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

by David Marquet

  I had suffered through many wasted hours listening to lectures about how we should “work together,” “take initiative,” and the like. These weren’t backed up with mechanisms that actually enabled or rewarded these behaviors, so the speeches were worse than nothing at all; they sounded hypocritical and the speakers out of touch.

  I was resolved to avoid this altogether. Instead of trying to change mind-sets and then change the way we acted, we would start acting differently and the new thinking would follow. Or so I hoped. Besides, we didn’t have time for a long gestation period. We needed change now!

  I wasn’t 100 percent sure that the chiefs would bite. I was confident in the support of the chief of the boat (COB). As the senior enlisted man, he was organizationally committed to supporting me. I was less confident about the rest. I was sorry that Senior Chief Andy Worshek, the senior sonarman and weapons department chief, was on leave. I knew he would have been an ally. I looked around; Chief John Larson, an electronics technician (ET), sat opposite me. He had struck me as thoughtful and eager to learn. Chief Brad Jensen, the senior nuclear chief (we called him the bull nuke), and his nuke chiefs sat together. They’d likely be on board.

  I was glad to see Chief David Steele in the group. After our earlier conversation, he had gone home and talked to his wife. They agreed to give the new command a chance, and he withdrew his transfer request. His positive nodding was already influencing the men around him in a good way as the meeting began.

  My flashlight was superfluous but I had brought it anyway. Brandishing it, I opened with a question: “Men, we say the chiefs run the Navy. Is this true on Santa Fe?”

  Reflexively they answered, Yes! Uh-huh. Of course!

  “Really?”

  “Well . . .” came the second round of answers, as most of them looked at the floor. Apparently not so much on Santa Fe.

  They were right. The chiefs did not run the Navy and they did not run the Santa Fe. The authority of the chief petty officers had long been eroded away. The reasons for this were both institutional and human. The institutional problem was that the desire to have the commanding officer uniquely and completely accountable for the ship ran counter to allowing the chiefs the authority to manage things. Admiral Hyman Rickover and the nuclear-powered Navy implemented a highly successful program with an unparalleled safety record. From an organizational perspective, the accountability of the commanding officers was heavily stressed. Their selection and training were incredibly important. The department heads approved operations, and the department head or captain authorized maintenance. A long list of activities and evolutions could be performed only with the specific permission of the CO, and so on.

  These practices reinforced leader-follower in the submarine force. As a result, the performance of the submarines was directly coupled with the technical ability of the CO. As I’ve already mentioned, some ships would do well under one CO and then poorly under the next.

  At the same time, the naval nuclear propulsion program has succeeded in developing an alternative to the personality-centered leadership approach: a procedurally centered leadership structure in which the procedure reigns supreme. This structure is effective when it comes to operating a nuclear reactor. The system is well defined and predictable: people are highly trained and the operators follow the procedure! Actually, as a citizen of the planet, you want this procedurally centered leadership when it comes to operating the reactor plant. The range of potential conditions and responses is bounded. It is when operators don’t follow procedures that very unpredictable, and typically bad, things happen.

  Yet this emphasis on following the procedure can have a stultifying effect. We take bright operators, train them extensively, and then tell them that the most important thing is to follow the procedure.

  When it comes to operating a submarine against the enemy, the application of this procedurally centered approach is limiting, both in how the submarine is employed and in how the intellect of the operators is employed. Fundamentally, tactical operations of the submarine are different from reactor plant operations. Tactical operations are against an intelligent enemy who thinks, plots, and deliberately exploits weaknesses. The complexity is significantly higher. Strictly following procedures won’t get us there. At this point, we fall back on the personality-centered leadership structure.

  In reversing years of the leader-follower system’s erosion of the chiefs’ authority, the chiefs on board Santa Fe—now under my command—would be going against the grain. I wanted to make sure they deliberately decided to take charge. It wouldn’t be any good if I directed them. You can’t invoke leader-follower rules to direct a shift from leader-follower to leader-leader.

  To say these guys were skeptical would be an understatement. Sure, they sensed that things could have been better but, after all, Santa Fe hadn’t had a collision, grounding, or truly significant incident. Was it performing that poorly?

  Furthermore, they’d been in the Navy for fifteen years, on average, and it had always been this way on all their other submarines. Was it possible that a better way existed?

  My next question built on what we had all agreed on, namely, the chiefs did not run Santa Fe.

  I asked, “Do you want to?”

  Reflexively they answered, Yes! Uh-huh. Of course!

  “Really?”

  And that’s when we began to talk honestly about what the chiefs’ running the submarine would mean.

