David Marquet, Turn The Ship Around

L. David Marquet is a retired United States Navy captain and bestselling author of Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language. He was the commander of the submarine USS Santa Fe. He turned the submarine from the worst in the fleet to being the most successful by using a leader-leader model of leadership. He became captain of the submarine in 1999 and since his retirement the submarine has continued to win awards.

Since then he has worked as a leadership expert and he speaks to audiences globally about creating workplaces where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work. He taught previously at the Columbia University School of professional studies.

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Transcript

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david uh absolutely excited and privileged to have you on this episode of leadership bites welcome hey thanks for having me on your show guys well i can't tell you how how happy i am i'll have done an introduction to who you are and i think a lot of people probably will know who you are but i'll cover that in the introduction and just wanting to keep this punchy and to keep this in a kind of a space and place where there's immediate value i wanted to pull on your experience and so i just have a couple of questions that i'd like to kind of offer to you just to get your response if we're okay to move into that space yeah sure fantastic so my um i think my interest comes from people that have trodden the path of leadership very often have examples of the moments maybe where they had leaps in their learning because you know there's there's a there's a path forward which is made up of years of experience but that's hard to maybe talk about specifically but there's often a a person a moment a book a revelation a disaster whatever it is and i just wonder if you could share one or two poignant moments from your career that go those definitely helped me learn about myself or or to develop and move forward i'd love to hear a few of those yeah so of one of the critical moments for me was shortly after i took over as a captain of the nuclear-powered submarine uss santa fe and i'd come up through the navy system and i was being promoted on the strength of my ability to tell people what to do and get them to do it and make good decisions and i was deeply deeply deeply rooted in that paradigm of leadership leaders and followers management and workers how other how else could it possibly be uh and so i show up on the uss santa fe now i'd spent a year uh training to take over a different submarine which was a different kind of submarine okay and what happened was the santa fe wasn't doing well it was the worst performing submarine in the fl in the navy and the had the worst morale and the captain to his credit in my mind said i'm not the person for this i resign a year early so the navy hadn't done the normal they hadn't sequenced someone into to come replace him so at very short notice two weeks notice they told me hey you're not going to go where you thought you're going to go to the santa fe different kind of submarine oh by the way it's the worst performing submarine and it has the worst morale and you don't know the ship better than that you should be fine[ __ ] them crack on and and so here's here's the picture of the the ceremony but the reality was i looked like this inside i was i was really quite nervous anxious and concerned but you don't really can't really show that i mean you're a submarine commander you don't want to be vulnerable and i gave an order very early on that couldn't be done it was a very simple thing it was about shifting into the second gear on an engine that only had one gear and when the navy went to the newest ship they sent the the navy's constantly simplifying the machinery because simpler machinery fewer moving parts breaks less cost less cheaper to maintain more reliable so you want to make it exactly as you want to get as simple as you can and uh with santa fe being one of the newest ships ship i'd never been on kind of never been on before that[Music] this this motor now had uh one speed but on all the older ships was two speed motor anyway i um i suggested going to second gear on this one speed motor and it came to light hey can't do it blah blah blah and nothing really happened but the thing that really shocked me and rocked me back on my heels was the fact that the officer ordered it and when i asked him if he knew about it he said yes and well why did you order it because you told me to and wow in yeah now if you're listening to this and say oh that would only happen in the military yeah i don't know commercial spice i can list a hundred corporations volkswagen wells fargo blockbuster wherever whatever where people just do what they're told i mean it is the number one behavior in a corporation that get you advanced attach yourself to someone else and do what do what they want you to do yeah and it's designed that way the organization is designed that way we do say we do sprinkle fairy tales say oh but i really want you to think but the fundamental organizational design is for compliance and conformity not for thinking and we we can tamper with the edges but it doesn't really make a fundamental difference my thought was oh i need to give better orders i got to make better decisions this had always been my thought in the past but on the santa fe it was because it was a brand new ship that was unfamiliar to me i was like well how am i possibly going to learn everything before i kill everybody there's no way so the problem wasn't i gave a bad order the problem was i was the one giving orders and this was my damasking moment where i realized all my leadership training all of it and and i would dare say basically all leadership training on the planet 90 of it is about telling people what to do and getting them to do it and making good decisions and it's not helpful it was that it was the winning formula for the industrial revolution but is not the winning formula for thinking organizations because it's not about thinking we need to optimize the organization not for doing but for thinking and we need to balance it with doing so we need doing and thinking but right now most organizations are 99 doing one percent thinking now there's some a few people at the top we reserve those spots those are the thinking spots and they make decisions and tell everyone