David Marquet, Former-Captain, US Navy Seals: Turn The Ship Around!

thank you very much I'm going to talk about people I'm going to tell you a story about an experiment that happened onboard a nuclear submarine in organizational design where you created an organization that maximize the engagement the passion and the thinking of everybody on the team now you may be thinking a nuclear submarine that's kind of an unlikely place to run an experiment an organizational design and I would agree with you it's isolated from the rest of the world it's contained no one can get more than 200 feet away from the boss I can go to someone's rat bed we call it a rack and actually wake them up and it's very risk adverse if an investor talks about getting the risk wrong they talk about losing money when we get the risk wrong we died what we're doing here is we're putting a seal team on board the submarine now the seal team are our Special Forces guys they're very fit individuals they have to work out like 25 hours a day and because of that and there's really no room for them to work out on the submarine when we need to do something with the seals we rendezvous in the middle of the ocean helicopter comes over they drop a line down the seals come down really quick that helicopter stays there for 11 seconds and then it flies away a submarine is a toxic environment for seals because they can't get their workouts in and so we have to start a timer and make sure we launch them on the mission before too much time goes by of course it seems perfectly okay for me and my crew to live there six months this is a chaotic event it's highly planned but it's chaotic the wind could shift a rope may go in the wrong direction a wave may come and everybody on the team needs to know what they're going to do appear in the orange that's where I'm sitting quote controlling this this is what it looks like to me I can't even see the people on deck and that helicopter is pretty close and I'm thinking if that helicopter gets too close and it runs into the back of the submarine it's going to be curtains for me but the Navy is very safety conscious I had to wear a hard hat and I had this image you know they take my head and they give it to my wife to say well you know his head's intact he was wearing his hard hat you can't control people but this is the image I suggest you have when it comes to the most important thing that's in your company which is the creativity the passion and the thinking of your people you can't order people to do those things and so it might as well be like you can't see them and the Hat and you have to set create an environment where they can just do what they need to do without being told it didn't start like that for me though I went to the Naval Academy and after 17 years my dream was to become the captain of a submarine and after 17 years I was selected to be the captain of this ship the USS Olympia even though I'd come up to the ranks of the submarine force the Navy took me out of my job and for 12 months sent me to school to learn only about this ship I could draw all the wiring diagrams I could draw all the piping systems I could draw the internals of the pumps I could I read the dossiers about all the people and I'd read how the ship had responders responded to problems I was literally the smartest person on the planet when it came to that ship why because as the captain I was going to give all the orders we call it know all tell all leadership the captain or the CEO knows all the answers and they're going to give all the orders and here's the definition my when I graduated from the Naval Academy this is the book that I had on leadership leadership can be defined as directing the thoughts plans and actions of other souls to obtain and command their obedience their confidence their respect and their loyal cooperation now I ask you can you actually direct somebody's thoughts has anyone seen it I have Star Wars one obi-wan Kenobi comes out he's an odd teacher right there's no what we want Kenobi's and here you can't direct people's thoughts and yet this is the structure that we had and this is what I believed in in terms of leadership and although this may seem a bit archaic to you when I visit companies now this cultural image of leadership runs deep in the blood and the DNA of the leaders of many of our companies because of that we've got problems Trott organizational trust that's is at the lowest point and play engagement is at the lowest point and heads up for you techies oh it's so much better in the tech world and it's actually worse this just came out in this week's Economist nineteen percent only nineteen percent are happy with their jobs seventeen percent feel valued at work twenty eight percent only twenty eight percent even understand what their company's vision is and it's because not because we're not doing that leadership that I told you about wrong it's because it's the wrong kind of leadership the plan for me all changed one day after that 12 months of schooling I flew out to Pearl Harbor Hawaii I was ready to take command of the USS Olympia and there was another submarine out there the USS Santa Fe now the Santa Fe was the Enron of submarines the Santa Fe was a submarine that we laughed at we giggled that we snickered at during that 12 months of schooling they couldn't get underway on time they had the lowest retention in the fleet only three sailors out of 35 reenlist the captain was supposed to be there for another year and we sort of snicker to said all those poor bastards in Santa Fe he quit abruptly and the Navy said well we can't have a submarine without a captain so mark hey you're going to Santa Fe now I was the poor bastard and I only had two weeks two weeks I thought my life was over it wasn't the poor morale and it wasn't the poor performance the issue was the Santa Fe was a different kind of submarine than the Olympia and all that studying I done was basically irrelevant how could I be a know-all tell-all leader that was scary this is my crew we have 135 men we now have women on board submarines over here those guys in khaki those are the only people with college degrees the rest of the crew are enlisted men they don't have college degrees the average age is 26 and this is the team I had to work with despite being scared I get dressed up in my nice white uniform to take command and I very fancy ceremony let me take you on board the sonar room now just like this room there are no windows on a submarine everything we know about the outside world we gained from some sensor like a lot of it is through sonar which is listening to the sounds in the ocean analyzing the sounds and figuring what they are and say that over there that sounds like a cruise ship and we display with these green lines that sounds like an oil well that might be an enemy submarine and it's important to figure out which one is which over here we have