Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders - by David L. Marquet

Date read: 2021-12-20
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

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The true story of submarine captain, David Marquet, who took one of the worst submarine crews in the Navy and turned them into one of the best. He walks through how he did it by using a leader-leader approach vs. a leader-follower approach that was standard across the Navy. Great advice on how to push decision-making down to your middle managers with a focus on servant leadership & 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. A must-read for any manager or director who is looking to improve accountability and team morale.

My Notes

It is precisely the success of the top-down, leader-follower structure that makes it so appealing. As long as you are measuring performance over just the short run, it can be effective. 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.

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.

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.

A submarine has a built-in structure whereby information is channeled up the chain of command to decision makers. Instead, we were going to deconstruct decision authority and push it down to where the information lived. We called this “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.”

EXERCISE #1
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.

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. On board Santa Fe, the officers and I did the latter, acting our way to new thinking. We didn’t have time to change thinking and let that percolate and ultimately change people’s actions; we just needed to change the behavior. Frankly, I didn’t care whether people thought differently at some point—and they eventually did—so long as they behaved in certain ways.

“I INTEND TO . . .” was an incredibly powerful mechanism for CONTROL. Although it may seem like a minor trick of language, we found that it profoundly shifted ownership of the plan to the officers.

Here is a short list of “disempowered phrases” that passive followers use:

Request permission to . . .
I would like to . . .
What should I do about . . .
Do you think we should . . .
Could we . . .

Here is a short list of “empowered phrases” that active doers use:

I intend to . . .
I plan on . . .
I will . . .
We will . . .

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. Initially, they would provide some information, but not all. Most of the time, however, they had the answers; they just hadn’t vocalized them. Eventually, the officers outlined their complete thought processes and rationale for what they were about to do.

RESIST THE URGE TO PROVIDE SOLUTIONS is a mechanism for CONTROL. When you follow the leader-leader model, you must take time to let others react to the situation as well. You have to create a space for open decision by the entire team, even if that space is only a few minutes, or a few seconds, long.

IDEAS TO GET YOUR TEAM THINKING FOR THEMSELVES
Here are a few ways to try to get your team thinking for themselves:

If the decision needs to be made urgently, make it, then have the team “red-team” the decision and evaluate it.

If the decision needs to be made reasonably soon, ask for team input, even briefly, then make the decision.

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.

ELIMINATING TOP-DOWN MONITORING SYSTEMS is a mechanism for CONTROL.

And with that, we unburdened ourselves of the effort of maintaining the tickler. This had two advantages. First, it would be most efficient because the work would be getting done without the overhead of maintaining the tickler and those darned tickler meetings. Second, there would be no illusion about who was responsible for the performance of the various departments: the department heads were!

I’m not talking about eliminating data collection and measuring processes that simply report conditions without judgment. Those are important as they “make the invisible visible.” What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing.

We called this “thinking out loud.” We worked hard on this issue of communication. It was for everyone. I would think out loud when I’d say, in general, here’s where we need to be, and here’s why. They would think out loud with worries, concerns, and thoughts.

EMBRACE THE INSPECTORS is a mechanism for CONTROL, organizational control. In other words, the crew of Santa Fe are responsible for Santa Fe. We found we needed this parallelism with internal control. Later, we’d hand out T-shirts that jokingly read, “DON’T BE A VICTIM.”

"Training implies a knowledge deficiency. I should be able to identify that with a test. So what question on a test do you think any of these guys would have gotten wrong?” No one could think of one. It wasn’t a knowledge deficiency, and training wasn’t the solution.

We discussed a mechanism for engaging your brain before acting. We decided that when operating a nuclear-powered submarine we wanted people to act deliberately, and we decided on “take deliberate action” as our mechanism. This meant that prior to any action, the operator paused and vocalized and gestured toward what he was about to do, and only after taking a deliberate pause would he execute the action. Our intent was to eliminate those “automatic” mistakes. Since the goal of “take deliberate action” was to introduce deliberateness in the mind of the operator, it didn’t matter whether anyone was around or not. Deliberate actions were not performed for the benefit of an observer or an inspector. They weren’t for show.

As authority is delegated, technical knowledge at all levels takes on a greater importance. There is an extra burden for technical competence.

USS Santa Fe Creed:

What do we do on a day-to-day basis? We learn.
Why is “learning” a better word than “training”? Training implies passivity; it is done to us. We are trained; we attend training. Learning is active; it is something we do.
If all we do is learn, how does the work get done? We do the work. But, we learn by doing—maintenance, evolutions, casualty drills, studying. So, when we are working, even doing field day, we are learning.
How does the training program fit in? The training program is a part of the learning process, but by no means all of it. Training is a subset of learning, which in turn is a subset of personal growth. We strive to grow each day.
What do you expect me to do? I expect you to learn to be a better submariner each day. I challenge you to look at each field day, maintenance action, drill, monitor watch, underway, and deployment as an opportunity to learn more, and by doing so, to grow as a person.

Want to have a training program that employees will want to go to? Here’s how it should work:

The purpose of training is to increase technical competence.
The result of increased technical competence is the ability to delegate increased decision making to the employees.
Increased decision making among your employees will naturally result in greater engagement, motivation, and initiative.

EXERCISE #2
Here’s something to try at your next leadership meeting or corporate off-site:

Hand out a bunch of four-by-six cards and markers.
Start with this sentence completion: Our company would be more effective if [level] management could make decisions about [subject]. You specify the level of management but ask the group to fill in the subjects.
Once you have the set of cards, post them on the wall, and go on break. Let people mill around looking at what they’ve written.
Down-select to a couple subjects. Ask this question: What, technically, do the people at this level of management need to know in order to make that decision? Again, answer on the cards, post them, and go on break.

A certification is different from a brief in that during a certification, the person in charge of his team asks them questions. This could be the Chief in Charge—as in the case I’m recounting—or a lead surgeon prior to an operation. At the end of the certification, a decision is made whether or not the team is ready to perform the upcoming operation. If the team has not adequately demonstrated the necessary knowledge during the certification, the operation should be postponed.

You could start with something as simple as read-ahead or think-ahead assignments that people are accountable for accomplishing.

CONTINUALLY AND CONSISTENTLY REPEAT THE MESSAGE is a mechanism for COMPETENCE. Repeat the same message day after day, meeting after meeting, event after event.

When you bring in something new, something that has never been seen before, you can talk about it and some will get it.

I discovered that what happens when you explain a change is that the crew hears what you say, but they are thinking, “Oh yeah, I know what he’s talking about. That’s like it was on the USS Ustafish.” They hear and think they know what you mean, but they don’t. They’ve never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can’t see in their imagination how it works. They are not being intentionally deceitful; they just are not picturing what you are picturing.

Moreover, if they understand what you mean they might be skeptical that this new way of doing business, which is different from anything they’ve seen before, could be better. How is it possible to be in the Navy for (fill in the years) and not have seen this?

SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.

Once they were freed from following a prescribed way of doing things they came up with many ingenious ways to shave seconds off our response time.

Taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior. That’s the path to irresponsibility. What it does mean is giving them every available tool and advantage to achieve their aims in life, beyond the specifics of the job. In some cases that meant further education; in other cases crewmen’s goals were incompatible with Navy life and they separated on good terms.

Instead of focusing on intimate review of the work, I focused on intimate review of the people. Instead of requiring more reports and more inspection points, I required fewer. Instead of more “leadership” resulting in more “followership,” I practiced less leadership, resulting in more leadership at every level of the command.

Contents:

My Notes