Turn the ship around! David Marquet

Turn the ship around! is the amazing and inspiring true story of nuclear submarine commander David Marquet and his crew’s journey to completely turn around the style of leadership on board of the Sante Fe. The change is from what he calls a leader-follower model to a leader-leader model. Marquet managed to turn around one of the worst performing subs of the US navy into one the best performing ones by challenging about every piece of conventional wisdom about naval leadership dominating at that moment.

The most inspiring part of reading this book is the belief that if you can successfully turn around leadership in a truly hierarchical environment as the military, you can do it everywhere. Many times when I explain modern leadership style to managers I get a response like ‘that sounds all fine bit would never work over here.’ I guarantee you will not be able to say that anymore after reading this book.

The story begins

The dominating idea about naval leadership at the time was ‘in order to give good orders the commander needs to know better than everyone else’. Now, I think this is something we can easily compare to a business environment. In organization we also see that managers are often promoted to a management position based on their proven knowledge and expertise.

So, when Marquet was to take command of the nuclear submarine Olympia he went to school for a year to be educated on every detail of the vessel and on naval leadership. But just a few weeks before he would take over the command of the Olympia he got a phone cal: He was to take over the Sante Fe instead. And the Santa Fe was a completely different type of submarine than the Olympia. O, and by the way, it was also one the wordt performing ones in the US navy in terms of inspections reports and retention of the crew.

In preparing the take-over of command Marquet quickly found out the crew was solely trained for compliance: do whatever the captain tells you to do. And he didn’t know much of this type of ship! This realization strengthened his determination that leadership on board of a naval vessel could and should be changed.

Again, we can compare with most organization were compliance is the dominant culture. Maybe not as obvious and extreme as in a military environment but still very prevailing.

Marquet made another observation that I recognize in most organizations: A departing commander is fully but only responsible for the ship and crew up until the moment he transfers command to his successor. While this might sound obvious on first glance, look at it a bit closer: Everything the new commander of director inherits suddenly becomes his responsibility. If safety regulations have continuously been neglected and an accident happens five minutes after you are the new leader, it is your responsibility. What does this say about leadership responsibility and morale if it can end so abruptly after you pass the reins to someone else?

Control, Clarity, and Competence

Marquet divides his learnings into three parts: Control, which is supported by the two pillars of competence and clarity.

Control: In most organizations, including a submarine, information is channeled up the chain of command to decision makers. Marquet was determined to distribute decision-making to the officers and crew. “Move authority where the information is” 

One of the most inspiring changes he made was to replace giving orders by having the crew express their intent. By doing so he shifted psychological ownership to them while still retaining enough information on their intentions to be able to ask questions on the decision someone was about to make.

Competence: In order to distribute control people must have the technical competence to make decisions. Translated to your organization this would mean: create an environment for learning.

Clarity: If you ant people to be able to take decision on their own you need to be crystal clear on what the organization is about, what it is we are trying to achieve and why.

In many organization strategy and tactics are hardly shared at all or simply communicated in some kind of town hall meeting. If you, as management, have gone through a lengthy process to define strategy enabling you to make it your own, how can you expect that simply communicating it once is enough for people to truly understand the context of the decisions the need to make. If you want people to think, you need to give them clarity. Tell them the why, so they can figure out the how.

Why should you read this book?

The book is spot on when it comes to what it takes to turn compliance into engagement and distributed decision-making. It also proofs that is is worth while: After two years the Sante Fe received the best score from an inspecting team ‘they had ever seen’.

Divided into the sections of control, competence, and clarity, the book provides plenty of mechanisms you can use in your organization as well. Plus they are all described with inspiring examples.

A third reason to read the book if you are a leader who wants to turn things around but you are not sure where to begin is the fact that the book describes Marquet’s personal and honest story, including all the pitfalls and frustrations along the way. Changing leadership above all means changing yourself. And that is not easy. I’ve had many people in my management courses who stated this style of leadership actually was quite natural to them. Yet, few managed to fundamentally change their leadership style once back in their organization. Why is that? One reason is this is not the way you have been trained and expected to lead, so you will find you need to change more than your perhaps expected. Second, you probably work in an environment that is still wired for compliance and command-and-control leadership. That environment will push heavily on you to comply to ‘the way we work over here’. Becoming a delegating leader is a personal journey that is not an easy one and this book can give you some of the necessary inspiration to endure.