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

by L. David Marquet

Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.

Many bosses and owners got rich, and the followers were better off too. It is exactly because the leader-follower way of doing business has been so successful that it is both so appealing and so hard to give up. But this model developed during a period when mankind’s primary work was physical. Consequently, it’s optimized for extracting physical work from humans.

Leader-leader structures are significantly more resilient, and they do not rely on the designated leader always being right. Further, leader-leader structures spawn additional leaders throughout the organization naturally. It can’t be stopped.

The bridge is control, divesting control to others in your organization while keeping responsibility. Control, we discovered, only works with a competent workforce that understands the organization’s purpose. Hence, as control is divested, both technical competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened.

I concluded that competence could not rest solely with the leader. It had to run throughout the entire organization.

One of the things that limits our learning is our belief that we already know something.

It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it! It was

When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.

In your organization, are people rewarded for what happens after they transfer? Are they rewarded for the success of their people? Do people want to be “missed” after they leave? When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a leader, what does this say about that person’s leadership? How does the organization view this situation? How does the perspective of time horizon affect our leadership actions? What can we do to incentivize long-term thinking?

What are you willing to personally risk? (Sometimes taking a step for the better requires caring/not caring. Caring deeply about the people and mission, but not caring about the bureaucratic consequences to your personal career.) What must leaders overcome mentally and emotionally to give up control yet retain full responsibility?

What’s the hardest thing you experience in letting go of micromanaging, top-down leadership, or the cult of personality? How can you get your project teams interacting differently but still use the same resources? What can you as a subordinate do to get your boss to let you try a new way of handling a project? Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose?

What are the things you are hoping I don’t change? What are the things you secretly hope I do change? What are the good things about Santa Fe we should build on? If you were me what would you do first? Why isn’t the ship doing better? What are your personal goals for your tour here on Santa Fe? What impediments do you have to doing your job? What will be our biggest challenge to getting Santa Fe ready for deployment? What are your biggest frustrations about how Santa Fe is currently run? What is the best thing I can do for you?

If you walk about your organization talking to people, I’d suggest that you be as curious as possible. As with a good dinner table conversationalist, one question should naturally lead to another. The time to be questioning or even critical is after trust has been established.

Do you have to be the smartest person in your organization? To what degree does technical competence form the basis for leadership? Is that technical competence a personal competence or an organizational competence? How do you know what is going on “at the deck plate” in your organization?

As things on Santa Fe deteriorated, the crew adopted a hunker-down mode in which avoiding mistakes became the primary driver for all actions. They focused exclusively on satisfying the minimum requirements. Anything beyond that was ignored.

Is there a call to action in your organization? Do people want to change, or are they comfortable with the current level of performance? Are things too comfortable? Is there a feeling of complacency? Do people take action to protect themselves or to make the outcome better? Does leadership in your organization take control or give control?

such delegation of authority shall in no way relieve the commanding officer of continued responsibility for the safety, well-being and efficiency of the entire command

While that singular point of accountability is attractive in many ways, there is a downside. The previous commanding officer would not be held accountable. Thus, as I pointed out earlier, each CO is encouraged to maximize performance for his tour and his tour alone. There is no incentive or reward for developing mechanisms that enable excellence beyond your immediate tour.

ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE, DON’T JUST AVOID ERRORS is a mechanism for CLARITY. (The book to read is Simon Sinek’s Start with Why.) QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Are your people trying to achieve excellence or just to avoid making mistakes? Has your organization become action-averse because taking action sometimes results in errors? Have you let error-reduction programs sap the lifeblood out of initiative and risk taking? Do you spend more time critiquing errors than celebrating success? Are you able to identify the symptoms of avoiding errors in your workplace? When you ask people what their jobs are, do they answer in terms of reducing errors? When you investigate the criteria that went behind decisions, do you find that avoidance of negative outcomes far outweighs accomplishing positive outcomes? What is the primary motivation of the middle managers and rank and file (not what it says on the wall poster outside the boardroom)? How can you minimize errors but not make that the focus of your organization?

“Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.”

Use “I intend to . . .” to turn passive followers into active leaders. Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems. Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates).

had suffered through many wasted hours listening to lectures about how we should “work together,” “take initiative,” and the like. These weren’t backed up with mechanisms that actually enabled or rewarded these behaviors, so the speeches were worse than nothing at all; they sounded hypocritical and the speakers out of touch.

I was resolved to avoid this altogether. Instead of trying to change mind-sets and then change the way we acted, we would start acting differently and the new thinking would follow.

Here is a list of the primary problems the chiefs struggled with: Below-average advancement rates for their men A lengthy qualification program that yielded few qualified watch standers Poor performance on evaluations for the ship A lean watch bill, with many watch stations port and starboard under way, and three-section in port (the objective was to have three-section at sea and at least four-section in port; this meant that each member would stand watch every third watch rotation—typically six hours on watch and twelve hours off—at sea, and every fourth day in port) An inability to schedule, control, and commence work on time An inability to control the schedules of their division and men.

“eyeball accountability.” It would mean being intimately involved—physically present in most cases—in the operations of the ship and in each activity.

Knowing the officers above them would likely veto excessive leave plans and wanting to be the nice guys, the chiefs tended to say “yes” a lot.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the CO wasn’t authorized to make this change. The submarine organization manual was a Navy document that we weren’t supposed to change.

Here’s an exercise you can do with your senior leadership at your next off-site. Identify in the organization’s policy documents where decision-making authority is specified. (You can do this ahead of time if you want.) Identify decisions that are candidates for being pushed to the next lower level in the organization. For the easiest decisions, first draft language that changes the person who will have decision-making authority. In some cases, large decisions may need to be disaggregated. Next, ask each participant in the group to complete the following sentence on the five-by-eight card provided: “When I think about delegating this decision, I worry that . . .” Post those cards on the wall, go on a long break, and let the group mill around the comments posted on the wall. Last, when the group reconvenes, sort and rank the worries and begin to attack them.

