Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

You may be able to “buy” a person’s back with a paycheck, position, power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only.

The world’s greatest problems will be solved by passionate, unleashed “volunteers.”

People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers.

The follower learns to rely on the leader to make all decisions rather than to fully engage with the work process to help make the organization run as efficiently as possible.

The leader-leader model not only achieves great improvements in effectiveness and morale but also makes the organization stronger.

The steps were evolutionary. The result was revolutionary.

divesting control to others in your organization while keeping responsibility.

I prevented any more major problems, but everything hinged on me.

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

I felt I was at my best when given specific goals but broad latitude in how to accomplish them.

To promote long-term success, I had to ignore the short-term reward systems.

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.

In your organization, are people rewarded for what happens after they transfer?

Are they rewarded for the success of their people?

officers make sure we do the right things and chiefs make sure we do things right.

What’s the hardest thing you experience in letting go of micromanaging, top-down leadership, or the cult of personality?

What can you as a subordinate do to get your boss to let you try a new way of handling a project?

I am not advocating being ignorant about the equipment. For me, however, it was a necessary step to make me truly curious and reliant upon the crew in a way I wouldn’t have been without it.

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.

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.

Do people want to change, or are they comfortable with the current level of performance?

Is there a feeling of complacency?

Do people take action to protect themselves or to make the outcome better? Does leadership in your organizati...

The problem for Santa Fe wasn’t an absence of leadership. It was too much leadership of the wrong kind,

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

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

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?

My primary focus when I assumed command of Santa Fe was to divest control and distribute it to the officers and crew.

Control is about making decisions concerning not only how we are going to work but also toward what end.

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

being the chief would no longer mean a position of privilege but a position of accountability, responsibility, and work.

Identify decisions that are candidates for being pushed to the next lower level in the organization.

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.

add a line to our planning documents that listed the “Chief in Charge” next to each event.

How can you prepare your mid-level managers to shift from holding a “position of privilege” to one of “accountability, responsibility, and work”?

When thinking about delegating control, what do you worry about?

Subordinates generally desire to present the boss with a “perfect” product the first time. Unfortunately, this gets in the way of efficiency because significant effort can be wasted.

Officers would state their intentions with “I intend to …” and I would say, “Very well.” Then each man would execute his plan.

the goal for the officers would be to give me a sufficiently complete report so that all I had to say was a simple approval.

What causes us to take control when we should be giving control?

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

If the decision can be delayed, then force the team to provide inputs. Do not force the team to come to consensus; that results in whitewashing differences and dissenting votes. Cherish the dissension. If everyone thinks like you, you don’t need them.

Eliminate Top-Down Monitoring Systems

What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing.

In his book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming lays out the leadership principles that became known as TQL, or Total Quality Leadership.

efforts to improve the process made the organization more efficient, while efforts to monitor the process made the organization less efficient.

Are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passion of your mid-level managers who want to be responsible for their department’s work product?