A surprisingly useful book on leadership. This book reminded me a lot of It’s Your Ship, as both tell compelling stories of how a captain was able to take a US Navy ship (or in the case of this book, submarine) from the worst performer in its class to the best performer. However, Turn the Ship Around! has the advantage of telling you not only what to do, but also how to do it. It includes a series of practical, hands-on, actionable steps you can take to improve the performance of just about any organization.
Here are some of the key insights for me:
From leader-follower to leader-leader
A central theme of this book is the recommendation to move from a leader-follower model to a leader-leader model.
Most organizations use a leader-follower model, where one person, the leader, makes all the decisions, and everyone else, the followers, does what the leader says. This model made sense in the past, where the goal was to extract physical work from humans (e.g., for manual labor jobs), but it is not a good fit for the modern world, where most of the work is intellectual. If you treat people like followers, they act like followers: with little decision making authority, they have no incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy, or passion. Instead, they tend to follow the leader’s decisions blindly, not thinking through problems fully, not using their creativity, not taking ownership or responsibility, and ultimately, feeling less motivated and engaged. So you could have an organization with hundreds or thousands of people, but only a handful of them, the “leaders,” fully engage their capacity to observe, analyze, and problem-solve, while everyone else just “does what they are told,” with their brain largely shut off. Moreover, you create an unhealthy dependence on the leader: all decisions depend on this one person and their performance, which doesn’t scale, and may fall apart if that leader leaves.
Most organizations would be better off with a leader-leader model, where everyone is treated as a leader, everyone owns a specific subset of decisions, everyone takes ownership and responsibility, and everyone has to think, be creative, and solve problems. This leads to teams that are far more engaged and motivated, perform better, and the performance improvements are enduring, with no dependence on any single leader.
“Our world’s bright future will be built by people who have discovered that leadership is the enabling art. It is the art of releasing human talent and potential. You may be able to “buy” a person’s back with a paycheck, position power, or fear, but a human being’s genius, passion, loyalty and tenacious creativity is volunteered only. The world’s greatest problems will be solved by passionate, unleashed “volunteers.””
To move to a leader-leader model, you must do three things:
- Control: give employees more control and decision making power.
- Competence: ensure employees can develop the skills and knowledge they need to make good use of their new-found control.
- Clarity: ensure everyone is aware of what the organization is trying to achieve, what’s expected of them, what the performance standards are, and so on.
Most of the book focuses on specific, concrete tools to change control, competence, and clarity in an organization.
Delegating control
Here’s a useful exercise for how to push control further down the organization:
- Come up with a list of who owns what decisions currently in your organization.
- From this list, identify decisions that are candidates for being pushed to the next lower level of the organization.
- Next, ask each participant to complete the following sentence on a note card: “When I think about delegating this decision, I worry…”
- Post all the note cards on the wall so everyone can see them.
- Go through all the concerns, and put together a plan for how to address them.
Most of the concerns in (5) will be about either competence, where you’re worried someone lacks the skills or knowledge to make the decision, or clarity, where you’re worried some lacks the visibility into the bigger picture of what the organization is trying to accomplish. Both of these problems can be resolved. Merely writing these out will often be enough for you to know how to resolve these: e.g., setting up training programs or doing a clear job of communicating vision & strategy. There are also numerous techniques discussed in the book for improving competence and clarity.
I intend to…
A key mechanism for divesting control is to shift how you interact: instead of the person higher in the organization making the decision or giving an answer, the person lower in the organization states their intention with “I intend to…” This is not just a trick of language, but a massive change in how you think and behave. Here’s why.
First, notice how the framing here isn’t, “what should I do?” or “could I have permission to …?” but an intent: “here is what I intend on doing.” So right away, the responsibility for figuring out what to do has shifted lower in the organization.
But there’s even more. The goal with the “I intend to…” formulation is that, if you do it right, the person higher in the organization should solely need to say, “very well.” To get to that point, you have to anticipate the questions that person higher in the organization might ask: what concerns will they have? What problems will they worry about? What alternatives will they consider? In order to get to “very well,” you need to share not only your intention, but also the complete thought process behind it: “I intend to do A. This is because I’m trying to solve problem B. I’ve considered options C and D as well, but I think A is the better choice because… I’ve also thought through the risks with A and I think we can mitigate those by…”
This is a critical insight: the “I intend to…” structure forces you to think at the next higher level. If you’re an individual contributor, and you want your manager to say, “very well,” then you need to think at the level of a manager, working through all the questions and concerns that they would consider. If you’re a manager, and you want a “very well” from the VP, then you have to think like a VP; and you’re a VP, and you want a “very well” from the CEO, then you have to think like the CEO.
