Home > Work > Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
61 " The guiding principles needed to do just that: provide guidance on decisions. "
― L. David Marquet , Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
62 " having the courage to change, and tolerating failures. "
63 " Continuous Improvement Continuous improvement is how we get better. We continually seek ways to learn from processes and improve them and ourselves. The chain of command has the obligation to develop and institute mechanisms (such as conducting debriefs) to achieve continuous improvement. "
64 " Empowerment We encourage those below us to take action and support them if they make mistakes. "
65 " I have seen this, for instance, in an organization that talked about safety first but whose real interests were in profits and accepting degradations in safety if they seemed “reasonable.” After all, the safest thing to do is to shut down and send everyone home. But not acknowledging that they would be balancing safety with profits resulted in miscommunication, lack of credibility (because everyone knew the truth), and unaligned decisions. USE GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR DECISION CRITERIA is a mechanism for CLARITY. "
66 " I was also modeling that lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance. "
67 " The most important change that happens, however, is that all teams (in our case, all submarines) are now collaborators working against a common external goal as opposed to competitors working against one another. "
68 " The rule for the mentoring meeting was that we could talk only about long-term issues, and primarily people issues. All business concerning a leaking valve or failed circuit card had to occur outside these meetings. During the first set of discussions, we adapted a useful technique for long-term focus and planning. I asked each of them to write their end-of-tour awards. Since these supervisors are assigned to the submarine for three years, this particular exercise made them look that far into the future. "
69 " Competence means that people are technically competent to make the decisions they make. "
70 " SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS is a mechanism for COMPETENCE. "
71 " Are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passion of your mid-level managers who want to be responsible for their department’s work product? Can you turn over your counterpart to Santa Fe’s tickler to department heads and rid yourself of meetings in the process? How many top-down monitoring systems are in play within your organization? How can you eliminate them? "
72 " Have your processes become the master rather than the servant? How can you ensure adherence to procedure while at the same time ensuring that accomplishing the objective remains foremost in everyone’s mind? Have you reviewed your operations manual lately to replace general terminology with clear, concise, specific directions? Are your staff complying with procedures to the neglect of accomplishing the company’s overall objectives? "
73 " As more decision-making authority is pushed down the chain of command, it becomes increasingly important that everyone throughout the organization understands what the organization is about. This is called clarity, "
74 " Clarity means people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about. "
75 " in a leader-follower structure, the performance of the organization is closely linked to the ability of the leader. As a result, there is a natural tendency to develop personality-driven leadership. "
76 " For how far in the future are you optimizing your organization? Are you mentoring solely to instruct or also to learn? Will you know if you’ve accomplished your organizational and personal goals? Are you measuring the things you need to be? Have you assigned a team to write up the company’s goals three to five years out? What will it take to redesign your management team’s schedule so you can mentor one another? How can you reward staff members who attain their measurable goals? "
77 " THE END IN MIND is an important mechanism for ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY. "
78 " we hadn’t been keeping track of the appropriate data, and we’d have to start doing so. "
79 " When you’re trying to change employees’ behaviors, you have basically two approaches to choose from: change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking. "
80 " (To see where we ended up, and for a more detailed process for conducting critiques, visit davidmarquet.com to read “How we learn from our mistakes on nuclear submarines: A seven-step process.”) "