Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet is my favorite non-fiction book. It is told from the personal experience of Captain Marquet as he transformed a US Navy submarine from “worst to first”. I love it so much because it is packed with actionable information and told through a memorable story. I really connected with the principles that he advocates and hope to incorporate them in my own leadership opportunities. I reread this book as part of my efforts to improve my teamwork skills.
Story: Transforming a Submarine
David Marquet was a captain in the US Navy and was preparing to take command of the nuclear attack submarine, the USS Olympia. His entire career had been building to this point, and he had specifically been preparing for over a year. He knew every technical system and had poured over all the personnel reports. Being in command is the pinnacle of an officer’s operational career. In some ways it is your one shot at being completely in charge and Captain Marquet was determined to be nothing less than excellent.
No interesting story is easy. Right before the change of command, he was given a new assignment. He would instead be given command of the USS Santa Fe, a submarine that was struggling with poor morale and technical failings. He had six months to “turn the ship around” and be ready for an operational deployment. The Santa Fe was a nuclear attack submarine, so the mission was still the same. The Santa Fe was known to consistently underperform compared to other submarines and had trouble qualifying to standard. In addition, it was commissioned in a different year than the USS Olympia, which made much of Marquet’s technical preparations useless. Instead of being well prepared to make a good ship better, he felt underprepared for the task of making a bad ship good. He resolved to do his very best and to foster excellence anyway.
His plan had always been to create a climate of engaged leadership at every level. However, one moment catalyzed him to take his plans a step further. One day while conducting a drill using the auxiliary power he gave an order, “Ahead two thirds.” which was instantly repeated by the officer on the deck, “Ahead two thirds.” Unfortunately, there was no two thirds on the auxiliary power (there would have been on the ship he prepared for). When he realized that his subordinates would repeat and attempt to follow an impossible order, he resolved to never again give an order, any order at all. That was not the Navy way of doing things, but he thought it was important to have everyone fully engaged in their work. This lead to many changes to the language of leadership and direction among his crew. It also illustrates how drastic of a culture change he was planning to create.
The meat of the book is the story of how Captain Marquet and the crew of the Santa Fe was able to transform themselves from worst to first. Instead of being known for failures, they had the highest promotion rates, best inspection performance, and were ready to deploy two weeks early. This turnaround was created by transforming from a top-down, risk averse culture into one where every individual contributed to their fullest. After their successful turnaround, Stephen Covey (yes that one) took a tour of the ship. He called it the most empowered culture he had ever seen.
One of the best parts of this book is that it is written as a story rather than a prescription. There are ups and downs, things that work and things that don’t. It is also eminently practical, answering specific questions while also highlighting general principles. You’ll have to read the book to see everything he covers. Below I will talk about what I consider the two central principles in the transformation.
Leader-leader vs leader-follower
The central premise of the book is that the structure of leader-follower is an ineffective management style that hobbles teams and stifles individuals. It has been the traditional model of teamwork for generations. Kings and emperors, presidents and CEOs, bosses and overseers have all filled the role of master and commander. To be fair, many amazing accomplishments have been achieved throughout history using this structure. However, it suffers from several flaws which combine to hurt the organization as a whole and the individuals involved.
The first major flaw is that this structure is completely dependent on the leader’s capabilities. The performance of an entire organization can go from good to bad simply because of a leadership change. This makes the organization very brittle and has resulted in more than one failed company or collapsed government. In addition to being brittle, this limits the size of an effective organization. Effectiveness drops at the edges of the leaders expertise or oversight. In my opinion, this is part of the reason that large companies seem much less able to be exceptional. It is hard for a single leader to be exceptional at everything.
Another flaw is the untapped potential of those who are the followers. Often those who are the followers are treated as second class. They are told what to do, how to do it, how fast, and when. This can be extremely demotivating and causes many people to just get by with meeting minimum expectations. It also misses out on the potential improvements these followers could offer. Who better to improve how the work is done than those who are actually doing it? If there is no route for these improvements to flourish then these untapped ideas will flounder.
Not only does this system damage the followers, it hurts the leaders as well. With all the extra oversight and control comes a lot of extra stress. When the entire organization depends on one person, that one person can be ground down to bits. Lack of sleep, extra hours, and extra stress all contribute to damaging the leader at the top. Ironically, these added stressors can reduce the effectiveness of the leader, which then amplifies the issues that they are facing.
