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

by David Marquet

  Empowerment

  We encourage those below us to take action and support them if they make mistakes. We employ stewardship delegation, explaining what we want accomplished and allow flexibility in how it is accomplished.

  Teamwork

  Submariners have traditionally worked as a team because a mistake by one person can mean disaster for all. We work as a team, not undercutting each other. The chain of command is obligated to implement mechanisms that encourage and reward teamwork. We back each other up in a positive way.

  Openness

  We exercise participative openness: freedom to speak one’s mind. Additionally, we exercise reflective openness, which leads to looking inward. We challenge our own thinking. We avoid the trap of listening to refute.

  Timeliness

  Timeliness means we do things on time: start work on time, qualify on time, are ready to start evolutions and drills on time, and get to rendezvous points on time. Timeliness also recognizes that accomplishing most things faster is better and that working to reduce inherent delays and time lags results in a more effective organization.

  Leadership at Every Level!

  Mechanism: Use Guiding Principles for Decision Criteria

  Leaders like to hang a list of guiding principles on office walls for display, but often those principles don’t become part of the fabric of the organization. Not on Santa Fe. We did several things to reinforce these principles and make them real to the crew. For example, when we wrote awards or evaluations, we tried to couch behaviors in the language of these principles. “Petty Officer M exhibited Courage and Openness when reporting . . .”

  My own behavior frequently needed adjustment when it was tested against the guiding principles. For example, I might initially attempt to dismiss a sailor who had a suggestion for a new way of doing business without listening to his suggestion. I might be expecting openness from the sailors but at the same time responding to reports of mistakes with short-tempered irritation rather than reflective curiosity. When the guiding principles were helping me, they were likely helping others.

  Guiding principles have to accurately represent the principles of the real organization, not the imagined organization. Falseness in what the organization is about results in problems. Since these are a set of criteria that employees will use when they make decisions, decisions won’t be aligned to the organization’s goals.

  I have seen this, for instance, in an organization that talked about safety first but whose real interests were in profits and accepting degradations in safety if they seemed “reasonable.” After all, the safest thing to do is to shut down and send everyone home. But not acknowledging that they would be balancing safety with profits resulted in miscommunication, lack of credibility (because everyone knew the truth), and unaligned decisions.

  USE GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR DECISION CRITERIA is a mechanism for CLARITY.

  Most of you have organizational principles. Go out and ask the first three people you see what they are. I was at one organization that proudly displayed its motto in Latin. I asked everyone I saw what it meant. The only one who knew was the CEO. That’s not good.

  QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

  How can you simplify your guiding principles so that everyone in your organization understands them?

  How will you communicate your principles to others?

  Are your guiding principles referenced in evaluations and performance awards?

  Are your guiding principles useful to employees as decision-making criteria?

  Do your guiding principles serve as decision-making criteria for your people?

  Do you know your own guiding principles? Do others know them?

  A Dangerous Passage

  Do you recognize your staff’s achievements so long after the event that even they forget? We learned not to let admin get in the way.

  July 10, 1999: The Strait of Malacca

  Santa Fe was on the surface transiting westward through the Strait of Malacca. It’s a tough transit. More than 160 large vessels—nearly half the world’s oil tankers—pass through the strait every day.8 Because it is shallow, any submarine must transit on the surface, an unnatural and uncomfortable place to be. After all, a submarine is designed not to be seen, and our speed is slower on the surface than it is when submerged.

  Near Singapore, ferries and tugs with tows create significant cross-traffic between Singapore and Indonesia. Finally, the gap between the east- and westbound maritime traffic lanes was full of small fishing boats—sometimes no larger than a paddleboard—that wandered into the main traffic lane from time to time.

  Our plan for making the difficult three-day passage was to tuck in one thousand yards behind one of the large westbound (empty) oil tankers and draft in its shadow like a cyclist in the Tour de France. Ships would avoid the large, easy-to-see tanker, and we’d get a clear path. The trick was to get close enough not to let the other traffic close in behind the tanker but at the same time maintain a safe distance. I split the time with my new XO, Lieutenant Commander Tom Stanley, on the bridge. I’d be up there for twelve hours, then he would drive the ship. I took the night shift.

  On the first night, as we were passing the lights of Singapore to our starboard, I noticed a dim light moving across us.

  While I was trying to figure out what it meant, Rick Panlilio, the OOD, shouted, “All back emergency, right hard rudder!”

  Immediately the ship started shuddering as the throttleman back in maneuvering shut the ahead throttles and rapidly opened the astern throttles, reversing the main engines and Santa Fe’s screw. The light was a dimly lit tugboat, and the tug was on one side of our path and its tow on the other.

  We barely stopped short of the towline between the tug and the barge. I was shaken.

