Book: Turn the Ship Around! - L. David Marquet

Another absolute gem of a book (see also: Book: Radical Candor - Kim Scott). The whole strategy and implementation of the “leader-leader” (vs the “leader-follower”) mentality is profound, and the storytelling is captivating. Very hard to put down this book, and I finished it in a week.

Similarly as before, I will leave some of my bookmarks here for future reference.

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?

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.

• 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?

I subsequently went over this end-of-day checkout event in detail with all the officers. The problem, I explained, was that in this scenario the XO is the one who was being responsible for each department head’s work, not the department head himself. Psychological ownership for accomplishing the work rested with the XO, not the department head. Checking out is fine, I said, but it should go more like this: “XO, I’m shoving off for the day. The charts for next week’s underway are coming along fine, and we’ll be able to show the rough plan to the captain tomorrow. I wasn’t able to see Petty Officer Smith for his qualification interview but will be able to make that up tomorrow.” In this scenario, it is the department head, not the XO, who is responsible for the department head’s job. This is leadership at all levels.

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.

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.

“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 shifter ownership of the plan to the officers.

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 mistakes never happened because of deliberate action. Either they were corrected by the operator himself or by a teammate.”

He was describing a resilient organization, one where error propagation is stopped.

Eventually we would expand deliberate action to administrative paperwork. When documents were signed careleslly, we injected the concept of deliberate action into the act (mostly for officers) of signing papers and authorizing events.

What I realized, however, is the need for a relentless, consistent repetition of the message.

CONTINUALLY AND CONSISTENTLY REPEAT THE MESSAGE is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.

Repeat the same message day after day, meeting after meeting, event after event. Sounds redundant, repetitive and boring. But what’s the alternative? Changing the message? That results in confusion and lack of direction. I didn’t realize the degree to which old habits die hard, even when people are emotionally on board with the change. The chiefs wanted to be on board, but they pictured a leadership approach, a style, they’d seen before on the “USS Ustafish” - the generic term for the submarine I “used to” be on. They just pictured something from their past. It was hard for them to create an image of what we were trying to accomplish. It was something brand new. There wasn’t an existing example or movie we could point to.

BUILDING TRUST AND TAKING CARE OF YOUR PEOPLE is a mechanism for CLARITY.

I worked hard to overcome my natural intolerance of inadequacies and my blunt speaking, but I didn’t always succeed. I found, over time, that when I blurted our criticism people didn’t mind. They didn’t take it personally because they knew that two weeks previously I had been doing everything possible to get them promoted.

It’s hard to find a leadership book that doesn’t encourage us to “take care of our people.” What I learned is this: 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 in good terms.

I asked Dillon, “Why did you do that?”

Well, he explained, he knew it was the next action to take, and with deliberate action, he wanted to be ready for the order.

Yes, and at the same time he signaled to the OOD in a tense time, without injecting more words, what the OOD needed to order.

In this way, we learned another powerful aspect of deliberate action: 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. It was powerful and helpful.

Thereafter, whenever we talked about deliberate action, we talked about multiple benefits. Not only did it minimize the chance of a mistake by a person by himself and provide an opportunity for drill team intervention; it was also a critical aspect of teamwork. It worked in a couple ways. It was a bottom-up way of signaling action. It also worked because adjacent watch standers could correct potential mistakes before they happened. This was an excellent example of putting our mechanism of deliberate action into practice.

How to Begin with the End in Mind

• …
• Go through the evaluations and look for statements that express achievement. In every case, ask “How would we know?” and ensure that you have measuring systems in place.
• Then have employees write their own evaluations one year, two years, or three years hence. The goals in the employees' evaluations should cascade down from the organization’s goals; they needn’t necessarily be identical but they should be appropriate at an individual level.
• Have conversations with employees to make their desired achievements indisputable (How would I know?) and measurable.

Instituting the Leader-Leader Model

The core of the leader-leader model is giving employees control over what they work on and how they work. It means letting them make meaningful decisions. The two enabling pillars are competence and clarity. Here is a listing of the mechanisms outlined in this book:

Control

• 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.

Competence

• Take deliberate action.
• We learn (everywhere, all the time).
• Don’t brief, certify.
• Continually and consistently repeat the message.
• Specify goals, not methods.

Clarity

• Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors.
• 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.

Mechanism: Don’t Empower, Emancipate

Empowerment is a necessary step because we’ve been accustomed to disempowerment. Empowerment is needed to undo all those top-down, do-what-you’re-told, be-a-team-player messages that result from our leader-follower model. But empowerment isn’t enough in a couple of ways.

First, empowerment by itself is not a complete leadership structure. Empowerment does not work without the attributes of competence and clarity.

Second, empowerment still results from and is a manifestation of a top-down structure. At its core is the belief that the leader “empowers” the followers, that the leader has the power and ability to empower the followers.

We need more than that because empowerment within a leader-follower structure is a modest compensation and a voice lost compared with the overwhelming signal that “you are a follower.” It is a confusing signal.

What we need is release, or emancipation. Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment. With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge. We realize that we don’t have the power to give these talents to others, or “empower” them to use them, only the power to prevent them from coming out. Emancipation results when teams have been given decision-making control and have the additional characteristics of competence and clarity. You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them. Indeed, you no longer have the ability to empower them because they are not relying on you as their source of power.