all the buttons for operating the equipment now on board the USS Olympia I could have reached over the sail the shoulder of the Sailor and told them which button to push I wouldn't normally do that but I could have because that's the level to which I was trained but on a Santa Fe I didn't know what but I had this habit of asking the sailors hey tell me about your equipment you know show me how it works well captain this does this and this does this and this does this and eventually I said well what about this one yeah I forget they were cringing because they expected well I'll tell you young man you really should know yes sir I should that was leadership secret was I didn't know either going in the combat not scary admitting you don't know something when you're the captain of a nuclear submarine scary I had this thing going in my head what do i do what do I do what do we do I finally said you know what I don't know either what you're the captain ya know go figure hey I have an idea let's press it and see what happens I think we attacked a cruise ship no that didn't happen that was scary but I now think these words I don't know are the most important words any leader can say because those are the words that open the door to learning all learning starts with the assumption that we don't know and when the leader says I don't know it makes it safe for the whole team to say I don't know I don't know let's find out I don't know let's run that experiment I don't know can we look it up I find an opportunity every day to say I don't know at work I don't try this with my wife by the way I'm going to give you five things I learned about leadership that's the first one the next thing has to do with this knob now this is how we control the speed of the submarine in the control room we ring up the speed it sends a signal to the end room now as you can see it's got a head 1/3 2/3 standard full flank just like you see in the movie Titanic we haven't changed the knob it's the same you wring that baby around ahead flank it is awesome it sends a signal back to the engine room there's a man with the wheel he spins it open it opens these valves steam heated by the reactor goes into these turbines they're the size of two city buses just barely fit inside of this 33 foot tube and surges through the Pacific Ocean it's cool but here's the exercise we're going to do it's our favourite exercise on a nuclear submarine we're going to pretend the reactor is broken and now we just have a battery and so when we shut down the reactor we have a race between finding the problems of reactor and starting back up and draining the battery during that time you operate on the electric motor the electric motor is 300 horsepower it's the same proportions because we have a 6,500 tons of Reed as driving your car with your electric toothbrush slow but it gets you home so here we are we're driving along we start the exercise now this is a very first drill now remember I just took over the worst-performing crew in the fleet so we're gonna drink train hard that's what I'm thinking we just took good now the office of the deck who's running who's in charge is doing the right thing he shifted over to the electric motor and he's going at ahead 1/3 the minimum speed he's conserving the battery on the electric motor on every other submarine I'd been on there were always two speeds 1/3 and 2/3 not the other ones but you did get the 2 I started thinking you know we got to speed up on the electric motor it's going to draw more current drain the battery faster it's going to put stress on my team so I suggested hey why don't we speed up the officer Dex takes my suggestion in orders it helm I had 2/3 nothing happens I noticed that I'm looking at the 4 kids sit at this panel say hey what happened he says captain on this submarine there's only one third on the electric motor when the Navy went to the newest class of submarines they went from a 2 speed to a 1 speed motor fewer parts cheaper doesn't break as much but I was in train that was my excuse blah blah blah no one cares I asked the navigator I said hey did you know about this 2/3 thing yes sir I did riddle me this why did you order it what'd he say you told me to thank you you told me to retrain people to do their toll I got a meeting together and I said man we are in a bad way I was trained for a different ship you guys were trained to do it you're told what are we going to do for me initially it was like all out here you need to be more proactive you need to be empowered and finally one of the kids says no captain it's you you need to be quiet I got this again might sing in my head this kid has not seen too many submarine movies but I think I said you know what I think he's right because that's what I can do so I said I'm gonna make a deal I'm going to stop telling you guys what to do I'm never going to give another order on this ship do we know what that's going to look like no do we know how it's going to work no is it better than dying yeah let's try so that's what we did that's the deal I made with my crew for the on their part they said I intend to they said they stopped bringing me problems without solutions they stopped saying I recommend they stop saying I would like to they stopped saying I would say I'm thinking about doing this they said I intend to I intend to load a torpedo i antenna submerge the ship and I would just I would say very well and it shifted the ownership to them was very very powerful cascaded down through the ranks number two leaders resist telling people what to do and that prompts responsibility from the team because when you're the guy saying I intend to do this you own it we get to blow stuff up sometimes now in the movies you see the torpedo goes into the side of the ship that's not how it works the torpedo actually goes under the ship detonates creates a hole in the ocean and then the ship falls into that hole and breaks in half that sinks the ship these torpedoes are big deals you don't want to drop them obviously here we are loading the torpedo we're in Japan that's the green thing on the bow of the ship there before we were doing an evolution like this we'd have what we call the brief you do this you do this you do this you do this it was just another way of telling people what to do and finally realize you know what we're just again we're telling people what to do we got to find all these rituals traditions patterns and habits of behavior where we're telling people what to do and stop them so we stopped doing briefs and we got better than any other submarine for loading torpedoes because what we did is we activated thinking and sometimes I have a little game with myself I walk around and I look for signs where people were just telling people what to do and then we challenge people hey how can we rewrite this sign where we don't we're not telling people what to do you can think about that