Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet was given to me by Dom and Jed, two former Royal Marine Commanders and successful business people from the consultancy Albany York, whose work I would throughly recommend to companies looking for coaching on building high performance teams. ( https://www.albanyyork.com/about-us#team) It’s not uncommon for enthusiastic employees to suggest new ideas, only to be told “that won’t work” or “it’s not your job”. People feel frustrated and eventually stop trying or leave the organization altogether. Bosses also feel frustrated when their staff would rather do the bare minimum rather than to innovate or take responsibility. This is the story of Captain David Marquet's unprecedented experiment in the most rigid of environments on the Santa Fe, a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered submarine. He had the courage to operate counter-culture, reengineering the very definition of leadership accepted by the U.S. Navy for as long as it has existed. He took huge risk to do this. The outcome was revolutionary - within a few short months, the crew of the Santa Fe went from worst to first. In today's information age, Human Capital is our most precious resource. It is the 21stCentury weapon of choice. Captain David Marquet's experiment in leadership has far greater application to the entire business world. This is thought leadership. (Charlie Kim, Founder & CEO of Next Jump, Inc.) Several principles from Covey's 7 Habits and 8th of Habit were covered throughout the book and Covey was a big fan of the author's success in empowering his organization.

Embracing the inspectors. Use the opportunities provided by inspection to learn where improvements can be made.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” The typical leader-follower structure is designed to push information up the chain of command to the people who make the decisions. In contrast, Marquet pushed control, or decision-making authority, down to where the information originated. Marquet supervised one of two 60-person crews operating the control room and nuclear reactor. Hoping to generate the passion he felt on Sunfish, Marquet gave the crew more control over their work. Instead of involving himself in details, he tried explaining the objectives and leaving it to the crew to determine how to meet them. But things went badly—the crew made mistakes in maintenance that required redoing work. They missed deadlines and fell behind schedule. For now, we’ll go straight into a short overview of the Leader-Leader approach. Turn the Ship Around with The Leader-Leader Approach

Fake it til you make it" - or, as the author says "Acting your way to new thinking" as a mechanism for control. Even if you feel bad - smile - that will eventually make you feel better. Since Turn the Ship Around! was published in 2013, hundreds of thousands of readers have been inspired by former Navy captain David Marquet’s true story. Many have applied his insights to their own organizations, creating workplaces where everyone takes responsibility for his or her actions, where followers grow to become leaders, and where happier teams drive dramatically better results. 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.” I owe a lot to Captain David Marquet ... not only for turning the Santa Fe around during some REALLY bad times but I learned many lessons on leadership from him that have been invaluable in my post-Navy life. I preach the three legs (control, competence, clarity) of Leader-Leader everyday to empower my people and move the decisions to where the information lives.... I used these principles to turn around the GE Dallas Generator Repair Department, which was in crisis when I arrived in 2010 and now is the best Generator Repair Department in the GE Network.... Now I am tasked with turning around the Dallas Steam Turbine Repair Department.... (Adam McAnally, Steam Turbine Cell Leader at the GE Dallas Service Center and former crewmember, USS Santa Fe) Yet Santa Fe was the ship the PCOs (prospective commanding officers) had joked about in training. A photo of the control room crew carrying on instead of paying attention had gone viral the previous year.Fake it til you make it" - or, as the author says "Acting your way to new thinking" as a mechanism for control. Even if you feel bad - smile - that will eventually make you feel better (it's proven). If you have doubts and don't fully commit to a new thing - it will come through so fake it til it feels natural and only then will you be able to determine the efficacy. Because, if there’s one thing people like more than following is being followed. Everyone can be a leader, in its own fashion. Marquet’s early ideas on leadership came from reading classics and from movies, where plots centered on a heroic leader and his followers. His Naval Academy training reinforced the assumption people are either leaders or followers. However, based on several frustrating early experiences, Marquet began questioning this model of leadership and ultimately rejected it. 1989: The Irish Sea Decentralizing control under a leader-leader system only works when the people receiving increased control have the technical competence or knowledge to make decisions. Marquet and his officers used the following mechanisms to strengthen the crew’s technical competence:

Along with competence, a leader-leader model that decentralizes control also requires clarity. Everyone needs to understand the organization’s goals so that the decisions they make align with what the organization is trying to accomplish. If the purpose isn’t clear, the criteria on which decisions are made may be off base, leading to bad decisions. The traditional leader-follower model practiced in the U.S. Navy and most companies and organizations assumes there are two types of people: leaders who make decisions and followers who implement them. Identify practices and procedures embedded in the organization—the “genetic code”—that dictate control and rewrite them. According to Marquet, there’s a simple reason for this: we’ve lost our step with the times. And this is especially true for leaders and managers! Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.” -Scrum Guide 2020But, “Turn the Ship Around” is a bit different. It’s even more democratic than “ The Leaders We Need.” No matter your business or position, you can apply Marquet's radical guidelines to turn your own ship around. The payoff: a workplace where everyone around you is taking responsibility for their actions, where people are healthier and happier, where everyone is a leader. What? Yet another book on leadership, filled with generic statements focused on WHAT (which is quite straightforward) instead of HOW (the hard part ...)? Not really, not this time. You see, today’s leaders are not much different than the ones who managed the building of the pyramids or the Industrial Revolution. In fact, a pharaoh might do just as good as a company CEO today. The problem is that this good is not good enough.

DON’T BRIEF, CERTIFY is a mechanism for COMPETENCE." - this was fantastic because instead of the chief reading off the process while everyone else's eyes glazed over, the person who would be doing the task would identify the steps that he would be taking and the others would certify that process was correct (technical competence). The 20 th century was the century of workers. The 21 st is the century of leaders. The Leader-Leader Philosophy Is the Future Does your Scrum Team have control? If not, who does? The Scrum Master? Scrum Masters are not there to make decisions or give commands, but to give control to the team so that the team grows in self-management. Scrum Masters influence, facilitate, and help make things transparent so that the team can inspect and adapt the why, what, and how of their work. They also are resolved on removing impediments to self-management and cross-functionality so that their team can thrive. A leader-follower Scrum Master is a non sequitur. Scrum Masters must be leader-leaders. They must give control away so that one day they are almost not even needed. In ConclusionThe best how-to manual anywhere for managers on delegating, training, and driving flawless execution.” —FORTUNE Competence could not rest solely with the leader. It had to run throughout the entire organization.” David Marquet is a former U. S. Navy captain and a successful author on articles and books about leaders and leadership. A 1981 U.S. Naval Academy graduate, he commandeered the nuclear-powered USS Santa Fe submarine from 1999 to 2001, turning its crew from “worst to best” by disturbing the standard practices. Most of the companies today are filled with smart and confident people who can add value to the company if given more freedom and responsibilities. The first step he took in his early days on the ship was to remove the requirement for the Captain to be the final authority to sign-off shore leave (having also been signed off my every intermediate level in the chain of command) and pass the final authority to a sailor’s direct superior. Now I’m a business context this is an odd example - I think this sign-off by the supervisor would be standard practice in most businesses and most where I have worked have taken it further and left the employee to sign off their own leave. That said, it does illustrate his principle well - when there was a chain of sign-off those lower down the chain would then take no real responsibility for or ownership of the decision and the Captain would be too far from the situation and not really best utilised to sign off 150 people’s leave.