Here are some notes and highlights I took while reading "Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders" by David Marquet
Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves. -- STEPHEN R. COVEY
I thought deeply about what motivated me and how I want to be treated.
I felt I was at my best when given specific goals but broad latitude in how to accomplish them.
💡 ❗ Ask "What motivates you?". Discuss and explore with the support of the Moving Motivators.
💡 ❗ Ask How do you want to be treated? Why?".
One of the things that limits our learning is our belief that we already know something
- Why do we need empowerment?
- Do you need someone else to empower you?
- How reliant is your organization on the decision making of one person, or a small group of people?
- What kind of leadership model does your business or organization use?
- When you think of movie images that depict leadership, who/what comes to mind?
- What assumptions are embedded in those images?
- How do these images influence how you think about yourself as a leader?
- To what extent do these images limit your growth as a leader?”
People need to see the need to decide to change.
💡 ❗ "Why should I change my way of working? What is not working in the current way of managing things?"
- Because it is successfully
Officers are rewarded for being indispensable, for being missed after they depart.
When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.
- Because it is comfortable
Leader-follower induces numbness: it absolves subordinates of the hard work of thinking (people get comfortable with this)
But there's a cost: people who are treated as followers will treat others as followers when it's their turn to lead.
- In your organization, are people rewarded for what happens after they transfer?
- Are they rewarded for the success of their people?
- Do people want to be “missed” after they leave?
- When an organization does worse immediately after the departure of a leader, what does this say about that person’s leadership? How does the organization view this situation?
- How does the perspective of time horizon affect our leadership actions?
- What can we do to incentivize long-term thinking?
Mechanism: Eliminate Top-Down Monitoring Systems.
Don't preach and hope for ownership; instead, implement mechanisms that actually give ownership.
If you complain about "lack of ownership" in your employees, but actually defeat any attempt to build ownership, you will fail, and you'll also lose credibility in front of them.
💡 ❗ One question you could use when you assess a team's or org's agility is this: "What are you (or your org) doing to give ownership to your employees / teams? What kind of actions are you applying? What practices are you following?"
It's not about eliminating data collection and stop measuring processes. It's about avoiding the systems whereby senior employees are determining what junior personnel should be doing.
When it comes to processes, adherence to the process frequently becomes the objective, as opposed to achieving the objective that the process was put in place to achieve.
- How many top-down monitoring systems are in play within your organization?
- How can you eliminate them?
“As authority is delegated, technical knowledge at all levels takes on a greater importance. There is an extra burden for technical competence. [...] If all you need to do is what you are told, then you don’t need to understand your craft. However, as your ability to make decisions increases, then you need intimate technical knowledge on which to base those decisions.”
"Clarity means people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about." "This is needed because people in the organization make decisions against a set of criteria that includes what the organization is trying to accomplish. If clarity of purpose is misunderstood, then the criteria by which a decision is made will be skewed, and suboptimal decisions will be made."
"...writing down our three ship-wide goals in an outgoing message would add clarity to our thinking, keep my bosses informed about what we were doing, and add weight to our initiatives."
Writing goals means committing to each other, and clarifying (to oneself and to their peers) what the real purpose is. This is why different agile practices works so well:
- Pair programming means continually clarifying one's intents and actions to the others. Moreover, you have to do it verbally, so a more strong and unambiguous process of internal revision has to take place, before the actual words come out of your mouth.
- Daily Journaling is a way to clarify, by telling the story of your day at job. What happened? What did you learn? What did you surprise? What worked well? What ideas came to your mind?
- TDD is a way of discovering and declaring a clear intent on the behavior you want the system (and their elements) to have. This brings clarity and triggers discussions.
1) What does XPeppers what to accomplish? Is this shared inside our organization?
2) I should help each team member to explore and declare their personal goals. How?
- Marco's Talent Canvas
- Moving motivators
- Drawing a personal map
The guiding principles provide guidance on decisions.
We take action without direction from above.
We look at new ways of doing the same things. We have the courage to change. We tolerate failures.
We do the right thing, even if it may be uncomfortable.
We are present when we come to work. We choose to be here.
is how we get better: we continually seek ways to learn and improve
We tell the truth to each other and to ourselves
We encourage others to take action, and support them if they make mistakes. We explain what we want accomplished, and allow flexibility in how it is accomplished.
We work as a team.
We exercise participative openness: freedom to speak one’s mind. We exercise reflective openness, which leads to looking inward. We challenge our own thinking.
We do things on time
Mechanism: Use Guiding Principles for Decision Criteria