This is a book on leadership.
By giving someone the opportunity to own a problem and their solution to it, they will consider themselves as vital to its success.
As a leader, it is your mission to get your people to see their own worth and potential.
The old model of leaders and followers is dead. If you treat someone as a follower, that’s how they will act. To get around this, we are taught about the empowerment model – but it has its problems. In that it takes a leader to empower a follower – it doesn’t. It takes the so-called followers to do that for themselves. Marquet’s solution is leader-leader instead of leader-follower. He states that he has a four-part process for this.
Part One: Starting Over
Initially, Martquet tried to empower his people with the traditional empowerment method, eg. Asking them to prepare lists of what should be done and then asking them to do it, but this failed. His people were taking shortcuts, and the end product was not adequate. Empowerment doesn’t work in a leader-follower environment. Empowerment only exists as we have disempowered others in the leader-follower status quo.
Give people specific goals, but let them decide how to get there. This is crucial. At my last school, the director and principal I worked for would give me a goal but did not micromanage with how this should be done.
Upon starting Marquet’s new position on the Santa Fe, he didn’t have enough time to become an expert on the submarine’s equipment. This had a profound effect on how he interacted with his team – he focused on them first, rather than the task. He recommends walking amongst your people and letting curiosity lead you. I’ve seen this in practice more than once at my old school, SCIS, and read it recently in the 15 Commission. The infers that trust comes from this, only then should you start to ask critical questions. Another way of looking at it is that you should ask questions so that you get to know the answer, not to check that they know the answer. To reiterate this point – you really do need to listen to your people. Don’t ignore their talents or waste their time.
A tell-tale sign that you have lost someone is if You ask them “What do you do?” And they reply with whatever I’m told to do. It shows that they are not motivated and feel oppressed. Moreover, you are not getting those people out their best. They almost become robotic and do not use their initiative. I have certainly faced this, and found it more prevalent with elementary education leaders; although not all.
Completion of work should lie with the person doing it, not their supervisor.
The challenge is to motivate your people to achieve excellence, not avoid errors.
Part Two – Control
Divest and distribute control to your team. Push down control to those who will enact it. Marquet breaks this down into 3 categories: control, competence and clarity.
For leader-leader to work, your people have to want to take charge. You can’t make them take charge. So, what do you do as a leader? You ask your people if they want to take charge, and then start talking about what that means and what do they think it looks like.
He started by giving his chiefs increased responsibility for their people. E.g the chiefs decided when people could go on leave. I do have one question for Marquet here, that is what does leadership look like on a daily basis for his chiefs? It is not covered in the book, other than anecdotal stories and inferred through the success of the submarine and its organisational behaviour.
He says that you need to find out your organisation’s genetic code for control, the very basics, and then change it; if it is ossified in the leader-follower paradigm. Get your people to write down their worries about what would happen when the change was implemented (change management) and then, as a group, attack the worries!
The reason why empowerment programs fail is because you can’t direct people to be empowered. You have to get at the genetic code of the organisation, or start from the ground and work your way up from there. You have to identify where changes with the biggest impact can be made. Moreover, these changes will last much longer because they go to the first principles of an organisation.
Marquet then identifies putting the chiefs (middle managers) in charge of different tasks – i.e. during the task evolution process. He makes an interesting point about putting someone in charge of decisions- in that when a decision is made, they are done so against a set of criteria. Ergo, he required that his decision-makers obtain a higher level of knowledge.
On changing organisational culture he says, when bringing about change, care first about your people NOT about the organisation. He puts it another way, stop putting your reputation first.
An awesome question he proposes is to ask your team:
“How would we know if our people are proud of the organisation?”
From here you can ask additional questions.
Now, controversially ( Ed Schein and Lewin fanboy here), these are the steps that he suggests for embedding cultural change. It’s similar to a Kagan learning structure – jot thoughts. Get your people to write down what change they want to see. Post up on the wall and then sort the answers and discuss how to implement the change you want to see. He goes on to say that you can then change culture by either changing your way of thinking or by changing your behaviour. Finally, he points out something that I intrinsically agree with, which is that people on board his ship were not suffering from low morale because of the long hours, they were suffering from low morale because they were in a culture that focused on avoiding mistakes. For me, there are implications of people being reactionary rather than being proactive. This reactionary culture reflects a lack of autonomy because if you are in a culture where you’re not free to make a mistake it is because someone’s always looking over your shoulder!
