Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

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

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Why do we need empowerment? Do you need someone else to empower you? How reliant is your organization on the decision making of one person, or a small group of people? What kind of leadership model does your business or organization use? When you think of movie images that depict leadership, who/what comes to mind? What assumptions are embedded in those images? How do these images influence how you think about yourself as a leader? To what extent do these images limit your growth as a leader?

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

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER In your organization, are people rewarded for what happens after they transfer? Are they rewarded for the success of their people? Do people want to be “missed” after they leave? 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? How does the perspective of time horizon affect our leadership actions? What can we do to incentivize long-term thinking?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER What are you willing to personally risk? (Sometimes taking a step for the better requires caring/not caring. Caring deeply about the people and mission, but not caring about the bureaucratic consequences to your personal career.) What must leaders overcome mentally and emotionally to give up control yet retain full responsibility? What’s the hardest thing you experience in letting go of micromanaging, top-down leadership, or the cult of personality? How can you get your project teams interacting differently but still use the same resources? What can you as a subordinate do to get your boss to let you try a new way of handling a project?

Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose?

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 are your biggest frustrations about how Santa Fe is currently run? What is the best thing I can do for you?

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.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Are you asking questions to make sure you know or to make sure they know? Do you have to be the smartest person in your organization? To what degree does technical competence form the basis for leadership? Is that technical competence a personal competence or an organizational compe...

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?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Why is doing what you are told appealing to some? Do people really just want to do as they are told? If a snapshot of your business went viral on the Internet, what would it reveal about your workers? Do your procedures reinforce the leader-follower model? How would your middle managers react if you implemented a checkout system like the one described in this chapter?

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

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

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

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Are your people trying to achieve excellence or just to avoid making mistakes? Has your organization become action-averse because taking action sometimes results in errors? Have you let error-reduction programs sap the lifeblood out of initiative and risk taking? Do you spend more time critiquing errors than celebrating success? Are you able to identify the symptoms of avoiding errors in your workplace? When you ask people what their jobs are, do they answer in terms of reducing errors? When you investigate the criteria that went behind decisions, do you find that avoidance of negative outcomes far outweighs accomplishing positive outcomes? What is the primary motivation of the middle managers and rank and file (not what it says on the wall poster outside the boardroom)? How can you minimize errors but not make that the focus of your organization?

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

control, competence, and clarity.

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’s book Built to Last

Here’s an exercise you can do with your senior leadership at your next off-site. Identify in the organization’s policy documents where decision-making authority is specified. (You can do this ahead of time if you want.) Identify decisions that are candidates for being pushed to the next lower level in the organization. For the easiest decisions, first draft language that changes the person who will have decision-making authority. In some cases, large decisions may need to be disaggregated. Next, ask each participant in the group to complete the following sentence on the five-by-eight card provided: “When I think about delegating this decision, I worry that …” Post those cards on the wall, go on a long break, and let the group mill around the comments posted on the wall. Last, when the group reconvenes, sort and rank the worries and begin to attack them.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER How can you prepare your mid-level managers to shift from holding a “position of privilege” to one of “accountability, responsibility, and work”? What procedure or process can you change with one word that will give your mid-level managers more decision-making authority? When thinking about delegating control, what do you worry about? What do you as a proponent of the leader-leader approach need to delegate to show you are willing to walk the talk?

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.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER How do you respond when people in your workplace don’t want to change from the way things have always been done? What are some of the costs associated with doing things differently in your industry? Do we act first, and think later? Or do we think first, and then change our actions?

SHORT, EARLY CONVERSATIONS is a mechanism for CONTROL. It is a mechanism for control because the conversations did not consist of me telling them what to do. They were opportunities for the crew to get early feedback on how they were tackling problems. This allowed them to retain control of the solution. These early, quick discussions also provided clarity to the crew about what we wanted to accomplish. Many lasted only thirty seconds, but they saved hours of time.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER How would you counter any reluctance on the part of your team to have early, quick discussions with you, the boss, to make sure projects are on course?

To what degree is trust present in your organization? Is your staff spending time and money creating flawless charts and reports that are, simultaneously, irrelevant? What can you do in your organization to add “a little rudder far from the rocks” to prevent needing “a lot of rudder next to the rocks”? What commonplace facts can you leverage to make information more valuable and accessible to your employees? Have you ever uncovered a “reason why” akin to Sled Dog’s admission that the navigational chart legends depended on whatever color highlighter was at the ready?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER What causes us to take control when we should be giving control? Can you recall a recent incident where your subordinate followed your order because he or she thought you had learned secret information “for executives only”? What would be the most challenging obstacle to implementing “I intend to …” in your place of business? Could your mid-level managers think through and defend their plan of action for the company’s next big project?

