These are my notes on Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet.
Classic.
Key Insights
- Divested control only works with a competent workforce that understands the org's purpose.
- Disengaged, dissatisfied employees break the spirits of their colleagues.
- Thinking that we know something is a barrier to continued learning.
- It is contradictory to have an empowerment program whereby you are empowered by your boss.
- I was at my best when give specific goals and broad latitude in how to accomplish them.
- Are you optimizing the org for your tenure, or forever?
- It doesn't matter how smart a plan is if the team cannot execute it.
- When performance of a unit goes down after an official leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.
- Avoiding errors == no new initiatives, no innovation.
- Don't move information to authority, move authority to the information.
- Worries to delegate control usually fall either in lack of technical competence or lack of clarity on what the org is trying to accomplish. Both can be resolved.
- Short, early conversations make efficient work.
- Demand of perfect products the first time around results in significant waste and frustration.
- Trust == I believe you don't lie, but you can still be wrong.
- Use "I intend to ... " to turn passive followers into active leaders:
- It has to include all the rationale of the decision which caused subordinates to think at the next higher level.
- Adherence to the process frequently becomes the objective, as opposed to achieving the objective that the process was put in place to achieve.
- When I heard what my officers where thinking, it made it much easier for me to keep my mouth shout and let them execute their plans.
- Lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance.
- Inspectors == disseminate ideas in the org, learn from others.
- Balancing the courage to hold people accountable for their actions with the compassion for their honest efforts.
- Control without competence is chaos.
- How to design a training program.
- A briefing is a passive activity for everyone except the briefer.
- Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.
- One hour session with supervisors:
- Rule: only talk about long-term issues, and primarily people issues.
- Steps to move to leader-leader.
Mechanisms
Compiled list of mechanism:
- Control mechanisms:
- Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it.
- Act your way to new thinking.
- Short, early conversations make efficient work.
- Use "I intent to ..." to turn passive followers into active leaders.
- Resist urge to provide solutions.
- Eliminate top-down monitoring systems.
- Think out aloud (both superiors and subordinates):
- Also a clarity practice.
- Embrace the inspectors.
- Competence mechanisms:
- Take deliberate action.
- We learn (everywhere, all the time).
- Don't brief, certify.
- Continually and constantly repeat the message.
- Specify goals, not methods.
- Clarity mechanisms:
- 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 behaviours.
- Begin with the end in mind.
- Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.
TOC
- Introduction
- Starting Over
- Part 2 - Control
- Part 3 - Competence
- Part 4 - Clarity
- Chapter 29 - Ripples
Introduction
- Disengaged, dissatisfied employees break the spirits of their colleagues.
- Leader-follower:
- People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act as followers.
- Those who take orders run at half speed.
- Performance of the organization is closely linked to the ability of the leader.
- Leader leaving is a major event.
- People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act as followers.
- Leader-leader:
- Evolutionary steps.
- Divested control only works with a competent workforce that understands the org's purpose:
- Control, competence, clarity.
- As control is divested, both tech competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened.
Starting Over
- Thinking that we know something is a barrier to continued learning.
Chapter 1 - Pain
- It is contradictory to have an empowerment program whereby you are empowered by your boss.
- I was at my best when give specific goals and broad latitude in how to accomplish them.
- Irritated when given a task list.
Chapter 2 - Business as Usual
- Are you optimizing the org for your tenure, or forever?
- It doesn't matter how smart a plan is if the team cannot execute it.
- When performance of a unit goes down after an official leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.
Chapter 4 - Frustration
- Being curious (make sure you know) vs being questioning (make sure subordinate knows).
- Bad: Technical knowledge as the basis of leadership.
Chapter 5 - Call to Action
- Flashlight anecdote: leading by example.
- Little things like lack of punctuality are indicative of much bigger problems.
- Avoiding mistakes became the primary driver for all actions:
- Focus exclusively on satisfying minimum requirements.
- Leave request required 7 approvals == huge delay.
- It was the system, not the people, that failed.
Chapter 7 - I Relieve You!
- Self-reinforcing downward spiral:
- Avoiding errors == no new initiatives, no innovation.
- Shift from avoiding errors to achieve excellence.
- Connecting our day-to-day activities to something larger was a strong motivator for the crew.
- Clarity: Start with Why by Simon Sinek.
