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

by David Marquet

  Forty-one of these ballistic missile submarines were built between 1958 and 1965 in response to the Soviet threat, an impressive industrial accomplishment. Will Rogers was the last of the forty-one SSBNs and had operated nearly continuously since its commissioning. Those original submarines were being replaced by the newer and more capable Ohio class; however, Will Rogers still had important operational tasking to perform. Nevertheless, after thirty-three years, it was a tired ship. Worse, during the patrol before I reported aboard, Will Rogers had collided with a trawler and failed an important certification.

  • • •

  I checked the chart in the control room. We were on track to start the deep dive in about half an hour. I walked aft, past the rows of missile tubes and the reactor compartment to the engine room. With my flashlight, I started doing a last-minute walkabout. All our repairs had been properly certified as completed but it wouldn’t hurt to do one more visual check.

  As engineer officer for the Blue Crew, I was responsible for inspecting the nuclear reactor and important auxiliary equipment and supervising the sixty men who maintained and operated it. There was a constant tension between doing things right and meeting deadlines; every member of the crew felt it. The job was grueling and I wasn’t particularly happy with how things were going.

  The officer I relieved was very involved in details. He was always reviewing technical documents and directing maintenance and other operations. I was determined to change that—by giving the men more control of their work, more decision-making authority, and fewer lists of tasks. In doing so, I hoped to bring the passion I’d experienced on Sunfish to Will Rogers. In this, I was going against the tide.

  Just prior to going aboard, I’d had the chance to ride another SSBN for several days. It was undergoing an underway war-fighting inspection, and the crew were tasked with different missions that required significant internal coordination. I followed the captain around to see what he did. He was everywhere: dashing to the engine room, then back to control; running to sonar and from there to the torpedo room. I was exhausted before twenty-four hours were over. I’m not sure he ever slept during the three days I was observing.

  That ship did well on its inspection, and the inspection team specifically cited the involvement of the captain. I had a sense of unease because I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to run a submarine. Even if it were, I knew I could not physically do what he did.

  Even though the Navy encouraged this kind of top-down leadership, I pressed forward with my Sunfish-inspired plan to give control to the department rather than orders. For example, rather than giving specific lists of tasks to the division officers and chiefs of the Will Rogers, I gave broad guidance and told them to prepare the task lists and present the lists to me. Rather than telling everyone what we needed to do, I would ask questions about how they thought we should approach a problem. Rather than being the central hub coordinating maintenance between two divisions, I told the division chiefs to talk to each other directly.

  Things did not go well. During the maintenance period, we made several errors that required us to redo work. We fell behind schedule. We also had several jobs that didn’t start on time because the mid-level management had not assembled all the parts and permissions, or established the propulsion plant conditions necessary to do the work. I overheard people wishing for the old engineer back, who would just “tell them what to do.” Indeed, it would have been much faster just to tell people what to do, and I frequently found myself barking out a list of orders just to get the work done. I wasn’t happy with myself, but no one else seemed to mind much. I seemed to be the only one who wanted a more democratic and empowered workplace, and I wondered if I was on the right track.

  It was touch and go, but as the maintenance period came to an end, my efforts to empower others seemed to be working. There was a budding sense of optimism; we’d make it on time.

  In a moment, I realized we wouldn’t.

  I dropped down the ladder into the lower level of the engine room. I was scanning the various pieces of equipment with my flashlight when I was stopped cold by what I saw. The nuts holding the bolts for the end bell of a large seawater heat exchanger had been improperly installed. The nuts weren’t sufficiently grabbing the threads on the bolt. They were close, but I was sure they didn’t meet the technical specification. Someone had taken a shortcut. This cooler was subjected to full submergence pressure. Even a small leak would cause seawater to spray into the ship with tremendous force. Failure would be catastrophic.

  My heart sank. The deep dive should be starting shortly. I needed to cancel that immediately. Not only would we need to reassemble this cooler; we would need to inspect all the other coolers to make sure the mistake hadn’t been repeated. Most important of all, we would need to figure out how this had happened.

  I called the OOD and told him we’d need to postpone the deep dive. Then I started the long walk forward to tell the captain. Walking past the sixteen tubes in the missile compartment, I felt quite alone. The reputation of the ship and my department would suffer. My efforts at empowering my team had failed. This should never have happened. As expected, the captain had a fit. Of course, that didn’t help fix the problem.

  After this, things got worse. I had wanted to give my team more authority and control, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I would give decision-making control to my people, but they’d make bad decisions. If I was going to get yelled at, I at least wanted it to be my fault. I went back to leading in the way I’d been taught. I personally briefed every event. I approved all decisions myself. I set up systems where reports came to me all day and all night. I never slept well because messengers were waking me so I could make decisions. I was exhausted and miserable; the men in the department weren’t happy either, but they stoically went about their jobs. I prevented any more major problems, but everything hinged on me. Numerous times I found errors. Far from being proud of catching these mistakes, I lamented my indispensability and worried what would happen when I was tired, asleep, or wrong.

