Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

The successes we’d had still relied too much on my personal involvement.

THINK OUT LOUD is a mechanism for CONTROL because when I heard what my watch officers were thinking, it made it much easier for me to keep my mouth shut and let them execute their plans.

We aren’t comfortable talking about hunches or gut feelings or anything with probabilities attached to it.

How comfortable are people in your organization with talking about their hunches and their gut feelings?

Are you willing to let your staff see that your lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance?

Whenever an inspection team was on board, I would hear crew members saying things like, “I’ve been having a problem with this. What have you seen other ships do to solve it?” Most inspection teams found this attitude remarkable.

How do you use outside groups, the public, social media comments, and government audits to improve your organization?

pushing decision making and control to lower and lower levels in the organization.

as authority is delegated, technical knowledge at all levels takes on a greater importance.

We were going to have to train our guys to a higher level of technical competence if we wanted to give them more authority.

No matter what we were doing, we would figure out how to extract the maximum learning from that event.

Training is a subset of learning, which in turn is a subset of personal growth.

How could you implement a “we learn” policy among your junior and senior staff?

I was upset because it seemed like in some cases they’d taken the increased authority I’d given them and used that to make their own situations easier.

Repeat the same message day after day, meeting after meeting, event after event.

Are any of your employees on the brink of going AWOL because they’re overworked and underappreciated?

The problem with specifying the method along with the goal is one of diminished control. Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.

As more decision-making authority is pushed down the chain of command, it becomes increasingly important that everyone throughout the organization understands what the organization is about.

Sailors below that level were “PNA” (Passed, Not Advanced). This meant that they’d passed the exam but did not achieve a final multiple high enough for advancement.

Taking Care of Your People Extends Beyond Their Work Lives

Because the crew was convinced that I was “on their team” there were never any issues with negative responses to constructive criticism.

Taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior. That’s the path to irresponsibility.

think about it as anticipatory deliberate action. With the movements of watch standers indicating the next action they anticipate taking, they signal fellow team members and supervisors what they should be thinking about.

Do your guiding principles help people in your organization make decisions?

If I were a crew member and faced with deciding between two different courses of action, would these principles provide me with the right criteria against which to select the appropriate course of action?

Use Immediate Recognition to Reinforce Desired Behaviors

We’d say “There is no ‘they’ on Santa Fe.” We wanted cooperation within the ship

This has been called “gamification.” The blog to read more about this is Gabe Zichermann’s Gamification blog: www.gamification.co.

Encourage a Questioning Attitude over Blind Obedience

Instead of more “leadership” resulting in more “followership,” I practiced less leadership, resulting in more leadership at every level of the command.

Empowerment does not work without the attributes of competence and clarity.

With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy, and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge.

You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them.

they are not relying on you as their source of power.

Your mechanisms will be structurally similar, but the specifics will be different.

visit my Web site (www.leader-leader.com