The contrast is moving to a leader-leader organization. This doesn’t require anarchy and equality. It requires each person in the organization be responsible for their portion of the work, engaged in doing it the best way possible, and doing so in concert with the larger team. It sounds simple and obvious. Why doesn’t everyone do this? Does it only work with the right people? In certain industries? This book is so compelling to me because it busts some of those myths. It takes place in the wrong industry. The military is historically one of the most top-down leader-follower settings. It also takes place with the wrong people. Captain Marquet didn’t get to select a team full of high performers. He didn’t have time to make any personnel changes.
The reason most organizations tilt to a leader-follower mentality is because it is it requires more thought and effort to create a leader-leader organization. It requires intentionality and the courage to allow some control to not be directly in the leader’s hands. It is also the most common default in society and history. When things don’t work out, we easily revert to telling everyone what to do.
Clarity, Competence, and Control
The second theme I want to discuss is that of clarity, competence, and control. David Marquet’s goal was to develop a leader-leader organization, but he recognized here can be several pitfalls along the path to get there. Many times people will give more control to their subordinates, only to be frustrated with poor results. Usually, these leaders revert back to continual oversight and correction in order to make sure things get done correctly. In the book, Captain Marquet talks about a previous assignment as an engineering officer where he had done just that. He gave the engineering department more authority and control over their tasks and how things were done. Then, they failed at several critical maintenance tasks, causing their entire submarine to be unable to complete a dive. From this point on, he made sure to get involved in every detail because he felt he could no longer trust his team to do things correctly without his direct intervention.
As he reflected on that portion of his career, he realized that in order for his team to have increased control it needed to be combined with increased competence and increased clarity. It was important that someone could correctly perform their increased duties. It was also critical that they had clarity on the overall goals of the organization in order to adapt their efforts to work with the broader efforts. His insight was whenever there was a failure in the organization, he needed to push control to the appropriate level and also check if competence and clarity needed to be increased. While reading I was struck by how well clarity, competence, and control map to the autonomy, mastery, and purpose described by Daniel Pink. Essentially distributed control is the desired outcome and competence and clarity are the required inputs. This makes it a diagnostic and prescriptive principle.
This idea, that control requires competence and clarity, allows the individual to push control to others. I have also found that it allows individuals to create control for themselves. I have found this very helpful in my own work whenever I suffer from a lack of control. Once while working on a project to design an ergonomic enclosure, I was frustrated by the stated need to not make any changes to the layout of the PCBA. This limitation on our control was making it difficult to achieve the goal of making the design ergonomic and light weight. Our client had been explicit about the requirement to not change the PCBA. I decided to ask for more clarity in the hopes of gaining more control. When we asked the client why they did not want any changes to the PCBA, we found out it was because they did not want to change any of the connections or the firmware. As long as we maintained the same electrical schematic, we were free to change the PCBA layout. Having clarity about what was meant by “don’t change the PCBA” allowed me to regain the control needed to meet the overall project goals. Once I had the needed clarity, the client happily gave me more control.
Conclusion and My Action Points
In conclusion this is an excellent book with an engaging story and actionable insight. It has helped me sharpen my thoughts on leadership and develop plans on how to improve. I highly recommend this book to anyone who works on a team at any level. There are so many insights from the book that I didn’t cover. Please go read it yourself.
This is my third or fourth read through of the book. My goal this time was to find specific action points that I could use in my own life. Below are the things I plan to do in order to incorporate this book into my teamwork.
- Explicitly communicate my leadership philosophy and goals (both to teammates and to clients). Most of my projects have some sort of kickoff meeting, that would be an excellent time. For projects I am currently on, it feels a little more awkward – but I am going to do it anyway. There is just a lot of upside to being explicit.
- Whenever I give direction or oversight to a teammate, make sure I address their clarity and/or competence gaps. The goal is for me to not need to be directly involved in controlling delegated tasks. Example – I am working with an intern to make assembly instructions, instead of just reviewing their work and making edits myself – I am telling him why I am making the changes and how he can avoid them in the future (hint: use copy/paste to maintain consistency).
- Whenever I want more control, make a plan to increase either my competence or clarity. I do this pretty well already, I just want to make it more habitual and conscious by writing it out.
I need this book on my shelf. Fantastic review.