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

by David Marquet

  I tried to understand the skeptics’ position. One thing that bothered them was that this way of doing business was different from what they had been doing before—on Santa Fe and on every other submarine in the force. There were two components to this. First, many of the chiefs had served on two, three, or even four submarines. No one else had authorized the COB to be the final authority on enlisted leave. Heck, they’d never even heard of it. Was it possible that a way of doing business no one had ever heard of could be better than what the Navy had been doing for more than one hundred years? It was a legitimate question.

  Second, there was the fear and cost of being different. Even if we demonstrated that this was a better way, did we want to operate differently from the other fifty-five nuclear-powered attack submarines in the Navy? Several advisers asked me point-blank if I was willing to take the career risk. “Why don’t you just be like everyone else, do the normal things, build teamwork, enforce standards, conduct training?” they’d suggest. “If things go well with your new program, great, but if things don’t go well, there will be a long line of people saying, ‘Well, he did things differently from the rest of us.’”

  Chalk it up to being left-handed, perhaps, but I didn’t feel any of this fear myself. As I thought about it, pushing authority down could only be good. I remembered how I had felt on board the Sunfish when my CO let me run my own watch team and how powerful that was. I remembered how I had reverted to top-down leadership on the Will Rogers as well, and how dispiriting that was.

  Right or wrong, I was committed to doing whatever I thought was best for Santa Fe, the Navy, and the nation without worrying about the repercussions. I called this 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.

  Despite the skeptics, enough of the team was willing to try our new approach and give me the benefit of the doubt. Some were enthusiastically sold and formed the core of advocates. The skeptics were willing to give it a shot, although less enthusiastically. They weren’t going to get in the way.

  The morning wardroom meeting was my first substantive session with the officers. I had told them to bring all the leave chits they had in their inboxes, and I collected them at the meeting to give to the COB. The pile of unapproved leave chits was significant and provided a physical context for the changes we were making. We had an initiative going for the chiefs, but I wanted to come up with something for the entire ship. The officers would help me craft it.

  Mechanism: Act Your Way to New Thinking

  One of the things I heard during my turnover discussions was that they wanted to change the morale among the crew. We invest an average of $50,000 to recruit a sailor, then another $100,000 to train a submarine sailor and give that individual significant responsibility at sea. On board Santa Fe, almost none of the enlisted men had stayed beyond their initial tour of duty. Of a crew of 135, only 3 sailors reenlisted in 1998. Two of the junior officers, who are trained at an even greater cost, had already submitted their resignations.

  How do you raise morale quickly? It didn’t seem like you could just order a cultural change like this. And yet, that’s just what we did.

  I asked the officers how we would know if the crew were proud of the boat. What would we observe? There was silence. Apparently these officers weren’t accustomed to being involved. I pointed my flashlight at one of the junior officers. “You go first,” I commanded, and after he spoke, others volunteered their own opinions:

  They’d brag about it to their family and friends!

  They’d look visitors in the eye when they met them in the passageway!

  They’d wear their Santa Fe ball caps as much as possible!

  They’d boast to their friends on other submarines!

  They’d buy Santa Fe lighters, pens, and pins from the ship’s store!

  Well, what if we just tell them to act that way? I suggested. What if we just tell them to greet people respectfully, sincerely, and proudly? Could we act, or talk, our way into a new way of thinking?

  This sparked a vigorous debate. Some thought that would be like putting the cart before the horse. First, we needed to create a work environment that would give the men respect and dignity; a place they were happy to go to each day. Then behavior would change, and morale would improve naturally, on its own. Others thought we could talk ourselves into it, almost fake it.

  I decided we would try the route of talking ourselves into a new way of thinking. We called it the “three-name rule” and this is how it worked: When any member of the crew saw a visitor on our boat (and we were specifically thinking about the following week, when Commodore Kenny and his staff were coming down for the inspection), he was to greet the visitor using three names—the visitor’s name, his own name, and the ship’s name. For example, “Good morning, Commodore Kenny, my name is Petty Officer Jones, welcome aboard Santa Fe.”

  On the pier at quarters the next day, I started explaining the three-name rule to the crew. Almost immediately I stopped; as was normal, the crew stood in formation behind the officers and chiefs and I knew that most of those in the back couldn’t hear what I was saying. I waved my arms and shouted, “Gather round.” It wasn’t in the book of commands, but everyone knew what I wanted. The men moved forward. Now I was in a tight and intimate huddle of a hundred men. It wasn’t something General Patton would have been proud of, but it definitely seemed better. The officers and chiefs were still in front, but because I interacted with that group frequently, I sent them to the back. From that moment on, at quarters the crew would gather around me and the khakis (officers and chiefs) would stand in back.

