This is a book written by a Navy captain that took command of the USS Santa Fe in the late 90s. He explains that the default model for leading in US submarines is the leader-follower model, where the captain is basically an all-knowing God who is the most expert in everything, and is therefore the one most qualified to give orders down to the minutiae. The model obviously has limits, most notably its strong dependence on one single person (what happens if the captain is asleep, sick, or quite simply, wrong). Additionally, it negatively impacts the crew's aspirations, a problem Marquet encountered upon taking command of the USS Santa Fe.

I prevented any more major problems, but everything hinged on me. Numerous times I found errors. Far from being proud of catching these mistakes, I lamented my indispensability and worried what would happen when I was tired, asleep, or wrong.

So he set out to break this model and to try to convert it to what he calls "leader-leader", where everyone is able to take decisions at their level. Ideally, the successful implementation of the "leader-leader" model would result in a crew capable of functioning without a captain.

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.

Marquet found that there are some main issues with transitioning to leader-leader:

• How to get the crew to actually care to the point where they want autonomy.
• How to get the crew to be competent so that they do their job correctly.
• How to get the crew to be aligned with the mission so that they don't do any random shit (even competently).

Have you tried to divest control without first making sure your organization is competent to handle more decision-making authority? I learned the hard way that control without competence is chaos.

On the caring part, Marquet explains that people naturally have a lot of opinions about their workplace, which is the root for motivation, and that the difference between caring and not caring is whether you give them a platform to voice their opinion, and, moreover, when you give them the opportunity to act on them.

According to procedure, I was to spend the next two weeks reviewing everything on the ship, including training records, school records, administrative records, award records, advancement records, records pertaining to the operation and maintenance of the reactor plant, the weapons system, the torpedoes and missiles, schedules, exercises, classified material, and so on. I ignored that. Instead, I spent my time walking around the ship talking to people.

On the competence part, we can differentiate between 2 types of adeptness: first the ability to do one's job correctly, and then the ability to it without making mistakes (that can be very costly). On doing the job correctly, Marquet preaches a philosophy of "don't brief, certify". Basically, giving the talk is not enough, you actually need to have the people show that they are able to do what they should do in practice. As for avoiding mistakes, "deliberate action" is lauded as a great initiative, which basically means avoiding doing stuff in "machine mode", and doing everything mindfully instead.

Still, there is warning against the danger of systematic error avoidance. If a crew is only trying to minimize errors, then everybody avoids any position that could remotely lead to a mistake, which makes it impossible to be anything else than mediocre. So there is a great importance in the book attributed to thriving for excellence and celebrating success, instead of just trying to avoid errors.

Do you spend more time critiquing errors than celebrating success?

Finally, on the alignment to the mission (the book calls this "clarity"), one of the pieces of advice is to "begin with the end in mind". That is, communicate clearly and repetitively what is the goal to achieve, and then derive what to do from this goal. This way people can see that their tasks and work is not some abstract and arbitrary piece of work, but an actual, useful, step on the way.