In the SOF world, we have an expression, “admire your work through your sites.” It means to keep looking through your weapon’s optic as you engage a threat. For every shot you take, there must always be two site pictures, one before the shot and one after. We use this discipline to ensure that our weapon, our site picture, and our focus remains on the threat until the threat no longer remains.
When doing this, we look through a tube on the top of our weapon while keeping both eyes open to ensure depth perception and peripheral vision. The peripheral enables the identification of other threats, but the focus remains on the target.
This illustration relates to many other aspects of life and leadership. We tend to focus on the most critical problems at any given time until that problem is reduced. These may come in the form of obstacles to progress, delays in delivery, and personnel disruptions to our business. Those personnel disruptions often become the most pressing issue. In times like this, we must remember that people are not problems. Problems are problems. People are people. When we view people as problems, we can slip into viewing them as threats and get fixated down our sites.
There are a few dangers to this approach. First, we stop viewing people as anything more than threats that need to be eliminated. Second, we keep “reacquiring site pictures” on the person instead of the problem. And finally, we live through the optic tube and miss the bigger picture going on around us. We must be disciplined to “lower our weapons,” just like we do in the SOF world.
In the SOF world, we train to reduce the threat and then lower our weapons to just below our line of site. This allows us to see the situation around us more clearly. To see important features of the room, the situation, and the people we interact with. Without lowering our weapons and seeing the full frame, we can miss important details that inform rapid decision-making in high-stress environments. Of note, we cannot more accurately look at the hands of those who we come across to identify whether they are combatants or noncombatants. And in the heat of the moment, if we are solely looking through our optics, everyone’s a combatant.
But everyone is not a combatant–not in combat and not in our companies.
We also tend to miss our teammates while being over-fixated on our obstacles. We fail to see where they are in relation to the mission and the obstacle. We fail to check how they are as we progress toward our goals. And we fail to acknowledge that we are not alone on the objective. If you are a leader, by definition, you are not alone. But beware, over-fixation will turn you into a lone gunman on a team mission. I’ve been there. So over-fixated and jacked up that I was the only one in the room because I’d left my team in the hallway.
Are you getting the application to life and leadership? When dealing with a threat, admire your work through your sites until the work is done, but don’t get so fixated on your targets that you live life through your optics. Your fixation will degrade your situational awareness, and you’ll miss your mission, your people, and your purpose.