else what to do so there's two problems for this number one we're not activating the thinking of many people in the organization so we're missing out on what they what they know it's bad for the organization but it's also horrible for them for as human beings just to show up to work and just be a cog in the machine and so that's number one number two it's fundamentally coercive because we separate the people who are making the decisions from the people who are doing the work the people who are doing the work are not making decisions about the work somebody else is making decisions about the work and so everybody in every level of hierarchy has two problems number one they're trying to control somebody else and they're being controlled by their boss both of those things are tremendous sources of stress because you can't control somebody else so you're trying to control something you fundamentally cannot control and you in turn are being controlled which also doesn't feel good and we have studies here in the united states that show the cost of the stress and the relationship to toxic workplaces is over 200 billion dollars a year and was the fifth leading cause of death this is pre-coveted fifth leading cut fifth leading cause of death in the united states is toxic workplaces why because it's fundamentally designed to be stress inducing and so we don't we can't just tinker on the edges with this approach what we need to do is let the people who are doing the work make make as many fundamental decisions about the work as possible and it and it comes down to the is baked into our language that's the problem you can say whatever you you can you can dream up and write policies about whatever you want but if you show up and you run a meeting the same way you ran the meeting two years ago the same way you ran that your your parents ran a meeting that the ceo ten years ago ran you're not changed nothing's changed and that's what we see well that's fascinating and again i have a sneaky suspicion you know as i always do when i speak to somebody like yourself that i could spend a couple of days with you on this so uh keep keeping it tight um i'm i'm i'm really alert to what you're talking about i've also become quite alert i think to another thing is that people need to be developed in themselves as much as they do in the role primarily because what i also see is that people put themselves into a submissive state sometimes even if they're being asked not to and what i mean by that is the market shifts covid happens etc whatever it is and it becomes harder to get a job out there they've got a mortgage they've got a second kid on the way whatever it is and even if they've got the recognized guru of leadership in in the organization their fear manifests in a submissive state and because they're fearful of losing job and all those kind of things and one thing i'm i'm highly alert to is that even if you are actually a really skilled leader there is something about the organization has to be more than the individual i had gary ridge on the podcast who's the md of wd-40 he talks you're very much about we're a tribe and we're coaches and not managers and you know that that kind of thing but i'm i'm just super alert that even when a company tries its best and tries really hard there are still times when people do that to themselves because of their own fear and i just wonder if you observe that where i'm giving you permission and yet you're still not stepping up and what you might do to bridge that gap because it's not technically what you're doing it's the reaction they're having to you know it's an interesting conversation for you yeah so the way we think about it is the leader's job is to create the environment where it's safe for people to participate it being bold and if you're looking for bold behavior it needs to come from a place of safety not from a place of fear you can you can goad people and scare them into once jumping but then they age they all jump in different directions it's not organized and it doesn't keep working it doesn't get everyone's best thinking so leaders say oh my job is to make it as safe as possible if if you're the employee the employee's job is no matter how safe the environment feels i'm going to be bold i'm going to share what i think i'm going to speak up and i see things differently now you say oh people say oh it's up to you to make a decision i think these people they're a little bit deluding themselves and they're blaming the the team when they really haven't made made it easy to to for the team to speak up i'm guessing but because i'm just based on what we've seen in 100 corporations they're still running the meetings the old way they're going to talk about it and then they're going to vote and they're going to say look everyone voted the same way yeah that's because you structure the meeting incorrectly they're going to ask binary questions they're going to say things like so we should launch the product next week right and then they're going to complain because they didn't get any descending opinions well that whole sentence was was a bad way to do it the way adding that and adding that right at the end is is designed to suppress different opinions does that make sense we good here it's it's coercion those are all small small coercions and so we're actually coercing over and over again every binary question is a micro coercion because i'm trying to force someone to take a binary position in a highly complex world for something about the future you're gonna say oh did you go to the game last night okay that can be binary but we're gonna say should we launch the product yeah the decision is binary but the input's never binary it's like how strong how confident are you in the product start the question with the word how over and over and over again so i s what i see is here's a very simple here's a simple example how this plays out on a cross-country flight lady stands up falls over she faints she stands up too fast and she faints the lights come on all the flight attendants rush over are you okay are you okay yeah i'm i'm fine i'm and she's sort of shaking i'm fine they put her in the seat next to me which is empty and she's sort of recovering and pretty soon they all quiet down they go back to their they turn the lights back off and i say how are you not a binary question the problem with are you fine everyone says yeah of course i'm fine i'm fine i was on a bike riding one of the