This book came highly recommended through the Rands leadership community, and it deserves all the praise.
It centers around the author’s experience commanding a nuclear submarine in the navy and his experience and techniques turning the crew from worst to first. The book is told as a retrospective, and like many leadership books, can sound all peaches and roses. I find myself wondering if his successes were possible because he was operating in the navy or in spite of him being in the navy. Both?
I have always believed in the idea of distributing ownership and delegating authority. In a previous job where I was the head of a department, that was how I try to run the department. This belief came from a mish-mash of leadership reading, professional experience, and honestly me not liking being told what to do. I have always known it as the servant leadership model, but this book presents it as the “leader-leader” model, in contrast to the “leader-follower” model.
I was unable to then. Now, the book helped me crystalize the ideas behind my actions and provided me a canvas to think about and expand upon. The central tenet here is this: a lot of organizations adopt a top down leader-follower model. In these teams, because of the nature of how authority flows, i.e., the leader issues commands and the commands flows down the hierarchy; if there are requests or issues they percolate up the chain until they get up to the leader where they give their yes or no, it both exerts tremendous amount of stress to the leader as they have to manage every aspect of the enterprise and it removes decision making from the people doing the work. This deprives the team of their intelligence and experience.
To create a team dynamic that is creative, agile, and high functioning, we will have to invert the model. Let the authority be delegated closest to where work is being done and empower the people who are doing the work to think through the problem and execute on their plans. The leader in this situation sets the direction and goals of the team, provides feedback, and coordinates among the broader team. In an idealized outcome, because people are empowered to do what they think is best for the organization’s goals, useful work can happen at a high rate with diverse solutions and removing the need for layers of bureaucracy.
In an interesting way, this book reminds me of two leadership books that I have read in the past. A recent one, Beyond Command and Control, by John Seddon, talks about how contemporary service organizations try to control and monitor their workers to such a degree as to both hinder effectiveness and customer satisfaction, echos a lot of the core ideas of this book applied in a completely different context. An older book, High Output Management, is interestingly anachronistic in its analogies to manufacturing and at the same time erudite about how to delegate and motivate.
If I were to mount a counter-argument, I would wonder how much of the success described here can also be ascribed to the hierarchical and regimented structure of the military. Perhaps it is in contrast to the highly rigid nature of military life where giving people space to maneuver would yield the most benefits. Regular civilian organizations, especially ones operating in chaos, may benefit from tighter rule. Also, in contrast to more democratic institutions, one thing that is also true about the author’s situation is that ultimately he still gets to wield absolute power. To a certain degree, he was able to build the culture he wanted because he had the power to institute it and do so.
That said, I’m not sure I can take that argument seriously. One thing I’m increasingly convinced as I grew older in age, is that doing anything significant requires a team of people, all pointed in the same direction, executing at a high level, where the sum is greater than its parts. And honestly, in my experience, there is no better way to do it than to have an empowered team, and I’m glad the book shows me how to do it better.