Turn the Ship Around

Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.

This week, I want to talk about a book. A great book, Turn the Ship Around! by David Marguet, written in 2012. I can't believe I didn't find this book, it's been out for a number of years now. It reminded me very much of a book that we reviewed some time ago called It's Your Ship by Mike Abrashoff, which came out in 2002. Abrashoff ran surface ships, Marguet ran a boat, a submarine. Submarines are always boats irrespective of size, just the fun fact.

Marquet ran submarines and he had a bad experience. First of all, he talked about the very definition that the submarine fleet had of leadership, and he said, "Leadership is the art, science or gift by which a person is enabled and privileged to direct the thoughts, plans, and actions of others in such a manner as to obtain and command their obedience, their confidence, their respect, and their loyal cooperation." And he said, "Leadership then, as defined by the Navy, is all about command, top-down command." And he didn't necessarily think that was the best way to run a boat or an organization. He said that most organizations have the leader-followers model. That's what you think about, right? Leaders, lead, followers, follow.

I remember there was a book, gosh, ages ago about followership, how to be a good follower and he didn't like that. He wanted, on his boat, he wanted 135 leaders. He didn't want the leader-follower model. He wanted the leader-leader model. And he may have been the first person that quantified that that was actually a thing, and it was something that he could do. He said, he concluded that competence could not rest solely with the leader. It had to run throughout the entire organization. Well, why not? Why wouldn't a leader want that? It doesn't make sense to me that a leader would want all of the competence to rest with him or her, or a small handful of people. Why wouldn't you want competent people throughout your organization? That seems to make a lot more sense to me. He found that the chiefs, who run boats in the Navy, the chiefs on the Santa Fe, which was his sub, were unempowered, uninspired and embarrassed. There was poor eye contact.

They had symptoms, like bad flashlights. On a submarine, there's a lot of dark spaces and you need flashlights, and the flashlights didn't work. Bad bulbs, bad batteries. He said, "That was a symptom of just rottenness." It's kind of the broken windows theory, isn't it? That was on that submarine. So, he said, "The problem really wasn't with the chiefs. It wasn't from a lack of leadership; it was from too much leadership of the wrong kind." They were disempowered. They had to get permission to change batteries, and bulbs, and all that kind of stuff, and it was ridiculous. So, he went around the boat, and he did the same thing that Mike Abrashoff did. He talked to his people, and he asked them, "How are we going to turn this thing around?" And he did what Mike Flentje recommends, which is management by walking around. He talked to everybody on the boat and solicited their bottom-up opinions. Again, the same as Abrashoff, and management by walking around just actually worked.

So, he came up with three components to achieve the leader-leader versus the leader-follower model. First was control. The goal was to divest, control and delegate. It was common then for people to ask permission from the captain or the senior watch commander to take an action. He didn't want that. He wanted them to make recommendations. He wanted them to know the course of action and recommend to the leaders. He didn't want to have to make orders. All he wanted to do was say, "I concur," or "Make it so," or whatever it was. He wanted the decision to be made. And he said, "You can't direct empowerment programs. Directed empowerment programs are flawed because they're predicated on this assumption, I have the authority and ability to empower you and you don't. Fundamentally, that's disempowering." And I agree with that a thousand percent.

You want competency throughout the organization, right? So, he vowed never to give an order on this boat. Now, can you imagine in the military, a senior leader, a commander who says, "I'm not going to give any orders on this boat." He wanted his people to say, "I intend to do X or Y." And he wanted his only comment to say, "Very well, do it." He said that what was important about that was getting the people at their levels to have short, early conversations to get started. And instead of a quiet control room, he wanted a constant hum of chatter. So, he knew that his people were interacting, cooperating with each other. He wanted constant conversation. He wanted people, literally, to think out loud, because if I think out loud, I say, "I'm thinking about doing this," then my peer can say, "Have you thought about X, Y, and Z?" And I might say, "Oh, man, you're right. I forgot about something." We all do that, right? None of us are perfect.

The second thing, competence. He said, "Basic competence is a given, and training of course increases competence, and increased competence allows for more delegation and better decision making among the people." And the more people can make their own decisions, the more inspired they're going to be, the more productive they're going to be, the higher morale is going to be. And he said, the single most powerful mechanism that he came up with, in this leader-leader model, was take deliberate action. He defined that as vocalizing what you're going to do and use hand gestures for what you're going to do. Again, so your peers around you can see what you're getting ready to do, so you don't inadvertently steer to starboard when you should be steering to port. It's a great practice on any boat of any size where people need to cooperate.

The third thing is clarity. Constant, relentless repeating of the messages. He had a few short, simple messages, and he spoke about them constantly. And I know that, as leaders, we feel like broken records, that we have to talk about mission, and vision, and values all the time, but repetition is the only way to make sure that people have this stuff in their brains. He talked about his job as the commander, and it wasn't to give orders. He said that my job as the commander is to tap into the existing energy of the command, discover the strengths, and remove barriers to further progress. Because his superiors were asking him, what the heck is he doing? He's breaking all these rules that the Navy had. He wasn't breaking any rules. He was just empowering his crew to take action and make decisions.

He said he had principles, but he wanted those principles to bubble up from the bottom, which I think is the best way to do it in organizations. And that's how you build trust. You let people in the organization talk, be frank, be transparent, and trust bubbles up from the bottom. You do that by taking care of your people. This is a great book. I'm not sure it's any better than It's Your Ship by Mike Abrashoff, it's just newer. And our guy, Mike Flentje, knew David Marquet from the submarine fleet. So that's another connection.

So, what do you think? If you've read the book or you're picking up the book, let know what you think. Share with us in the comments. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.