guys in our in our bike group crashed and he's lying on the ground we stop and we're looking at him he's like i'm okay i'm okay yeah he had broken his pelvis he wasn't okay look the problem isn't him saying he's okay the problem is us saying are you okay that's the wrong question it's how do you feel where does it hurt and we are just conditioned in the wrong we are programmed to speak the industrial age language and then we blame our team and we say well where's your thinking because you're managing me like a cog in a machine every word you say is programmed to get me to go along with what you want me to do so does the craft of asking the right kind of question and then there's the environment that gives me the safety to respond to it it's the same thing the environment is created by a quote the question anything now you could attain handle when people make mistakes which they always will we say what did we learn it's always about learning what do we learn everything has two dimensions what did we do what did we learn what did we do what did we learn if all if your only dimension is what did we do then you're going to have failures what did we do well we didn't quite do we didn't quite get there i have a goal for this year which i'm very close to making but i might not make it i have a fitness goal at the end of the year and[Music] so if that's all i'm focused on it's going to feel like a failure but if you say well oh what did i do what did i learn well what did i learn well i you always learn something right so it mitigates the sense of failure and we can get better it's a it's about getting better yes there's an interesting relationship i think between the well especially i'm from the commercial space i i don't know your space that you're talking about at all but that expectation of an end game that can be quite selfish for people i.e people are in private equity companies they've got an earn out or bosses that can get a certain bonus so you know that that kind of um and it's not about running a kibbutz but you know balancing the human doing and the human being kind of thing and actually having a sense of social responsibility i'm not a big fan of the word corporate social responsibility but just social responsibility and asking come down to that um and again i'm not about get rid of the profits but i'm worth it i'm with you here's here's what we see it's it's very clear if you're doing quote social responsibility out of a sense of charity that's that's to me great have a charity just give the money away that's corporate social responsibility to me yeah run a charity fine do that but yeah here's the thing you're the people in your company are number one your customer is not number one you your job as a leader is to take care of the people in your company and the people in your company will take care of the customer if your company if you say customers number one then the people in your company the doing the care and the feeding are number two so we work with mcdonald's and i'm in a mcdonald's and franchise i'm standing in the back and the shift manager the team meets before the shift and shift managers sort of barking at the people only two pickles blah blah blah and don't forget what happened yesterday okay now go out there and serve hamburgers with a lot of empathy like really you know screw you because if i don't get treated with empathy how am i gonna treat the customer with any kind of empathy so the way the path look you could get rich with a very short-term focus a lot of people have done it i think ultimately at the end of the at the end of your life it's a relatively hollow uh approach to legacy i think long term and we know guys compare costco which was run by jim senegal costco is a big box store here in the united states quiet not a big brash guy no one ever heard of them and in 1980 if you had invested same amount of money in costco and ge you would have way more i don't know the number 100 times more money in costco right now but then we have jack wells big and flashy blah blah blah and then crash yeah and he had a certain genius for achievement but not for leadership because as soon as he left the thing fell apart his his disciples were basically disasters wherever they went and that's not to me leadership happens the day you leave i'm fascinated by you know this idea of you know momentum isn't leadership you know and if the product or the market is allowing you to have momentum that's not in itself great leadership it's uh and a lot of people think that they are the cause of success when actually it's happening in spite of them i see that a lot right well we always when good luck happens we that's that's my talent i made that happen exactly um and i've been the beneficiary of of a tremendous benef if i were a submarine i could be the most famous ever submarine commander in denmark write a book in danish and there's five million people who could read it but so there's a lot of luck involved but we should always remember that that there was there's luck involved but and when but when you are lucky and you're ready then you can um okay you can take you can take advantage of it but certainly for us leadership the path to long-term success is through your people it's through taking care of your people and creating a thinking team creating a team which consistently makes good decisions organizations can tell you to the tenth of a penny what all the different pieces they're making building a car they can tell you what that screw costs and when you ask them well what did it cost to make the decision to build this car like something why did you use these kind of tires or why did you place the gas tank where you placed it no idea we have no idea what our decisions are costing us so we always think in two dimensions we have decision making factory and then we have the factory factory where we're making the whatever it is the product that we're making and then the decisions which improve the product the job this is leadership the decision-making factor because it's about thinking it's about human interaction it's designing in human interactions that activates and allows people to express their thinking in in a most effective way this while you're in the organization we call that achievement you're a great achiever you're that's a great accomplishment that's a great achievement it's not great leadership until you leave and then we see how the organization does yeah so in your kind of space