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

RESIST THE URGE TO PROVIDE SOLUTIONS is a mechanism for CONTROL.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER How deeply is the top-down, leader-follower structure ingrained in how your business operates? Do you recognize situations in which you need to resist the urge to provide solutions? When problems occur, do you immediately think you just need to manage everything more carefully? What can you do at your next meeting with senior staff to create a space for open decision making by the entire team?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passion of your mid-level managers who want to be responsible for their department’s work product? Can you turn over your counterpart to Santa Fe’s tickler to department heads and rid yourself of meetings in the process? How many top-down monitoring systems are in play within your organization? How can you eliminate them?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Do you ever walk around your facility listening solely to what is being communicated through informal language? How comfortable are people in your organization with talking about their hunches and their gut feelings? How can you create an environment in which men and women freely express their uncertainties and fears as well as their innovative ideas and hopes? Are you willing to let your staff see that your lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance? To what degree does trust factor in the above?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER How do you use outside groups, the public, social media comments, and government audits to improve your organization? What is the cost of being open about problems in your organization and what are the benefits? How can you leverage the knowledge of those inspectors to make your team smarter? How can you improve your team’s cooperation with those inspectors? How can you “use” the inspectors to help your organization?

The chapters in this part will focus on the mechanisms we employed to strengthen technical competence. They are: Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER How do you react when an employee admits to doing something on autopilot, without deliberately thinking about the action or its consequences? Do you think that by implementing a system of taking deliberate action you can eliminate errors in your company, or within certain departments in your company? Will employees in your workplace revert to acting hastily and automatically in a real-life situation? How effectively do you learn from mistakes?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Are you aware of which areas in your business are marred by mistakes because the lower-level employees don’t have enough technical competence to make good decisions? How could you implement a “we learn” policy among your junior and senior staff? Would you consider writing a creed for your organization modeled after the one we wrote for Santa Fe? Are people eager to go to training?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER How do you shift responsibility for performance from the briefer to the participants? How much preparation do people do prior to an event or operation? When was the last time you had a briefing on a project? Did listeners tune out the procedures? What would it take to start certifying that your project teams know what the goals are and how they are to contribute to them? Are you ready to assume more responsibility within the leader-leader model to identify what near-term events will be accomplished and the role each team member will fulfill?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Are any of your employees on the brink of going AWOL because they’re overworked and underappreciated? When is it right for the leader to overturn protocol in the effort to rescue a single stressed-out subordinate? What messages do you need to keep repeating in your business to make sure your management team doesn’t take care of themselves first, to the neglect of their teams?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Have your processes become the master rather than the servant? How can you ensure adherence to procedure while at the same time ensuring that accomplishing the objective remains foremost in everyone’s mind? Have you reviewed your operations manual lately to replace general terminology with clear, concise, specific directions? Are your staff complying with procedures to the neglect of accomplishing the company’s overall objectives?

Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors (this was introduced in chapter 7). Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria.

Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER What would you and your team like to accomplish? How can you as a leader help your people accomplish it? Are you doing everything you can to make tools available to your employees to achieve both professional and personal goals? Are you unintentionally protecting people from the consequences of their own behavior?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER What is the legacy of your organization? How does that legacy shed light on your organization’s purpose? What kind of actions can you take to bring this legacy alive for individuals in your organization?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER How can you simplify your guiding principles so that everyone in your organization understands them? How will you communicate your principles to others? Are your guiding principles referenced in evaluations and performance awards? Are your guiding principles useful to employees as decision-making criteria? Do your guiding principles serve as decision-making criteria for your people? Do you know your own guiding principles? Do others know them?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Do you have a recognition and rewards system in place that allows you to immediately applaud top performers? How can you create scoring systems that immediately reward employees for the behaviors you want? Have you seen evidence of “gamification” in your workplace? Perhaps it’s worth reading one of Gabe Zichermann’s blog posts and discussing it with your management team.

Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER For how far in the future are you optimizing your organization? Are you mentoring solely to instruct or also to learn? Will you know if you’ve accomplished your organizational and personal goals?

Are you measuring the things you need to be? Have you assigned a team to write up the company’s goals three to five years out? What will it take to redesign your management team’s schedule so you can mentor one another? How can you reward staff members who attain their measurable goals?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 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?