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October 15 - October 19, 2019
If you are a boss, you have likely been stymied by the lack of passion and ownership you see among your workforce. You probably have tried to encourage them to make decisions only to have many seem more comfortable simply doing what they are told. Empowerment programs start well but don’t sustain themselves.
Technical expertise forms the basis of leadership in the nuclear Navy, and my first captain was an embodiment of that philosophy. Brusque, aloof, but technically expert, he led Sunfish during our first, and highly successful, deployment. I didn’t think twice about how he ran the ship—that was the way things were.
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7344003-belief-in-the-mission-ties-in-with-the-fourth-law
rather than giving specific lists of tasks to the division officers and chiefs of the Will Rogers, I gave broad guidance and told them to prepare the task lists and present the lists to me. Rather than telling everyone what we needed to do, I would ask questions about how they thought we should approach a problem. Rather than being the central hub coordinating maintenance between two divisions, I told the division chiefs to talk to each other directly. Things did not go well.
I overheard people wishing for the old engineer back, who would just “tell them what to do.” Indeed, it would have been much faster just to tell people what to do, and I frequently found myself barking out a list of orders just to get the work done. I wasn’t happy with myself, but no one else seemed to mind much. I seemed to be the only one who wanted a more democratic and empowered workplace, and I wondered if I was on the right track.
First, though I liked the idea of empowerment, I didn’t understand why empowerment was needed. It seemed to me that humans are born in a state of action and natural empowerment. After all, it wasn’t likely that a species that was naturally passive could have taken over the planet. Empowerment programs appeared to be a reaction to the fact that we had actively disempowered people.
It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it!
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.
We talked about Santa Fe chiefs. Unempowered, uninspired. The twelve chiefs are the senior enlisted men. They are middle management. At our submarine schools, the instructors tell us that officers make sure we do the right things and chiefs make sure we do things right. Their technical expertise and leadership would be key, as would my ability to tap their expertise.
I wonder how this parallels to a typical dev team.
I felt bad for these guys: the attendees wandered in late, and the captain stayed away until everyone was assembled. Then he was invited. The meeting started late. It might seem like a little thing, but on board a nuclear submarine, little things like lack of punctuality are indicative of much, much bigger problems. At this particular meeting, everyone was waiting for someone else.
A regular problem I've seen at large companies. How much time is wasted because no one feels the need to be punctual?
I probably should have paid attention to the technical issues because this missile system wasn’t on the Olympia so I hadn’t paid attention to it during my training, but instead I observed the people in the room.
More parallels to Jocko: Leaders job isn't to be in the details, its to be detached and looking at the whole picture.
What goes on in your workplace every day that reinforces the notion that the guys at the top are the leaders and everyone else is simply to follow?
Everything we did reinforced the notion that the guys at the top were the leaders and the rest of the crew were the followers. The problem for Santa Fe wasn’t an absence of leadership. It was too much leadership of the wrong kind, the leader-follower kind.
This is exactly why I hate referring to some people as "leaders." It implies that other people aren't leaders. This itself is disempowering.
In the nuclear-powered submarine Navy we focus on errors. We track them, we report them, and we attempt to understand the reasons for them. There is a powerful and effective culture of open and honest discussion about what went wrong and what could have gone better. What happens then is that we evaluate ships based on the mistakes they make. Avoiding mistakes becomes the prime focus of the crew and leadership.
I worry that when we talk about "operational excellence" we end up treating production issues the same way.
I, we, needed everyone to see the ultimate purpose for the submarine and remember that it was a noble purpose. I also wanted to connect our current endeavors with the submarine force’s rich legacy of service to and sacrifice for the country. Once the crewmen remembered what we were doing and why, they would do anything to support the mission.
“Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.”
The only way the chiefs could own the leave planning was if they owned the watch bill. The only way they could own the watch bill was if they owned the qualification process. It turned out that managing leave was only the tip of the iceberg and that it rested on a large supporting base of other work. It was hugely powerful.
Right or wrong, I was committed to doing whatever I thought was best for Santa Fe, the Navy, and the nation without worrying about the repercussions. 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.
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.
The mind does not lead the body, the body leads the mind.
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.
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.
Interested readers will want to check out Stephen Covey’s The 8th Habit for more ideas about the value of empowering language.
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.
Eliminating these types of systems are easy. What's harder is when things go wrong, someone will propose adding them back. Dealing with these process changes when they are first proposed is a difficult task.
When it comes to processes, adherence to the process frequently becomes the objective, as opposed to achieving the objective that the process was put in place to achieve. The goal then becomes to avoid errors in the process, and when errors are made, additional overseers and inspectors are added. These overseers don’t do anything to actually achieve the objective. They only identify when the process has gone bad after the fact.
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. It was generally when they were quiet and I didn’t know what they would do next that I was tempted to step in. Thinking out loud is essential for making the leap from leader-follower to leader-leader.
This mechanism sends the signal that we are in charge of our destiny, not controlled by some force. It runs counter to the instincts expressed by many of my officers and chiefs to minimize the ship’s visibility to the outside, especially when problems were involved. EMBRACE THE INSPECTORS is a mechanism for CONTROL, organizational control. In other words, the crew of Santa Fe are responsible for Santa Fe. We found we needed this parallelism with internal control. Later, we’d hand out T-shirts that jokingly read, “DON’T BE A VICTIM.”
Ownership
(To see where we ended up, and for a more detailed process for conducting critiques, visit davidmarquet.com to read “How we learn from our mistakes on nuclear submarines: A seven-step process.”)
We decided to do away with briefs. From that point on we would do certifications. A certification is different from a brief in that during a certification, the person in charge of his team asks them questions. This could be the Chief in Charge—as in the case I’m recounting—or a lead surgeon prior to an operation. At the end of the certification, a decision is made whether or not the team is ready to perform the upcoming operation. If the team has not adequately demonstrated the necessary knowledge during the certification, the operation should be postponed.
An effective survey question to ask your employees is how many minutes a week they spend learning on their own, not mandated, not directed. Typically it’s a small number. An organizational measure of improving health would be to increase that number. If you want engaged teams, don’t brief, certify!
At this point, the standard practice would be for the chief of the watch (COW) to call every watch stander on the ship and find out what they were all doing so that we could determine the source of the transient. It was top-down management. But this time Senior Chief Worshek walked into the control room and suggested we change the practice. Instead of us (in the control room) hunting down the violation, we told the watch standers that if they made a transient they should just call the COW and report it without being prompted. This would save a lot of time, and it turned the handling of this
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question: If I were a crew member and faced with deciding between two different courses of action, would these principles provide me with the right criteria against which to select the appropriate course of action?
This is what is great about Amazon's leadership principles. They do this, and people within the company treat them this way.
