Monthly Archives: October 2017

Book Notes : Turn the Ship Around!

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was presented in a very easy to read way. Showing how the leadership model can work in quite a challenging environment. The book lists a lot of questions which are useful and worth thinking about. These are:

  • Why do we need empowerment?
  • Do you need someone to empower you?
  • How reliant is your organisation on the decision making of one or a small group of people?
  • What kind of leadership model does your organisation use?
  • In your organisation, are people rewarded for what happens after people leave?
  • Are they rewarded for the success of their people?
  • Do people want to be “missed” after they leave?
  • When an organisation does worse after someone leaves, what does it say about this persons leadership? what does this say about the organisation?
  • How does the perspective of time horizon affect our leadership actions?
  • What can we do to incentivise long-term thinking?
  • What are you willing to personally risk? (Sometimes taking a step for the better requires caring/not caring.  Caring deeply about the people and the mission, but not caring about the bureaucratic consequences to your personal career)
  • What must leaders overcome mentally and emotionally to give up control yet retain full responsibility?
  • What;s the hardest thing you experience in letting go of micromanaging, top-down leadership, or the cult of personality?
  • How can you get your project team interacting differently but still use the same resource?
  • What can you, as a subordinate, do to get your boss to let you try new ways of handling a project?
  • Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose?
  • Do you have to be the smartest person in your organisation?
  • To what degree does technical competence form the basis for leadership?
  • Is that technical competence a personal competence or an organisational competence?
  • How do you know what is going on “at the deck plate” in your organisation?
  • Is there a call to action in your organisation?
  • Do people want to change, or are they comfortable with the current level of performance?
  • Are things too comfortable?
  • Is there a feeling of complacency?
  • Do people take action to protect themselves or to make the outcome better? Does leadership in your organisation take control or give control?
  • Why is doing what you are told appealing to some?
  • Do people really just want to do as they are told?
  • If a snapshot of your bussiness went viral on the Internet, what would it reveal about your workers?
  • Do your procedures reinforce the leader-follower model?
  • Are your people trying to achieve excellence or just avoid making mistakes?
  • Has your organisation become action-adverse because taking action sometimes results in errors?
  • Have you let error-reduction programs sap the lifeblood out of initiatives and risk taking?
  • Do you spend more time critiquing errors than celebrating success?
  • Are you able to identify the symptoms of avoiding errors in your workplace?
  • When you ask people what their jobs are, do they answer in terms of reducing errors?
  • When you investigate the criteria that went behind decisions, do you find that avoidance of negative outcomes far outweighs the accomplishing positive outcomes?
  • What is the primary motivation of the middle manager and rank an file?
  • How can you minimise errors but not make that the focus for the organisation?

