Name: Turn the Ship Around
Rating: 4.4 (172 reviews)
Author: L. David Marquet

What’s in it for me? Learn how to turn a team around from an inspiring military commander.

If you’re a manager, you know that constantly improving your leadership skills is important, so you can keep your team focused and moving in the right direction.

But what if your strategies aren’t working? What if employees seem increasingly listless, uninspired by the work you assign?

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider how you lead. In these blinks, you’ll learn from the first-hand experience of L. David Marquet, a U.S. Navy officer who transformed one of the fleet’s worst-performing submarines into a well-oiled, effective team.

Marquet learned that encouraging others to lead made him a better leader, and in turn, empowered his whole team to perform better and succeed together.

In the following blinks, you’ll also discover

why the leadership style that helped build Egypt’s pyramids is no longer relevant;
why the best way to lead is to create more leaders around you; and
why briefing puts people to sleep instead of inspiring them.

The United States is facing a crisis of leadership, and this is bad news for business.

Be honest: Do you like your job? If you answered “no,” you’re not alone.

Job satisfaction in the United States is at an all-time low. From 2004 to 2012, less than half of U.S. workers considered themselves satisfied with their jobs; in 2009, a Conference Board Survey showed worker satisfaction to be at its lowest rate ever.

Dissatisfaction in the workforce isn’t the only trend that’s emerged in recent years. We’ve also witnessed a considerable drop in productivity, with up to $300 billion lost due to productivity issues in the United States alone.

Times have also been tough for those outside the workforce, as U.S. unemployment sat at 9 percent for a record 31 months, up until November 2011.

The symptoms, a doctor might say, are bad. Yet before they worsen, it’s crucial that we work out where the illness actually is. To do so, we’ve got to examine the structure of organizations themselves.

For centuries, we fashioned our organizations according to a particular style of leadership. The Egyptians harnessed it to build the pyramids; this strategy also drove the Industrial Revolution.

We’re talking about the leader-follower approach, where decisions are made by a leader (a boss) and carried out by followers (the workers).

A leader-follower system is perfectly suited for work requiring physical labor, allowing menial tasks to be delegated among many individuals to increase efficiency. However, many more jobs today are dominated by cognitive tasks and decision-making, not at all suitable for a “follower” workforce.

As a result, the leader-follower approach is ill-suited to the times. Think of it this way: it’s a great strategy for building pyramids, but not for operating a nuclear-powered submarine or even starting a technology business!

To truly empower workers, we need to overhaul our idea of leadership. Find out how we start in the next blink.

To make your employees more productive, empower them by giving them more responsibility.

So now you know that a leader-leader approach can help your team perform more effectively. Yet how do you start to implement it in a business?

Establishing a leader-leader system begins with rewriting the basic foundations – the DNA, so to speak – of your organization.

When you give employees more responsibility, you also need to ensure they can handle it.

Giving more responsibility to employees often seems like a risk. You know that such a move is empowering, but are you sure they’ll be competent enough to handle it?

Fortunately, there are practical mechanisms that ensure your workforce builds and maintains their competence levels. The first of these concerns “taking deliberate action.”

Key ideas in Turn the Ship Around

What is Turn the Ship Around about?

Turn the Ship Around reveals the story of how one United States Navy captain managed to turn a dissatisfied submarine crew into a formidable and respected team. But how did he do it? By changing the way we think about leadership, this story will show you that inside, we all have the power to be leaders.