Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

I’d need to radically change the daily motivation by shifting the focus from avoiding errors to achieving excellence.

Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems.

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.

By pointing at the chart and giving my crew the solution, I had made things worse. I deprived them of the opportunity and obligation to think.

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.

Competence means that people are technically competent to make the decisions they make.

The emphasis in the book thus far has been on pushing decision making and control to lower and lower levels in the organization.

Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.

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.

Mechanism: Begin with the End in Mind

Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment. With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy, and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge. We realize that we don’t have the power to give these talents to others, or “empower” them to use them, only the power to prevent them from coming out.

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.