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

by L. David Marquet

For my part, I would avoid giving orders. Officers would state their intentions with “I intend to . . .” and I would say, “Very well.” Then each man would execute his plan. Mechanism: Use “I Intend to . . .” to Turn Passive Followers into Active Leaders

The key to your team becoming more proactive rests in the language subordinates and superiors use.

One day I caught myself, and instead of asking the questions I had in mind, I asked the OOD what he thought I was thinking about his “I intend to submerge.” “Well, Captain, I think you are wondering if it’s safe and appropriate to submerge.” “Correct. So why don’t you just tell me why you think it is safe and appropriate to submerge. All I’ll need to say is ‘Very well.’”

Most of the time, however, they had the answers; they just hadn’t vocalized them. 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. The OODs needed to think like the captain, and so on down the chain of command. In effect, by articulating their intentions, the officers and crew were acting their way into the next higher level of command. We had no need of leadership development programs; the way we ran the ship was the leadership development program.

Eventually we turned everything upside down. Instead of one captain giving orders to 134 men, we would have 135 independent, energetic, emotionally committed and engaged men thinking about what we needed to do and ways to do it right. This process turned them into active leaders as opposed to passive followers.

Do you like to help your people come to the right answers? I did, and that made matters worse.

Upon reflection, I decided that giving specific direction, as in my statement “We need to be here at 0600,” without the underlying thought processes just didn’t work in the complex and unpredictable world we were in.

Tempted as I was to bark orders at this moment, I looked at my shoes instead. “We’re not going to do that,” I muttered. “We have to find another solution.” Even if we lost the opportunity to attack right then, I needed to get everyone on board thinking. I waited for several seconds. It worked.

Mechanism: Resist the Urge to Provide Solutions

I had the fire control party with me, about thirty guys. I told them at the outset that I was not going to give any orders unless someone recommended it. We ended up driving in a straight line for thirty minutes because they all just thought I’d order the turn. It was painful.

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.

When problems occur, do you immediately think you just need to manage everything more carefully?

When checking out with the XO, the department heads were now telling him what they were doing, hadn’t done, and needed help with. It was a bottom-up dialogue.

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. 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.

“Weps, are you going to turn?” I asked directly. In the narrow channel, every second counted. I glanced sideways at the familiar day markers and palm trees and knew we were at the point where we needed to turn. “Yes, three seconds. I thought they were early.” He seemed miffed I had prodded him. “Helm, right fifteen degrees rudder.” Santa Fe started a slow turn to the right, lining up with the next leg of the channel. It worked out just fine. But I could see Dave had lost initiative, lost confidence, and lost control. He was no longer driving the submarine, I was. His job satisfaction had just taken a big hit.

QUuestion were there ny pointd thay stopped you in your tracks and mmde you realizze sowmrhijng you wwanrwd to implemmememt or vhangee rigjt away?

Here’s what I wish Dave had been saying: “Captain, the navigator has been marking the turns early. I am planning on waiting five seconds, then ordering the turn,” or “I’m seeing the current running past this buoy pretty strongly and I’m going to turn early because of it.” Now the captain can let the scene play out. The OOD retains control of his job, his initiative; he learns more and becomes a more effective officer. He’s driving the submarine! He loves his job and stays in the Navy. We called this “thinking out loud.”

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.

We say submarining is a team sport, but in practice it often amounts to a bunch of individuals, each working in his own shell, rather than a rich collaboration.

When I, as the captain, would “think out loud,” I was in essence imparting important context and experience to my subordinates. I was also modeling that lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance.

My instincts were to somehow protect my people from the scrutiny of these outside organizations. We could have not reported it; they would likely have never known. On the other hand, reporting it would invite additional monitor watches, possibly additional periodic and one-time reports, skepticism about the competency of Santa Fe’s leadership, and a lot of management time. Rick was adamant, and he was right. We set up a critique for the next day,

Embrace the inspectors turned out to be an incredibly powerful vehicle for learning. 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.

Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods.

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.”)

“take deliberate action” as our mechanism. This meant that prior to any action, the operator paused and vocalized and gestured toward what he was about to do, and only after taking a deliberate pause would he execute the action. Our intent was to eliminate those “automatic” mistakes.

