Transcript - THE LEADERSHIP LIST podcast - L. David Marquet - Turn The Ship Around! - Episode Two

UNITED STATES

07.03.2020

Story by George Maurer 

American Forces Network Radio (AFN Radio)

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

TONY SCOTT (announcer) - The American Forces Radio Network presents The Leadership List.
GEORGE MAURER (host) – Welcome to The Leadership List, command recommended reading because leaders never stop learning I'm your host George Mauer, in this episode from the professional reading lists of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Air Force Chief of Staff. I'm featuring David Marquet, author of, "Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders." Leadership tips in today's podcast, turn your employees from mindless drones into engaged leaders, briefings are a waste of time…certify instead, and how intent-based leadership can take your group from worst to first. Now, David, you graduated from the Naval Academy in 1981. At the top of your class, congratulations, very impressive. You were a believer in empowering your subordinates from the very beginning. And when you tried implementing this style of leadership as a young officer on the USS Will Rogers, it did not go very well. However, as the captain of the USS Santa Fe, a Los Angeles class, nuclear powered fast attack submarine, it went much better. So much so, you took the sub from the worst in the fleet to the best by many measures. And when Stephen Covey, author of the international bestseller, "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," visited you on the sub, he was very impressed by your work. I'll ask you to tell that story later. Then since retiring from the Navy in 2009, you've been preaching the gospel of intent based leadership to the world and perhaps most impressive to me. You narrated your own audiobook. Not an easy thing to do. Now, before we get too far along, what exactly defines a submarine as a Los Angeles class fast attack boat? If boat is the right word. –
DAVID MARQUET (author) - Sure, so we have different classes of submarines. And we made a decision during the latter parts of the Cold War to build a submarine that could keep up with the carrier battle group and that was a Los Angeles class submarine. It was faster than any previous US submarine and we built a bunch of them and then the Navy wanted to make a significant modification. We added vertical launch Tomahawk tubes, we changed the reactor we made a lot of the equipment digital which it wasn't before. There was a significant upgrade, but when you wanna get a program through Congress, you have to go through a lot of hoops. You don't have to go through as many hoops if you sell it as a modification, than a totally new program. And the Navy, even though it's basically a new submarine, the Navy sold it as a modification of the old submarine. So the submarine I ended up on…the Santa Fe…is a quote improved Los Angeles class, but it's basically a different kind of submarine.
TONY SCOTT - Leadership tip from Turn the Ship Around…building leaders requires letting go.
MAURER - You believe the first thing a leader must do is understand empowerment. What is empowerment?
MARQUET - Empowerment means giving your people the ability to make decisions, simple as that and empowerment will lead to engaged thinking teams. The problem we have right now the problem that I inherited the problem that I see in a lot of military organizations is they're overly bias towards doing and compliance and doing what you're told. And the problem is this doesn't activate the thinking parts of our brain. And if you want leaders, thinkers, decision-makers, what we need to do is deliberately step back from telling our teams what to do. And this is hard because basically, you have to bite your bottom lip and say, "I'm gonna not move forward. "I'm not gonna tell them what to do." Even though I think we know we should do but what I'm gonna do is allow them to grapple with the problem. I'm gonna build leaders, I'm gonna give up a little bit of production, I'm gonna be building leaders and decision-makers. So rather than thinking of myself as a decision-maker, and making this bold, strong, brilliant decisions all day long, I thought of myself as the architect of a decision-making factory. And everybody on the submarine was part of that decision-making factory. And once you build a decision-making factory, you no longer have to make all these decisions and you can raise your head above the minutiae of these decisions. And you see things that you wouldn't have seen before. - You believe the leader-follower model of leadership should be ancient history. You feel intent, based leadership, a leader-leader model model is much more effective in today's world. Why do you feel that way? - Those terms I made up I was thinking, as I was going through my journey on a submarine, and I was trying to get my guys to think and I was myself holding myself back from giving them orders and instructions, no matter how brilliant I felt they were at every possible moment. And I was like, why is this so hard? What is holding us back? And I realized that this underlying philosophy of how organizations are designed, which is so deeply rooted, we don't even question it. And it's the idea that some people are leaders, some people are decision-makers and other people are followers, and they're the people who execute the decision. And this concept is so deeply rooted, we don't even question it and so I came up with this phrase leader-follower, to contrast that with leader-leader and a leader-leader organization. Everybody is two-part as part of the decision making calculus and I think what happens is you get a much more resilient, much more adaptive, much more agile, much more enduring organization. If you can get everybody thinking we've all know situations where someone saw a problem. They didn't say anything. Or maybe they did, but they didn't say it very strongly. And then we blame them and then bad things happen. And then we do an investigation say, "Oh, yeah, there were indications." But for some reason, we steamed ahead despite that, and the reason is because even though we might say safety first or mission first or team first, it's really hierarchy first, is conformed to your role in the hierarchy. And that's what holds us back from fully engaging everyone's brain on the team.
