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A Primer on Intent-Based Leadership
Lessons and notes from L. David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around
Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet is a book with a clever title. It not only refers to a captain’s order of turning the ship but also to how David turned one of the worst performing ships (the Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered attack submarine) into one of the highest performing of the fleet.
The book came about because 1. a nuclear-powered attack submarine is an incredibly complex machine and 2. David, the captain, ordered the crew to follow an impossible order and when he questioned the crew on why they followed the order, the crew said “because you ordered us to”. He realized at that moment that the top-down leadership approach that the navy espoused was creating more followers (David calls it the leader-follower model) when instead they should be creating more leaders (the leader-leader model).
Here are the things I learned and will immediately start to apply where appropriate:
Intent-based leadership
David, trying to encourage the leader-leader model, tried not to give orders. Instead, he asked his crew to describe their intent.
“I intend to submerge the ship to 1500 ft”.