  I assessed my chances of being selected for executive officer, my next career milestone, as low. None of the other department heads on the Will Rogers were selected (screened) for executive officer. None of the department heads on the Gold Crew screened either. Neither executive officer screened for captain. The captain wasn’t promoted. The Will Rogers was a cemetery for careers. I made plans to do something else with my life. I took a job doing START and INF treaty inspections in the former Soviet Union with the On-Site Inspection Agency instead of going to a submarine staff job.

  I returned from an inspection in Volgograd to find a message in my inbox. I had screened for executive officer, the next step after my tour as the engineering department head—I would be going back to sea on a submarine. I should have been ecstatic. Executive officer was one step below captain. Instead, I was strangely ambivalent. I would have to grapple with the tension between how I aspired to be as a leader and how I actually was.

  Thinking Anew

  While assigned to the On-Site Inspection Agency I had to contemplate what had happened on the Will Rogers. I started reading everything I could about leadership, management, psychology, communication, motivation, and human behavior. I thought deeply about what motivated me and how I wanted to be treated.

  I remembered the release of energy, passion, and creativity I had experienced running my own watch team on the Sunfish. I was motivated to avoid any reoccurrence of the pain, frustration, and emptiness of my three years on the Will Rogers, both being directed and directing others.

  At the end of that study, I was troubled by three contradictions.

  First, though I liked the idea of empowerment, I didn’t understand why empowerment was needed. It seemed to me that humans are born in a state of action and natural empowerment. After all, it wasn’t likely that a species that was naturally passive could have taken over the planet. Empowerment programs appeared to be a reaction to the fact that we had actively disempo
wered people. Additionally, it seemed inherently contradictory to have an empowerment program whereby I would empower my subordinates and my boss would empower me. I felt my power came from within, and attempts to empower me felt like manipulation.

  Second, the way I was told to manage others was not the way I wanted to be managed. I felt I was at my best when given specific goals but broad latitude in how to accomplish them. I didn’t respond well to executing a bunch of tasks. In fact, being treated that way irritated me and caused me to shut my brain down. That was intellectually wasteful and unfulfilling.

  Third, I was disturbed by the close coupling of the technical competence of the leader with the performance of the organization. Ships with a “good” commanding officer (CO) did well, as had the SSBN I rode. Ships that didn’t have a good CO didn’t do well. But a good ship could become a bad ship overnight when a new CO came aboard. And there was a further twist: every so often a mishap occurred that caused people to shake their heads and lament, “It happened on such a good ship.” It seems the captain had made a mistake, and the crew, lemming-like, just followed him. I concluded that competence could not rest solely with the leader. It had to run throughout the entire organization.

  Essentially, what I had been trying to achieve on Will Rogers was to run an empowerment program within a leader-follower structure. The leadership structure, which was strongly reinforced by the behavior and expectations of the captain, was one of “Do what you are told.” Hence, my efforts amounted to little more than “Do what you are told, but . . .” It just didn’t work.

  What I was trying to do was an extension of the way things worked on Sunfish. On that ship, I was empowered, but the sense of leadership stopped with me. Those in my watch team were followers in the traditional model. What made it so liberating was that for those six hours, I didn’t feel like a follower. That’s what I had wanted to pass on to the officers and crew of the Will Rogers engineering department.

  • • •

  One of the things that limits our learning is our belief that we already know something. My experience on the Will Rogers convinced me there was something fundamentally wrong with our approach. Simply exhorting people to be proactive, take ownership, be involved, and all the other aspects of an empowerment program just scratched the surface. It was only after serving on the Will Rogers that I opened myself up to new ideas about leadership. I began to seriously question the image of the sea captain as “master and commander.” I began to wonder whether everything I’d been taught about leadership was wrong.

  QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

  Why do we need empowerment?

  Do you need someone else to empower you?

  How reliant is your organization on the decision making of one person, or a small group of people?

  What kind of leadership model does your business or organization use?

  When you think of movie images that depict leadership, who/what comes to mind?

  What assumptions are embedded in those images?

  How do these images influence how you think about yourself as a leader?

  To what extent do these images limit your growth as a leader?

  Business as Usual

  Are you and your people working to optimize the organization for their tenure, or forever? To promote long-term success, I had to ignore the short-term reward systems.

  December 1998: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

  The USS Olympia (SSN-717) was heading out the main Pearl Harbor channel without me. I hadn’t expected that.