  I came down off the bridge and went directly to maneuvering to applaud the efforts of the engineering team. The petty officer who had “pushed the red tag” aside in the shore power incident was the throttleman. He had spared us from a collision. It was 0515 and the watch team was about to get relieved. I grabbed YN1 Scott Dillon, who maintained the supply of awards, and asked him to get me a Navy Achievement Medal. With it, I returned to the crew’s mess and pinned it on the throttleman while he and the off-going watch team ate breakfast. I spoke words of appreciation and professionalism. Later, I would formally report his exemplary service, but the immediacy of the recognition was important.

  Mechanism: Use Immediate Recognition to Reinforce Desired Behaviors

  We let our administrative processes get in the way of prompt recognition. Many times we would submit awards three months prior to the departure of a sailor, only to find ourselves calling during the last week to track down the award before his departure. When I say immediate recognition, I mean immediate. Not thirty days. Not thirty minutes. Immediate.

  Look at your structures for awards. Are they limited? Do they pit some of your employees against others? That structure will result in competition at the lowest level. If what you want is collaboration, then you are destroying it.

  Instead, have awards that are abundant, with no limit. They pit your team against the world—either external competitors or nature. I like to call these man-versus-nature as opposed to man-versus-man awards. Every team that can get a fire hose to the scene of the fire within two minutes gets an award (the “award” could be a superior grade). In cases where there is a physical reason for the goal, this is better than, say, having the top 10 percent of the shortest times get an “excellent.” On the one hand, it’s possible that the best times are three minutes, and you are handing out “excellents” to a team that would actually die in a fire. On the other hand, once the team has gotten better than two minutes, you don’t need them to spend more time and energy honing that skill. Better to move to another problem area.

  The most important change that happens, however, is that all teams (in our case, all submarines) are now collaborators working against a common external goal as opposed to competitors working agai
nst one another. One of the things I tried to change was the collaboration-competition boundary. When I got to Santa Fe, people within the ship were competing with one another: department heads for the top fitness report (fitrep) spot, nukes against supply for blame on who didn’t order the part, and so on. We deliberately pushed that boundary to the skin of the ship. We’d say “There is no ‘they’ on Santa Fe.” We wanted cooperation within the ship and the competition to be against the other submarines or, better yet, the potential enemy.

  USE IMMEDIATE RECOGNITION TO REINFORCE DESIRED BEHAVIORS is a mechanism for CLARITY.

  • • •

  Some people worry that having a fixed objective reduces the incentive for continuous improvement and breeds a mentality that “we just need to meet the goal.” In some cases, this is appropriate, but in other cases, relative grading is also appropriate. There’s no reason you can’t do both: assign the grade based on the fixed objective and provide data on how that team stacks up against all teams.

  Simply providing data to the teams on their relative performance results in a natural desire to improve. This has been called “gamification.” The blog to read more about this is Gabe Zichermann’s Gamification blog: www.gamification.co.

  QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

  Do you have a recognition and rewards system in place that allows you to immediately applaud top performers?

  How can you create scoring systems that immediately reward employees for the behaviors you want?

  Have you seen evidence of “gamification” in your workplace? Perhaps it’s worth reading one of Gabe Zichermann’s blog posts and discussing it with your management team.

  Looking Ahead

  Are you mired in short-term thinking? For me it was tough to start thinking beyond the next inspection, but it paid off.

  July 15, 1999: Indian Ocean

  I mentioned that we deployed two weeks earlier than originally scheduled. We were able to accomplish that because of a conversation I had with Lieutenant Dave Adams about three months prior. At the time, we were on track to be ready for deployment. The crew was adapting well to the many changes we’d made, and he earnestly wanted to get them some time off before we left our families behind for the six-month deployment. We were scheduled to depart for the western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf on June 29. In that time, we had myriad things to fix and equipment to load, including missiles and torpedoes, all of which had to be checked. We were also scheduled to return to San Diego for a second set of battle group exercises, a tactical inspection, and the final certification for our deployment.

  I appreciated what Weps was saying. In the scheduling books, all ships showed a predeployment “stand-down” in the two weeks prior to deployment, but it was effectively just an accounting tool so the staff could say the ship had stand-down. In reality, that period was crammed with frenetic activity and no one had any time off.

  By beginning with the end in mind, however, we should be able to do something about negotiating at least part of that stand-down period for the crew. Following up on Dave’s goal, we got the department heads and chiefs together and looked at the schedule.

  The only way we would be able to give the crew two weeks off in June, just before we deployed, would be if we were completely ready for deployment two weeks early. This would be tough because the external organizations—the weapons loading facility and the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard—would know they actually had another two weeks to finalize preparations and work would “slip” into that period.