TONY SCOTT - Leadership tip from Turn the Ship Around...intent creates ownership.
MAURER - One of the classic traps for empowerment programs, according to your book, is to continue using the leader-follower management model while trying to install a leaderless system. What advice might you offer to someone who isn't quite sure how to break away from that mold?
MARQUET - Okay, so there's a couple things. One, empowerment is not a light switch. Too many times what I hear is, "Yesterday I used to make this decision. Tomorrow you make the decision." That's treating empowerment like a light switch. I want you to think about it more like a thermostat on the wall where you can dial it to different degrees. So for us, it starts with, “Hey, what do you see here?” Just to state your observations, okay? What do you think is going on? What would you recommend we do? What do you intend to do? And then maybe even just do it and report afterward. We reserve those for really high tempo operations. But where we tried to move the organization was from, what was basically a permission-based…I request permission, and you approve it….to an intent-based organization where they state their intent. Which means they already have permission, and I can veto it. And that sounds like a pretty subtle difference. But it's really, really hugely powerful because what happens now is instead of me, authorizing and directing things…the team was coming to me, and they own it. You can't hide from the ownership and responsibility of your job. As we did this, we tapped into some things that the military has that most companies I've been to don’t. Four things. Number one, a sense of trust and teamwork… as much as we say it, it’s not the way it is in many military units. Number two, clearly defined processes, clearly defined ownership and clearly defined language. That was number two, three and four. And so we built on those things. Those are the things that let me let people make decisions. Without those things, that would have been a mess. And what I see companies do sometimes is try to empower, but they don't have clear guidelines. Like, I'm empowered, but to make what decisions? Well, you know, just go make decisions. That doesn't work.
MAURER - You touched upon this a little bit already. The, "I intend to," phrases. You're no fan of the phrase, "Mistakes just happen. Human beings commit them. And that's just the way it is." The people under your command on the Santa Fe began using the phrase, "I intend to," before engaging in their next action. What was gained by doing this? And how does the phrase “deliberate action” apply here?
MARQUET - It's as simple as this, the officer of the deck comes to me, the Captain, and in the old way, he would say, "Request permission to submerge the ship," or whatever he wants to do. And then I will give the order, “Submerge the ship.” And then he would acknowledge it and do it. And in this model, if I don't say anything, the ship never submerges. Iit's hard to imagine, but let's say this happens by email, or I'm not paying attention or who knows what. But the bottom line is, I'm giving the order. He's not giving the order. She's not giving the order. She's asking permission. So what happens with intent is, I don't run around telling people to submerge the ship. The officer comes to me and says, “I intend to submerge the ship.” And it's a three-part statement, what they intend to do, why its technically correct…for example, we've shut all the hatches, we've checked the water depth, all personnel are below that kind of thing….and then why we wanna do it. But the reason we're submerging here and now is because it'll support the mission in the following way. So it's a three-part conversation. And all I need to say at this point is very well, they're gonna do it unless I stop them. In that sense of when I say something, when I tell the captain, or the commander that I intend to do something, it creates a tremendous sense of ownership. And so they own it, and they can’t hide from the responsibility and their decisions are better because they're more thoughtful because they realize they can't shrug their shoulders later and say, "Oh, I was just doing what I was told."
MAURER - Okay, how do you describe that feeling? Knowing that something you've known and believed in for so long is finally validated by watching people get empowered and become better versions of themselves. Because of your intent-based leadership model
MARQUET - It's super powerful and it cascaded down the cruise. It was magic, it's hard to describe it. I would go down in the engine room and talk to those Junior sailors and they were speaking like this and it was just, warm my heart and we got all these people engaged and thinking. It was magic.
