Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

by David Marquet

  Even the most promising employees can go through this downward evolutionary spiral. Take Ian, for example, who should have been viewed as a model employee by the multibillion-dollar communications company that hired him. Instead, his first corporate employment experience was so disheartening he swore never to return. He’s now an entrepreneur. When I asked Ian what went wrong, he told me: “I could complete my day’s work in two hours. I asked for more, and I was met with ‘in time, young man.’ I had no decision-making power.” And this from a company that has a reputation for thoughtful leadership and innovative products!

  Ian quit and found a more satisfying way to spend his time. “You know, sure, maybe over time things would have improved, but who wants to gamble their career—no, their life energy—on the hope of a sea change at an established, ‘successful’ company. I went on to pursue my dreams, and I’ve done so.”

  If you have felt the urge to follow Ian’s example, you are not alone. Worker satisfaction in America is at an all-time low.1 Worker engagement and commitment to their employers is also at a low.2 As of November 2011, unemployment had been at 9 percent for thirty-one months. You’d think that everybody who had a job would be happy just to have one, but that is not the case.

  This deliberate disengagement is costing billions in lost productivity. Disengaged, dissatisfied, uncommitted employees erode an organization’s bottom line while breaking the spirits of their colleagues. Gallup estimates that within the U.S. workforce, this cost is more than $300 billion in lost productivity alone.3 As large as the cost is in lost productivity, my sense is that it is dwarfed by the costs of lost joy and happiness.

  Bosses are frustrated as well.

  If you are a boss, you have likely been stymied by the lack of passion and ownership you see among your workforce. You probably have tried to encourage them to make decisions only to have many seem more comfortable simply doing what they are told. Empowerment programs start well but don’t sustain themselves. New workers come into the organization straight from school expecting to be given prescriptions for how to do their work.

  This situation exists in even the best companies. For example, Dr. Scott Mesh is CEO of Los Niños, a company dedicated to assisting with the educational development of special needs children. Los Niños has been a “Best Company to Work for in New York” award winner in multiple recent years. I met some of Scott’s employees and recognized that he’d assembled a pretty elite team.

  Still, Scott has his frustrations. “I’m babysitting too much. Some folks take care of stuff—they own it, grow it, love it, and have great results. Others need reminders—maybe they don’t do the killer follow-up or they have other needs.”

  He is not alone. A recent survey indicated that 44 percent of business leaders reported their disappointment in the performance results of their employees.4

  This vexation within both parties in the workplace has one root cause: our present leadership model, which is a painfully outdated one.

  The Problem: Leader-Follower

  When I served in the U.S. Navy, I had firsthand experience with an outdated leadership model. Here’s what my Naval Academy leadership book told me about being a leader:

  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.5

  In other words, leadership in the Navy, and in most organizations, is about controlling people. It divides the world into two groups of people: leaders and followers. Most of what we study, learn, and practice in terms of leadership today follows this leader-follower structure. This model has been with us for a long time. It is pervasive. It is the structure depicted in The Iliad, in Beowulf, and in other Western epics.

  It permeates some of the most popular novels and movies about leadership, such as Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander.

  People can accomplish a tremendous amount through the leader-follower model, particularly with adept bosses. The widespread development of farming, the pyramids in Egypt, and the factories of the Industrial Revolution were all built using this structure. It generated tremendous wealth. Many bosses and owners got rich, and the followers were better off too. It is exactly because the leader-follower way of doing business has been so successful that it is both so appealing and so hard to give up. But this model developed during a period when mankind’s primary work was physical. Consequently, it’s optimized for extracting physical work from humans.

  In our modern world, the most important work we do is cognitive; so, it’s not surprising that a structure developed for physical work isn’t optimal for intellectual work. People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers. As followers, they have limited decision-making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy, and passion. Those who take orders usually run at half speed, underutilizing their imagination and initiative. While this doesn’t matter much for rowing a trireme, it’s everything for operating a nuclear-powered submarine.

  This is a recognized limitation of the leader-follower model.

  We’re taught the solution is empowerment.

  The problem with empowerment programs is that they contain an inherent contradiction between the message and the method. While the message is “empowerment,” the method—it takes me to empower you—fundamentally disempowers employees. That drowns out the message.

  Additionally, in a leader-follower structure, the performance of the organization is closely linked to the ability of the leader. As a result, there is a natural tendency to develop personality-driven leadership. Followers gravitate toward the personality. Short-term performance is rewarded. When leaders who tend to do it all themselves and rely on personality depart, they are missed and performance can change significantly. Psychologically for the leader, this is tremendously rewarding. It is seductive. Psychologically for most followers, this is debilitating. The follower learns to rely on the leader to make all decisions rather than to fully engage with the work process to help make the organization run as efficiently as possible.

  The Solution: Leader-Leader

  The leader-leader structure 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. As humans, we all have what it takes, and we all need to use our leadership abilities in every aspect of our work life.

