David Marquet speaking at the Army Leadership conference 2018

good morning ladies gents as moms my name's Stephon Cleland I'm from two four Royal Engineers down in Tiffany North Devon and Steve got the privilege of introducing David Mark a he's a retired US Navy captain student of leadership and organizational design and he's the best-selling author of turn the ship around David Mark a was assigned to command the nuclear-powered submarine the USS Santa Fe which when took over was ranked last and retention and operational standing he turned the ship around by treating the cruise leaders and not followers and given control not taking control this revolutionary approach not only took the Santa Fe from worse to first in the rankings but also created more subsequent leaders than any other submarine in the US fleet they've been mark as the author of turned the ship around a true story of turning followers into leaders Fortune magazine named it the number one must read business book of the year and the USA Today it listed it one of the top 12 business books of all time David Marquis is here today to deliver a powerful message then highly effective organizations leadership is not for the Select view at the top he will tell you how he and the crew of the Santa faith have developed the way to create leaders at every single level so please with me welcome Dave mark Aden stage everybody [Applause] thank you thank you very much and thank you all for coming out today so I had a question which was if this idea of commander's intent is so powerful so important then why is it that within the command we operate with anything but intent we give instructions we give orders we give directions we tell people what to do and what would it look like if we applied this idea of intent or instead of giving instructions we've provided our intentions and the team instead of waiting to do what they were told provided their intent back to the commander well I'm here to tell that story and at the core of the story there's an idea that the only person on the planet whose behavior you can control is your own so that if you want to affect change it always starts right here now to tell you my story I need to take you down to my submarine so for you lot up there a submarine is like a tank that goes underwater and we're gonna go out for six months so we have to sleep there so first thing we're gonna do is assign you a bunk here's here's a very nice bunk here that's your pillow that's the feed of this sailors sit leaping in front of you you're sleeping across from this big green thing what is that yeah two Navy guys good torpedo you're sleeping in the torpedo room now we have 117 bunks we call them racks on a submarine but we're going to go to sea with 140 people what does that mean sharing but not at the same time calm down when you're on duty your bunk mates in the in the rack we're gonna wake them up they can relieve you you go down and get in the rack we could bite because that time is not that long when you get in the rack it's still warm from their body heat and here's a sailor in his rack with all the private space that he's going to have divided by two for the next six months once you get your stuff stowed in your rack come on up to the cruise masts meet the crew here's the crews mess Chow is actually pretty good on a submarine the crews mess is where it's one of the bigger rooms on the ship is where we do our training it's where the crew dines we do meetings and operations meetings and that kind of thing but sometimes we get to have fun now what are these silly lads doing well actually we're taking the submarine deep and if you look over here at these juice dispensers you can see we're going down at a 30-degree angle now submarine errs are a strange group we love going deep because that's where no one can see us no one can find us and we can move across large swaths of the planet undetected we have one galley this is the trick to good food on submarine it's very easy there's only one galley one kitchen there's two windows it's an optical illusion the crew gets served out one window the officers and the captain out the other but it's all the same food so that raises the standard for everybody and here we are in the wardroom this is where the officers Luke whistles where we were dying we would do our meetings of course watch movies and on Saturday night play poker but it was also the operating room we would go to see with one corpsman not a doctor but a highly trained technician and we went into combat the Karman would set the wardroom up is the operating room now as you probably know most medical procedures benefit from having more than one person so we need an assistant who do we use the head chef two reasons two reasons number one he doesn't really have anything to do in combat and number two he's the best guy with the knives so you don't want to get sick on a submarine and you have your tanks and I saw one out front that's very impressive but we get but we get to do this kind of thing yeah so think about that when you're sailing off to where you go up but the most important thing about a submarine and in this way it's exactly the same as what you do that everything that happens on or by the ship happens because of people and it happens because of teams of people now you saw there's not a lot of room on the submarine submarine you a secret submarines are uber for the SEAL Teams if the SEAL team wants to go someplace they have to call a submarine that's the Santa Fe known for good conversation I would prefer bringing the SEAL Teams with me because then when we were close to the enemy shoreline I could just launch them but the seals said no it doesn't work for us because there's no exercise equipment and I know all you guys are seals are seal like creatures and you work out 25 hours a day and the seals said our bodies are deteriorating with every passing moment on that submarine it's a toxic environment for human beings and the