  Internally, the department heads would need to have the ship ready in all respects on June 8, a full three weeks before the scheduled deployment date. I would personally approve all exceptions for any work planned after that date. It would be a tall order and was met with groans of impossibility. Against that backdrop, however, we talked about what would be achieved: a true stand-down where we could spend time with our families before the six-month deployment. It was my job to notify external parties—the squadron and the repair facility, primarily—that we had drawn a line in the sand and Santa Fe needed to be ready in all respects on June 8.

  We put the word out to the crew and started figuring out how to be ready on our target date.

  Then, at the end of April, with about six weeks to go, Commodore Mark Kenny called me. The nation needed us to deploy eleven days early, on June 18. Well, we could and we did. It was only because we were already working on our plan for being ready three weeks early that it was possible. Unfortunately, we did lose much of the family time we’d hoped for. We would have a short stand-down; the nation needed us and we would deliver.

  Mechanism: Begin with the End in Mind*

  We had started a new practice. Now, I wanted to build on the success of that practice. I decided that one key supervisor a day, rotating among the XO, COB, Weps, Nav, Eng, and Suppo, would have an hour-long mentoring session with me. The rule for the mentoring meeting was that we could talk only about long-term issues, and primarily people issues. All business concerning a leaking valve or failed circuit card had to occur outside these meetings.

  During the first set of discussions, we adapted a useful technique for long-term focus and planning. I asked each of them to write their end-of-tour awards. Since these supervisors are assigned to the submarine for three years, this particular exercise made them look that far into the future. If someone was having trouble visualizing that far out I asked him to write his performance evaluation for the next year. Lieutenant Commander Bill Greene would be transferring in a few months, but Lieutenant Commander Tom Stanley, Lieutenant Dave Adams, and Lieutenant Commander Rick Panlilio weren’t leaving for another two years. I wanted this to be a serious exercise; I wouldn’t let them turn in a quick response. I assigned it as homework between two mentoring sessions a week apart. Then we would look at the write-up together.

  When we looked at Dave’s end-of-tour award write-up, I noted he had some great ideas. It struck me that I had entered this mentoring practice with the idea of a traditional mentor-mentee relationship and hadn’t realized the incompatibility of that hierarchy with leader-leader. I learned as much from them as they did from me. Hence, we were practicing a mentor-mentor program.

  Dave and I discussed each one of his goals and made it as specific and measurable as possible. Dave made a plan to accomplish each of the things in the write-up, spaced over the next two years. He was going to get two fitness reports (fitreps) over those two years as well, and we applied the same approach to the fitreps, making goals measurable and setting in place the tools to collect the data.

  Two years later, when Dave transferred off Santa Fe, his department had accomplished almost everything he’d written down, and the actual citation sounded just like our vision.

  Frequently, we would start off by writing about achieving certain levels of qualification, as in “qualify for command,” or having general goals for their team, such as “have my department do better in procedural compliance.” Objectives like these are too vague and hard to quantify, so we would work to write the objective in measurable ways. We’d arrive at the specifics by asking a question such as:

  “How would you know if procedural compliance was improved?”

  “We’d have fewer critiques.”

  “Okay. How many fewer? How many did you have last year?”

  “Don’t know, didn’t count.”

  In this way, we generated verifiable measures. And in the process, we often learned that we hadn’t been keeping track of the appropriate data, and we’d have to start doing so.

  The Navy’s performance system is deliberately constructed to make the highest comparative rankings scarce. Since we had three department heads and one XO on Santa Fe who were all of the rank lieutenant or lieutenant commander, they were competing against one another. As a result, it is difficult to get all of them promoted because only one will get the top recommendation. We were able to get everyone promoted and had tremendous success with bigger groups like the first class petty officer eval
uations as well.

  Customarily, selection boards read performance evaluations that are filled with phrases like “significantly improved procedural compliance,” which are basically meaningless. The evaluations of the officers on Santa Fe, on the other hand, would report “reduced critiques by 43 percent, reduced percent of the crew smoking by 12 percent, increased on-time performance by 31 percent,” and so on. I believe the ability to specifically quantify accomplishments, in addition to the focus this exercise required of the officers and the overall reputation of the ship, went a long way toward allowing us to boast disproportionately high selection rates. During my last year in command, 2001, we had ten men eligible to be promoted from first class petty officer to chief petty officer. We had an amazing 90 percent selection rate, promoting nine chiefs. In one day the number of chiefs almost doubled (and then they transferred to other boats). It was gratifying to see YN1 Scott Dillon, whom I met as a second class petty officer when I reported on board, make chief. Using hard data was an effective way of proving we had achieved the end we had in mind.

  How to Begin with the End in Mind

  Here are some things you can do to “begin with the end in mind”:

  Hand out this chapter as reading material. Also consider Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, chapter 2, “Begin with the End in Mind.”