What seems like a minor turn of phrase actually inverts the entire organization, and gets everyone behaving like a leader: thinking at the next higher level, engaging fully with a problem, thinking through it creatively, and taking ownership and responsibility. So instead of an organization with hundreds of people, but only a handful of them, the “leaders,” fully engaged, you suddenly have hundreds of people all acting as leaders and all using their capacity to observe, analyze, and problem-solve.
“I intend to…” isn’t the only possible formulation. In general, you should be working to shift your organization from passive phrases such as:
“What should I do about…”
“Do you think we should…”
“Could I…”
To more active phrases such as:
“I intend to…”
“I plan on…”
“I will…”
Invert tracking
The “I intend to…” formulation inverts who proposes and thinks through decisions. But what happens after? Someone is still responsible for following up and seeing how that decision played out.
In a leader-follower organization, the leader often checks in on each item they care about: “what’s the status with X? Is Y working as we expected? When will Z be completed?”
In a leader-leader organization, this is another thing that you should invert. People lower in the organization should be the ones tracking the items they are responsible for and proactively sharing status updates with folks higher in the organization: “Last week, I started on X, and here’s where we are now… Y is working even better than expected… I wanted to give you a heads up that we’re working on Z, but we’re about a week behind…”
By making it each person’s job to proactively track their work, they now take full ownership for that task. It becomes their responsibility to think about it regularly, to keep stakeholders up to date, and to proactively course correct if problems are developing.
Think out loud
A key practice to divesting control is to require everyone to “think out loud”: that is, to announce, in an informal way, what you are about to do, just before you do it. This has a few powerful benefits:
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This gives everyone else on your team a better understanding of what you’re doing and the thought process behind it. This keeps everyone more in sync and aligned.
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This helps avoid two types of errors. The first type is a normal mistake that you might make, where by sharing your thought process out loud before acting, someone else on your team might hear an error in what you’re saying, and jump in to help before you act. The second type is the mistake made by someone else, where if they saw your action, they might think it’s wrong, but only because they are missing something themselves, and by sharing your thought process out loud before acting, you help them avoid incorrectly trying to jump in when they don’t need to.
How you think out loud depends on the context, of course. In a navy submarine, or in an office, you do this by literally speaking out loud before acting. In a remote company, you might do this by sharing what you’re going to work on in chat (e.g., in Slack) shortly before starting on each task.
Focus on achieving excellence, not avoiding errors
If you set your goal as “avoid errors,” you are destined to fail. You might succeed at reducing the number of mistakes, but never to zero, and every time you do make a mistake, you’ll feel like a failure. With such a goal, the incentives are all wrong too: even when you succeed, “your reward is no punishment.” It also sets a low bar, striving for just enough competence to avoid mistakes, but no more.
The better way to frame it is to set your goal as “achieve excellence.” This way, as performance improves, you can feel more and more successful, despite the occasional mistake. And, of course, as performance improves, reducing the number of such mistakes is a lovely side benefit. But it’s not the focus. The focus is on continuously raising the bar.
Training programs that work
Giving employees control before they have the necessary competence to properly exercise that control is a recipe for disaster. In organizations that have relied on the leader-follower model for too long, you may find that the “muscles” for being a leader and taking control may have atrophied amongst many employees. A key part of the solution is to institute training programs. However, in many organizations, the reaction to training programs is a big groan and sigh.
Here’s how to set up a training program employees will want to participate in:
- Define explicitly that the goal of the training program is to increase competence in specific abilities.
- Explain that increased competence is the pre-requisite for increasing decision making. Those who demonstrate the requisite level of competence will get to make more decisions, have more autonomy, and will feel more engaged and motivated.
Now employees will actually want to attend training.
The next thing is to figure out what competence to train for. Here’s an exercise to figure that out:
- Have you leadership team sit down and give everyone a bunch of note cards.
- Fill out the note cards by completing the sentence: “Our company would be more effective if employees at level X could make decisions about subject Y.”
- Post the cards on the wall and go around the room and ask, “what do employees at level X need to know in order to be able to make decisions about Y effectively?”
- Collect all the responses, and now you have a list of topics to cover in your training programs.
Rating: 5 stars
Yevgeniy Brikman
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like my books. If you need help with DevOps, reach out to me at Gruntwork.