Summary
This book reveals a system to transform your organization from leader-follower (‘I’m the leader’) to leader-leader (‘We are all leaders’) composed of three pillars:
- Divesting control while keeping responsibility
- Strengthening technical competence
- Providing clarity on what the organization is about
When most people think of this book, their #1 takeaway is the divesting control mechanism, “I intend…” — (explained in bold below)
8 Mechanisms for Divesting Control
- Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it
- The chiefs run the Navy [Chief Petty Officers are first-line managers; this same phenomenon is true is most civilian organizations as well]
- You can’t invoke leader-follower rules to direct a shift from leader-follower to leader – leader.
- We searched for the organizational practices and procedures that would need to be changed in order to bring the change to life with the greatest impact.
- “Caring but not caring”— that is, caring intimately about your subordinates and the organization but caring little about the organizational consequences to yourself.
- Have people complete the following sentence: “I’d know we achieved [this cultural change] if I saw employees…”
- Act your way to new thinking
- Short, early conversations make efficient work
- “A little rudder far from the rocks is a lot better than a lot of rudder close to the rocks.” [In other words, a small, early course correction is much easier than a late, big one.]
- 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.
- I needed frequent conversations with all levels of the chain of command to ensure that they were working toward accomplishing operational excellence.
- Use “I intend to…” to turn passive followers into active leaders
- “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. We are in water we own, water depth has been checked and is four hundred feet, all men are below, the ship is rigged for dive, and I’ve certified my watch team.” — “Very well.”
- 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.
- Resist the urge to provide solutions
- When you follow the leader – leader model, you must take time to let others react to the situation as well.
- Do not force the team to come to a consensus
- Eliminate top-down monitoring systems
- You are responsible for your job
- 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. 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.
- Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates)
- I was also modeling that lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance.
- Embrace the inspectors
- If we were excellent and prepared, the drills and inspections would take care of themselves.
- Human instinct gets in the way of adequate inspection and enforcement when an individual or a group is also responsible for correcting deficiencies in performance.
- Concerning areas where we were doing something exceptionally innovative or expertly, we viewed the inspectors as advocates to share our good practices with. Concerning areas where we were doing things poorly and needed help, we viewed them as sources of information and solutions. This created an atmosphere of learning and curiosity among the crew, as opposed to an attitude of defensiveness.
- Ask the inspector: “I’ve been having a problem with this. What have you seen other ships do to solve?”
5 Mechanisms to Strengthen Technical Competence
- Take deliberate action
- We learn (everywhere, all the time)
- No matter what we were doing, we would figure out how to extract the maximum learning from that event.
- Don’t brief, certify
- A certification is different from a brief in that during a certification, the person in charge of his team asks them questions [whereas in a briefing, the person in charge just shares information/updates].
- Continually and consistently repeat the message
- Repeat the same message day after day, meeting after meeting, event after event.
- Specify goals, not methods
- I felt I was at my best when given specific goals but broad latitude in how to accomplish them.
7 Mechanisms to Provide Organizational Clarity
(Clarity means people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about.)
- Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors
- Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes our focus away from becoming truly exceptional.
- Build trust and take care of your people
- Taking Care of Your People Extends Beyond Their Work Lives
- 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.
- Use your legacy for inspiration (i.e. invoke the storied history of your organization)
- Connecting our day – to – day activities to something larger was a strong motivator for the crew.
- Use guiding principles for decision criteria
- 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?
- When we wrote awards or evaluations, we tried to couch behaviors in the language of these principles.
- Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors
- Look at your structures for awards. Are they limited? Do they pit some of your employees against others? That structure will result in competition at the lowest level. If what you want is collaboration, then you are destroying it. Instead, have awards that are abundant, with no limit. They pit your team against the world — either external competitors or nature.
- Specifically quantify accomplishments
- Begin with the end in mind
- Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience
2 Bonus Mechanisms
- Don’t Empower, Emancipate
- 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.
- You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them.
- Be as curious as possible
- Ask: If you were me what would you do first?
- Walk about your organization talking to people
Other Wisdom
- Genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only.
- Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.
- Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.”
- We had no need of leadership development programs; the way we ran the ship was the leadership development program.
- This was something I would wrestle with my entire command tour — balancing the courage to hold people accountable for their actions with my compassion for their honest efforts.
- Visit davidmarquet.com to read “How we learn from our mistakes on nuclear submarines: A seven-step process.”
- I decided that one key supervisor a day, rotating among the XO, COB, Weps, Nav, Eng, and Suppo, would have an hour-long mentoring session with me. The rule for the mentoring meeting was that we could talk only about long-term issues, and primarily people issues. We were practicing a mentor – mentor program.
- It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it!
- Associate an officer’s leadership effectiveness with how his organization does after he leaves and with how often his people get promoted two, three, or four years hence.
| Don’t Do This! | Do This! |
| Leader-follower | Leader – leader |
| Take control | Give control |
| Give orders | Avoid giving orders |
| When you give orders, be confident, unambiguous, and resolute | When you do give orders, leave room for questioning |
| Brief | Certify |
| Have meetings | Have conversations |
| Have a mentor-mentee program | Have a mentor – mentor program |
| Focus on technology | Focus on people |
| Think short-term | Think long-term |
| Want to be missed after you depart | Want not to be missed after you depart |
| Have high – repetition, low – quality training | Have low – repetition, high – quality training |
| Limit communications to terse, succinct, formal orders | Augment orders with rich, contextual, informal communications |
| Be questioning | Be curious |
| Make inefficient processes efficient | Eliminate entire steps and processes that don’t add value |
| Increase monitoring and inspection points | Reduce monitoring and inspection points |
| Protect information | Pass information |