Part 2 - Control
- Don't move information to authority, move authority to the information.
Chapter 8 - Change, in a word
- Start at the mid-level managers:
- Starting top-down contrary to a bottom-up leadership philosophy.
- Starting at the bottom: too inexperience people.
- When delegating decision-making authority, I was worried ... that the interests of the command would not be protected. That didn't happen.
- Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it:
- Senior leadership exercise:
- Identify in the org's policy documents where decision-making authority is specified.
- Identify decisions that are candidates for being pushed to the next lower level in the org.
- For easy decisions, draft change. For large decisions, maybe disaggregate.
- Ask each participant to complete the following sentence in a 5x8 card:
- "When I think about delegating this decision, I worry that ..."
- Post cards on the wall, go on a long break, and let the group mill around them.
- Sort and rank worries and begin to attack them.
- Worries usually fall either in lack of technical competence or lack of clarity on what the org is trying to accomplish. Both can be resolved.
- Senior leadership exercise:
Chapter 9 - Welcome Aboard Santa Fe!
- The fear and cost of being different.
- How to embed a cultural change in your org:
- Identify what cultural change is required.
- In a 5x8 card, people complete the sentence:
- "I'd know we achieved [this cultural change] if I saw employees ..."
- Expectation is that the answers will be specific and measurable.
- Allow 5 mins, tape card to wall, go to break, have everyone mill around reading cards.
- Depending on discussions and quality of answers, give everyone a second shot.
- Short and prioritize answers.
- Discuss how to code the behaviours into company's practices.
- Write new practices in appropriate company procedures.
Chapter 10 - Underway on Nuclear Power
- Adding additional verification/review steps to a process == extra work without making anything better.
- Short, early conversations make efficient work.
- Early feedback of unfinished work.
- Not to order but to provide clarity.
- Hierarchy is supposed to protect Commanding Officer time (== highly valuable).
- Demand of perfect products the first time around results in significant waste and frustration.
- Early feedback raised the question:
- "Don't you trust me?"
- Trust == I believe you don't lie, but you can still be wrong.
Chapter 11 - I Intent To ...
- Use "I intend to ... " to turn passive followers into active leaders.
- 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 ...
- Empowered phrases that active doers use:
- I intent to ...
- I plan on ...
- I will ...
- We will ...
- "I intend to" has to include all the rationale of the decision which caused subordinates to think at the next higher level:
- Basically training them to be their boss.
- Disempowered phrases that passive followers use:
- Book recommendations:
Chapter 12 - Up Scope!
- Mechanism: resist the urge to provide solutions:
- If there are a lot of short notice decisions, you are in reactive mode:
- No time to training the team.
- No time to think.
- To get the team thinking:
- Urgent decisions: make it, then the team "red-team" the decision.
- Soon decisions: ask for team input, make the decision.
- Decision can be delayed:
- Force team to provide inputs.
- Don't force team to come to consensus.
- Cherish dissension: if everybody thinks like you, you don't need them.
- If there are a lot of short notice decisions, you are in reactive mode:
Chapter 13 - Who's Responsible?
- Mechanism: Eliminate top-down monitoring systems:
- Avoid system whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing:
- Gives ownership and responsibility.
- You want to keep data collection and measuring processes that simply report conditions without judgment.
- Adherence to the process frequently becomes the objective, as opposed to achieving the objective that the process was put in place to achieve.
- Avoid system whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing:
Chapter 14 - A New Ship
- Mechanism: Think out loud:
- When I heard what my officers where thinking, it made it much easier for me to keep my mouth shout and let them execute their plans.
- As the captain, impart important context and experience to subordinates.
- We aren't comfortable talking about gut feelings or anything with probabilities.
- Lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance.
Chapter 15 - We Have a Problem
- Mechanism: Embrace the Inspectors:
- No being defensive, but taking ownership.
- Inspectors == disseminate ideas in the org, learn from others.
Part 3 - Competence
Chapter 16 - Mistakes Just Happen!
- Balancing the courage to hold people accountable for their actions with the compassion for their honest efforts.
- 7 Steps to Learning from Our Mistakes.
- Mechanism: Take deliberate action.
- Usual ways to avoid mistakes:
- More training:
- Implies lack of knowledge, which can be detected with a test.
- What question would detect it?
- Implies lack of knowledge, which can be detected with a test.