  Mechanism: Find the Genetic Code for Control and Rewrite It

  Here is a list of the primary problems the chiefs struggled with:

  Below-average advancement rates for their men

  A lengthy qualification program that yielded few qualified watch standers

  Poor performance on evaluations for the ship

  A lean watch bill, with many watch stations port and starboard under way, and three-section in port (the objective was to have three-section at sea and at least four-section in port; this meant that each member would stand watch every third watch rotation—typically six hours on watch and twelve hours off—at sea, and every fourth day in port)

  An inability to schedule, control, and commence work on time

  An inability to control the schedules of their division and men.

  We talked about the reality that running Santa Fe would mean they would be accountable for the performance of their divisions. No more sitting in the cozy chiefs’ quarters and letting the department head or division officer explain to the captain why things had gone wrong. Later, I would call this “eyeball accountability.” It would mean being intimately involved—physically present in most cases—in the operations of the ship and in each activity.

  The chiefs’ enthusiasm waned noticeably. Some could see this would change the way they would have to think about their position: being the chief would no longer mean a position of privilege but a position of accountability, responsibility, and work. Not everyone thought this would be better. We discussed this long and hard, but didn’t waste time discussing the philosophy of the role of the chief petty officer in today’s Navy or on exhortations and speeches. We didn’t have time for those luxuries.

  At the end, we were agreed: the sole output would be concrete mechanisms. I was thinking about Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’s book Built to Last and their discussion of how personalities come and go but institutional mechanisms endure and embed the change in the organization. I put this question to Santa Fe’s chiefs: “What can we do so that you actually run the ship?”

  First and foremost, the chiefs wanted to be in charge of their own men, and that meant putting them in charge of their men’s leave. Some of the chiefs protested, claiming they were already in charge of their leave. But after the COB signed the leave chit—and he did so for every enlisted man—it still needed to be signed by three officers: the division officer, the department head, and the XO. The chiefs weren’t in charge.

  The chiefs came up with a solution: could the COB be the final signature authority for
the enlisted leave chits? It was brilliantly simple. Instead of making a fourteen-step process more efficient (seven steps up through the enlisted chain of command and the COB, to the division officer, department head, and XO, and seven steps down), we would eliminate six of the steps. I just needed to cross out XO and write in COB in the ship’s regulations. A one-word change. That was the genetic code. That was what they were proposing.

  I was reluctant to agree for a couple of reasons. In my previous jobs, I had countermanded ill-thought-out leave plans from the chiefs. Knowing the officers above them would likely veto excessive leave plans and wanting to be the nice guys, the chiefs tended to say “yes” a lot. Additionally, I was concerned that the junior officers would lose the experience of learning personnel management and lose touch with their divisions. Finally, and perhaps most important, the CO wasn’t authorized to make this change. The submarine organization manual was a Navy document that we weren’t supposed to change.

  We discussed some of these drawbacks, and the chiefs offered their solution. The chiefs would be responsible for the performance of their divisions and all that encompassed. I agreed and made the change to the manual that afternoon. In command less than a day and I’d already exceeded my authority.

  This one-word administrative change put the chiefs squarely in charge of all aspects of managing their men, including their watch bills, qualification schedules, and training school enrollments. The only way the chiefs could own the leave planning was if they owned the watch bill. The only way they could own the watch bill was if they owned the qualification process. It turned out that managing leave was only the tip of the iceberg and that it rested on a large supporting base of other work. It was hugely powerful. We called it “Chiefs in Charge.”

  Because we had just removed a significant amount of the XO’s authority by eliminating him from the process of signing the enlisted leave chits, I needed to do something to show that I was walking the walk. Therefore, I delegated the control of all officer leave, which I was required to sign, to the XO. This was consistent with what we’d done with the chiefs, and also beyond my authority.

  I wasn’t worried about the authority issue, but I was worried about the behavior. If the chiefs continued to be the “good guys” and approve every chit that came their way, the interests of the command would not be protected. As it turned out, however, that didn’t happen.

  Find Your Organization’s Genetic Code for Control

  Here’s an exercise you can do with your senior leadership at your next off-site.

  Identify in the organization’s policy documents where decision-making authority is specified. (You can do this ahead of time if you want.)

  Identify decisions that are candidates for being pushed to the next lower level in the organization.

  For the easiest decisions, first draft language that changes the person who will have decision-making authority. In some cases, large decisions may need to be disaggregated.

  Next, ask each participant in the group to complete the following sentence on the five-by-eight card provided: “When I think about delegating this decision, I worry that . . .”

  Post those cards on the wall, go on a long break, and let the group mill around the comments posted on the wall.

  Last, when the group reconvenes, sort and rank the worries and begin to attack them.

  When I’ve conducted this exercise, I usually find that the worries fall into two broad categories: issues of competence and issues of clarity. People are worried that the next level down won’t make good decisions, either because they lack the technical competence about the subject or because they don’t understand what the organization is trying to accomplish. Both of these can be resolved.