TONY SCOTT - Leadership tip from Turn the Ship Around…empowerment requires action, not words.
MAURER - When an organization experiences true empowerment, it can change everything. However, it can be difficult to achieve. Why does it work so well in one group? But sometimes it doesn't really take in another?
MARQUET - Here's the problem I had always, you know, I always heard these empowerment speeches. And I always been, you know, the Admiral stands up and says, “You're all empowered,” and it really didn't feel any different. The problem is, and in fact, I gave that speech to my guys, “Hey, you guys are all empowered.” I want you to be proactive and take initiative. The problem is you are pushing the burden of change onto them. And you're not taking responsibility for your own behavior. We think, "Oh when the team asks to speaks up, I can then be quiet." But the reason the team's not speaking up is because you're not being quiet. You have to change your own behavior. You have to, as a leader, bite your tongue and say, "I don't know. What do you guys think? If I weren't here, what would you do? If you had to make this decision without me, how would you get through it?" And then listen, and hear what they say. And then, if possible, say, "Okay, great, why don't you guys go do that." And then you practice in small ways. But it always starts with you. The only behavior you can control is yourself and the military spends so much time trying to control other people's behaviors. We think that's the objective. No, you control your own behavior. And it'll ripple out. Because when you say, "I don't know, what do you think? If you had to make this decision, and I wasn’t here, what would you do?" You've controlled your behavior, but they're gonna come forward to you and say, "Okay, well, here's what I would do. Get out of the way old man."
MAURER - This all sounds great. But certainly, you could never do any of these things in the fast-paced environment of combat, like on a Los Angeles class, fast attack submarine, right.
MARQUET - No, see, this is the problem. People think, oh, when we go into some combat situation, we're gonna revert. The truth is teams that can…..operate with intent. Now it sounds a little bit different, and in an office, it might be an email that says, "Hey tomorrow I intend to offer the following discount to a client or I intend to launch a product." And then in combat, I might sound like, “Submerging the ship. Loading torpedo. Flooding torpedo tube…” So people are saying it basically just moments before they're pushing the button to make it happen, but everybody's communicating. Otherwise, you hear things like the captain, "Submerge the ship, submerge the ship, "Load the torpedo, load the torpedo”, "Flood the torpedo, flood the torpedo." So first of all, that just takes longer. So my team was faster than any other team because they weren't waiting to be told to do something. Secondly, in the second situation, if the captain forgets something, then someone's gonna sit there like, "Oh, I really need to be doing this action. I need to be preparing the noisemaker, but no one's told me to. Did they forget or did they not want to?" And they delay and they wait and they finally speak up maybe, "Hey, you guys want the…. "Oh crap, the noisemaker! Forgot about that." Because you got so many things going on and stress is running high. But in a team where people just expect to say, "I'm in charge of noisemakers, prepare the noisemaker.” "Oh, yeah, right, good, thanks." So few things get missed. And the other people on the team are involved. "Hey, man, are you supposed to be doing something with the noisemaker?” “Oh, yeah."
MAURER - Many minds together work better than one.
MARQUET - Yes, exactly, but you need to have a structure that allows that to happen. And what we do is we give that speech and then we cross our fingers. And then we talk to each other in exactly the same way, and we wonder why there's no change because it's not the speech and the aspiration that makes a difference. It's changing our language and creating a mechanism at work that has a difference.
(rhythmic upbeat music) TONY SCOTT - Leadership tip from Turn the Ship Around!...fear of errors prevents excellence.
MAURER - A couple of benchmarks you give for leaders to consider. One, does your organization spend more time reaching for excellence or avoiding mistakes? And two, are you creating a foundation that will allow all of this to continue after you leave? And if someone honestly asks these questions of themselves, and they get back the wrong answers, what advice would you offer?
