Turn the ship around!

A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking the Rules

Since Turn the Ship Around! was published in 2013, hundreds of thousands of readers have been inspired by former Navy captain David Marquet’s true story. Many have applied his insights to their own organizations, creating workplaces where everyone takes responsibility for his or her actions, where followers grow to become leaders, and where happier teams drive dramatically better results.

Marquet was a Naval Academy graduate and an experienced officer when selected for submarine command. Trained to give orders in the traditional model of “know all–tell all” leadership, he faced a new wrinkle when he was shifted to the Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine. Facing the high-stress environment of a sub where there’s little margin for error, he was determined to reverse the trends he found on the Santa Fe: poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention rate in the fleet.

Almost immediately, Marquet ran into trouble when he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. When he asked why, the answer was: “Because you told me to.” Marquet realized that while he had been trained for a different submarine, his crew had been trained to do what they were told—a deadly combination.

That’s when Marquet flipped the leadership model on its head and pushed for leadership at every level. Turn the Ship Around! reveals how the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy’s traditional leader-follower approach. Struggling against his own instincts to take control, he instead achieved the vastly more powerful model of giving control to his subordinates, and creating leaders.

Before long, each member of Marquet’s crew became a leader and assumed responsibility for everything he did, from clerical tasks to crucial combat decisions. The crew became completely engaged, contributing their full intellectual capacity every day. The Santa Fe set records for performance, morale, and retention. And over the next decade, a highly disproportionate number of the officers of the Santa Fe were selected to become submarine commanders.

Whether you need a major change of course or just a tweak of the rudder, you can apply Marquet’s methods to turn your own ship around.

1 Auflage

Sprache: English

Am 29. April 2013 von Penguin Books Ltd veröffentlicht.

ISBN:: 978-1-59184-640-6
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Themen

Leadership
Miliary
Navy

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Otto Rask hat Turn the ship around! von L. David Marquet besprochen

Interesting view of what unorthodox leadership can do to a team within a very strict and conservative organization

4 Sterne

Marquet writes well about their leadership style aboard a US navy submarine. Military is stereotypically hierarchical, rigid, and conservative when it comes to leadership and management. Marquet and Santa Fe (their submarine) proved that a new way of leading will result in better outcomes, now and down the line.

By employing leader-leader instead of leader-follower thinking, Marquet was able to transform one of the worst performing submarines of its fleet to one of the very best. People were given autonomy to lead on their own, and people became more objective-driven all across the crew. This resulted in a complete shift in how the sub operated and how it achieved results. Marquet talks about various somewhat generalized techniques they tried aboard Santa Fe which were aimed at making followers leaders, but they also do say that one has to apply them with context in mind in other organizations.

But …

But what the book also reveals, is that for unconventional leadership to happen in these kinds of places, there has to be some person higher in the hierarchy who is willing to at least tolerate experimentation and autonomy.

All in all a very good book about leadership in general, not just submarines or military hierarchies.