By having short conversations (as short as 30 seconds) at the beginning of a project you can give feedback, highlighting any problems without actually telling people what to do. A form of coaching, except with more direction. The downside is that some people may think you don’t trust them.
He says to avoid an inspection mentality, as you only focus on the next inspection, and that it results in low morale. This reminded me of the broken OFSTED system in England, and I totally agree with the low morale; and absurd hierarchy in schools there.
Get your people to ask you “I intend to…,” to help them grow from followers to leaders. Other verbiage you could use might be: I plan to, I will, we will… NOT could we, or can I. THEN ask follow-up questions regarding their intentions.
He discusses the importance of not providing solutions because it means that your people become reliant on you to come up with the solutions. Moreover, your people stop thinking as you are doing that for them. If you have to make a decision quickly then make it, but they need to critique it later. Otherwise, if it’s in the near future ask for team input then decide. If there’s plenty of time to make the decision, get them to make it – empowerment in action!
He criticises tracking other people’s work in a so-called tickler (Navy term), as this reinforced the top-down narrative e.g. you are always checking over someone’s shoulder – note that this particular process was essentially senior leadership checking all the other leaders’ work was done. The proposal was for each department to be fully responsible for their work ultimately the department head. To sum this up, you have to implement systems that create responsibility.
He encourages a thinking-out-loud environment, where his people are constantly thinking out loud about the processes they’re following. As a leader, this then allows you to hear what your people are thinking.
Part Three – Competence
Your people also need to be technically competent.
Don’t accept that mistakes will happen, actively find a way to reduce them. For example, when someone had done something wrong Marquette acknowledged their honesty and then let them carry on. Rather than blame them, he and his other officers asked what they could do to prevent something like that from happening again in the future. Their solution for avoiding mistakes is a procedure called deliberate action. Marquette points to this being used in the hospital operating room for example or other businesses where they are interacting with machinery that is significant.
A key ingredient for pushing authority down to your people is that they also have enough competence to carry out the tasks they are doing. Competence naturally reduces if your people had previously been living in a top-down culture – because they wait until they are told to do something. Control without competence = chaos. To accomplish a shift in his organisation he changed it into a learning organisation where people took responsibility for their learning.
Another method he used was to remove briefing with certification; like what I do with my students. As it shows them to show they understand. Moreover, you just state a brief and move on. For certification, you don’t start until you know everyone is ready. For me, if I give my students a task, I will ask them to paraphrase/summarise what I have asked them to do, or what they plan to do.
He raises the important point of making sure that your leaders look after their people first, and that there is equity amongst all of your people. If your people slip up, it is important to constantly repeat the message – you have to be consistent with this. For example, you keep repeating that like we’re all in this together. I am sceptical of this rhetoric, I suppose I will need to give this a go.
Remember that when you want to raise competency levels, specify the GOALS, not the methods
Part Four – Clarity
He defines clarity as having your people know exactly what the organisation is about. You can achieve clarity when you keep putting your team first, look after their needs and get them to push their learning to achieve their full potential. It doesn’t mean letting them avoid responsibility for their actions. Ask them what their goals are.
First up in clarity is taking care of your people. Get your people to identify their own professional goals.
Marquet lists his organisation’s principles and states that they are not just up on the wall for people to see, but are enacted by the crew every day. When I reflect on all of the schools I worked at, not for a moment can I picture them – because they simply do not exist. Most schools are obsessed with what these are for the students without thinking about their people. This is a mistake and needs to be rectified. The closest I came to this was at my previous school, but it was not explicit.
Interestingly, he brings up the vital importance of acknowledging and rewarding people ASAP after the event in which they demonstrated exemplary behaviour or action (see Karen Pryor and Don’t Shoot the Dog). Do not have rewards that encourage competition but ones that support collaboration – to achieve this you should have as many rewards as possible. He calls these rewards man(person) versus the world (environment). He also recommends trying out gamification- providing data to your team on their team https://www.gamification.co/about-gabe-zichermann/
He encourages critical questioning, but only briefly.