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December 6 - December 14, 2019
RESIST THE URGE TO PROVIDE SOLUTIONS is a mechanism for CONTROL. When you follow the leader-leader model, you must take time to let others react to the situation as well.
You need to change that cycle. Here are a few ways to try to get your team thinking for themselves: If the decision needs to be made urgently, make it, then have the team “red-team” the decision and evaluate it. If the decision needs to be made reasonably soon, ask for team input, even briefly, then make the decision. If the decision can be delayed, then force the team to provide inputs. Do not force the team to come to consensus; that results in whitewashing differences and dissenting votes. Cherish the dissension. If everyone thinks like you, you don’t need them.
How deeply is the top-down, leader-follower structure ingrained in how your business operates? Do you recognize situations in which you need to resist the urge to provide solutions? When problems occur, do you immediately think you just need to manage everything more carefully? What can you do at your next meeting with senior staff to create a space for open decision making by the entire team?
Like every other submarine we would have weekly “tickler” meetings where the department chiefs and department heads would sit in the wardroom for an hour or more going through the binder page by page. Of course, none of this activity actually resulted in getting any of the work done; it simply allowed us to catalogue what we were supposed to do and what we were delinquent on. It sucked up a lot of time, valuable supervisory time.
You are all going to monitor your own departments and whatever is due. You are responsible, not me and not the XO, for getting it done.”
ELIMINATING TOP-DOWN MONITORING SYSTEMS is a mechanism for CONTROL.
Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership. Eliminating the tickler did that for us. Eliminating top-down monitoring systems will do it for you. I’m not talking about eliminating data collection and measuring processes that simply report conditions without judgment. Those are important as they “make the invisible visible.” What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing.
In his book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming lays out the leadership principles that became known as TQL, or Total Quality Leadership. This had a big effect on me. It showed me how efforts to improve the process made the organization more efficient, while efforts to monitor the process made the organization less efficient.
Are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passion of your mid-level managers who want to be responsible for their department’s work product? Can you turn over your counterpart to Santa Fe’s tickler to department heads and rid yourself of meetings in the process? How many top-down monitoring systems are in play within your organization? How can you eliminate them?
THINK OUT LOUD is a mechanism for CONTROL because when I heard what my watch officers were thinking, it made it much easier for me to keep my mouth shut and let them execute their plans.
Do you ever walk around your facility listening solely to what is being communicated through informal language? How comfortable are people in your organization with talking about their hunches and their gut feelings? How can you create an environment in which men and women freely express their uncertainties and fears as well as their innovative ideas and hopes? Are you willing to let your staff see that your lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance? To what degree does trust factor in the above?
EMBRACE THE INSPECTORS is a mechanism for CONTROL, organizational control.
Whenever an inspection team was on board, I would hear crew members saying things like, “I’ve been having a problem with this. What have you seen other ships do to solve it?” Most inspection teams found this attitude remarkable.
How do you use outside groups, the public, social media comments, and government audits to improve your organization? What is the cost of being open about problems in your organization and what are the benefits? How can you leverage the knowledge of those inspectors to make your team smarter? How can you improve your team’s cooperation with those inspectors? How can you “use” the inspectors to help your organization?
visit davidmarquet.com to read “How we learn from our mistakes on nuclear submarines: A seven-step process.”)
TAKE DELIBERATE ACTION is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.
Here’s something to try at your next leadership meeting or corporate off-site. Hand out a bunch of four-by-six cards and markers. Start with this sentence completion: Our company would be more effective if [level] management could make decisions about [subject]. You specify the level of management but ask the group to fill in the subjects. Once you have the set of cards, post them on the wall, and go on break. Let people mill around looking at what they’ve written. Down-select to a couple subjects. Ask this question: What, technically, do the people at this level of management need to know in
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Are you aware of which areas in your business are marred by mistakes because the lower-level employees don’t have enough technical competence to make good decisions? How could you implement a “we learn” policy among your junior and senior staff? Would you consider writing a creed for your organization modeled after the one we wrote for Santa Fe? Are people eager to go to training?
Don’t brief, certify also became quite powerful because instead of one person studying an evolution and briefing it to the watch team, every crew member became responsible for knowing his job.
How do you shift responsibility for performance from the briefer to the participants? How much preparation do people do prior to an event or operation? When was the last time you had a briefing on a project? Did listeners tune out the procedures? What would it take to start certifying that your project teams know what the goals are and how they are to contribute to them? Are you ready to assume more responsibility within the leader-leader model to identify what near-term events will be accomplished and the role each team member will fulfill?
CONTINUALLY AND CONSISTENTLY REPEAT THE MESSAGE is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.
SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.
Have your processes become the master rather than the servant? How can you ensure adherence to procedure while at the same time ensuring that accomplishing the objective remains foremost in everyone’s mind? Have you reviewed your operations manual lately to replace general terminology with clear, concise, specific directions? Are your staff complying with procedures to the neglect of accomplishing the company’s overall objectives?
Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors (this was introduced in chapter 7). Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.
USE YOUR LEGACY FOR INSPIRATION is a mechanism for CLARITY.
What is the legacy of your organization? How does that legacy shed light on your organization’s purpose? What kind of actions can you take to bring this legacy alive for individuals in your organization?
We did several things to reinforce these principles and make them real to the crew. For example, when we wrote awards or evaluations, we tried to couch behaviors in the language of these principles. “Petty Officer M exhibited Courage and Openness when reporting . . .”
Guiding principles have to accurately represent the principles of the real organization, not the imagined organization. Falseness in what the organization is about results in problems. Since these are a set of criteria that employees will use when they make decisions, decisions won’t be aligned to the organization’s goals.
USE GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR DECISION CRITERIA is a mechanism for CLARITY.
How can you simplify your guiding principles so that everyone in your organization understands them? How will you communicate your principles to others? Are your guiding principles referenced in evaluations and performance awards? Are your guiding principles useful to employees as decision-making criteria? Do your guiding principles serve as decision-making criteria for your people? Do you know your own guiding principles? Do others know them?
Mechanism: Use Immediate Recognition to Reinforce Desired Behaviors
BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND is an important mechanism for ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY.
For how far in the future are you optimizing your organization? Are you mentoring solely to instruct or also to learn? Will you know if you’ve accomplished your organizational and personal goals? Are you measuring the things you need to be? Have you assigned a team to write up the company’s goals three to five years out? What will it take to redesign your management team’s schedule so you can mentor one another? How can you reward staff members who attain their measurable goals?
How do we create resilient organizations where errors are stopped as opposed to propagating through the system? Will your people follow an order that isn’t correct? Do you want obedience or effectiveness? Have you built a culture that embraces a questioning attitude?
Instead of focusing on intimate review of the work, I focused on intimate review of the people. Instead of requiring more reports and more inspection points, I required fewer. Instead of more “leadership” resulting in more “followership,” I practiced less leadership, resulting in more leadership at every level of the command.
Control Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it. Act your way to new thinking. Short, early conversations make efficient work. 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). Embrace the inspectors. Competence Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods. Clarity Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and
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First, empowerment by itself is not a complete leadership structure. Empowerment does not work without the attributes of competence and clarity. Second, empowerment still results from and is a manifestation of a top-down structure. At its core is the belief that the leader “empowers” the followers, that the leader has the power and ability to empower the followers. We need more than that
What we need is release, or emancipation. Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment.