I usually find that the worries fall into two broad categories: issues of competence and issues of clarity. People are worried that the next level down won’t make good decisions, either because they lack the technical competence about the subject or because they don’t understand what the organization is trying to accomplish. Both of these can be resolved.

FIND THE GENETIC CODE AND REWRITE IT is a mechanism for CONTROL. The first step in changing the genetic code of any organization or system is delegating control, or decision-making authority, as much as is comfortable, and then adding a pinch more. This isn’t an empowerment “program.” It’s changing the way the organization controls decisions in an enduring, personal way.

We discovered that distributing control by itself wasn’t enough. As that happened, it put requirements on the new decision makers to have a higher level of technical knowledge and clearer sense of organizational purpose than ever before. That’s because decisions are made against a set of criteria that includes what’s technically appropriate and what aligns with the organization’s interests.

Second, there was the fear and cost of being different. Even if we demonstrated that this was a better way, did we want to operate differently from the other fifty-five nuclear-powered attack submarines in the Navy? Several advisers asked me point-blank if I was willing to take the career risk. “Why don’t you just be like everyone else, do the normal things, build teamwork, enforce standards, conduct training?” they’d suggest. “If things go well with your new program, great, but if things don’t go well, there will be a long line of people saying, ‘Well, he did things differently from the rest of us.’”

I called this the paradox of “caring but not caring”—that is, caring intimately about your subordinates and the organization but caring little about the organizational consequences to yourself.

What you want to do now is embed it into the organization, independent of personality. Hand out five-by-eight cards. Have people complete the following sentence: “I’d know we achieved [this cultural change] if I saw employees . . .” (The specific wording in this question should move you from general, unmeasurable answers like “Have people be creative” to specific, measurable ones like “Employees submit at least one idea a quarter. The ideas are posted and other employees can comment on them.”) Allow five minutes. Then tape the cards on the wall, go on break, and have everyone mill around reading the cards. Based on the discussions and quantity of answers, you may want to give everyone a second shot at filling out the cards. Sort and prioritize the answers. Then discuss how to code the behavior into the company’s practices. For example: implementing the three-name rule. The final step is to write the new practices into the appropriate company procedure.

When you’re trying to change employees’ behaviors, you have basically two approaches to choose from: change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.

How do you respond when people in your workplace don’t want to change from the way things have always been done? What are some of the costs associated with doing things differently in your industry? Do we act first, and think later? Or do we think first, and then change our actions?

There was another human tendency working against us as well. Subordinates generally desire to present the boss with a “perfect” product the first time. Unfortunately, this gets in the way of efficiency because significant effort can be wasted.

We boiled this down to this motto: “A little rudder far from the rocks is a lot better than a lot of rudder close to the rocks.”

SHORT, EARLY CONVERSATIONS is a mechanism for CONTROL. It is a mechanism for control because the conversations did not consist of me telling them what to do. They were opportunities for the crew to get early feedback on how they were tackling problems. This allowed them to retain control of the solution. These early, quick discussions also provided clarity to the crew about what we wanted to accomplish. Many lasted only thirty seconds, but they saved hours of time.

and the hierarchy was supposed to protect that time. Inefficiencies in my time were highly visible, especially to me. Less visible, however, were the inefficiencies of all the people throughout the organization. In my organization, even accounting for the difference in the value of our time, those inefficiencies overwhelmingly outweighed whatever efficiency I was getting with my time as captain.

supervisors needed to recognize that the demand for perfect products the first time they see them results in significant waste and frustration throughout their organization. Even a thirty-second check early on could save your people numerous hours of work.

Trust means this: when you report that we should position the ship in a certain position, you believe we should position the ship as you indicated. Not trusting you would mean that I thought you might be saying one thing while actually believing something else. Trust is purely a characteristic of the human relationship. Now, whether the position you indicate is actually the best tactical position for Santa Fe is a totally different issue, one of physics, time, distance, and the movements of the enemy. These are characteristics of the physical world and have nothing to do with trust.

How would you counter any reluctance on the part of your team to have early, quick discussions with you, the boss, to make sure projects are on course? To what degree is trust present in your organization? Is your staff spending time and money creating flawless charts and reports that are, simultaneously, irrelevant? What can you do in your organization to add “a little rudder far from the rocks” to prevent needing “a lot of rudder next to the rocks”? What commonplace facts can you leverage to make information more valuable and accessible to your employees? Have you ever uncovered a “reason why” akin to Sled Dog’s admission that the navigational chart legends depended on whatever color highlighter was at the ready?

“I INTEND TO . . .” was an incredibly powerful mechanism for CONTROL. Although it may seem like a minor trick of language, we found that it profoundly shifted ownership of the plan to the officers.

Here is a short list of “empowered phrases” that active doers use: I intend to . . . I plan on . . . I will . . . We will . . .

Thereafter, the goal for the officers would be to give me a sufficiently complete report so that all I had to say was a simple approval.

Eventually, the officers outlined their complete thought processes and rationale for what they were about to do. The benefit from this simple extension was that it caused them to think at the next higher level.

What causes us to take control when we should be giving control? Can you recall a recent incident where your subordinate followed your order because he or she thought you had learned secret information “for executives only”? What would be the most challenging obstacle to implementing “I intend to . . .” in your place of business?

Could your mid-level managers think through and defend their plan of action for the company’s next big project?

A more enlightened approach would have been to engage in a discussion about why I came up with the position and what assumptions were key to making that position work.