things started going really well in the submarine number one we got the highest score for operating our submarine in the history of the Navy that they had records for 12 months later number two over the next 12 months 35 out of 35 sailors Rhian listed and so I got a phone call from dr. Covey author of 7 habits which was huge for me it was a big I played a big role in my life I idolized the guy and like dr. Covey wants to come and ride the submarine and he came out was this beautiful day off of Hawaii we picked him up and he watched the crew for a while and we were sparring up on the bridge and we came up with this he said I know how you're doing it and he called the latter of leadership down at the bottom you have tell me what to do people would come to me all day long tell me what to do tell me what they sometimes it was camouflaged like this hey I pay boss I got a problem that's camouflage tell me what to do we wouldn't tell him what to do we would just say what do you think we level them up the ladder one by one by one by one by one we wouldn't take them from the bottom of the top that's too much it's like weightlifting just push a little bit more ways and I now think this is a tremendous leadership hack because this takes this nebulous fuzzy concept of empowerment and now makes it detectable because I can hear it in the language and measurable and affect it because I don't say be more empowered I just say hey why don't you just say this I intend to I've asked 10,000 executives across the planet 17 different countries last year what is the number-one thing that keeps people at the bottom of that ladder and this is their collective response again this was eye-opening for me and the lesson is leaders don't add stress to their teams they make it safe the more cognitive the task is the more complicated the task is and the more creative you need your team to be the safer you need to make them feel we spent a lot of time focusing on language here we are fighting fires on board the submarine we have some fire exits here on board a submarine you know how many fire exits the submarine has zero if you don't put the fire out you die we call that motivation and we weren't really very good we would we would train on this we weren't very good and we'd sit in the debrief afterwards we say hey how'd it go what happened and I heard a lot of they they did this they did that they didn't pressurize the hose phylite that upsets it there's no vay on Santa Fe it rhymed so they remembered it I said we're going to use the word weave from now on now we had a lot of days right engineering was they to ops supply was they to everybody the officers related enlisted guys Chiefs were they to the I you know her I was of course the biggest day of all why are you doing that they told me what do you mean well you anyway something really interesting happened the engineer came up to me the very next day and he says hey captain bad news pump repair will be delayed because they they ordered he wants to say they the supply department ordered the wrong part but he can't say they so he has to say we ordered the wrong part like uh he just walked away it's all he's just like yeah never mind there's no blame there's no blame we were inspected one of the senior officers said this this team has the most powerful culture of teamwork I have ever seen and I said no no no we don't have a culture what we have is a rule that we use the word we but what had happened is by saying we we rewired our brains we reconnected our brains in a different way so that we started thinking of each other as we you use the word we for our team and if you want to understand where the boundaries are on your organization just ask people today tell me about these guys oh we're in marketing what about them oh they're in the sales and I usually say HR but HR is very powerful by the way they have they write the code for the organization's culture yeah they're in sale like as soon as you and I call it the weed a boundary you got to expand the we the lesson is we act our way to new thinking not think our way to new action to promote change this kid in front wants to go on leave he wants to go on vacation he's got to put a form in that's got to go up through six levels of the submarine we sign off on it at the top it gets approved and it comes back down we call that pushing information to Authority in every organization there's a gap between the people with the authority at the top and the people with information at the bottom and the way we traditionally closed that is push information with art you can buy a lot of software that helps you do that well we didn't on a submarine as I lined it up and I just wrote in on my little form I said no for the USS Santa Fe even though Navy regs say do this other thing we're going to let the chief the guy sitting behind them sign the form we're going to push the authority for making the decision down to the people with the information now if you want to make some money design some software that'll help people do that because I don't I don't know leaders push authority to information not information to Authority and finally leaders give control and they create more leaders I asked executives when you think about giving up control how does it make you feel and these are the kind of things that they say we have on one side freedom and relief and at the other side we have anxiety and fear and if you're not feeling those things when you're at work you're not doing it right because you're not giving up enough control if you want to connect with me it's my email my Twitter Pinterest Instagram Facebook everything I'm gonna wrap it up for us it was great I got Awards I got promoted people would call me and tell me how great I was blah blah blah but it wasn't really about that for me and the reason it took me 10 years to write the book is because it took me 10 years to figure out what we really did but we really had done is we had created leaders we created more leaders on that submarine than any other submarine by a factor of three and a half and so his officer after officer after officer was selected to promote to command his own ship over the next 10 years and that to me is what was about wasn't success of a significance and the good news is for you here in Switzerland because of your geography there's a political tradition there's a little bit of skepticism of centralized control and there's a tradition of balancing control to the outline Canton's versus the central government and so I'm optimistic about you guys in the ability to give control in your companies thank you very much you you

Channel: Worldwebforum

Views: 278,274

Rating: 4.9064493 out of 5

Keywords: Worldwebforum, World web forum, WORLDWEBFORUM, worldwebforum, world web forum, WWF, wwf, us navy, navy seal, navy, speaker, david marquet

Id: ivwKQqf4ixA

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2016