Turn The Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

He is not alone. A recent survey indicated that 44 percent of business leaders reported their disappointment in the performance results of their employees.4

The problem with empowerment programs is that they contain an inherent contradiction between the message and the method. While the message is “empowerment,” the method—it takes me to empower you—fundamentally disempowers employees. That drowns out the message.

Brusque, aloof, but technically expert, he led Sunfish during our first, and highly successful, deployment. I didn’t think twice about how he ran the ship—that was the way things were. Between my first and second deployments on Sunfish, we got a new captain, Commander (later Rear Admiral) Marc Pelaez. One day while we were cruising in the Atlantic Ocean during our training cycle and nothing much was going on, I saw a large merchant ship through the periscope. Sonar had been listening to it but they were not sure of its range because they had been authorized only for passive listening, the normal mode for submarines. I whimsically mused with the sonar chief how helpful it would be if they could ping on the merchant using active sonar, something we rarely did. Captain Pelaez appeared beside me. “Well, why don’t you?” Of course he knew the reason—it takes the captain’s permission to authorize going active on sonar. Sensing my discomfort, he said, “Why don’t you just say, ‘Captain, I intend to go active on sonar for training’?” I tried it. “Captain, I intend to go active on sonar for training.”

I followed the captain around to see what he did. He was everywhere: dashing to the engine room, then back to control; running to sonar and from there to the torpedo room. I was exhausted before twenty-four hours were over. I’m not sure he ever slept during the three days I was observing. That ship did well on its inspection, and the inspection team specifically cited the involvement of the captain. I had a sense of unease because I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to run a submarine. Even if it were, I knew I could not physically do what he did.

I had wanted to give my team more authority and control, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I would give decision-making control to my people, but they’d make bad decisions. If I was going to get yelled at, I at least wanted it to be my fault. I went back to leading in the way I’d been taught. I personally briefed every event. I approved all decisions myself. I set up systems where reports came to me all day and all night. I never slept well because messengers were waking me so I could make decisions. I was exhausted and miserable; the men in the department weren’t happy either, but they stoically went about their jobs. I prevented any more major problems, but everything hinged on me. Numerous times I found errors. Far from being proud of catching these mistakes, I lamented my indispensability and worried what would happen when I was tired, asleep, or wrong.

First, though I liked the idea of empowerment, I didn’t understand why empowerment was needed. It seemed to me that humans are born in a state of action and natural empowerment. After all, it wasn’t likely that a species that was naturally passive could have taken over the planet. Empowerment programs appeared to be a reaction to the fact that we had actively disempowered people. Additionally, it seemed inherently contradictory to have an empowerment program whereby I would empower my subordinates and my boss would empower me. I felt my power came from within, and attempts to empower me felt like manipulation. Second, the way I was told to manage others was not the way I wanted to be managed. I felt I was at my best when given specific goals but broad latitude in how to accomplish them. I didn’t respond well to executing a bunch of tasks. In fact, being treated that way irritated me and caused me to shut my brain down. That was intellectually wasteful and unfulfilling.

concluded that competence could not rest solely with the leader. It had to run throughout the entire organization.

Are you and your people working to optimize the organization for their tenure, or forever? To promote long-term success, I had to ignore the short-term reward systems.

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

I was panicked. The foundation of my leadership approach, my technical competence, was for the wrong submarine.

Do people want to be “missed” after they leave?

Later Mark told me that one of the reasons he argued for me was that I’d evinced a particular enthusiasm for learning throughout the entire PCO course. He sensed that a keen curiosity would be vital for the successful about-face of Santa Fe and its crew, a fact I would later deeply appreciate in ways I didn’t then imagine.

“Look, here’s the deal. If you need to change out some people, let me know, but I’m not interested in a lot of turnover. I don’t think that will help the crew. I think a better focus would be on working with what you’ve got. With only six months to deployment you don’t have a lot of time to find replacements.”

My challenge would be to use the same people and support team and by changing the way they interacted and behaved, dramatically increase the combat effectiveness of Santa Fe.

Then I began to reconsider the situation. Since Mark wasn’t going to micromanage me, maybe this was a chance to do something different. Maybe this was the chance to set the crew free from the top-down, “do what you’re told” approach to leadership. Maybe this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Of course, I would be solely responsible, and if Santa Fe wasn’t ready, it would be my fault and likely my job.

Are you curious? I thought I was being curious during my previous tours; turns out I was only “questioning.”

Walking the ship, I would ask the crew questions about their equipment and what they were working on. They were skeptical about these questions initially. That’s because normally I would have been “questioning,” not curious. I would have been asking questions to make sure they knew the equipment. Now I was asking questions to make sure I knew the equipment.

