus was on adult learning. What is it that enables us to change an adult human’s behavior even when they aren’t asking for that change? The answers enabled us to create success for our students and participants, and we started to become known more for our work in behavior change than just in security.

I also became known for my story. I was always open about my background. I talked about being in the SEALs, of course, but also why I wanted to join in the first place. The seeds had been planted in grade school, when my parents realized the charter school my twin sister and I attended in first grade had let us fall behind where we should have been. They took us out and enrolled us in a little Catholic school in the city in Pittsburgh, with a couple of dozen kids who had been together since kindergarten. We were twins, new, different, and way behind the rest of them. The bullying and fights started right away and didn’t stop until I graduated, and by then I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

My career in the SEALs enabled me to go after the biggest bullies in the world. I could jump out of airplanes, blow stuff up, shoot guns all the time, and hunt down people who used their power to hurt others. It was the only job I wanted to do. After that career ended, my purpose continued. I talked about bullying whenever I could.

A few years into this work, a school contacted me through one of our students saying they’d heard about my background and stance on bullying and knew my work was about more than just self-defense. It wasn’t a service I advertised for—in fact, I hadn’t worked with a school before at all—but they wanted me to help them with a bullying problem in their school. When I ran an assessment of their existing anti-bullying programs, I could see the problem right away. They were actually creating bullies. Everything was focused on the negative behaviors, after which the teachers would leverage control and force. Instead of deterring bullying behavior, they were providing models for it.

They didn’t have a bullying problem. They had a leadership development problem.

Within a couple of weeks, the school board had approved the use of a leadership development curriculum that I hadn’t yet created. The material had to address the complex components of leadership—respect, communication, confidence, and more—but it had to be digestible for fifth graders and presented in a way that could be taught with little to no training or preparation on the part of the teacher.

Existing resources gave me functionally useless definitions and surface-level discussions repeated either in books and all over the Internet, or in doctorate-level psychology tomes. There was nothing in between. My job was to distill the concepts to their absolute, most fundamental principles. What is the core nature of respect, communication, or confidence that transcends every role and relationship, from student/teacher to CEO/executive team to salesperson/client?

It took two and a half weeks to put together just one tiny piece of the first component: six words that define respect, with practical uses of that careful distinction. I repeated the work for each distinction that the kids (and teachers) would need to understand leadership, and then the curriculum was deployed.

Not long after the semester started, parents started calling me. Their kids’ fifth-grade homework held more effective training than anything their executive teams had done, and they wanted to use it in their organizations as well.

Ultimately, by focusing on the topic that drove my purpose from the very beginning, we uncovered an understanding of leadership