  The leader-leader model not only achieves great improvements in effectiveness and morale but also makes the organization stronger. Most critically, these improvements are enduring, decoupled from the leader’s personality and presence. Leader-leader structures are significantly more resilient, and they do not rely on the designated leader always being right. Further, leader-leader structures spawn additional leaders throughout the organization naturally. It can’t be stopped.

  Born of Failure

  When I reported to my first job as a junior officer on the USS Sunfish (SSN-649), a Sturgeon-class attack submarine, I was technically an expert on all the systems on the ship, including the intimate details of the reactor plant. I have always been an eager learner, and I graduated number one from my nuclear power school class and the submarine officer basic course. Between these advanced courses and my Naval Academy training I definitely knew a lot about submarines as well as leadership.

  Technical expertise forms the basis of leadership in the nuclear Navy, and my first captain was an embodiment of that philosophy.

  Brusque, aloof, but technically expert, he led Sunfish during our first, and highly successful, deployment. I didn’t think twice about how he ran the ship—that was the way things were. Between my first and second deployments on Sunfish, we got a new captain, Commander (later Rear Admiral) Marc Pelaez. One day while we were cruising in the Atlantic
Ocean during our training cycle and nothing much was going on, I saw a large merchant ship through the periscope. Sonar had been listening to it but they were not sure of its range because they had been authorized only for passive listening, the normal mode for submarines. I whimsically mused with the sonar chief how helpful it would be if they could ping on the merchant using active sonar, something we rarely did. Captain Pelaez appeared beside me. “Well, why don’t you?” Of course he knew the reason—it takes the captain’s permission to authorize going active on sonar. Sensing my discomfort, he said, “Why don’t you just say, ‘Captain, I intend to go active on sonar for training’?”

  I tried it.

  “Captain, I intend to go active on sonar for training.”

  He responded, “Very well.” And disappeared, leaving me standing alone, and actually in charge for the first time.

  For the next half hour, we pinged away using all the combinations of pulses we could with our sonar and cycling every sonarman through the sonar shack so they could see what an active surface contact looked like. The sonarmen loved using their equipment in novel ways. The sonar chief loved training his men. I loved it too. That taste of authority and ability to craft my watch team’s training was a powerful tonic for me. I looked forward to my time on watch. When off watch, I spent hours studying and dreaming up new ways of training with my watch team.

  After Sunfish, I served as a flag aide in the Pentagon and then went to the Naval Postgraduate School to get a year of Russian language training and a master’s degree in national security affairs. After this respite, it was back to sea as the engineer (Eng) on board the USS Will Rogers (SSBN-659) from 1989 to 1991.

  I thought I knew something about leadership. Turned out I didn’t.

  My tour on the Will Rogers was a disaster. We were in a dispiriting top-down leadership environment. No one wanted to be there. To change that, I intended to get the crew more involved and to decentralize decision making. I used all the tricks I had learned to “inspire and empower” my team, but none of those tricks seemed to improve either performance or morale. In fact, we ended up having a lot more problems. I just couldn’t figure out what was going wrong. I felt like Ian and wanted to quit. After a while, I reverted to taking back the authority I had tried to share, micromanaging projects, and controlling every decision possible.

  Eight years after departing Will Rogers, when I took command of the USS Santa Fe (SSN-763), one of the most modern nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), that experience weighed heavily on me. The problems I encountered on Santa Fe reminded me of those I faced on Will Rogers. They were all fundamentally about people and leadership. I was resolved to try a new leadership approach.

  Success, Immediately and Forever

  A nuclear-powered submarine is an unlikely place for a leadership revolution to occur. It operates in an unforgiving environment. Deadlines are tight, as is space. When no one is ever farther than 150 feet away from the control room, it’s easy to adopt a highly hierarchical management structure. Naval tradition and the approach of the naval nuclear power program, which stresses accountability and technical competence, reinforce that natural accretion of power, authority, and control at the top. Submarines, which can operate for extended periods without radio communication, are the closest things we have to the far-ranging frigates of old. In short, they offer the perfect environment for reinforcing leader-follower.

  When I took command of Santa Fe, its crew were at the bottom of the fleet—technically, operationally, and emotionally.

  Within a year, the situation was totally turned around. We went from worst to first in most measures of performance, including the one I valued most—our ability to retain our sailors and officers. The steps were evolutionary. The result was revolutionary.

  Santa Fe performed superbly while I served as its captain. If that had been it, this would be the same personality-driven leadership story that occupies so much space on bookshelves now. Only ten years later can we assess the true success of that work—with Santa Fe’s continued operational excellence and the implausibly high promotion rates for its officers and crew. This is the legacy of leader-leader.