high performance and people that actually cause problems but are high performers and i think i see a lot of organizations but for foul of they actually have a certain amount of incredible talent but it's you know they they just pareto's law kind of stuff in play and when those people are you know good contributors that's a beautiful thing but when they're maybe malcontents or saboteurs or whatever it is but they bring home the bacon so to speak and i just wonder your not so much your tolerance but your approach to people who are technically excellent and worth every penny but at the same time cause massive issues i just wonder how i mean how you how you face into those kind of people and it depends what kind of a company you're running i i it's hard for you for me to imagine in my experience going from your history from your past when you're in those places and spaces somebody who's a bloody great performer but caused emotional problems with people it was a sort of well you have to get it okay on a submarine nothing happens no one person is that valuable i i would get rid of them you have to get rid of that person it the the there's we we somehow get enamored and the the same thing with why are we paying ceos 2 000 times the average because they're so you really think this person is so much better at making decisions well again that's a fundamentally flawed approach because that's not the ceo's job the ceo's job is to create an organization you got 20 000 people working in your company isn't there brain power worth something no no we're going to bank it on the ceo making the right call well how about there are hundreds and thousands of little decisions that happen all day long to the organization that add up to determine success or failure now if if you're fundamentally in the wrong business then yeah that's that's that's going to be a problem but your organization will detect that they'll notice it sales will start dropping off it'll be harder for the salesman to sell the product the the people that are talking to are going to start talking about well you know there's this other thing have you guys heard and in the right organization that gets filtered and it gets responded to and the organization reacts and and changes to it yeah you can't i mean i'm guessing i i i don't know i guess there may be you know what i i'm going to just go out on a limb and say there is no such thing we've seen so during the financial crisis there were some some hedge funds over here that got it exactly right this is the 2008 they they saw the thing they saw the implosion coming they bet against the mortgage markets they made billions of dollars they were they they're on their own private islands of their own private yachts and then and then and then they don't repeat and then everyone throws money at them and then they underperform for the next 10 years just so just because you made a great decision once now you may say that's all i need yeah all i need is one good decision make a billion dollars i'm done fine my family said for generations okay but i don't think i mean i don't know uh one of the exercises we do with with uh ceos sometimes is we have them say right you just got an email from god who said this is your last day at midnight tonight you're gonna you're gonna die and what are you what are you thinking about just just jot down your thoughts for the next 20 minutes most of them don't talk about money they talk about they talk about people and there's a there's an interesting little book a nurse in australia wrote five uh wishes of the dying or something like that and really so she's a hospice nurse and she's it's a chance to talk to people who are near death and the things they talk about and they talk about they don't talk about oh i wish i'd made more money that is not one of the top i just do a spoiler alert top five so yeah i you know what's important in your life and you gotta you gotta i call it fast forward you gotta take take the take the movie of your life and play it to the end imagine or at least play it a year in the future or 10 years in the future and like well what what is it what is what is it about what you're trying to get people to move away from just being task focused to say listen jump to that point where actually you'll actually know what's really important to you and connect with that now and actually if that is a true thing then start behaving like that now yeah yeah i i feel that yeah another thing is i think we also we view we spend too much time what i call behind our own eyeballs my sense of the world is i'm looking out through my eyeballs and in me whatever is whatever i am is behind my eyeballs looking at the world through my eyeballs and i say get out from behind your own eyeballs and basically you want to be over here put yourself over here look back at yourself in a meeting imagine okay i'm sitting over there and i'm looking at me what do i think this was on a live video i have to say this was a live video stream and the people that you care about were watching would they be proud of you would they be going oh my god and very often having that third party perspective and if you think they'd be proud of you well you know crack on but if you if you know in your heart they'd be embarrassed then you know do something else right yeah yeah it's an interesting one so in in your time of developing and nurturing talent and bringing people forward you know i often you know i often say what's the best piece of advice that you've ever received but i've actually started to ask a different question which is what's the best bit of advice you've ever given which is a slightly different take on it and may make you think but i'd love to know the answer if you've got one well i guess the best piece of advice i've given is advice i've given to myself um and and there's there's a couple of things number one is only contr all only control what you can control just control what you can control and the only thing you control is yourself and give up give up trying to control everybody else just give it up you can influence their behavior but it comes by controlling your own behavior so what we have instead of instead of leaders i walk standard situation i walk up to you i say hey boss here's a problem what should i do well either my boss tells me or they'll say well what do you think uh we should do and um i'm like well i don't know you tell me okay we'll do this so and then i get lecture because i've