Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

Remember, leadership is a choice, not a position. I wish you well on your voyage! —STEPHEN R. COVEY, SPRING 2012

Further, leader-leader structures spawn additional leaders throughout the organization naturally. It can’t be stopped.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the assumption behind that leadership structure, so fundamental that it becomes subconscious, is that there are leaders and there are followers. It was only after I cleared my mind of these preconceptions that I was able to see a truly better way for humans to interact.

Forty-one of these ballistic missile submarines were built between 1958 and 1965 in response to the Soviet threat, an impressive industrial accomplishment. Will Rogers was the last of the forty-one SSBNs and had operated nearly continuously since its commissioning.

Rogers. I started reading everything I could about leadership, management, psychology, communication, motivation, and human behavior. I thought deeply about what motivated me and how I wanted to be treated.

Empowerment programs appeared to be a reaction to the fact that we had actively disempowered people.

One of the things that limits our learning is our belief that we already know something.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

To what extent do these images limit your growth as a leader?

we learned tactics and leadership.

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

In the Navy system, captains are graded on how well their ships perform up to the day they depart; not a day longer. After that it becomes someone else’s problem.

Officers are rewarded for being indispensable, for being missed after they depart. 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.

When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a leader, what does this say about that person’s leadership? How does the organization view this situation?

In the U.S. Navy, we name the submarine classes after the hull number of the first ship in the class. The Los Angeles–class submarines are 688s, and the class was split into two “flights”:

Doing the same thing as everyone else and hoping for a different outcome didn’t make sense.

If you walk about your organization talking to people, I’d suggest that you be as curious as possible. As with a good dinner table conversationalist, one question should naturally lead to another. The time to be questioning or even critical is after trust has been established.

Dave was describing a problem inherent in the leader-follower model, although he didn’t use those words. Because of his insights and passion he would become one of Santa Fe’s greatest engines for good, embracing the concept of leader-leader and carrying it forward.

As things on Santa Fe deteriorated, the crew adopted a hunker-down mode in which avoiding mistakes became the primary driver for all actions. They focused exclusively on satisfying the minimum requirements. Anything beyond that was ignored.

him. He gets good marks for being very involved, having his fingerprints everywhere. But from my perspective, it’s not helpful; it actually hurts. Not only are they telling me to do stuff I already know I have to do, but also frequently I get told exactly how and when to do it. That takes away any decision-making opportunities I might have.”

I asked one of the crew members if he could hear. No, but it didn’t matter, he said. If there was something important, the chief would tell them at divisional quarters, a meeting that followed this meeting. With leader-follower it didn’t matter.

What goes on in your workplace every day that reinforces the notion that the guys at the top are the leaders and everyone else is simply to follow?

First class petty officers are one rank below chief. They are the workhorses of the Navy, doing a tremendous amount of watch standing, hands-on maintenance, as well as training of the junior enlisted men. They are considered to be budding leaders.

“Whatever they tell me to do,” he immediately replied with unmistakable cynicism.

Who would be responsible and accountable for the work? If you, the captain, allow us to make decisions about the work, aren’t you risking your professional reputation and career on how well we do? Isn’t that the reason these ideas are so hard to implement? They had a point. I pondered that.

Another thing bothered me as well. Who, exactly, was the “they” in the statement “whatever they tell me to do”? Wasn’t “they” us?

Everything we did reinforced the notion that the guys at the top were the leaders and the rest of the crew were the followers.

I could also see the costs of leader-follower in the passivity of the sailors at quarters, in the lack of initiative, in the waiting for others, in the department heads’ paralysis without the CO at the department head meetings.

Why is doing what you are told appealing to some?

Is your organization spending more energy trying to avoid errors than achieving excellence?

While that singular point of accountability is attractive in many ways, there is a downside. The previous commanding officer would not be held accountable.

Without the thirst for change it would have been difficult to get the crew to accept an entirely new way of thinking about leadership. This call to action would be necessary for the changes I had in mind.

Second, we had an incredibly supportive chain of command. My bosses, Commodore Mark Kenny and Rear Admiral Al Konetzni, Commander, Submarine Forces, Pacific (COMSUBPAC or CSP), were ready to give me all the encouragement I needed—and all the rope I needed to hang myself.

They were outcome focused. They didn’t care or need to know the specifics of what we were going to do as long as the evidence showed that the submarine was improving in performance, war-fighting capability, and morale. This was good because I’m not sure I could have articulated ...

There were many times I had the impulse to give specific direction but I couldn’t. Although I cursed my lack of technical knowledge, it prevented me from falling back on bad habits.

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.

What happens then is that we evaluate ships based on the mistakes they make.

It dawned on me the day I assumed command that focusing on avoiding errors is helpful for understanding the mechanics of procedures and detecting impending major problems before they occur, but it is a debilitating approach when adopted as the objective of an organization.

Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes our focus away from becoming truly exceptional.

Reducing mistakes would be an important side benefit to attaining our primary goal, achieving excellence.

Excellence was going to be more than a philosophy statement pasted to the bulkhead; it was going to be how we lived, ate, and slept.

Connecting our day-to-day activities to something larger was a strong motivator for the crew. The connection was there but it had been lost.

Once the crewmen remembered what we were doing and why, they would do anything to support the mission.

ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE, DON’T JUST AVOID ERRORS is a mechanism for CLARITY. (The book to read is Simon Sinek’s Start with Why.)

“Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.”

“When I think about delegating this decision, I worry that …”

worries fall into two broad categories: issues of competence and issues of clarity.

AND REWRITE IT is a mechanism for CONTROL. The first step in changing the genetic code of any organization or system is delegating control, or decision-making authority, as much as is comfortable, and then adding a pinch more.

The barriers had to do with trusting that the chiefs understood the goals of Santa Fe the way I did. I call this organizational clarity, or just clarity.

bring the change to life with the greatest impact. 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.