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The late Stephen Covey had an opportunity to observe David Marquet’s ship. He observed that throughout the day, people approached the captain “intending” to do this or to do that, but 95 percent of the decisions were being made without any involvement or confirmation by the captain whatsoever. He noted how Captain Marquet coined the phrase “leader-leader” to differentiate it from the leader-follower approach that traditional leadership models espouse, and his approach seems to paint the picture of Covey’s own definition of leadership: communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.
Marquet starts the book, explaining that the Naval Academy taught him that leadership is the art, science, or gift by which a person is enabled and privileged to direct the thoughts, plans, and actions of others in such a manner as to obtain and command their obedience, their confidence, their respect, and their loyal cooperation. This approach divides the world into two groups of people: leaders and followers.
People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers. The leader-leader structure, however, is fundamentally different from the leader-follower structure. At its core is the belief that we can all be leaders and, in fact, it’s best when we all are leaders. Leadership is not some mystical quality that some possess and others do not.
The officer Marquet replaced was very involved in details. He was always reviewing technical documents and directing maintenance and other operations, so Marquet was determined to change that—by giving the men more control of their work, more decision-making authority, and fewer lists of tasks. Rather than giving specific lists of tasks, he provided broad guidance and told them to prepare the task lists and present the lists to him. Rather than telling everyone what they needed to do, he would ask questions about how they thought we should approach a problem. Rather than being the central hub coordinating maintenance between two divisions, he told the division chiefs to talk to each other directly.
Things did not go well. Marquet learned that he was essentially trying to run an empowerment program within a leader-follower structure. At submarine schools, instructors point out that officers make sure their people do the right things and chiefs make sure their people do things right. Marquet asked himself, “What are you willing to personally risk?” Sometimes taking a step for the better requires both caring and not caring–caring deeply about the people and mission, but not caring about the bureaucratic consequences to your personal career.
Control
Marquet’s primary focus when he assumed command was to divest control and distribute it to the officers and crew. “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.”
Achieve Excellence, Don’t Just Avoid Errors
Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes the focus away from becoming truly exceptional. Marquet needed everyone to see the ultimate purpose for the submarine and remember that it was a noble purpose. He wanted to connect their current endeavors with the submarine force’s rich legacy of service to and sacrifice for the country. Once the crewmen remembered what they were doing and why, they would do anything to support the mission. This was a stark contrast to earlier, when people were coming to work simply with the hope of not screwing up.
He encouraged leaders to act their way to new thinking. He had his subordinates use the phrase “I intend to . . .” to turn them from passive followers into active leaders. He resisted the urge to provide solutions. He eliminated top-down monitoring systems.
This shift was a significant culture change, especially for middle management. So, how can you prepare your mid-level managers to shift from holding a “position of privilege” to one of “accountability, responsibility, and work”? The paradox of “caring but not caring”—that is, caring intimately about your subordinates and the organization but caring little about the organizational consequences to yourself.
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.
Do you play “bring me a rock” in your organization, where vague understanding of the goal results in wasted time? Marquet noted that they did, and needed to change that. 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. Marquet decided that at each phase in the review process the navigator or the assistant navigator should talk to him. These would be quick conversations. On their part, the review team needed to overcome a fear of criticism of an incomplete plan; on his part, he needed to refrain from jumping in with answers. In fact, Marquet sensed he needed frequent conversations with all levels of the chain of command to ensure that they were working toward accomplishing operational excellence. Later, once the crew had adopted the new philosophy of achieving operational excellence rather than avoiding errors, he would back out of the process.
These short, early conversations were a mechanism for control—because the conversations did not consist of Marquet 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. Even a thirty-second check early on could save your people numerous hours of work. Many, many times he’d be walking around the boat and ask someone, “Show me what you are working on,” only to discover that a well-meaning yet erroneous translation of intent was resulting in a significant waste of resources. Is your staff spending time and money creating flawless charts and reports that are, simultaneously, irrelevant?
Use “I Intend to . . .” to Turn Passive Followers into Active Leaders
The phrase, “I intend to…” was an incredibly powerful mechanism for control. This replaced other phrases of passive followers, like: “Request permission to…”; “I would like to…”; “What should I do about…”; “Do you think we should…”; and “Could we…”
After “I intend to…”, the goal for the officers would be to give a sufficiently complete report so Marquet could provide a simple approval. Eventually, the officers outlined their complete thought processes and rationale for what they were about to do. The benefit from this simple extension was that it caused them to think at the next higher level.
Resist the Urge to Provide Solutions
The vast majority of situations do not require immediate decisions. You have time to let the team chew on it, but many times, we often still apply the crisis model of issuing rapid-fire orders.
Eliminate Top-Down Monitoring Systems
What was incredibly powerful was the idea that everyone was responsible for their own performance and the performance of their departments; that Marquet and his leadership team weren’t going to spend a lot of effort telling them what to do. Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership. Eliminating top-down monitoring systems will do it for you. Marquet is 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
Marquet’s team worked hard on the issue of communication, and they encouraged everyone to “think out loud.” Marquet would think out loud when he’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. When Marquet, as the captain, would “think out loud,” he was imparting important context and experience to his subordinates. He was also modeling that lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance.