nation said we agree with you so you can stay ashore and at the very last minute we'll send you out on a helicopter and we'll bring the ship to you now it's just really troubled me because we're going to go to sea for six months and I used to think how the Navy doesn't care so much about us but I've refrained it we're just a lot tougher than those seals so we bring the ship away from the shore we surface the ship we open the hatch we go topside the submarine crew this is me I'm up here I'm in charge that's one of my Chiefs the link then we search for the youngest guy in the crew we say your jobs go back there hold on that rope the helicopter comes drops the line now we're moving through the ocean and the helicopters hovering over us and moving together SEAL team comes down fast ropes down about a second per person 11 person team 11 seconds come forward go down the hatch three-step process go down the hatch shut the hatch and then submerge the ship you got to get the sequence right there it's very important and I want you to think about this young man at the back holding on to that rope life is happening very quickly at this moment the wind could shift the helicopter could move off station a wave could come and knock someone over the the seal coming down could slip he lands on the deck badly hurts his leg falls in the ocean he falls in the there's a lot that could happen he doesn't have time to call me and say well captain what should I do besides it's got a helicopter on his head so all you would hear is and the final reason why that's not going to work is because this is my view I can't even see what's going on now I'll tell you when the helicopter shows up and you're on I up and they're on the bridge like wow that's close those Raider rotor blades feel like they're right over there calm down I had a hardhat I showed this picture to corporates all over the world because I think that the world we live in now this is very relevant to all of us number one we work with distributed team so I can't stand behind people and watch what they're doing and say no no turn left turn right do something different and number two even if I could the most important thing that they're doing is not the visible part is what's going on up here what's going on down here and the degree to which we try and tell people what to do and order them around we're suppressing the fire inside everyone has power everyone is great it's our job just to recognize that and get out of the way all right my story this happy group is the math team it's the math team at the Concord Carlisle public high school in Massachusetts in 1976 and this is me now the math team hos our math team with me come on it must I have it over here because so here's the okay so here it is math team is where you go to another school you solve math problems you see you can do doom better faster more accurately it's super fun it's not really a spectator sport but it's pretty fun actually math team was invented so people who were geeks and introverts like me could feel at home somewhere and but I tell you the 70s were a terrible time in America we had the gas oil oil shocks we had the Iranians took her hostages the East Germans won more gold medals than the United States in 1976 and not only that we were building really crap cars like the Pinto my first car which if it got rear-ended had a tendency to explode and the other ugliest car ever invented the AMC Pacer but I felt very strongly about the Constitution and I was idealistic young man and we were in this cold war with the Soviet Union and there was no guarantee that we would win what I worry about sometimes today is there was a sense of inevitable inevitable 'ti but there was no inevitability to it I came from a family of scientists I went home one day I said mom I'm gonna join the service what why can't you be a scientist it's so much safer and look at you you're gonna get beat up it's a mom I got it don't worry thanks for your confidence by the way I said look I read about these things are called submarines the job of the submarine is to hide from peak that's perfect for me so I'm gonna go be a sub I had no idea what I was getting into I went to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis Maryland the United States government which we all know makes no mistakes gave me this book leadership can be defined as directing the thoughts plans and actions of other souls to obtain in command their obedience their confidence their respect and their loyal and you know what I was really good at this I was really good at going in and looking around and say oh I see the problem you're stopped out don't do that why are you doing that are you thinking again I'll do the thinking here I'll tell you what to do and work out better for everything of course I started getting this reputation of being able to fix things and things got a little better while I was there I would leave and I'd fall apart even more proof of what a good leader I was and everybody hated me a few years later the Navy announced the crop of submarine commanders and this happens 12 months in advance my name was on the list and it was I called my mom I've been beaten up a few times the ship I was gonna command was the USS Olympia define running warship out in Pearl Harbor Hawaii and so for 12 months I went to school to learn every single detail of the ship I could draw the piping systems the electrical systems the breaker boxes I could walk around the ship blindfolded and know where all the air connections were and the breakers I knew everything about the ship because as the captain I was going to be the one giving all the orders and I needed to know all the answers there was a drama playing out in the Navy and the drama had to do with this ship the USS sent and the Santa Fe was the Enron of the Navy Santa hey the following problems number one very poor performance and number two very poor morale and it and we were coming up on the twelve months