  Turn the Ship Around! is the story of that journey and the men aboard Santa Fe who lived it with me. It describes essentially four phases in my struggle to change the way we interacted for the better. I describe how I needed to let go of old ideas to make room for new ones in Part I. In Parts II, III, and IV, I describe the bridge to leader-leader and supporting pillars. The bridge is control, divesting control to others in your organization while keeping responsibility. Control, we discovered, only works with a competent workforce that understands the organization’s purpose. Hence, as control is divested, both technical competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened. The book parts are generally grouped into these categories, but the reality of how this works is that these cycles are repeated in ever increasing circles.

  I imagine a world where we all find satisfaction in our work. It is a world where every human being is intellectually engaged, motivated, and self-inspired. Our cognitive capacity as a race is fully engaged in solving the monumental problems that we face.

  Ultimately, this book is a call to action, a manifesto, for all those frustrated workers and bosses for whom the current leadership structure just isn’t working. We need to reject leader-follower as a model and view the world as a place for leaders everywhere to achieve this vision. Whether you are a boss, an employee, a teacher, or a parent, you will find ways to work toward this goal.

  Have fun, and let me know how leader-leader works for you. Send me your stories and thoughts at david@turntheshiparound .com.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  CAPTAIN MARK KENNY

  Prospective Commanding Officer (PCO) instructor and later Commodore, Submarine Squadron Seven, to which USS Santa Fe was assigned.

  LIEUTENANT COMMANDER TOM STANLEY

  Executive officer (XO) on Santa Fe 1999–2000.

  LIEUTENANT COMMANDER MIKE BERNACCHI

  XO on Santa Fe 2000–2.

  LIEUTENANT COMMANDER RICK PANLILIO

  Engineer (Eng) on Santa Fe 1998–2001.

  LIEUTENANT COMMANDER BILL GREENE

  Navigator (Nav) on Santa Fe 1997–99.

  LIEUTENANT DAVE ADAMS

  Weapons officer (Weps) on Santa Fe 1998–2001.

  LIEUTENANT CALEB KERR

  Nav on Santa Fe 2000–4.

  SENIOR CHIEF ANDY WORSHEK

  Chief Sonarman and Weapons Department Chief on Santa Fe 1998–2002.

  CHIEF DAVID STEELE

  Chief Fire Controlman on Santa Fe 1996–2000.

  CHIEF BRAD JENSEN

  Senior Nuclear Chief (bull nuke) on Santa Fe 1998–2000.

  CHIEF MIKE CIKO

  Senior Nuclear Chief (bull nuke) on Santa Fe 2000–2.

  YN2 SCOTT DILLON

  Yeoman Division Leader on Santa Fe 1998–2001.

  SLED DOG

  Quartermaster (Navigation Plotter) on Santa Fe 1998–2001.

  PART I

  STARTING OVER

  Our greatest struggle is within ourselves. Whatever sense we have of thinking we know something is a barrier to continued learning. For me, my ideas of leadership were formed by reading Western classics like Beowulf and The Odyssey, reading histories of the sea, and watching popular movies. These notions of “leader as individual hero” were strongly reinforced when I got to the U.S. Naval Academy.

  In this part of the book, I describe my frustration, questioning, and ultimate rejection of that type of leadership. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the assumption behind that leadership structure, so fundamental that it becomes subconscious, is that there are leaders and there are followers. It was only after I cleared my mind of these preconceptions that I was able to see a truly better way for humans to interact.

  Pain

  How has failure shaped you? As a department head, I tried to implement a new leadership approach on Will Rogers and faile
d.

  1989: The Irish Sea

  Eight thousand tons of steel moved silently, hidden in the depths of the Irish Sea. In the control room of the USS Will Rogers (SSBN-659), the officer of the deck (OOD) ordered the ship toward the deeper, wider expanses of the North Atlantic. Glancing at the missile control panel, he could see the status of the sixteen Poseidon missiles on board, each capable of carrying fourteen multiple nuclear-armed reentry vehicles. These missiles were the sole reason for the existence of the Will Rogers, a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine—SSBN for short—the kind of submarine the crew affectionately called a “boomer.” One thing above all else mattered for a boomer: to be at sea and in a condition that would enable it to execute a strike if so ordered. SSBNs were a vital component of America’s strategic deterrence.

  The control room was the nerve center of the ship. So important were its sixteen missiles, invulnerable to attack once under way and submerged, that boomers had two crews—a Blue Crew and a Gold Crew—to maximize the time the submarine could spend at sea on strategic deterrent patrol. The crews lived near New London, Connecticut, and Will Rogers was operated out of a forward base at Holy Loch, Scotland. Every three months the crews would swap, with a three-day turnover period. After assuming the boat from the other crew, the new crew would spend four weeks doing the necessary corrective and preventive maintenance before going to sea. In order for the United States to have a credible strategic deterrent, the missiles needed to be ready to go. If Will Rogers couldn’t make it on time another submarine would have to remain at sea longer.