Embrace the inspectors
It’s important to be open and invite outside criticism. Marquet would utilize inspectors to disseminate ideas throughout the squadron, to learn from others, and to document issues to improve the ship. Concerning areas where the team was doing something exceptionally innovative or expertly, they viewed the inspectors as advocates to share good practices. Concerning areas where they were doing things poorly and needed help, they viewed inspectors as sources of information and solutions. This created an atmosphere of learning and curiosity among the crew, as opposed to an attitude of defensiveness.
Embrace the inspectors can be viewed as a mechanism to enhance competence, but it fits even better in the discussion of control because it allowed Marquet’s team not only to be better submariners but also to maintain control of their destiny.
Competence
One of the two pillars that support control is competence. Competence means that people are technically competent to make the decisions they make.
Take Deliberate Action
When Marquet heard, “Well, he was just in auto. He didn’t engage his brain before he did what he did; he was just executing a procedure.”, he determined the need for engaging your brain before acting. It may sound basic but when operating a nuclear-powered submarine, but he wanted people to act deliberately, so “take deliberate action” was the mechanism.
When Marquet’s submarine, the Santa Fe, earned the highest grade on reactor operations inspection that anyone had seen, the senior inspector told Marquet: “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.” He was describing a resilient organization, one where error propagation is stopped. Eventually they expanded deliberate action to administrative paperwork. When documents were signed carelessly, they injected the concept of deliberate action into the act (mostly for officers) of signing papers and authorizing events.
If all you need to do is what you are told, then you don’t need to understand your craft. However, as your ability to make decisions increases, then you need intimate technical knowledge on which to base those decisions. Control without competence is chaos.
We Learn (Everywhere, All the Time)
The USS Santa Fe Creed read like this: 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.
Don’t Brief, Certify
“Don’t brief, certify” became quite powerful because instead of one person studying an evolution and briefing it to the watch team, every crew member became responsible for knowing his job. It was a mechanism that forced intellectual engagement at every level in the crew. How do you shift responsibility for performance from the briefer to the participants?
Continually & Consistently Repeat the Message
There is a need for a relentless, consistent repetition of the message.
Specify Goals, Not Methods
The crew was motivated to devise the best approach to putting out the fire. Once they were freed from following a prescribed way of doing things they came up with many ingenious ways to shave seconds off of their response time.
Clarity
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. This is called clarity, and it is the second supporting leg—along with competence—that is needed in order to distribute control.
The chiefs talked to their sailors about their individual goals, but Marquet and his leadership team defined some ship-wide goals for everyone to focus on during the deployment: empowerment, efficiency, and tactical excellence.
Build Trust and Take Care of Your People
Taking care of your people extends beyond their work lives. It’s hard to find a leadership book that doesn’t encourage us to “take care of our people.” However, Marquet learned that taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior.
Use Your Legacy for Inspiration
Marquet explained, “It helped provide organizational clarity into what we were about—the why for our service.”
What is the legacy of your organization? How does that legacy shed light on your organization’s purpose? What kind of actions can you take to bring this legacy alive for individuals in your organization? “Well, don’t you think that you as the commander have an obligation to create a vision for your command?” It was more of a statement than a question. “No, I feel that my job as the commander is to tap into the existing energy of the command, discover the strengths, and remove barriers to further progress.”
Empowerment is encouraging those below us to take action and support them if they make mistakes. Marquet employed stewardship delegation, explaining what we want accomplished and allow flexibility in how it is accomplished.
Use Immediate Recognition to Reinforce Desired Behaviors
Simply providing data to the teams on their relative performance results in a natural desire to improve. This has been called “gamification.”
Use Guiding Principles for Decision Criteria and Begin with the End in Mind
One key supervisor a day, rotating among the XO, COB, Weps, Nav, Eng, and Suppo, would have an hour-long mentoring session with Marquet. The rule for the mentoring meeting was that they could talk only about long-term issues, and primarily people issues.
Discuss the concepts and idea of “Begin with the end in mind.” With your leadership team, develop longer-term organizational goals for three to five years out. 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.
Encourage a Questioning Attitude over Blind Obedience
Will your people follow an order that isn’t correct? Do you want obedience or effectiveness? Have you built a culture that embraces a questioning attitude?
Dr. Covey told Marquet it was the most empowered organization he’d seen anywhere, not just in the military. Unfettered by the mental image of leader-follower, the crew approached the business of making every evolution, every operation excellent.
Marquet explains that instead of more “leadership” resulting in more “followership,” he practiced less leadership, resulting in more leadership at every level of the command. 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.
Summary
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 turnpassive 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.
Figure out what decisions the people responsible for the interfaces needed to make in order to achieve excellence. Finally, understand what it would take to get those employees to be able to make those decisions. This typically requires an intersection of the right technical knowledge, a thorough understanding of your organization’s goals, authority to make the decision, and responsibility for the consequences of the decisions made.
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. 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.
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. If you ask your people what authorities they would like in order to make their jobs easier, you’ll definitely get some ideas.
Like me, you may want to get Weekly Leadership Nudges from David Marquet from his Web site (www.leader-leader.com), as you shoot for the stars!