before the Santa Fe commander was scheduled to depart so we all were like Oh licking our chops who's it gonna be the poor sob gonna cinnamon and darn it but he quit twelve months early and the Navy looked around so well can't have a submarine no commander mark a Santa Fe now I was the poor so big and the problem for me was not form around poor performance the problem for me was the Santa Fe was one of the newest ships in the fleet and as you see she doesn't have the sail planes like the Olympia had and every piece of gear on a ship was different and all those drawings and all those connections and all that work to know all the answers was now largely irrelevant so I go to the ship here's the crew the crews were very demoralized they've been beaten up beating up and beating up beating up and there is this passivity no one stick your head out no one make a decision because when we can't when the crew came to work all they did wanted was was to avoid errors they just wanted to not screw up and that bias the whole organization you know waiting to be told what to do here we have the officers the Chiefs and you know listed men who do the work in the middle and we put people in different colored uniforms because they really want to send a clear signal oh this is the LEAs are the leaders and these are the followers these are the thinkers and these are the doers we want to make sure you're not confused about which group you're in because heaven forbid one of the doers starts to think white hard hats blue hard hats lab coats overalls salary hourly worker well this goes on so I take command ready to exude confidence but inside petrified in the control room very first day we go to see now I've taken over the worst-performing crew in the fleet so of course what we're gonna do train hard and one things we love to do is to shut down the reactor and pretend it's broken because there's only one so it's the very first exercise we do me the new captain shut down the reactant and we shut down the reactor you shift over to electric motor and you run it draining the battery so there's two gears on the electric motor first gear second gear first gear drains the battery slowly second gear drains the battery quickly both gears drive you very slowly through the ocean so it really does that's the difference but draining the battery puts pressure on the team because it reduces the length of time they have to fix the problem it adds stress and after all adding stress was my job as leader so we start the exercise we shut down the reactor the officer bill green he's in charge he's the navigator he's he's been he's been on this ship for over two years he's shifting over to the electric motor operating at ahead 1/3 minimizing the draining of the battery extending the life of the battery so the engineers can have maximum time to solve the problem I start to think well we need to add a little stress here why don't we go to second gear on the electric motor now unbeknownst to me when the Navy went to the newest ship and by the way I only had two weeks to take over that's my I have a good excuse here the Navy went to a one speed motor so there's only first gear on this motor this is what the this is what the knob looks like it looks familiar we inherited from you 200 years ago and it's perfect then it's perfect now so the Sailor so so that so I say to bill hey bill why don't we why don't we speed up to second gear on the on the motor and he gives the order and the Sailor does exactly this now I noticed that because the this knob makes a bell sound ching ching ching there was no Bell so I said hey what happened how come no ching ching ching on the Bell and the Sailor said in the flattest tone possible captain on the Santa Fe it's a one speed motor there is no second gear and I recognized this very flat monotone this is I call this boss you're an idiot tone you may have heard it I don't know and I was like whoa that was deeply embarrassing whoa how does that happen as a first order is cab that I blew it Oh for what and the idea is when you're when you when you give a bad order you got to get better orders that's the solution I look at bill I said bill you've taken the ship to the Arabian Gulf and bath did you know about this bill said yes sir I did it's a bill riddle me this why did you order it you know what he said you told me to and my head when I said I'll stop everything officers assembled went down to the wardroom I said ok guys we got a big problem I was trained for a different chip and I got air dropped on you and you were trained to do it you're told and eventually I'm gonna give an order it's gonna be bad you're gonna do it we're gonna die and they were like they're like yeah yeah we we got that two weeks ago so here's what we gonna do you were gonna take initiative you're gonna be proactive you're gonna speak up if if I give say something it doesn't make sense you're gonna tell me for crying out loud and you're all empowered now what's the pattern here my behavior doesn't need to change I'm not the problem it's all out there so and it's a speech I'd heard so many times so it just really flew off the tongue had a young officer standing up in the back he's raising his hand I was insistently not calling on him consistently raised he's a millenials I didn't really want to know what he had fine okay okay what do you got this is captain why don't we skip that step what stuff you know where you give the bad order and then we have to fix it let's skip the bad order part oh yeah well how is that gonna work well you just have to give no orders like wait a minute you want me to be the submarine commander who never gives the command yes thought bubble thought bubble crazy have you seen any submarine movies I doubt it and I said I think that's right because if I'm urging you to speak up after I've already told you what I think it's very difficult and I need to take responsibility for my behavior which is to stay quiet a moment longer and to