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April 27 - April 30, 2023
He felt if he required them to own the problem and the solution to it, they would begin to view themselves as a vitally important link in the chain of command. He created a culture where those sailors had a real sense of adding value.
Captain Marquet has coined the phrase “leader-leader” to differentiate it from the leader-follower approach that traditional leadership models have espoused.
Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.
Remember, leadership is a choice, not a position. I wish you well on your voyage!
Disengaged, dissatisfied, uncommitted employees erode an organization’s bottom line while breaking the spirits of their colleagues.
The leader-leader structure is fundamentally different from the leader-follower structure. At its core is the belief that we can all be leaders and, in fact, it’s best when we all are leaders. Leadership is not some mystical quality that some possess and others do not. As humans, we all have what it takes, and we all need to use our leadership abilities in every aspect of our work life.
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!
I started interviewing the chiefs and officers in their spaces. After having them tell me about their people, I asked them a loosely structured set of questions like these: 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
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Doing the same thing as everyone else and hoping for a different outcome didn’t make sense.
When was the last time you walked around your organization to hear about the good, the bad, and the ugly of top-down management? Walking around and listening was my first step in preparing to command Santa Fe.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 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?
“Hi, what do you do on board?” By asking open-ended questions like this, I could better gauge what the crew thought their job was.
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. This was a stark contrast to earlier, when people were coming to work simply with the hope of not screwing up.
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.
Many empowerment programs fail because they are just that, “programs” or “initiatives” rather than the central principle—the genetic code, if you will—behind how the organization does business. You can’t “direct” empowerment programs. 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. This internal contradiction dooms these initiatives. We say “empowerment” but do it in a way that is disempowering. The practice outweighs the rhetoric.
My goal, professionally and personally, was to implement enduring mechanisms that would embed the goodness of the organization in the submarine’s people and practices and wouldn’t rely on my personality to make it happen.
How do you raise morale quickly? It didn’t seem like you could just order a cultural change like this. And yet, that’s just what we did.
Starting condition: you’ve had a discussion with your leadership group and identified some sort of cultural change the group mostly agrees to. 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
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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. On board Santa Fe, the officers and I did the latter, acting our way to new thinking. We didn’t have time to change thinking and let that percolate and ultimately change people’s actions; we just needed to change the behavior. Frankly, I didn’t care whether people thought differently at some point—and they eventually did—so long as they behaved in certain ways.
Some observers attributed the low morale on Santa Fe to the long hours. I didn’t think so. I felt it had more to do with focusing on reducing errors instead of accomplishing something great and the resultant feeling of ineffectiveness that had permeated the ship.
To my surprise, Sled Dog immediately perked up and began offering suggestions. He had clearly been frustrated, toiling away in the dark; now he had a voice. It was a classic case of the workers’ being technically competent but unclear about what we were trying to achieve.
Emergency situations required snap decision making and clear orders. There’s no time for a big discussion. Yet, the vast majority of situations do not require immediate decisions. You have time to let the team chew on it, but we still apply the crisis model of issuing rapid-fire orders. 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.
We called this “thinking out loud.” We worked hard on this issue of communication. It was for everyone. I would think out loud when I’d say, in general, here’s where we need to be, and here’s why. They would think out loud with worries, concerns, and thoughts. It’s not what we picture when we think of the movie image of the charismatic and confident leader, but it creates a much more resilient system.
If you limit all discussion to crisp orders and eliminate all contextual discussion, you get a pretty quiet control room. That was viewed as good. We cultivated the opposite approach and encouraged a constant buzz of discussions among the watch officers and crew. By monitoring that level of buzz, more than the actual content, I got a good gauge of how well the ship was running and whether everyone was sharing information.
What I learned is this: 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.
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.
Look at your structures for awards. Are they limited? Do they pit some of your employees against others? That structure will result in competition at the lowest level. If what you want is collaboration, then you are destroying it. Instead, have awards that are abundant, with no limit. They pit your team against the world—either external competitors or nature. I like to call these man-versus-nature as opposed to man-versus-man awards.
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?
The core of the leader-leader model is giving employees control over what they work on and how they work. It means letting them make meaningful decisions. The two enabling pillars are competence and clarity.
This is the power of the leader-leader structure. Only with this model can you achieve top performance and enduring excellence and development of additional leaders.
Ultimately, the most important person to have control over is yourself—for it is that self-control that will allow you to “give control, create leaders.” I believe that rejecting the impulse to take control and attract followers will be your greatest challenge and, in time, your most powerful and enduring success.
