There is not an aircraft or aviator in sight for this one, but the lessons from “Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders” cross the boundaries of role and service.
In this book, Capt. L. David Marquet tells the story of his leadership successes and failures at various points of his career, and how his leadership style evolved as time went on. Culminating with his time as captain of the Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine USS Santa Fe (SSN 763), he frames and focuses the story on his use of a “Leader-Leader” style to encourage his Sailors to take ownership of their particular area of expertise. That intentional and aggressive delegation ultimately resulted in improved morale and performance. Marquet notes the difficulty not only in changing the ship’s organizational culture, but also the internal struggle to change his leadership style to the one he wanted. At one time included on the Chief of Naval Operations’ and a slew of other reading lists, this volume is well worth your time.
—David Byrd,
Editor in Chief
Review by Madilynn Hershberger
People often turn to books to learn about leadership and participate in high-minded debates at their book club about what new personality quiz will unlock the secrets of why a team is falling behind or review the best new organizational structure will fix all their problems. While the concept Navy Capt. L. David Marquet explores in “Turn the Ship Around” is not entirely new, his approach takes aim at aspirations discussed in many leadership books and puts them to the test in a real-world environment. He takes the true story of his failures, his trials and his successes and presents them in actionable ways, making them relevant well beyond his operating environment. “Turn the Ship Around!” does far more than discuss the theory of leadership; it puts it into perspective, and it lets us into the author’s head as he grapples with all the decision points and uncertainties that come with shifting the paradigm of leadership.
But how do you develop a leader? Is it something you are born with or is it something you learn? On that topic, what even defines a leader and how do we reinforce that construct in our society? Marquet opens with a detailed exploration of leadership constructs as they existed when he was a department head on USS Will Rogers (SSBN 659) in 1989. He details the frustration with the traditional top-down leadership style within the Navy, dubbing it a “Leader-Follower” style, the overwhelming responsibility it places on the leader and the complacency it forces on the followers. With a single point of failure for all decisions made on the submarine, the crew lacked ownership of their work. This style requires leadership to be an expert in all elements of every job, a feat that is not often reasonable to attain. And most critically, the awards and promotional system valued short-term results by assessing effectiveness during a captain’s tenure rather than over long periods of time. This limited any one captain’s desire to complete systematic changes that ensured an enduring quality of service past their service.
Several years later, as the commanding officer onboard USS Santa Fe (SSN 763), Marquet invites us to consider the “Leader-Leader” style. Leader-Leader pushes decision-making authority to the lowest possible level that it resides with the relevant expertise. It encourages vocal accountability at all levels by discouraging blind obedience. It establishes the concepts of declarations of intent and learning to respond to mistakes that treat the source of an issue. It elevates education and curiosity at every level. And, most important, it provides concrete examples of all these elements in action.
The key to ensuring the Leader-Leader style succeeds in changing your organizational culture is to embrace the various “Mechanisms for Control, Competence and Clarity” he references throughout the book. Examples include “Embracing the Inspectors, Establishing Guiding Principles for Decision Criteria, Building Trust and Taking Care of Your People, Specifying Goals Not Methods, Continually and Consistently Repeat the Message, and Taking Deliberate Action.” Through each of these mechanisms, Marquet sought to build a curious and engaged team, balancing accountability with compassion, and ensuring every member of their the crew not only also knew where they fit in on the boat but were aware of the effects of their individual contributions to the whole.
Throughout the book, Marquet internally struggled with his decision to turn leadership on its head aboard Santa Fe. He often found himself defaulting back to wanting to give orders, desiring a faster decision-making process than the situation warranted. However, as he often reflects when these urges hit him, if he had, the crew’s ownership and creativity in their decision-making would have been stifled and the ultimate, long-term reward of a consistently successful submarine long after Marquet vacated his role would never be achieved. Even as a firm believer in the concept, Marquet said it was still a struggle to shift the paradigm and the culture even within himself.
Marquet leaves us with a compelling series of true stories from his time onboard Santa Fe. He shares his moments of failure and the steps he took to correct himself. He shares his crew’s successes and the moments they inspired him to keep striving toward his goal of a leader-leader dynamic. Most importantly, Marquet leaves us with an actionable account of how he took a submarine with notoriously low promotion and re-enlistment rates to one known for having the best leadership culture in the Navy. He takes us beyond the theory and leaves us with real-world implementations to better empower and engage our workforce and train our future leaders, a far more actionable plan than any personality quiz.
Madilynn Hershberger is a lead interoperability engineer at Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division. 