David Marquet Quotes

Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.

One of the things that limits our learning is our belief that we already know something.

If you want people to to think, give them intent, not instruction.

You may be able to “buy” a person’s back with a paycheck, position, power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty, and tenacious creativity are volunteered only.

People who are treated as followers treat others as followers when it’s their turn to lead.

The problem with specifying the method along with the goal is one of diminished control. Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.

Those who take orders usually run at half speed, underutilizing their imagination and initiative.

If all you need to do is what you are told, then you don’t need to understand your craft. However, as your ability to make decisions increases, then you need intimate technical knowledge on which to base those decisions.

Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.

Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes our focus away from becoming truly exceptional. Once a ship has achieved success merely in the form of preventing major errors and is operating in a competent way, mission accomplished, there is no need to strive further.

The leader-leader structure is fundamentally different from the leader-follower structure. At its core is the belief that we can all be leaders and, in fact, it’s best when we all are leaders. Leadership is not some mystical quality that some possess and others do not. As humans, we all have what it takes, and we all need to use our leadership

When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.

When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a leader, what does this say about that person’s leadership?

Leadership is not some mystical quality that some possess and others do not. As humans, we all have what it takes, and we all need to use our leadership abilities in every aspect of our work life.

Taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior. That’s the path to irresponsibility. What it does mean is giving them every available tool and advantage to achieve their aims in life, beyond the specifics of the job.

Begin with the End in Mind

control without competence is chaos.

leadership is the enabling art.

The leader-leader model not only achieves great improvements in effectiveness and morale but also makes the organization stronger. Most critically, these improvements are enduring, decoupled from the leader’s personality and presence. Leader-leader structures are significantly more resilient, and they do not rely on the designated leader always being right. Further, leader-leader structures spawn additional leaders throughout the organization naturally. It can’t be stopped.

Control, we discovered, only works with a competent workforce that understands the organization’s purpose. Hence, as control is divested, both technical competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened

Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors (this was introduced in chapter 7). Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience

Former navy captain David Marquet says that in too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority.

People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers. As followers, they have limited decision-making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy, and passion.

Ultimately, the most important person to have control over is yourself—for it is that self-control that will allow you to “give control, create leaders.” I believe that rejecting the impulse to take control and attract followers will be your greatest challenge and, in time, your most powerful and enduring success.

As you work with individuals in your organization to develop their vision for the future, it is crucial that you establish specific, measurable goals. These goals will help the individuals realize their ambitions. In addition, you as a mentor have to establish that you are sincerely interested in the problems of the person you are mentoring. By taking action to support the individual, you will prove that you are indeed working in their best interest and always keeping the end in mind.

A little rudder far from the rocks is a lot better than a lot of rudder close to the rocks.

A vast untapped human potential is lost as a result of treating people as followers.

Don’t Empower, Emancipate

It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it! It was a lesson that would serve me well.

But leadership is about making the lives of others easier, not blaming them. Leadership is about the hard work of taking responsibility for how our actions and words affect the lives of others.

David Marquet’s message in Turn the Ship Around! inspires the empowerment of engaged people and leadership at all levels. He encourages leaders to release energy, intellect and passion in everyone around them. Turn the Ship Around! challenges the paradigm of the hierarchical organization by revealing the process to tear down pyramids, create a flat organization and develop leaders, not followers

empowerment still results from and is a manifestation of a top-down structure. At its core is the belief that the leader “empowers” the followers, that the leader has the power and ability to empower the followers.

disempowered phrases” that passive followers use: Request permission to . . . I would like to . . . What should I do about . . . Do you think we should . . . Could we . . . Here is a short list of “empowered phrases” that active doers use: I intend to . . . I plan on . . . I will . . . We will . . .

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER In your organization, are people rewarded for what happens after they transfer? Are they rewarded for the success of their people? Do people want to be “missed” after they leave? When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a leader, what does this say about that person’s leadership? How does the organization view this situation? How does the perspective of time horizon affect our leadership actions? What can we do to incentivize long-term thinking?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER Why do we need empowerment? Do you need someone else to empower you? How reliant is your organization on the decision making of one person, or a small group of people? What kind of leadership model does your business or organization use? When you think of movie images that depict leadership, who/what comes to mind? What assumptions are embedded in those images? How do these images influence how you think about yourself as a leader? To what extent do these images limit your growth as a leader?

What we need is release, or emancipation. Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment. With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy, and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge. We realize that we don’t have the power to give these talents to others, or “empower” them to use them, only the power to prevent them from coming out. Emancipation results when teams have been given decision-making control and have the additional characteristics of competence and clarity. You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them. Indeed, you no longer have the ability to empower them because they are not relying on you as their source of power.

SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.

Have your processes become the master rather than the servant? How can you ensure adherence to procedure while at the same time ensuring that accomplishing the objective remains foremost in everyone’s mind? Have you reviewed your operations manual lately to replace general terminology with clear, concise, specific directions? Are your staff complying with procedures to the neglect of accomplishing the company’s overall objectives?

As more decision-making authority is pushed down the chain of command, it becomes increasingly important that everyone throughout the organization understands what the organization is about. This is called clarity,

Clarity means people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about.

By explaining the process to the crew and giving them the tools to improve their performance, we empowered them to determine their own success.

BUILDING TRUST AND TAKING CARE OF YOUR PEOPLE is a mechanism for CLARITY.

What would you and your team like to accomplish? How can you as a leader help your people accomplish it? Are you doing everything you can to make tools available to your employees to achieve both professional and personal goals? Are you unintentionally protecting people from the consequences of their own behavior?

What is the legacy of your organization? How does that legacy shed light on your organization’s purpose? What kind of actions can you take to bring this legacy alive for individuals in your organization?

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?

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.

For how far in the future are you optimizing your organization? Are you mentoring solely to instruct or also to learn? Will you know if you’ve accomplished your organizational and personal goals? Are you measuring the things you need to be? Have you assigned a team to write up the company’s goals three to five years out? What will it take to redesign your management team’s schedule so you can mentor one another? How can you reward staff members who attain their measurable goals?

Encourage a Questioning Attitude over Blind Obedience

How do we create resilient organizations where errors are stopped as opposed to propagating through the system? Will your people follow an order that isn’t correct? Do you want obedience or effectiveness? Have you built a culture that embraces a questioning attitude?

Here are some examples: DON’T DO THIS! DO THIS! Leader-follower Leader-leader Take control Give control Give orders Avoid giving orders When you give orders, be confident, unambiguous, and resolute When you do give orders, leave room for questioning Brief Certify Have meetings Have conversations Have a mentor-mentee program Have a mentor-mentor program Focus on technology Focus on people Think short-term Think long-term Want to be missed after you depart Want not to be missed after you depart Have high-repetition, low-quality training Have low-repetition, high-quality training Limit communications to terse, succinct, formal orders Augment orders with rich, contextual, informal communications Be questioning Be curious Make inefficient processes efficient Eliminate entire steps and processes that don’t add value Increase monitoring and inspection points Reduce monitoring and inspection points Protect information Pass information

Control Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it. Act your way to new thinking. Short, early conversations make efficient work. Use “I intend to . . .” to turn passive followers into active leaders. Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems. Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates). Embrace the inspectors. Competence Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods. Clarity Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.

Are you ready to take the first steps toward leader-leader? Are you ready to take the first steps toward an empowered and engaged workforce? Are you ready to embrace the changes that will unleash the intellectual and creative power of the people you work with? Do you have the stamina for long-term thinking?

Are you limiting your leadership to empowerment? What programs have you instituted to supplement control with competence and clarity? Have you divested yourself of the attitude that you, as a corporate leader, will empower your staff?

Are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passion of your mid-level managers who want to be responsible for their department’s work product? Can you turn over your counterpart to Santa Fe’s tickler to department heads and rid yourself of meetings in the process? How many top-down monitoring systems are in play within your organization? How can you eliminate them?

Do you ever walk around your facility listening solely to what is being communicated through informal language? How comfortable are people in your organization with talking about their hunches and their gut feelings? How can you create an environment in which men and women freely express their uncertainties and fears as well as their innovative ideas and hopes? Are you willing to let your staff see that your lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance? To what degree does trust factor in the above?

How do you use outside groups, the public, social media comments, and government audits to improve your organization? What is the cost of being open about problems in your organization and what are the benefits? How can you leverage the knowledge of those inspectors to make your team smarter? How can you improve your team’s cooperation with those inspectors? How can you “use” the inspectors to help your organization?

Competence means that people are technically competent to make the decisions they make.

(To see where we ended up, and for a more detailed process for conducting critiques, visit davidmarquet.com to read “How we learn from our mistakes on nuclear submarines: A seven-step process.”)

The key is that as the importance of doing things right increases, so does the need to act deliberately.

How do you react when an employee admits to doing something on autopilot, without deliberately thinking about the action or its consequences? Do you think that by implementing a system of taking deliberate action you can eliminate errors in your company, or within certain departments in your company? Will employees in your workplace revert to acting hastily and automatically in a real-life situation? How effectively do you learn from mistakes?

learned the hard way that control without competence is chaos.