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.

“Hi, what do you do on board?” By asking open-ended questions like this, I could better gauge what the crew thought their job was. “Whatever they tell me to do,” he immediately replied with unmistakable cynicism. He knew he was a follower, and not happy with it, but he also was not taking responsibility. He was throwing it back in my face that the command was all screwed up. It was a stunningly insulting thing to say, yet a brilliantly clear description of the problem. I should have been irate. Instead I felt strangely detached—like a scientific observer. “Whatever they tell me to do.” That was the attitude all over the ship. I began to see things in a new light.

By contrast, “whatever they tell me to do” pointed to the reality that the fundamental structure of leader-follower was the problem on board ship. Everyone below the captain and the department heads had their brain shut off. What did that give us? We had 135 men on board and only 5 of them fully engaged their capacity to observe, analyze, and problem-solve. An image from my hometown popped into my head. I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, near Lowell, where a host of empty textile mills mark the landscape. This is how I pictured the mental utilization of the crew—sitting idle. Another thing bothered me as well. Who, exactly, was the “they” in the statement “whatever they tell me to do”? Wasn’t “they” us?

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

Finally, it seemed clear that the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely 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.

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

The chapters in this part will introduce you to the initial set of mechanisms we devised to implement leader-leader practices. I’ve organized the mechanisms into three groups: control, competence, and clarity. Although the initial focus was on redistributing control, it was necessary to work in all three areas. Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it. Act your way to new thinking. Short, early conversations make efficient work. Use “I intend to …” to turn passive followers into active leaders. Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems. Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates). Embrace the inspectors.

In reversing years of the leader-follower system’s erosion of the chiefs’ authority, the chiefs on board Santa Fe—now under my command—would be going against the grain. I wanted to make sure they deliberately decided to take charge. It wouldn’t be any good if I directed them. You can’t invoke leader-follower rules to direct a shift from leader-follower to leader-leader.

How do you raise morale quickly? It didn’t seem like you could just order a cultural change like this. And yet, that’s just what we did. I asked the officers how we would know if the crew were proud of the boat. What would we observe? There was silence. Apparently these officers weren’t accustomed to being involved. I pointed my flashlight at one of the junior officers. “You go first,” I commanded, and after he spoke, others volunteered their own opinions: They’d brag about it to their family and friends! They’d look visitors in the eye when they met them in the passageway! They’d wear their Santa Fe ball caps as much as possible! They’d boast to their friends on other submarines! They’d buy Santa Fe lighters, pens, and pins from the ship’s store!

Starting condition: you’ve had a discussion with your leadership group and identified some sort of cultural change the group mostly agrees to. What you want to do now is embed it into the organization, independent of personality. Hand out five-by-eight cards. Have people complete the following sentence: “I’d know we achieved [this cultural change] if I saw employees …” (The specific wording in this question should move you from general, unmeasurable answers like “Have people be creative” to specific, measurable ones like “Employees submit at least one idea a quarter. The ideas are posted and other employees can comment on them.”) Allow five minutes. Then tape the cards on the wall, go on break, and have everyone mill around reading the cards. Based on the discussions and quantity of answers, you may want to give everyone a second shot at filling out the cards. Sort and prioritize the answers. Then discuss how to code the behavior into the company’s practices. For example: implementing the three-name rule. The final step is to write the new practices into the appropriate company procedure.

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.

There was another human tendency working against us as well. 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. We decided then and there that at each phase in the review process the navigator or the assistant navigator should talk to me. These would be quick conversations. On their part, the review team needed to overcome a fear of criticism of an incomplete plan; on my part, I needed to refrain from jumping in with answers. We boiled this down to this motto: “A little rudder far from the rocks is a lot better than a lot of rudder close to the rocks.”

Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.)

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.

One problem that came up as we spread the idea of these short interactions earlier in the process was the question of trust. I could hear the petty officers complaining that the command “didn’t trust them,” and sometimes they challenged me directly with that complaint. For a long time this bothered me because I actually did trust them, but I didn’t know how to answer the question. Then I realized that we were talking about two totally different things. Trust means this: when you report that we should position the ship in a certain position, you believe we should position the ship as you indicated. Not trusting you would mean that I thought you might be saying one thing while actually believing something else. Trust is purely a characteristic of the human relationship. Now, whether the position you indicate is actually the best tactical position for Santa Fe is a totally different issue, one of physics, time, distance, and the movements of the enemy. These are characteristics of the physical world and have nothing to do with trust.

