“Turn
the ship around!” of L. David Marquet, former nuclear submarine commander, is a
book published by Penguin Business, in 2019, telling us a true story, the story of how the crew of the submarine Santa Fe “became fully engaged and the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet”. Basically it is a book about why and how should we turn followers into leaders in our organizations.
In terms of structure, the book is divided into four parts: the first one is “Starting Over”, the second one is “Control”, the third one is “Competence” and the fourth and last one is “Clarity”.
“Starting over” is like an introduction to the book, in which the author refers what was not ok with the way that the crew of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine, was working. They were working only like followers resulting in “poor morale, poor performance and the worst retention in the fleet”.
“Control”, “Competence” and “Clarity”, the other three chapters of the book, are at the same time the three groups of mechanisms of the leader-leader model proposed by Marquet. This model is the main subject of “Turn the ship around!” and, according to the author, it brings great improvements in effectiveness and morale, making the organization stronger and more resilient. Less control and more responsibility (meaning that technical competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened) are other important aspects of this model, when comparing with the leader-follower model usually used in the Navy, for example.
Underlining the importance of each one of us take part of the leadership, David Marquet begins and ends the book with the same idea. In this sense, at the beginning, we have: “Out greatest struggle is within ourselves” (p.1) and, at the end, we can read: “(…) 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”” (p.216).
In fact, control is the core of this model. It is “giving employees control of what they work on and how they work”, “letting them make meaningful decisions”. For that, he believes that competence and clarity are “the two enabling pillars” (p.206). In the 27th chapter – homecoming -, we can find a list of everything that is part of each one of these mechanisms; this chapter works like a synthesis of all main ideas of the book, reproduced in the following table elaborated by me:
As
presented by Marquet, the leader-leader model is beneficial for all inside an
organization. However, this does not mean that everything will be perfect and
without failure, especially because…“You are destined to fail.”, writes
Marquet. People are focused in achieving excellence, not in the error reduction.
So, we need to fail many times until we can make better, just like the Irish
author Samuel Beckett said: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again.
Fail again. Fail better.” Achieving excellence is only possible through the
continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement, commitment, courage, initiative, innovation, intimate technical knowledge, integrity, empowerment, teamwork, openness, timeliness are the guiding principles of leadership followed by USS Santa Fe. Although, each organization is different and unique, I believe these principles can be applied to any organization, including, for example, a software company. They are the result of the idea of “leadership at every level”, as defended by Marquet.
All the book seems to be inspired in Agile as philosophy. This is valid not only to these guiding principles of leadership followed by the submarine, but it also seems to be possible when we try to find some correspondence between the list contained in the table above to the leader-leader model and some of the 12 Agile principles, such as the fifth and the nineth. Remembering the fifth principle, “supporting and trusting individuals to be motivated and get the job done”, Marquet defends under the mechanism of clarity to “Build trust and take care of your people”. The nineth principle “technical excellence/quality”, could also be found in Marquet’s model, again under the mechanism of clarity: “Achieve excellence”.
So, do you want to turn followers into leaders? This is a good book to understand how and why to do that in our organization/company. And... If you don’t have much time to read all the book now, from the beginning to the end, you can always use the 27th chapter as a guide and/or starting point and when needed, read the chapter where the idea is presented with a practical example/situation in the book…
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