Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

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.

Our goal would be excellence instead of error reduction. We would focus on exceptional operational effectiveness for the submarine. We would achieve great things.

I have the authority and ability to empower you (and you don’t). Fundamentally, that’s disempowering.

How many times do issues that require decisions come up on short notice? If this is happening a lot, you have a reactive organization locked in a downward spiral. When issues aren’t foreseen, the team doesn’t get time to think about them; a quick decision by the boss is required, which doesn’t train the team, and so on. No one has time to actually think through the issue.

Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership.

It wasn’t going to be good enough to just have a bunch of empowered people; we needed actually to be better.

I believe “take deliberate action” was the single most powerful mechanism that we implemented for reducing mistakes and making Santa Fe operationally excellent.

Control without competence is chaos.

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.

The two enabling pillars are competence and clarity.

Use “I intend to …” to turn passive followers into active leaders.