  • • •

  FIND THE GENETIC CODE AND REWRITE IT is a mechanism for CONTROL. The first step in changing the genetic code of any organization or system is delegating control, or decision-making authority, as much as is comfortable, and then adding a pinch more. This isn’t an empowerment “program.” It’s changing the way the organization controls decisions in an enduring, personal way.

  In the example I just shared, there was nothing technically complicated about signing a leave chit. The barriers had to do with trusting that the chiefs understood the goals of Santa Fe the way I did. I call this organizational clarity, or just clarity. (I describe this in greater detail in the chapters in Part IV.) You tackle it by being honest about what you intend to achieve and communicating that all the time, at every level.

  Many empowerment programs fail because they are just that, “programs” or “initiatives” rather than the central principle—the genetic code, if you will—behind how the organization does business. You can’t “direct” empowerment programs. Directed empowerment programs are flawed because they are predicated on this assumption: I have the authority and ability to empower you (and you don’t). Fundamentally, that’s disempowering. This internal contradiction dooms these initiatives. We say “empowerment” but do it in a way that is disempowering. The practice outweighs the rhetoric.

  In a broader sense, this mechanism highlights the point that we didn’t give speeches or discuss a philosophical justification for the changes we were going to make. Rather, we searched for the organizational practices and procedures that would need to be changed in order to bring the change to life with the greatest impact. My goal, professionally and personally, was to implement enduring mechanisms that would embed the goodness of the organization in the submarine’s people and practices and wouldn’t rely on my personality to make it happen.

  • • •

  We expanded the power of the chiefs several times during the three years I was on Santa Fe. We started with giving them control over their men’s leave. The next iteration was to make sure there was a chief who was in charge of every evolution. I wanted to make sure it was clear whenever something happened on the submarine that some chief was responsible for making sure it came out right. The mechanism was to add a line to our planning documents that listed the “Chief in Charge” next to each event. I learned that focusing on who was put in charge was more important than trying to evaluate all the ways the event could go wrong. These “Chiefs in Charge” initiatives were instrumental in Santa Fe’s winning the award for the best chiefs’ quarters for the next seven years in a row.

  We discovered that distributing control by itself wasn’t enough. As that happened, it put requirements on the new decision makers to have a higher level of technical knowledge and clearer sense of organizational purpose than ever before. That’s because decisions are made against a set of criteria that includes what’s technically appropriate and what aligns with the organization’s interests. In later chapters, you’ll be introduced to mechanisms that address both of these supporting pillars.

  QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

  How can you prepare your mid-level managers to shift from holding a “position of privilege” to one of “accountability, responsibility, and work”?

  What procedure or process can you change with one word that will give your mid-level managers more decision-making authority?

  When thinking about delegating control, what do you worry about?

  What do you as a proponent of the leader-leader approach need to delegate to show you are willing to walk the talk?

  “Welcome Aboard Santa Fe!”

  Don’t like something about the “culture” in your organization and want to change it? We did this in a simple way.

  January 11, 1999: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (169 days to deployment)

  The buzz of excitement filled the air on board the USS Santa Fe Monday morning as the chiefs started talking about their new authority. The sailors took notice and, accordingly, there was more spring in their step as we went about the work of the day. It seemed that the direct connection between the chiefs, who were responsible for making the work come out right, and the sailors, who were the performers of the valve lineups, maintenance procedures, and operational tasks, had engaged bo
th the troops and the supervisors alike. There was greater commitment, greater engagement.

  Military discipline improved as well. In the past, some of the junior enlisted men would mouth off to their chiefs. (We called this showing “attitude,” which is not a good thing.) Since each chief’s authority to discipline them for their remarks was minimal, these puerile enlisted men could afford to complain; the cost was low. Now, with the chiefs’ having more authority, the junior enlisted men were motivated to suppress their immature responses and get to the work of the day. So far, so good.

  Overall, the mood was upbeat. Yet there was so much to do. We were deploying in 169 days; more urgently, prior to deployment there would be a series of inspections of increasing complexity. We were scheduled to get under way in eight days to do the first of these: an inspection conducted by my immediate superior, Commodore Mark Kenny. He and his squadron staff were going to be riding us for four days, observing Santa Fe perform a host of submarine operations.

  I wasn’t sure how we could possibly do well. The knowledge gaps were so big and the operational practice so rusty there was no way we could learn and practice everything we needed to do in the next week. Besides, we had a full 24/7 job just finalizing the repairs and maintenance from the past month, loading stores, and preparing the charts and operational plan to get under way on time.

  Not only did we need to demonstrate to the squadron staff that we were competent; we needed a success in support of the changes I needed to make because not everyone understood how this new scheme was going to work. I already had skeptics among the crew.