Later, when Santa Fe earned the highest grade on our reactor operations inspection that anyone had seen, the senior inspector told me this: “Your guys made the same mistakes—no, your guys tried to make the same number of mistakes—as everyone else. But the mistakes never happened because of deliberate action. Either they were corrected by the operator himself or by a teammate.” He was describing a resilient organization, one where error propagation is stopped.

Why is “learning” a better word than “training”? Training implies passivity; it is done to us. We are trained; we attend training. Learning is active; it is something we do.

The purpose of training is to increase technical competence. The result of increased technical competence is the ability to delegate increased decision making to the employees. Increased decision making among your employees will naturally result in greater engagement, motivation, and initiative. You will end up with significantly higher productivity, morale, and effectiveness.

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. It was a mechanism that forced intellectual engagement at every level in the crew. When you walked around the boat, you’d see guys studying. Studying! On their own! But only if management did their part. Some people call this ownership. A current management term is employee engagement.

This wasn’t taken well, but I needed to get the point across, and I was tired of trying to explain things in a noncoercive way. They would just have to experience it.

Interesting

Repeat the same message day after day, meeting after meeting, event after event. Sounds redundant, repetitive, and boring. But what’s the alternative? Changing the message? That results in confusion and a lack of direction.

SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.

The problem with specifying the method along with the goal is one of diminished control. Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.

Does this work in certain lines of work? People with temporary jobs not carssrs

Have you reviewed your operations manual lately to replace general terminology with clear, concise, specific directions?

Taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior. That’s the path to irresponsibility. What it does mean is giving them every available tool and advantage to achieve their aims in life, beyond the specifics of the job. In some cases that meant further education; in other cases crewmen’s goals were incompatible with Navy life and they separated on good terms.

Mechanism: Use Your Legacy for Inspiration

We’d post notes in the Plan of the Day (POD) and read Medal of Honor or battle citations whenever we qualified a member of Santa Fe in submarines. We would make announcements when passing sunken submarines. Back in Pearl Harbor, we visited the USS Bowfin submarine museum and called it officer training.

Many organizations have inspiring early starts and somehow “lose their way” at some later point. I urge you to tap into the sense of purpose and urgency that developed during those early days or during some crisis. The trick is to find real ways to keep those alive as the organization grows. One of the easiest is simply to talk about them. Embed them into your guiding principles and use those words in efficiency reports and personnel awards.

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?

When I first got to Santa Fe, I sent out a survey asking the officers and chiefs what they thought the strengths of the command were and what our guiding principles should be. We then had a couple of meetings to select the few we wanted to keep (constraint: they all had to fit on one page) and what they meant. We were so busy, however, getting the ship out for the first underway and inspection and then the repair period, we hadn’t done much other than collect the initial inputs.

Initiative Initiative means we take action without direction from above to improve our knowledge as submariners, prepare the command for its mission, and come up with solutions to problems. With each member of the command taking initiative, the leverage is immense.

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.

Are your guiding principles referenced in evaluations and performance awards?

Are your guiding principles useful to employees as decision-making criteria?

He had spared us from a collision. It was 0515 and the watch team was about to get relieved. I grabbed YN1 Scott Dillon, who maintained the supply of awards, and asked him to get me a Navy Achievement Medal. With it, I returned to the crew’s mess and pinned it on the throttleman while he and the off-going watch team ate breakfast. I spoke words of appreciation and professionalism. Later, I would formally report his exemplary service, but the immediacy of the recognition was important.

Simply providing data to the teams on their relative performance results in a natural desire to improve. This has been called “gamification.” The blog to read more about this is Gabe Zichermann’s Gamification blog: www.gamification.co.

During the first set of discussions, we adapted a useful technique for long-term focus and planning. I asked each of them to write their end-of-tour awards. Since these supervisors are assigned to the submarine for three years, this particular exercise made them look that far into the future. If someone was having trouble visualizing that far out I asked him to write his performance evaluation for the next year.

With your leadership team, develop longer-term organizational goals for three to five years out. Go through the evaluations and look for statements that express achievement. In every case, ask “How would we know?” and ensure that you have measuring systems in place.

Have conversations with employees to make their desired achievements indisputable (How would I know?) and measurable.