MARQUET - I joined the military during the Cold War, we had a clear sense of mission and purpose, we were gonna go out there we were gonna defeat the Soviet Union. We were gonna win. And then the Soviets woke up one morning and they were knocking the wall down. And a year later, they had thrown in the towel. And we've sort of had this diffuse sense of purpose at that point. And then later, I became a submarine commander. And I just went back to the thing we signed up for…support and defend the Constitution against all enemies. And I asked my guys well, why did you join the military? "Oh, I don't know." I was like, “What about this oath we took? "Yeah, I say those words." What's the constitution? Why is it an important document? It's wasn't a cool thing to talk about. Cool people didn't talk about that. I was just, “Look we're here to support the constitution because it's a very important document in human history that has made the lives of millions of people better.” And we talked about it and the idea is achieving excellence means we're striving to make a better world. And that's our focus. Now we wanna reduce errors. We don't wanna have problems dropping torpedoes and messing up the nuclear reactor. But if our purpose when we come into work is focused on avoiding errors, than it biases the organization towards passivity and inertia because the best way to avoid errors is not making any decisions…not do anything. So the idea is to strive for excellence. Do your best and reduce errors as you're doing it. Error reduction is a side effect of striving for excellence, not the main focal point of our minds when we come to work. I had a client with his big global multinational company. I was in their headquarter building in Switzerland. There was a big poster on the wall….a picture of their CEO, who's this old white guy, and it looks like Uncle Sam. He's pointing out. He looks like the Uncle Sam pointing out, pointing on his finger. And he says, "One mistake is one mistake too many." And, they had this poster in various parts of the company, including the research lab, where they were doing research on new products. And the company was criticized and it's slow-moving, lethargic, hundred and 50-year old company. And there's a direct connection between, “Hey, one mistake is one mistake too many.” And this idea they have to avoid errors. It’s a bias for passivity, It's directly connected. What was part two of your question? I can't remember.
MAURER - No, no you're doing great. That sounds like a culture of fear. Not one of empowerment.
MARQUET - I think that's part of it. We're afraid to make mistakes versus I'm inspired to achieve something amazing.
(enchanted orchestra music) TONY SCOTT - Leadership tip from Turn the Ship Around!...certify rather than brief.
MAURER - Okay, you like to replace briefings with certifying. And I think we've all been to briefings where we've tuned out and stopped listening, perhaps even while we were the ones delivering the briefing. So you encouraged your supervisors to certify instead, how does one certify instead of brief?
MARQUET - Here's one of the 100 things that you do every day in a military organization or other organizations and it serves towards pushing the organization in a certain direction. It's serves pushing people into compliance, and a doing mode, not a thinking mode, which is the briefing. And we love this. We've embedded this and a briefing to me…what would happen is someone would stand up and say, "Here's what we're about to do. John, your job is, Sally, you're gonna do this. Blah, blah, blah, any questions?" Never any questions? Okay, Let's keep going. You show up, do what you're told. And I was looking at it, standing back, I was watching one of our briefings one day, and I realized, no one's paying attention. No one's thinking. No one's engaged. One person is talking and 20 people are listening. So I said stop it, cancel them all. What we're gonna do instead is we call it a certification because I wanted to capture this idea that it was a final decision before we did the event. So let's say we're gonna load a torpedo, the weapons officer would stand up and he would say, "Okay, John, what's your position? What are you gonna be doing?” "I'm gonna be the forward operator. Here's the key decisions I might have to make. Here's the critical points in the procedure.” "Great, Sally, tell me about your job." And the team would demonstrate that they were ready. Now you got 20 people thinking and talking, and one person listening. And then that person says, you know what, I think we're ready, maybe. Maybe they're not ready. Then they have to have the courage to say, "We're not ready, we need to go do some more training.” The point is, we have these rituals that we don't even question that keep pushing our people into a conform and comply role, and we need to question every one of them. And if you're not thinking about, "Is this thing that I'm about to do….is this way I'm interacting with my team…is this getting them to think?” "Or is this just getting them to do?" Because I bet you, 99% of the things that you inherited in terms of the organizational structure, are about getting people to do
MAURER - Now on this path to get people to think, you say specific goals and broad freedom to pursue those goals is an effective way to increase employee engagement. Give me an example of how that worked well for you on the Santa Fe.