taken enough initiative and what they can do is they cannot answer the question they can say even ask me what do i think is that sometimes a too big of a bridge you want to start with what do you see because what do you see is observation description which is unemotional even what you think can be feel emotional because it can be judged which is what what you see does not feel that judgmental is oh i see four rooms i see a wall i see some lights it's observations it's that that's where you start they can't control themselves they can't help but speak up or be the way they are and so they're then they push it on other people oh you're empowered but i refuse to shut up that's the classic and[Music] if your happiness is dependent upon the behavior of other people you're screwed yeah good luck with that yeah good luck with that i had this conversation my with my my mom she was upset my kids were all in their 30s now but you know earlier um in their 20s oh they didn't send me they didn't send a thank you note and i'm like well don't send them a present next year no no no make them send me a thank you will you are you i'm really upset they didn't tend to think well you that's your problem why why is there action have any controlling your happiness so now you're you're you're in a game you can't win because now you have to control other people in order to get them to do stuff that you think is going to make you happy it's a loser's game so stop trying to control other people and i guess that's my big piece of advice i find which is interesting when you are inverted commas in control and that's interesting conversation for people i guess yeah i say people the team's behaviors need to be coordinated highly coordinated but not when you really have it going right people's behaviors are coordinated but they're not controlled so it is a picture is a team where everyone is doing things announcing them and synchronizing in in a in this beautiful ballet uh but there's a lot of communication people say i'm doing this i'm about to doing this on the submarine it might be flooding on torpedo to lining up torpedo initializing gyros raising the periscope aligning the sonar and people are announcing this that's what it would sound on on the santa fe and i could say because they were announcing it i i could always stop it i say stop don't do that hold on for a second i need this other thing to happen first but what normally what we see is in the movies is one person the captain saying initialize sonar line up the torpedo and so we're controlling things which a makes things slower b steals people's ownership and doesn't get and it doesn't distribute the thinking we've we've we've uh created one singularity of thinking and if that thinker makes the wrong decision we're all dead i love that phrase actually uh distributed think distributed thinking i think that's a it's a it's an easy thing to say but it's there's a huge amount of stuff to unpack in there which we haven't got time for now yeah yeah that's a that's a massive thing about permission safety to do so being trained enough well enough to do it there's a lot in there yeah exactly yeah right and it's not just oh i have an opinion on something i don't know anything about that's not thinking that's just an opinion yeah exactly like thank you for it but yeah this is actually a nuclear reactor you actually need to know something so or an airplane or surgery or internet security what you're talking about is fascinating because i my little boy had a an asthma attack a couple of years ago and the ambulance came incredibly quickly and of course they told me to get out of the way you know because i can i just yeah you know as in your opinion sir you know but if you just step to the side and uh and of course what i did say was them calling off you know this is what i'm doing the check well i'll get the pump and they they i don't have to look at you but i'm hearing and so they didn't have to watch each other and it was a ballet and then when they'd basically saved his life and you're stood there going holy shmoley because it's their day job but to you you've just seen this a miracle a miracle we got in the ambulance and we were going to the hospital and my little boy was fine and then they did a debrief and they went um right anything we should think about not anything we did wrong not anything we did right so then we're gonna just give each other a group hug but anything we should think about and they did this for a bit and i turned around and said can i just ask why you did that and they go and not wait till the end of the shift or they go yeah because we might have another one in a minute and is there i thought yeah of course of course it might happen again in literally five minutes and if it does anything we should have thought about and i thought oh this is this is what i mean there's obviously a hierarchy there was a supervise you could tell there was a hierarchy but it wasn't in play and that was i imagine what we're talking about here that's exactly right what you described is exactly what what i think the highest performing teams the way they operate the hierarchy comes in play two months earlier when we said okay when we arrive on scene who's going to do what and how are we going to interact and i've gone through training videos american heart association training videos of how teams should interact to heart attacks where the doctor is directing every action and this is fundamentally in my mind a flaw it's a it's a it's fragile it's flawed because of two reasons number one it's very fragile we we think that being in control makes it more safe and reliable it's once advised looking out at the back of one brain looking at through the eyes as you said right yeah and if the doctor forgets something it's gonna be it's gonna make it harder for the team these are all probabilities so it's going to be harder for someone on the team to speak up and secondly it's not invoking everybody's thinking we're as good as one person but we have eight people on the team yeah stupid i love it listen i'm going to respect time here dave yeah and um you know i often say i could you know i could keep going until you lost your patience so i'm gonna keep it at the good side and just from my perspective just thank you so much for taking that time just to come on the episode and i'm just going to press stop now and we'll have two seconds but thank you thank you so much for coming on cheers[Music] you