lean back and to create a small gap where you can then Lena so why don't we do this never come to me again with here's what I want to do here's our here's what I request permission to do here's a problem what should I do just say the following words this is what I intend to do and if I don't say no if I don't say anything the answer is you have permission to do it in this casket first this few officers started saying I intend to and then the Chiefs to the office enlist them into the Chiefs the other cascaded on the ship so in the past we were all managing down now we're thinking Oh what do we need to do to achieve the mission and now we're thinking this way and this thinking cascaded down through the ship so no longer do we have thinkers or one thinker and a whole bunch of doers we had everybody thinking and doing thinking and doing a year later the United States Navy inspected the crew got the highest score in the history of the Navy for operating the submarine no one could understand of course the other submarine commanders were very happy for me call me up hey mark hey congratulations you must have given some really good orders and learned the ship very quickly well actually I didn't give any orders and I live I gave exactly zero orders during that entire 3-day inspection maybe like what yeah never mind the other thing that happened was previously we we had we had retain only 10% of the sailors 3 out of 33 sailors in the previous 12 months and over the next 12 months every sailor has a chance an officer had a chance to stay in the Navy did a hundred percent we set a record and it wasn't because people were working more easily I would contest that they were working hard because we were challenging them to take responsibility for the decisions when you say I intend to you own it you have psychological ownership and there's a bias for action because we remove the impediment of lading for permission we change their languages in a couple other different ways but just general thrust was we went from a language of doing to a language of learning the language of knowing to a language of curiosity a language of taking control to a language of giving control and now we screwed a lot of stuff up I'm not gonna tell you about any of it we were loading a torpedo and we made a mistake we dropped a piece of gear fortunately we didn't hurt somebody and I had given too much control I was rocked back on my heels and I said yeah I was tempted to say we tried this empowerment thing you guys screwed it up and now we're back to the old way and they said well yeah but things are going so well we're a lot happier and and this is where I said you know what I think what we did is I just gave I gave control empowered the team irresponsibly it wasn't anchored to the team's technical competence on organizational clarity and so we said we can't do that what we need to do is move this way and at some point we were way down we started way down here so I there was free it was free for a while but then we got to the upper limit we had to move this way we had to we had to improve our training processes and we and I had to talk about what we were trying to achieve in a way that I never had to before and then the word got out of what was what was going on and dr. cubby came I was a huge fan of seven Habits he rode the ship and he's watching and he sang comes to me finally on the bridge here we're pulling back into Pearl Harbor because I know what's going on here I said well that's good dr. Covey cuz I I really don't know how it's happening he said I think it's happening like this we had this language where said what's anyone on the ship I've been watching these interactions all these little tiny micro conversations when someone's just tell me what to do no one tells anyone what to do they say what do you see what do you think what what do you recommend what do you intend to do and we're moving deliberately from pause rewind forward just describe the current state that's the safest place to be so we always start in a psychologically safe place let me move to the hey well how do we get here second safe finally what should we do lease safe requires the most vulnerability in the safest environment and we move up so yeah I think that's right now we call this the ladder of leadership and now I had a language because I could tune whisper the language and someone come to me and say hey I request permission so I just tell me what you intend to do I would just invite them to the next higher level invite they didn't have to come they could say yeah I don't accept your invitation okay that's fine but next time I'm gonna invite you again when you don't do this you create fragile organizations this is the Motor Vessel hey hey me Maru on the 9th of February 2000 she was cruising peacefully off the coast of Hawaii when a sister ship of the Santa Fe was conducting maneuvers below and the last maneuver the day was to conduct an emergency blow in an emergency surface and the ship came up the captain looked through the periscope said it's all clear came back down now on the sonar they had been tracking for over an hour a ship which was getting louder and louder and louder and that ship turned out to be they a Hema Maru and the sailor who was sitting this far from the captain had a sense that that ship was close we didn't say anything and when the captain said it's clear no one said anything the ship did submarine went deep came up cut the ship in half ship sank nine people died and when the investigation was conducted they found that the captain had made a series of poor decisions but there was something interesting about the language in the investigation report and here's just one page these words the commanding officer ordered the commanding officer directed the commanding officer ordered the commanding officer instructed occurred ten times in just the thirty minutes prior to the collision and in some of those those are multiple orders so think of