- Add more supervision: unlikely to help.
- More training:
- Mistakes due to people in autopilot.
- We want to engage the brain before action:
- Prior to action, vocalize and gesture towards what you are about to do, even when alone.
- Pause.
- Execute action.
- Even when in emergency.
- Usual ways to avoid mistakes:
Chapter 17 - We learn
- Control without competence is chaos.
-
Mechanism: We learn (everywhere, all the time):
- Training program that employees will want to go to:
- Purpose: increases technical competence, so that
- Increases delegation of decision making, so that
- Increases engagement, motivation and initiative.
- To design, in the next leadership meeting:
- Hand out 4x6 cards.
- Complete:
- "Our company would be more effective if [level] management could make decision about [subject].".
- You fill [level] but the group fills the [subject].
- Cards to the wall, break, mill.
- Select a couple of subjects.
- Ask: what, technically, do the people at this level of management need to know in order to make that decision?
- Cards to wall, break, mill.
- Collect list of topic for training.
- Training program that employees will want to go to:
Chapter 18 - Under Way for San Diego
- A briefing is a passive activity for everyone except the briefer:
- It is not a decision point.
- No one listens to those briefings.
- Mechanism: Don't Brief, Certify.
- In a certification, the person in charge asks them questions:
- It is a decision point: no certification means no go.
- Requires more management: both what to do and who will do it.
- Active: Shift the onus of preparation to participants.
- Everybody responsible to know their job.
- In a certification, the person in charge asks them questions:
Chapter 19 - All Present and Accounted for
- Mechanism: continually and consistently repeat the message:
- Day after day, meeting after meeting, event after event.
- People think they understand, but if they haven't seen it before, it is unlikely that they do.
Chapter 20 - Final Preparations
- Mechanism: specify goals, not methods:
- Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.
- Also a mechanism for Clarity.
- Warn: compliance with procedure supplanting achieving the objective.
Part 4 - Clarity
Chapter 21 - Under Way for Deployment
- Mechanism: built trust and take care of your people:
- Take care != protecting them from the consequences of their own actions.
- Take care == give them every tool and advantage to achieve their aims in life, beyond the job.
Chapter 22 - A Remembrance of War
- Mechanism: use your legacy for inspiration:
- Use past examples to bring clarity to org's purpose.
Chapter 23 - Leadership at Every Level
- My job as the command is to tap into the existing energy of the command, discover the strengths, and remove barriers to further progress.
- Guiding principle: faced with a decision between two courses of action, provide criteria to chose.
- Mechanism: use guiding principles for decision criteria:
- Real ones aligned to org's goals.
- Use them for awards or evaluations.
Chapter 24 - A Dangerous Passage
- Mechanism: use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviours:
- Don't delay it for official/admin rubber-stamp.
- Awards should not pit a teammate against other, but the team against the external world.
- Example: avoid "Top 10%".
- Would hinder collaboration otherwise.
- Gabe Zichermann's blog on gamification.
Chapter 25 - Looking Ahead
- Mechanism: begin with the end in mind:
- One hour session with supervisors:
- Rule: only talk about long-term issues, and primarily people issues.
- Long term: write down end-of-tour awards/goals (1-3 years in future).
- Make goals specific and measurable:
- "How would you know if xxx was improved?"
- One hour session with supervisors:
- Not mentor-mentee sessions, but mentor-mentor:
- Both pars learn as much.
Chapter 26 - Combat Effectiveness
- Mechanism: encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.
Chapter 27 - Homecoming
-
Steps to move to leader-leader:
- Identify where excellence is created:
- Generally interfaces with the customers and the physical world.
- Figure out what decision the people responsible for the interfaces need to make to achieve excellence.
- Understand what is needed for those employees to make those decisions:
- Technical knowledge.
- Understanding org's goals.
- Authority.
- Responsibility for the consequences.
- Identify where excellence is created:
Chapter 28 - A New Method of Resupplying
- Mechanism: don't empower, emancipate:
- Empowerment is necessary but not enough:
- It is still a top-down structure as leader empowers followers.
- You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them:
- You are not their source of power.
- Empowerment is necessary but not enough:
Chapter 29 - Ripples
- Additional benefits:
- Excellence after leader leaving.
- Development of new leaders.
- https://intentbasedleadership.com.
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