Submarine Captain David Marquet’s Simple Tips for Leaders
It was one of the best Christmas gifts of my life. My girlfriend handed me a small package. It was certainly a book. I ripped open the paper and a note fell off the top of the book. The note said that we had reservations for brunch on New Year’s Day at the finest restaurant in town. That was an incredibly generous gift and it took me a second to turn my attention back to the book. It was Turn the Ship Around! by Navy Captain (retired) David Marquet.
The ideas in David’s book were immediately useful to me as a naval officer. Two years later, I’m out of the Navy, but David’s book is still relevant every day. David and I recently did a video interview that you can check out by clicking here to go to my YouTube channel. Below are some of the lessons from the episode.
1. Hold on loosely. Having control is more risky than it seems, especially on a submarine. For David, it was extremely risky because he was unfamiliar with his ship. He had trained for months to command a particular type of submarine. Then, at the end of his training, his orders were to lead an entirely different submarine. He couldn’t make all the decisions and keep track of everything. It was too dangerous to tell people how to run a ship that he didn’t understand. David found that the best solution was to push control down to the technical experts who were familiar with the ship.
2. Let your waiter choose your meal. Leaders always need their people to buy in. How do you get buy in? Have a workshop? Make a powerpoint presentation? In David’s case, he just started inviting people to make their own decisions. When people saw the Captain’s new approach, intent-based leadership, it quickly spread throughout the ship. If you want to get people to buy in, start modeling what you expect. If letting go of control at work is too challenging, David suggests a simple exercise — Go to a restaurant and ask the server to choose your meal for you. You can give a boundary (e.g. no meat, anything from page three, etc.), but it’s best to keep it broad and learn to trust in a safe setting. Using your turn signal every time you drive is another way to build a habit of signaling intention rather than command and control.
3. Use your words. David and I could have spent hours on the significance of the language used by leaders. Language is key to his leadership philosophy and the topic of his next book. He’s found that language primes behavior. For example, David’s submarine crew often described their procedures as, “For show,” when inspectors were around. After the inspectors left, they used different procedures. This language pattern created a false dichotomy and trivialized the expectations of inspection crews. The solution was to drop “for show” and start using one accurate procedure. The new phrase was, “embrace the inspectors.” Today, as a leadership consultant, David helps organizations update their own language from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Economy. It’s misleading to have an “all hands meeting” for software developers, hired for their minds not their hands. David believes that mindful use of language elevates the integrity of a team, because there is a “Wholeness between I say what I mean and I mean what I say.”
4. Make the default answer useful. If a boss asks, “Do you get it?” the subordinate will want to immediately say, “Yes!” and appear competent. The problem is that this default answer is a hurdle when the answer is, “No.” An open-ended question, such as, “What am I missing?” creates space for clarification.
For more from David Marquet, you can find our video interview by clicking here to go to my YouTube channel.