Turn your ship around. (Turn the Ship Around!)

I read this interesting book about leadership in a few days. The whole book is the story of the captaincy of David Marquet, who tells about his approach, with which he turned the submarine Santa Fe from the worst to the best in just a few years. David describes his approach as a transition from a “leader-followers” model to a “leader-leaders” model. To this end, he highlights three key themes.

• Control - decision-making and control over their implementation, David suggests transferring it to the level where it can be done most effectively. Something like OKR. (objectives and key results)It's a place where goals come from above, and people on the ground are already figuring out how to achieve them and what key results will be achieved. As a result, in David’s leadership model, the captain is not the person who tells you what to do and makes decisions for everyone. Officers and petty officers can make decisions in their area of responsibility and be responsible for them. (It is clear that despite all that is happening on the submarine still accountable captain.)
• Competency Transferring decision-making and control without the right competencies is a shot in the foot. So another pillar of David’s approach is to improve the team’s competencies. His approach to incidents and dealing with them is similar to that of SRE. (site reliability engineers) and specifically postmortems. Interestingly, David switches the team from error avoidance to operational excellence. (operational excellence). It focuses people on continual improvement and learning in the process, instead of just trying not to screw up.
• Clarity In the “leader-leaders” model, it is important that local decision-makers understand the overall purpose of the organization. Businesses often talk about vision, mission, strategy, and so on. In the book, David describes what it looked like for employees on a submarine:)

From an interesting point of view, David’s approach to leadership worked well within the Navy and many of his achievements became the de facto standard within a few years. (Somewhere de jure.). Plus, many officers from the Santa Fe continued to serve in the Navy and receive promotions, as they absorbed this leadership model and carried it on.

P.S. When reading a book, you can collect a very good list of questions for reflection, which the author gives at the end of each chapter. This will allow you to assess how well things are going on your submarine:)

#Management #Leadership #SelfDevelopment #Psychology #ForParents #SystemThinking #ProjectManagement