Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

He created a culture where those sailors had a real sense of adding value.

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.

felt my power came from within, and attempts to empower me felt like manipulation.

concluded that competence could not rest solely with the leader. It had to run throughout the entire organization.

It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it!

While that singular point of accountability is attractive in many ways, there is a downside. The previous commanding officer would not be held accountable. Thus, as I pointed out earlier, each CO is encouraged to maximize performance for his tour and his tour alone. There is no incentive or reward for developing mechanisms that enable excellence beyond your immediate tour. Imagine the impact of this on the thousands of decisions made by the commanding officers throughout the Navy.

Finally, it seemed clear that the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary. In order to break this cycle, I’d need to radically change the daily motivation by shifting the focus from avoiding errors to achieving excellence.

Connecting our day-to-day activities to something larger was a strong motivator for the crew.

I was resolved to avoid this altogether. 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.

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.

the level of control is divested, it becomes more and more important that the team be aligned with the goal of the organization.

When you follow the leader-leader model, you must take time to let others react to the situation as well. You have to create a space for open decision by the entire team, even if that space is only a few minutes, or a few seconds, long.

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

believe “take deliberate action” was the single most powerful mechanism that we implemented for reducing mistakes and making Santa Fe operationally excellent. It worked at the interface between man and machine: where petty officers were touching the valves, pumps, and switches that made the submarine and its weapons systems work. TAKE DELIBERATE ACTION is a mechanism for COMPETENCE. But selling the crew on this mechanism’s value was hard going.

“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.”

pair programming is the same

you tried to divest control without first making sure your organization is competent to handle more decision-making authority? I learned the hard way that control without competence is chaos.

Increased decision making among your employees will naturally result in greater engagement, motivation, and initiative.

After I got over my anger, I invoked the following rule of “watch bill equitability”: no supervisory watch station could be in a watch rotation better than the worst rotation of any watch station reporting to that supervisor. As this would work its way up the chain, there would be no way the chiefs or officers would be better off than the crew. 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.

CONTINUALLY AND CONSISTENTLY REPEAT THE MESSAGE is a mechanism for COMPETENCE. 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.

BUILDING TRUST AND TAKING CARE OF YOUR PEOPLE is a mechanism for CLARITY.

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.

Commitment Commitment means we are present when we come to work. We give it our best. We choose to be here.

Timeliness Timeliness means we do things on time: start work on time, qualify on time, are ready to start evolutions and drills on time, and get to rendezvous points on time. Timeliness also recognizes that accomplishing most things faster is better and that working to reduce inherent delays and time lags results in a more effective organization.

practice. I decided that one key supervisor a day, rotating among the XO, COB, Weps, Nav, Eng, and Suppo, would have an hour-long mentoring session with me. The rule for the mentoring meeting was that we could talk only about long-term issues, and primarily people issues. All business concerning a leaking valve or failed circuit card had to occur outside these meetings.

Emancipation results when teams have been given decision-making control and have the additional characteristics of competence and clarity. You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them. Indeed, you no longer have the ability to empower them because they are not relying on you as their source of power.

great

In my work as a consultant after leaving the U.S. Navy, I have discovered that each organization is different and unique. The people making up the organization have different backgrounds and a different level of tolerance for empowerment and a different sense of comfort in emancipation.

“give control, create leaders.”