Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

by L. David Marquet

Instead, have awards that are abundant, with no limit. They pit your team against the world—either external competitors or nature. I like to call these man-versus-nature as opposed to man-versus-man awards. Every team that can get a fire hose to the scene of the fire within two minutes gets an award (the “award” could be a superior grade). In cases where there is a physical reason for the goal, this is better than, say, having the top 10 percent of the shortest times get an “excellent.” On the one hand, it’s possible that the best times are three minutes, and you are handing out “excellents” to a team that would actually die in a fire. On the other hand, once the team has gotten better than two minutes, you don’t need them to spend more time and energy honing that skill. Better to move to another problem area. The most important change that happens, however, is that all teams (in our case, all submarines) are now collaborators working against a common external goal as opposed to competitors working against one another.