MARQUET - So you have your team, you're sitting around the table, you gotta make a decision. Are we gonna go left or right? Or are we gonna launch a product or not? The standard way of running that meeting is, "Hey, let's talk about the product launch tomorrow, blah, blah, blah." And what's happening is you're narrowing perspectives. You're narrowing people's thoughts and you're narrowing their willingness to contribute their thoughts. So if they think the whole team thinks like we should launch on time and you think there's a problem, you're probably not gonna speak up or it's gonna make it harder for you to speak up. So what you wanna do instead is ask them before a discussion. "Hey, let's vote on this, one to five. One, you strongly think we should not launch. Five, I strongly think we should launch. Let's vote." Everyone holds their hand up. And then you say, "Okay, let's hear from the ones. Let's hear from the fives." Because what you wanna do, embrace variability, we call it embrace the outliers. You wanna create an environment where it's easy as possible to express a dissenting opinion. But again, the standard way that we run a meeting is designed exactly to do the opposite…get everyone to narrow their views to one and we, quote, get everyone on board. This is not what we want. We want people to express dissenting opinions. Once a decision is made, then their behaviors support the decision. But you can still think it's a boned up decision. I'm fine with that. As long as your behavior….if you're the weapons officer, you're the engineering department head…your behavior supports the decision.
(rhythmic piano music) TONY SCOTT - Leadership tip from Turn the Ship Around!....don't give power to the blockers.
MAURER - What happens if you have a leader above you, who is implementing intent based leadership, the leader is empowering you and your co-worker. However, your co-worker has absolutely no interest in pursuing this empowerment. But you need them to engage, if you're going to be completely successful, how does one handle this situation?
MARQUET - First of all, you can't force people to think. And you can't force people to get more involved. You can create an environment, you can make it easy as possible by saying, "Okay, well, I'm not gonna speak first. I'll speak last. I wanna know what you think." But if at the end of the day, if they're like, "Look, I'm good. You tell me what to do?" Say, "Fine. I will, a couple of things. Number one, I think you're depriving the organization of what you think and see…which is detrimental to your teammates. And number two, you're not demonstrating what I view as leadership behaviors. So I won't be recommending you for promotion just as long as we're good with that. Do whatever you want.” But the fundamental thing, you can't order them. And you have to accept that some people aren't gonna wanna step into that leadership role, and it's okay. I would not spend a lot of time controlling, doing one on ones. Oh, we really need you to get on board. That's giving too much power to the blockers. So basically my approach to the skeptics was to ignore them. Because if you give them attention, you're giving them power. If you give them power, if you give power to the blockers, what you'll get is more blockers. So you just ignore them. And you see who's trying to do it. And you spend a lot of time with them. I would schedule one on one interviews with my officers. And if you were a blocker, I just didn't schedule one with you. You didn't benefit from mentoring. Why was I gonna bother mentoring you? You’ve already chosen your path. What happens is then the rest of the team starts elbowing these guys in the side and they say, "Hey, what's going on with you? Why aren’t you onboard? This is a much better way to be. We can all see the benefits." And then you let the rest of the team take care of them. But don't spend your treasures, the treasure of your own attention, time and energy on people who can be emotional black holes.
MAURER - Very interesting, that's a very good way to put that. The treasure of your time. More people should look at their time in that way. Very interesting, now, in your book, you use the phrase, "Embrace the inspectors.” Those of us who have served in the military generally hate inspections. And we're not too fond of the inspectors who come with them. But you say, "Embrace them, use them, learn from them." Explain.
MARQUET - The question is, are you trying to protect some kind of reputation of being good or you're trying to get better tomorrow? And if most people say, "Oh, I want both." You can't have both. Because the behaviors of protecting yesterday's reputation are gonna get in the way of the behaviors you need to get better tomorrow. To protect reputation behaviors, you defensively hide from the inspectors and hope they don't find your mistakes and that kind of thing. To get better tomorrow, you tab your record with where you had problems or where you think there are mistakes and point the inspectors to those areas and say, "Hey, I had trouble here, here and here. Let me know what you think." When the guys came down to Santa Fe, the inspectors came to me and said, “I think you guys are crazy. They're showing me their problems. Normally, we have to dig to find them.” “Well, they wanna get better.” Well, it all started with me, I would demonstrate that with myself and then cascaded down to the ship. So the idea is like, where's your focus? Is it behind you? Do you think, “I gotta protect the fact that over the last 12 months, I've been doing a good job?” Or is it front and you think, “I wanna make sure that the next 12 months are better than the last 12 months?” And when you put a forward focus, that's one of the things that's gonna help you. It's an issue of letting go of that persona that says, "I need to demonstrate credibility. And I need to demonstrate worth." You know, I trust that you believe I'm worthy. Now, let's see how I can get better. And then, you open the record for the inspectors and you point to all the places where you had problems. So, two things happened. One, we actually did get better faster than any other ship because we were open to that. And number two is, every time we were on the edge, like you know, B-plus A-minus sort of grade, the inspectors always gave us the benefit of the doubt because they always had so much fun. They could see the guys wanted to get better. So that benefited us in the final reports.
