heads were too new to assess. “Look, you’ve got one hundred percent from me and my squadron staff,” Mark continued, “to help you get the ship ready. We aren’t going to walk down there and tell you what you need, but whatever you think you need, we’ll support.” — 40: 560-562
We talked about Santa Fe chiefs. Unempowered, uninspired. The twelve chiefs are the senior enlisted men. They are middle management. At our submarine schools, the instructors tell us that officers make sure we do the right things and chiefs make sure we do things right. Their technical expertise and leadership would be key, as would my ability to tap their expertise. Just — 40: 565-568
ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE, DON’T JUST AVOID ERRORS is a mechanism for CLARITY. (The book to read is Simon Sinek’s Start with Why.) — 63: 918-919
At the end, we were agreed: the sole output would be concrete mechanisms. I was thinking about Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’s book Built to Last and their discussion of how personalities come and go but institutional mechanisms endure and embed the change in the organization. I put this question to Santa Fe’s chiefs: “What can we do so that you actually run the ship?” — 70: 1020-1022
I learned that focusing on who was put in charge was more important than trying to evaluate all the ways the event could go wrong. — 74: 1078-1079
Right or wrong, I was committed to doing whatever I thought was best for Santa Fe, the Navy, and the nation without worrying about the repercussions. I called this the paradox of “caring but not caring”—that is, caring intimately about your subordinates and the organization but caring little about the organizational consequences to yourself. — 77: 1123-1125
When you’re trying to change employees’ behaviors, you have basically two approaches to choose from: change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking. On board Santa Fe, the officers and I did the latter, acting our way to new thinking. We didn’t have time to change thinking and let that percolate and ultimately change people’s actions; we just needed to change the behavior. — 80: 1174-1177
Thereafter, the goal for the officers would be to give me a sufficiently complete report so that all I had to say was a simple approval. Initially, they would provide some information, but not all. Most of the time, however, they had the answers; they just hadn’t vocalized them. Eventually, the officers outlined their complete thought processes and rationale for what they were about to do. The benefit from this simple extension was that it caused them to think at the next higher level. The OODs needed to think like the captain, and so on down the chain of command. In effect, by articulating their intentions, the officers and crew were acting their way into the next higher level of command. We had no need of leadership development programs; the way we ran the ship was the leadership development program. One of the mechanisms I credit for the significantly disproportionate number of promotions that have been issued among Santa Fe’s officers and crew in the past decade was our “I intend to . . .” procedure. — 95: 1393-1400
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. The goal then becomes to avoid errors in the process, and when errors are made, additional overseers and inspectors are added. These overseers don’t do anything to actually achieve the objective. They only identify when the process has gone bad after the fact. — 108: 1592-1595
The more I saw and heard, the more I became aware that we’d done a great disservice to our crew back in March regarding the advancement exams. I vowed to do something about it, but one thing that continued to trouble me was why I had to drive this from the top. Couldn’t we get the chiefs themselves involved in their own guys’ advancement prospects? After all, as chiefs they had somehow figured out how to get advanced, that’s why they were chiefs. I kept this gripe to myself and focused on understanding the problem. The first issue was that our crew—by which I mean the enlisted men who were not yet chiefs, and made up 80 percent of the ship’s company—did not thoroughly understand how the advancement system worked. The crew had heard so many myths and had been given so much misinformation, they had come to believe that the advancement system was a mystical process over which they had no control. It was this issue of control that we had to attack first. The — 164: 2448-2455
Taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior. That’s the path to irresponsibility. What it does mean is giving them every available tool and advantage to achieve their aims in life, beyond the specifics of the job. In some cases that meant further education; in other cases crewmen’s goals were incompatible with Navy life and they separated on good terms. — 170: 2530-2533
USE YOUR LEGACY FOR INSPIRATION is a mechanism for CLARITY. — 174: 2594-2595
Guiding principles have to accurately represent the principles of the real organization, not the imagined organization. Falseness in what the organization is about results in problems. Since these are a set of criteria that employees will use when they make decisions, decisions won’t be aligned to the organization’s goals. — 179: 2669-2671
The most important change that happens, however, is that all teams (in our case, all submarines) are now collaborators working against a common external goal as opposed to competitors working against one another. One of the things I tried to change was the collaboration-competition boundary. — 182: 2721-2723
Some people worry that having a fixed objective reduces the incentive for continuous improvement and breeds a mentality that “we just need to meet the goal.” In some cases, this is appropriate, but in other cases, relative grading is also appropriate. There’s no reason you can’t do both: assign the grade based on the fixed objective and provide data on how that team stacks up against all teams. — 183: 2728-2731
What we need is release, or emancipation. Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment. With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy, and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge. We realize that we don’t have the power to give these talents to others, or “empower” them to use them, only the power to prevent them from coming out. — 209: 3119-3121