  I’d been training for twelve months to take command of this specific submarine, and my change of command was in less than four weeks. It was a dream assignment. Olympia was a frontline SSN (a nuclear-powered attack submarine)—exactly what I’d hoped for. While Will Rogers’s mission was to hide in the vastness of the ocean, attack boats were the hunters and would take the fight to the enemy. I had studied the equipment configuration and piping diagrams, the exact reactor plant, the schedule, the weapons, and every problem report the ship had issued in the previous three years. I learned the career status of each officer and read his biography. I reviewed every inspection report: tactical inspections, reactor inspections, safety inspections, food service inspections. For a year, I’d been doing nothing but think about the sailors on Olympia and my responsibility to lead them for the next three years. In the way of the nuclear Navy, I had gained an intimate technical knowledge of the ship. I had loved the prospective commanding officer (PCO) training I had just completed. As a student, I was responsible only for myself for an entire year! In addition to the specifics of Olympia, we learned tactics and leadership. I attended a weeklong leadership school in Newport, Rhode Island, and my wife Jane had been able to join me. The entire training course culminated with an intense two-week period at sea driving submarines hard and shooting torpedoes.

  The officers leading PCO training were hand-selected from among proven captains; Captain Mark Kenny, who had commanded the Los Angeles–class submarine USS Birmingham (SSN-698), led my group. Mark inspired us to great learning as well as introspection. Every day we learned about our submarines, and ourselves.

  During one torpedo approach, I devised an elaborate ruse that would flush out the opposing submarine and make it a sitting duck for our attack. I predicted to the officers in the control room—in this case, other PCOs—what would happen. The situation developed exactly as I’d foreseen, and we were able to get a hit on a quiet and tenacious enemy. In the middle of the attack, however, I’d had to reach over and do the job of one of the other PCOs because he had gotten confused.

  I thought I was brilliant, but Captain Kenny took me aside and upbraided me. It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it! It was a lesson that would serve me well.

  Olympia was doing well. Its retention numbers were good and its inspection scores were above average. Operationally, it had a reputation on the waterfront for getting it done—that is, fulfilling the missions assigned to it. I wondered what kind of a leadership approach I’d want to apply aboard Olympia.

  I was keen to get aboard this workhorse of the fleet and finish the turnover process. During the month I was to spend on board before taking command, the ship would be in port for a maintenance period except for this two-day evaluation of the ship’s ability to operate the reactor plant. Accordingly, I arranged to ride with the inspection team to meet the Olympia at the entrance to Pearl Harbor.

  This would not only be my only opportunity to see the ship and crew operate at sea before taking command, it would also be tremendously useful for me to watch the ship go through the inspection. I would be without the emotional attachment of being part of the crew, but I would be responsible for carrying out any corrective action after I took over.

  As Olympia appeared in the channel and approached the turning basin, the radios crackled on the small boat. The coxswain reported the passengers he expected to transfer to “Oly.” And then word came back from the Olympia: only the inspection team would come aboard, not the PCO. I wasn’t allowed on board. I “must have misunderstood” the plan. I watched as the submarine turned around and the small boat came alongside, put the brow across, and transferred the inspection team to Oly. I could see the captain on the bridge but we never made eye contact. Then the brow was raised and Oly returned to sea. The small boat carried me back to the inner harbor and dropped me off.

  I was miffed that the captain didn’t want me aboard. He was depriving me of seeing the boat operate and watching the inspection. In less than a month, I was going to be totally accountable for the performance of this submarine but wouldn’t be able to see it under way.

  Yet, at one level, who could blame him? I would take up another bunk and inconvenience a crew member. Even though this two-day underway period at sea would be greatly useful in sustaining Olympia’s quality performance after he departed, he apparently had no interest in helping facilitate that. Could I fault him? In the Navy system, captains are graded on how well th
eir ships perform up to the day they depart; not a day longer. After that it becomes someone else’s problem.

  I thought about that. On every submarine and ship, and in every squadron and battalion, hundreds of captains were making thousands of decisions to optimize the performance of their commands for their tour and their tour alone. If they did anything for the long run it was because of an enlightened sense of duty, not because there was anything in the system that rewarded them for it. We didn’t associate an officer’s leadership effectiveness with how well his unit performed after he left. We didn’t associate an officer’s leadership effectiveness with how often his people got promoted two, three, or four years hence. We didn’t even track that kind of information. All that mattered was performance in the moment.

  Nothing to See Here, Move Along

  I did get aboard Olympia—three days later, when it was tied to the pier. As expected, it had done well on its inspection.

  My turnover on Olympia was straightforward: a review of the records, material inspections, and interviews with the officers and crew. As I walked about the ship, I noted that the crew seemed alert and confident. Almost too confident, actually. Because I had a detailed knowledge of the ship, the systems, and the trouble reports, I was able to pinpoint technical issues I wanted to explore. I asked lots of questions about why we did things certain ways. The crew’s answers were concise and certain. I soon realized there wasn’t any impetus for change. Oly was operating in a top-down, business-as-usual structure, and everyone liked it that way.