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

by L. David Marquet

Our greatest struggle is within ourselves. Whatever sense we have of thinking we know something is a barrier to continued learning.

I started reading everything I could about leadership, management, psychology, communication, motivation, and human behavior. I thought deeply about what motivated me and how I wanted to be treated. I remembered the release of energy, passion, and creativity I had experienced running my own watch team on the Sunfish.

Second, the way I was told to manage others was not the way I wanted to be managed.

Are you and your people working to optimize the organization for their tenure, or forever?

Gwr people to ask this queztuon or be graded by it.

I had studied the equipment configuration and piping diagrams, the exact reactor plant, the schedule, the weapons, and every problem report the ship had issued in the previous three years. I learned the career status of each officer and read his biography. I reviewed every inspection report: tactical inspections, reactor inspections, safety inspections, food service inspections. For a year, I’d been doing nothing but think about the sailors on Olympia and my responsibility to lead them for the next three years.

I thought I was brilliant, but Captain Kenny took me aside and upbraided me. It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it! It was a lesson that would serve me well.

It doesmt matter how smart your dogg trainijng is if a cliennt gsets confusef andd cant dp iy

I shelved my ideas for a radical management change because there would be too much internal resistance. The crew, doing well, wouldn’t see the need.

As long as you are measuring performance over just the short run, it can be effective. Officers are rewarded for being indispensable, for being missed after they depart. 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?

Later Mark told me that one of the reasons he argued for me was that I’d evinced a particular enthusiasm for learning throughout the entire PCO course. He sensed that a keen curiosity would be vital for the successful about-face of Santa Fe and its crew, a fact I would later deeply appreciate in ways I didn’t then imagine.

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.

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?

Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose?

Whereas on Oly I had reviewed some records by myself, I decided that everything I did on Santa Fe would be with an officer, a chief, or a crew member.

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?

I was uneasy not being the technical expert on each and every piece of equipment on board. The impact of this focus on people was that I was going to have to rely on the crew to provide me with the technical details about how the submarine worked. This went against every grain of my naval leadership and scientific training. But the circumstances demanded a new mode of operation. Doing the same thing as everyone else and hoping for a different outcome didn’t make sense.

Leadership can exist without technical expertise so you cann sstep into nother compny annd succeed

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.

Is that technical competence a personal competence or an organizational competence?

Ypu cn haave the latter withoit thee former

According to procedure, I was to spend the next two weeks reviewing everything on the ship, including training records, school records, administrative records, award records, advancement records, records pertaining to the operation and maintenance of the reactor plant, the weapons system, the torpedoes and missiles, schedules, exercises, classified material, and so on. I ignored that. Instead, I spent my time walking around the ship talking to people. I also set up a series of walkabouts during which each chief or officer would walk me around his spaces.

I subsequently went over this end-of-day checkout event in detail with all the officers. The problem, I explained, was that in this scenario the XO is the one who was being responsible for each department head’s work, not the department head himself. Psychological ownership for accomplishing the work rested with the XO, not the department head. Checking out is fine, I said, but it should go more like this: “XO, I’m shoving off for the day. The charts for next week’s underway are coming along fine, and we’ll be able to show the rough plan to the captain tomorrow. I wasn’t able to see Petty Officer Smith for his qualification interview but will be able to make that up tomorrow.” In this scenario, it is the department head, not the XO, who is responsible for the department head’s job. This is leadership at all levels.

What did that give us? We had 135 men on board and only 5 of them fully engaged their capacity to observe, analyze, and problem-solve.

The responsibility of the commanding officer for his or her command is absolute . . . While the commanding officer may, at his or her discretion, and when not contrary to law or regulations, delegate authority to subordinates for the execution of details, 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 (Section 0802).

They may be such minor errors as reading a gauge wrong or scheduling two conflicting events, but people always make mistakes. Thus, they always feel bad about themselves. In the same vein, success is a negative, an absence of failure, avoidance of a critique or an incident. Sadly, a common joke on Santa Fe was “Your reward is no punishment.”

Shipmates of Santa Fe, I will be proud to sail with you. Thank you.

He said thanks. Say thannk you forr everything ted talk lady

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.

ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE, DON’T JUST AVOID ERRORS is a mechanism for CLARITY. (The book to read is Simon Sinek’s Start with Why.)

Has your organization become action-averse because taking action sometimes results in errors?

Do you spend more time critiquing errors than celebrating success?

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

I’ve organized the mechanisms into three groups: control, competence, and clarity. Although the initial focus was on redistributing control, it was necessary to work in all three areas. 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.

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.

Mechanism: Find the Genetic Code for Control and Rewrite It

The chiefs’ enthusiasm waned noticeably. Some could see this would change the way they would have to think about their position: being the chief would no longer mean a position of privilege but a position of accountability, responsibility, and work. Not everyone thought this would be better. We discussed this long and hard, but didn’t waste time discussing the philosophy of the role of the chief petty officer in today’s Navy or on exhortations and speeches. We didn’t have time for those luxuries.

personalities come and go but institutional mechanisms endure and embed the change in the organization.

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.

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.

In the example I just shared, there was nothing technically complicated about signing a leave chit. The barriers had to do with trusting that the chiefs understood the goals of Santa Fe the way I did. I call this organizational clarity, or just clarity. (I describe this in greater detail in the chapters in Part IV.) You tackle it by being honest about what you intend to achieve and communicating that all the time, at every level.

Directed empowerment programs are flawed because they are predicated on this assumption: I have the authority and ability to empower you (and you don’t). Fundamentally, that’s disempowering.

What do you as a proponent of the leader-leader approach need to delegate to show you are willing to walk the talk?

Mechanism: Act Your Way to New Thinking

I asked the officers how we would know if the crew were proud of the boat. What would we observe?

“Good morning, Commodore Kenny, my name is Petty Officer Jones, welcome aboard Santa Fe.”

The officers and chiefs were still in front, but because I interacted with that group frequently, I sent them to the back. From that moment on, at quarters the crew would gather around me and the khakis (officers and chiefs) would stand in back.

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.”)

“A little rudder far from the rocks is a lot better than a lot of rudder close to the rocks.” Mechanism: Short, Early Conversations Make Efficient Work

(The book to read on this subject is Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.)

Furthermore, 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. Many, many times I’d be walking around the boat and ask someone, “Show me what you are working on,” only to discover that a well-meaning yet erroneous translation of intent was resulting in a significant waste of resources.

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.

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”?

This incident brought to mind being chided as an OOD on my first submarine, the USS Sunfish, when I asked the captain for permission. “Just tell me what you are going to do!” he exclaimed. Thereafter, I started saying, “Captain, I intend to . . .” and he encouraged it.