With physics, you don’t have problems; you only have the consequences of your actions. They become problems when we decide that what happened wasn’t what we wanted to happen.

The personal liberty, well-being, and economic prosperity we enjoy in the United States are unique throughout the history of mankind. Man’s life has generally been short, hard, and brutish. The democratic system we have and the importance of individual rights specified by the Constitution are the reasons for our emotional and physical prosperity. It’s an important document, worthy of being defended. You are not alone in deciding this, as many have died defending the Constitution before you.

Instead of looking at a task as just a chore, look at it as an opportunity to learn more about the associated piece of equipment, the procedure, or if nothing else, about how to delegate or accomplish tasks.

Are you aware of which areas in your business are marred by mistakes because the lower-level employees don’t have enough technical competence to make good decisions? How could you implement a “we learn” policy among your junior and senior staff? Would you consider writing a creed for your organization modeled after the one we wrote for Santa Fe? Are people eager to go to training?

We found that when people know they will be asked questions they study their responsibilities ahead of time. This increases the intellectual involvement of the crew significantly. People are thinking about what they will be required to do and independently study for it.

An effective survey question to ask your employees is how many minutes a week they spend learning on their own, not mandated, not directed. Typically it’s a small number. An organizational measure of improving health would be to increase that number. If you want engaged teams, don’t brief, certify!

How do you shift responsibility for performance from the briefer to the participants? How much preparation do people do prior to an event or operation? When was the last time you had a briefing on a project? Did listeners tune out the procedures? What would it take to start certifying that your project teams know what the goals are and how they are to contribute to them? Are you ready to assume more responsibility within the leader-leader model to identify what near-term events will be accomplished and the role each team member will fulfill?

Are any of your employees on the brink of going AWOL because they’re overworked and underappreciated? When is it right for the leader to overturn protocol in the effort to rescue a single stressed-out subordinate? What messages do you need to keep repeating in your business to make sure your management team doesn’t take care of themselves first, to the neglect of their teams?

Finally, it seemed clear that the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary.

Finally, it seemed clear that the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary. In order to break this cycle, I’d need to radically change the daily motivation by shifting the focus from avoiding errors to achieving excellence.

Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes our focus away from becoming truly exceptional.

The practice outweighs the rhetoric. In

As Albert Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

In his book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming lays out the leadership principles that became known as TQL, or Total Quality Leadership. This had a big effect on me. It showed me how efforts to improve the process made the organization more efficient, while efforts to monitor the process made the organization less efficient.

Remember, leadership is a choice, not a position.

Sadly, a common joke on Santa Fe was “Your reward is no punishment.

(The book to read on this subject is Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.)

During World War II, when submarines spent most of their time on the surface, the crash dive was a matter of life and death. The men could clear the bridge, shut the hatch, and submerge in thirty seconds. Submerging on a nuclear-powered submarine was a much more graceful affair, taking several minutes. This wasn’t the problem so much as the preparations for submerging.

I’d know we achieved [this cultural change] if I saw employees …

Do people want to change, or are they comfortable with the current level of performance?

It didn’t matter how smart my plan was if the team couldn’t execute it!

What do we do on a day-to-day basis? We learn.

We decided to do away with briefs. From that point on we would do certifications.

When you’re trying to change employees’ behaviors, you have basically two approaches to choose from: change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.

Empowerment programs appeared to be a reaction to the fact that we had actively disempowered people.

We say submarining is a team sport, but in practice it often amounts to a bunch of individuals, each working in his own shell, rather than a rich collaboration.

As the level of control is divested, it becomes more and more important that the team be aligned with the goal of the organization.

as authority is delegated, technical knowledge at all levels takes on a greater importance. There is an extra burden for technical competence.

poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary.

It might seem like a little thing, but on board a nuclear submarine, little things like lack of punctuality are indicative of much, much bigger problems. At this particular meeting, everyone was waiting for someone else.

I was also modeling that lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance.

Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership. Eliminating the tickler did that for us. Eliminating top-down monitoring systems will do it for you. I’m not talking about eliminating data collection and measuring processes that simply report conditions without judgment. Those are important as they “make the invisible visible.” What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing.

Empowerment does not work without the attributes of competence and clarity.

You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them. Indeed, you no longer have the ability to empower them because they are not relying on you as their source of power.

Stephen Covey’s The 8th Habit

Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.)

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.

What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing.

If all you need your people to do is follow orders, it isn’t important that they understand what you are trying to accomplish.