all those times the commanding officer was telling people what to do the problem was not that the commanding officer made a bunch of bad decisions the problem was that we had the senior person in the organization making decisions and that creates a fragile organization and what you get with intent based leadership is the senior person now becomes only a decision evaluator and the decision makers are below because we know it's much easier for a senior person to say yeah I don't know let's hold off on that to a junior person than the other way around we were fighting fires we were not very good start to stopwatch and and at the end we get back together hey how'd it go well you know they they hung the gear up twisted and they didn't change the batteries on the thermal imager and they it was all this day and I kind of got angry and like there's no Bay on Santa Fe it was convenient that it rhymed there's only we and so when the engineer came out to me the very next day now he wants to tell me they in the different department we had day by ranks with all kinds of they and he gives us he says captain he wants to tell me they the supply department ordered the wrong part captain the the we ordered the wrong part I failed hundreds of times not to give orders when I was under stress when I hadn't slept right when I hadn't eaten right I went back to the old way I went right back down to the bottom of the ladder and I tell the crew what to do and I needed help so I asked them I said I need you guys to be my soccer referees I'm gonna give you these yellow cards if I tell you what to do I invite you to yellow card me they didn't want a yellow card me it's embarrassing I said oh no you're helping me and then I then I deliberately gave an order and they didn't yellow comers say no come on guy oh you're serious about yeah because of my head I needed someone to help reflect my behavior back to me now the problem was the generally went out the reason I was giving orders because I was already under stress pressure or heaven forbid my boss yelled at me of course that means have to yell at my people everybody knows that and rats right when the yellow car comes out as a yeah better help me get better so I want to talk about feedback for a second I've short video because I think most organizations don't understand feedback I'm here in the Munich Airport next to this feedback machine and lets me talk about its idea of feedback now I think in some organizations I run into we're teaching people how to give feedback I don't think this is the right approach I think what you want to do is teach people how to invite feedback so here's a game you can play for 30 days I want you to ask someone to give you feedback on something that you're doing now I want you to start very unemotionally with things like hey how was my driving today I surprised the barista the other day when I asked her hey how was I as a customer to you and so start with these things make it a little bit fun and then if you want to move two more emotional things and I'm I'm building up to asking my wife hey what one thing can I do better to be a husband hopefully it's not too surprising anyway the idea is invite feedback don't better given feedback yeah so we call it a nudge it's just a little one-minute reminder and we have a bunch of them on our YouTube channel leadership nudges you can connect you can enroll here connect with me it's like social media love to hear from you my emails in the book david at turn the ship around please stay in touch especially if you're trying if you do things and you run some experiments we love to hear stories and i'll be out front you know here this is I think this is really funny the number one book this was last night in human resource management has a picture up summary so come on meet the team but so here's why I ended up I started with this idea that leaders need to be knowing and telling and then I was not knowing but still telling that didn't work I said I'm not gonna tell but then finally I learned the ship but now I could choose knowing I could choose whether to tell or not tell and it's in that moment of decision do I tell them what I think or just I let them deal with it that's when you're growing leaders that's when you're building a team around you and the story is that it's not about those performance changes that happen in the moment that was great after I left the ship continued to do very well and the other thing was over the next ten years ten of the officers migrated through the ranks have made selection after selection after selection and got selected to be submarine commanders and we now have two Admirals five squadron commanders and ten submarine commanders from that one crew and I think what happens is when you lean back and you invite other people to think they start thinking like two decks up and then the Navy said oh well this person already things like a submarine command let's make them one and so this now comes back to you remember it starts with you and what you do your mission your your organization it's a force for good in the world and not but not only do we help externally which is I think where we end up thinking a lot but maybe the most important thing you'll do is believe in the soldier next to you sometimes when he or she isn't and believe in that and 10 years later when you've forgotten with a name you don't even know who they are anywhere they write you an email and they say Here I am I'm starting my own company I'm disrupting the world because you believed in me because leadership is not about telling people what to do leadership is creating the environment for people to be at their very best exactly the way they are thank you very much you you

Channel: Centre for Army Leadership

Views: 52,721

Keywords: Leadership, Army Leaderhip conference, Army, Military, Centre for Army Leadership, CAL

Id: e754hUwPTaI

Length: 35min 35sec (2135 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018