“I thought you’d learned something secret at PCO school that they only tell the COs about.” He was being perfectly honest. By giving that order, I took the crew right back to the top-down, command-and-control leadership model. That my most senior, experienced OOD would repeat it was a giant wake-up call about the perils of that model for something as complicated as a submarine. What happens in a top-down culture when the leader is wrong? Everyone goes over the cliff. I vowed henceforth never to give an order, any order. I would let this be a lesson to myself to keep my mouth shut.

Stephen Covey’s The 8th Habit

Frequently, I wouldn’t just say, “Very well.” There would be too many unanswered questions about the safety and appropriateness of the proposed event, so I found myself asking a bunch of questions. One day I caught myself, and instead of asking the questions I had in mind, I asked the OOD what he thought I was thinking about his “I intend to submerge.” “Well, Captain, I think you are wondering if it’s safe and appropriate to submerge.” “Correct. So why don’t you just tell me why you think it is safe and appropriate to submerge. All I’ll need to say is ‘Very well.’ ”

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

At this point, although I’d talked about accomplishing our mission (a positive goal), the team was still in the old mind-set of avoiding problems (in this case, avoiding contacts to prevent counterdetection and minimize the risk of collision). When it came to prosecuting the enemy, a correct assessment of risk versus gain would have been more focused on driving the submarine to an optimal tactical position rather than avoiding contacts. For the next several hours,

I reflected on what had taken place and realized that as tired as I was, and despite the time it would have taken, I should have let my officers figure things out. Emergency situations required snap decision making and clear orders. There’s no time for a big discussion. Yet, the vast majority of situations do not require immediate decisions. You have time to let the team chew on it, but we still apply the crisis model of issuing rapid-fire orders. RESIST THE URGE TO PROVIDE SOLUTIONS is a mechanism for CONTROL.

How many times do issues that require decisions come up on short notice? If this is happening a lot, you have a reactive organization locked in a downward spiral. When issues aren’t foreseen, the team doesn’t get time to think about them; a quick decision by the boss is required, which doesn’t train the team, and so on. No one has time to actually think through the issue.

So we had a system that was focused on understanding the status instead of actually getting the work done. Unfortunately, everyone was too busy to look at the binder, and in any event, it was stuck up in a locker in the XO’s stateroom.

Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership. Eliminating the tickler did that for us. Eliminating top-down monitoring systems will do it for you. I’m not talking about eliminating data collection and measuring processes that simply report conditions without judgment.

When it comes to processes, adherence to the process frequently becomes the objective, as opposed to achieving the objective that the process was put in place to achieve. The goal then becomes to avoid errors in the process, and when errors are made, additional overseers and inspectors are added. These overseers don’t do anything to actually achieve the objective. They only identify when the process has gone bad after the fact.

Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming

“Captain, the navigator has been marking the turns early. I am planning on waiting five seconds, then ordering the turn,” or “I’m seeing the current running past this buoy pretty strongly and I’m going to turn early because of it.” Now the captain can let the scene play out. The OOD retains control of his job, his initiative; he learns more and becomes a more effective officer. He’s driving the submarine! He loves his job and stays in the Navy. We called this “thinking out loud.”

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. It was generally when they were quiet and I didn’t know what they would do next that I was tempted to step in. Thinking out loud is essential for making the leap from leader-follower to leader-leader.

THINK OUT LOUD also works as a mechanism for ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY. If all you need your people to do is follow orders, it isn’t important that they understand what you are trying to accomplish. But we operate in a highly complex world, with the vagaries of an ever-changing environment and the opposition of a diligent and patient enemy. It’s not enough to put a finger on the chart and hope things come out well.

One of the two pillars that support control is competence. Competence means that people are technically competent to make the decisions they make. On a submarine, it means having a specific technical understanding of physics, electricity, sound in water, metallurgy, and so on.

(To see where we ended up, and for a more detailed process for conducting critiques, visit davidmarquet.com to read “How we learn from our mistakes on nuclear submarines: A seven-step process.”)

I was taking a risk. If we later discovered that someone’s actions were sufficiently neglectful to warrant punishment I would have painted myself into a box. However, I felt the candor and honesty of Petty Officer M were more important than continuing the current process of inquisition, fear, and punishment. “Now, gentlemen, how are we going to prevent this from happening again?” And that’s what we spent the next seven and a half hours talking about.

Later, when Santa Fe earned the highest grade on our reactor operations inspection that anyone had seen, the senior inspector told me this: “Your guys made the same mistakes—no, your guys tried to make the same number of mistakes—as everyone else. But the mistakes never happened because of deliberate action. Either they were corrected by the operator himself or by a teammate.”