  I went on to tell the crew what we wanted going forward. We had seven days to finish putting the boat back together and head to sea. We had torpedoes to prepare, maintenance to complete, repairs to finish, charts to prepare, stores to load, and a number of other things to accomplish. So, I resisted giving a big lecture about the reasons why we wanted to use the three-name rule and about respecting their time and their need to get back to work. Instead, I just explained the rule and acted it out.

  How to Embed a Cultural Change in Your Organization

  Starting condition: you’ve had a discussion with your leadership group and identified some sort of cultural change the group mostly agrees to. What you want to do now is embed it into the organization, independent of personality.

  Hand out five-by-eight cards. Have people complete the following sentence: “I’d know we achieved [this cultural change] if I saw employees . . .” (The specific wording in this question should move you from general, unmeasurable answers like “Have people be creative” to specific, measurable ones like “Employees submit at least one idea a quarter. The ideas are posted and other employees can comment on them.”)

  Allow five minutes. Then tape the cards on the wall, go on break, and have everyone mill around reading the cards.

  Based on the discussions and quantity of answers, you may want to give everyone a second shot at filling out the cards.

  Sort and prioritize the answers.

  Then discuss how to code the behavior into the company’s practices. For example: implementing the three-name rule.

  The final step is to write the new practices into the appropriate company procedure.

  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. On board Santa Fe, the officers and I did the latter, acting our way to new thinking. We didn’t have time to change thinking and let that percolate and ultimately change people’s actions; we just needed to change the behavior. Frankly, I didn’t care whether people thought differently at some point—and they eventually did—so long as they behaved in certain ways. I think there were likely some sailors who never understood what we were trying to do and resisted the change
to leader-leader, but they behaved as if they believed.

  Some observers attributed the low morale on Santa Fe to the long hours. I didn’t think so. I felt it had more to do with focusing on reducing errors instead of accomplishing something great and the resultant feeling of ineffectiveness that had permeated the ship.

  The sense on board was that we were not proactive movers but only passive reactors to external events. The schedule was against us, the parts didn’t arrive on time, the detailers didn’t give Santa Fe sailors the jobs they wanted, the torpedo missed because of “bad luck.” There was an emphasis on blaming what was happening on outside influences and factors, and the crew evidenced a collective lack of responsibility. This feeling of victimhood went hand in hand with the low morale. One of the things the three-name rule accomplished was that it got rid of that sense of being victims of our circumstances. In a small way, each sailor on board Santa Fe was now taking charge of his destiny.

  ACTING YOUR WAY TO NEW THINKING is a mechanism for CONTROL.

  QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

  How do you respond when people in your workplace don’t want to change from the way things have always been done?

  What are some of the costs associated with doing things differently in your industry?

  Do we act first, and think later? Or do we think first, and then change our actions?

  Under Way on Nuclear Power

  Do you play “bring me a rock” in your organization, where vague understanding of the goal results in wasted time? We did, and we needed to change that.

  January 20, 1999: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (160 days to deployment)

  I’d been in command twelve days. The sun was getting low on the horizon as I fidgeted on the bridge of Santa Fe. We were awaiting the clearance message from the maintenance facility that approved the repairs we’d made and authorized us to get under way. That the message was late was our fault. A couple of minor retests had held us up; nothing as bad as on board the Will Rogers, though. The tugboat was made up alongside. Much longer and we’d have had to delay a day before setting to sea. That would knock out one of our four days of preparation before we came in to pick up Commodore Mark Kenny and the inspection team.

  The speaker on the bridge crackled. “Captain, XO, clearance message on board.”

  The officer of the deck (OOD) turned to me. “Captain, all departments report readiness to get under way. Request permission to get under way.”

  “Get under way!” I responded.

  The tug pulled the bow away from the pier, and we silently slipped into the channel and headed to sea. The magic of the moment when the ship has cast off the last lines both to shore and to the tug never loses its potency. That particular moment was no exception.

  This was great fun. When I gave orders, big things happened! I would say “submerge the ship” and we would dive under the ocean. “Ahead flank” and Santa Fe surged through the water, “Bring the ship to periscope depth” and officers executed a procedure to safely bring Santa Fe just under the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

  This was welcome action in contrast to the previous weeks’ trials. In addition to the material issues of putting the boat back together, we had some struggles in preparing ourselves operationally. The crew was still focusing too much on complying with regulations rather than working to make our submarine the most operationally capable warship possible. It was the same problem as focusing on avoiding mistakes instead of trying to achieve something great. A typical example involved the preparation of the underway charts.