MAURER - I believe I am already worthy. That is an outstanding outlook.
(bouncy music) TONY SCOTT - Leadership tip from Turn the Ship Around!...Language is leadership.
MAURER - Stephen Covey, author of the book, "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," visited you on the Santa Fe and he was very impressed with what he saw. Tell me that story.
MARQUET - It was an amazing day, I was a huge fan of Dr. Covey. I had read, "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." Helped me profoundly. And we gave the book to every officer and chief who showed up and we'd have these little sessions then I say, “Okay, habit one, be proactive.” And our favorite question would be, "What would it sound like if everyone acted proactively?" And that's where we came up with things like, “People would say what they intended to do rather than waiting for permission.” And we say, "Okay, great, let's practice those words. Start with the end in mind. What would it sound like if people started with the end in mind?” And then we came up with phrases, “What would it sound like if people thought when?” “What would it sound like if people seek first to understand then be understood?” And then so we ended up with all these phrases and said, "Okay, well, these are the phrases that we use at work. This is how we talk to each other." Now, in the military, you don't get to control much. You can't control who comes to your unit, what job you are in, what your operational tempo is….any of this stuff. But you can control the language. It just turns out that language is how the team interacts. Someone says something that's vulnerable. Do we laugh at them? Do we make fun of them? Someone says something that's different than what the other people think. Do we attack them? Do we defend our position? Or are we curious about what they think? These are all the different little things I'm talking about. And so every day, I would just sit in the control room listening the way the team talk to each other. And just do tiny little tweaks to how we talk to each other, which had this huge, huge, huge impact.
MAURER - That has to be one of the most innovative ideas I've heard in a very long time, fascinating, truly.
MARQUET - You know, George, I have people say, "Oh, this is really servant leadership. "And you really did it for your team." And I will tell you, there's a strong part of me that was saying, “I need to help my team. I need to put my team in a place where they can have the most success in life, even when I'm gone.” But ultimately, I'm the benefactor, the mission benefited. And my life is much richer now than I think it ever would have been, because I travel around the world. I give speeches to companies all over the place. I meet inspiring teams everywhere. My book has been out in a dozen different languages. So it's China and Japan and Switzerland and South America. And so we see and I see this universal attractiveness. All around the world, people have the same basic desire, they want a job that matters. And they wanna be able to control what they do. They don't wanna be just a cog in a machine. And it doesn't matter whether you're in Shenzhen, China, or Kansas City. And so I've been fortunate to be able to receive the psychological boost and the reward from interacting with these people and feeling like we're helping them help create better workplaces.
(rhythmic pop beat) MAURER - David Marquet, author of the book, "Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders." From the professional reading lists of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Air Force Chief of Staff. Of course, this podcast just scratches the surface of all the great content and ideas contained in David Marquet's book, I highly recommend you give it a read for a more in-depth learning experience. Great insight today. David, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
MARQUET - Thank you, George. And thanks to all your listeners for what you guys do, take care.
MAURER - And thank you, listeners, for tuning into this edition of The Leadership List, a podcast produced by the American Forces Radio Network. I'm George Maurer. For now, goodbye. And remember, great leaders never stop learning. Until next time.
(bass-thumping beat) TONY SCOTT - The Leadership List is a production of the American Forces Radio Network. Creative consultant Dave Beasing, CEO of Sound That BRANDS. A podcast development business and AFN radios Grant Peters and Tom Arnholt. Additional narration provided by Tony Scott.

• Date Taken: 07.03.2020
• Date Posted: 07.03.2020 20:13
• Story ID: 373385
• Location: US