  Perfect, but Irrelevant

  Nautical charts are the foundation for nuclear submarine operations. They serve as maps, showing the routes we must follow to avoid buoys, shallows, and other submarines while at the same time achieving our operational objectives. In the upcoming exercise, we had to locate an enemy submarine, monitor its activities, and if directed, sink it. We knew the focus of the operations would be in the Maui basin—the area between Maui, Lanai, and Molokai. It is an area of shallow water and has an uneven bottom that makes submarining there difficult.

  Chart preparations consisted of three phases. In phase one, the quartermasters took the large paper charts and made sure they were up-to-date with information from the latest Coast Guard–issued “Notice to Mariners.” There might be additional hazards to navigation, such as the setting or moving of a buoy, since the submarine last moved through those waters. In addition, the paper charts had to be prepared according to submarine force instructions, such as highlighting the one-hundred-fathom curve and marking points ten miles from shoal water and twelve miles from land.

  Phase two consisted of laying out our assigned water. Since submarines are large, quiet objects, we assign them different blocks of water so they can move safely without fear of collisions. These blocks designate depth zones and geographic zones and change throughout the day and week. It’s imperative that these charts be absolutely correct; otherwise, you might inadvertently operate in water assigned to another submarine, risking collision. If you discovered yourself in this position, you would surface immediately and report the incident.

  The third, final phase consisted of integrating the operational plan with the chart. This involved laying down a track within the assigned water to accomplish the anticipated mission. This included the specific courses, speeds, and depth zones Santa Fe would use.

  The charts then went through a laborious review process starting with the quartermasters who prepared them and moving up through the assistant navigator (ANAV), the navigator (Lieutenant Commander Bill Greene), and with final approval by the captain—me.

  In response to a recent navigational problem on another submarine, a force-wide directive had added the XO, second in command, to the review process. The Navy commonly added such steps for the force to perform in order to prevent recurrence. (Steps are rarely removed.) Unfortunately, often these additional steps don’t prevent recurrence and sometimes make matters worse. It’s like adding inspectors at the end of the process to see if it’s gone well—extra work without making anything better.

  As the time for underway got closer, I became anxious because I hadn’t seen the charts. Bill Greene kept telling me they were “almost ready.” Finally, on Sunday, with underway scheduled for Tuesday, he called me to say he was ready to review the charts.

  After all those steps in the review process, they were perfect—but irrelevant.

  The charts were perfect in that they complied with all the rules and regulations. No inspector could have found a deficiency. They were irrelevant because even though the review team factored in where the operational plan had the submarine going, I knew we wouldn’t be using the route they proposed.

  The quartermasters who prepared the charts knew we would end up in the Maui basin, but they didn’t know which of the three paths we’d take to get there: north of Molokai, between Molokai and Lanai, or south of Lanai. They plotted the navigationally better route, which was north of Molokai. This was open water and the fastest route, but it wasn’t the way the enemy submarine would go and, hence, wasn’t the way we needed to go.

  None of the reviews up the chain of command noted this problem because the reviews were all focused on making sure the charts were navigationally and procedurally correct, not on enabling Santa Fe to be an operationally effective warship. In short, the reviews were focused on avoiding errors, as opposed to accomplishing something.

  There was another human tendency working against us as well. 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. We decided then and there that at each phase in the review process the navigator or the assistant navigator should talk to me. These would be quick conversations. On their part, the review team needed to overcome a fear of criticism of an incomplete plan; on my part, I needed to refrain from jumping in with answers. We boiled this down to this motto: “A little rudder far from the rock
s is a lot better than a lot of rudder close to the rocks.”

  Mechanism: Short, Early Conversations Make Efficient Work

  Not everyone liked this idea. Getting me, the boss, involved in the process risked my losing my level of detachment and being less willing to scrap the plan and start over because I had been part of its development. At this point, that was a trade-off I was willing to take because I sensed I 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, I would back out of the process.

  Beyond this hurdle was another, more basic, problem. The charts were inconsistently drawn. On one chart, the one-hundred-fathom curve was highlighted in yellow, on another, red.

  The young officers responsible for executing the ship’s mission standing watch as OOD would be presented with different chart legends on different charts and on different days. Yellow would mean something here, something different there. I also imagined running to look at the chart in the middle of the night in a dark control room and not being able to quickly sort out the picture because we hadn’t consistently applied color to the charts. These situations spelled nothing but disaster.