Control

  • How can you prepare your mid-level managers to shift from holding a “position of privilege” to one of “accountability, responsibility, and work”?
  • What procedure or process can you change with one word that will give your mid-level managers more decision-making authority?
  • When thinking about delegating control, what do you worry about?
  • What do you as a proponent of the leader-leader approach need to delegate to show you are willing to walk the talk?
  • How do you respond when people in your workplace don’t want to change from the way things have always been done?
  • What are some of the costs associated with doing things differently in your industry?
  • Do we act first, and think later? Or do we think first, then change our actions?
  • How would you counter any reluctance on the part of your team to have early, quick discussions with you, the boss, to make sure projects are on course?
  • To what degree is trust present in your organisation?
  • Is your staff spending time and money creating flawless charts and reports that are, simultaneously, irrelevant?
  • What can you do in your organisation to add “a little rudder far from the rocks” to prevent needing “a lot of rudder next to the rocks”?
  • What commonplace facts can you leverage to make information more valuable and accessible to your employees?
  • Have you eve uncovered a “reason why” akin to being a random decision?
  • What causes us to take control when we should be giving control?
  • Can you recall a recent incident where your subordinate followed your order because he or she thought they learned the secret information “for executives only”?
  • What would be the most challenging obstacle to implementing “I intend to …” in your place of bussiness?
  • Could your mid-level managers think though and defend their plan of action for the companies next big project?
  • How deeply is the top-down, leader-follower structure ingrained in how your bussiness operates?
  • Do you recognise situations in which you need to resist the urge to provide solutions?
  • When problems occur, do you immediately think you just need to manage everything more carefully?
  • What can you do at your next meeting with senior staff to create a space for open decisions making by the entire team?
  • Are you underutilising the ideas, creativity, and passion of your mid-level managers who want to be responsible for their department’s work product?
  • Can you push tasks to a lower level rather than having high level demands for things to be done?
  • How many top-down monitoring systems are in play within your organisation? How can they be eliminated?
  • Do you ever walk around your facility listening solely to what is being communicated through informal language?
  • How comfortable are people in your organisation with talking about their hunches and their gut feelings?
  • How can you create an environment in which mean and women freely express their uncertainties and fears as well as their innovative ideas and hopes?
  • Are you willing to let your staff see that your lack of certainty is strength and certainty?
  • To what degree does trust factor in the above?
  • How do you use outside groups, the public, social media comments, and government audits to improve your organisation?
  • What is the cost of being open about problems in your organisation and what are the benefits?
  • How can you leverage the knowledge of those inspectors to make your team smarter?
  • How can you improve your team’s cooperation with those inspectors?
  • How can you “use” the inspectors to help your organisation?

Competence

  • How do you react when an employee admits to doing something on autopilot, without deliberately thinking about the actions or its consequences?
  • Do you think that by implementing a system of taking deliberate action you can eliminate errors in your company, or within certain departments in your company?
  • Will employees in your workplace revert to acting hastily and automatically in a real-life situation?
  • How effectively do you learn from mistakes?
  • Are you aware of which areas in your bussiness are marred by mistakes because the lower-level employees don’t have enough technical competence to make good decisions?
  • Ho could you implement a “we learn” policy among your junior and senior staff?
  • Would you consider writing a creed for your organisation?
  • Are people eager to go to training?
  • How do you shift responsibilities for performance from the briefer to the participants?
  • How much preparation do people do prior to an event or operations?
  • When was the last time you had a briefing on a project?
  • What would it take to start certifying that your project team know what the goals are and how they are to contribute to them?
  • Are you ready yo assume more responsibility within the leader-leader model to identify what near-term events will be accomplished and the role each team member will fulfil?
  • Are there employees who are going to quit because they are overworked and underappreciated?
  • When is it right for the leader to overturn protocol in the effort to rescue a single stressed-out subordinate?
  • What message do you need to keep repeating in your bussiness to make sure your management team doesn’t take carer of themselves first, to the neglect of their team?
  • Have your processes become the master rather than the servant?
  • How can you ensure adherence to procedure while at the same time ensuring that accomplishing the objectives remains foremost in everyone’s mind?
  • Have you reviewed your operations manual lately to replace general terminology with clear, concise, specific directions?
  • Are your staff complying with procedures to the neglect of accomplishing the companies overall objectives?

Clarity

  • What would you and your team like to accomplish?
  • How can you, as a leader, help your people accomplish it?
  • Are you doing everything you can to make tools available to your employees to achieve both professional and personal goals?
  • Are you unintentionally protecting people from the consequences of their own behaviour?
  • What is the legacy of your organisation?
  • How does that legacy shed light on your organisations purpose?
  • What kind of actions can you take to bring this legacy alive for individuals in your organisation?
  • How can you simplify your guiding principles so that everyone in your organisation understands them?
  • How will you communicate your principles to others?
  • Are your guiding principles reference in evaluations and performance awards?
  • Are your guiding principles useful to employees as decision-making criteria?
  • Do your guiding principles serve as decision-making criteria for your people?
  • Do you know your own guiding principles? Do others know them?
  • Do you have a recognition and rewards system in place that allows you to immediately applaud top performers?
  • How can you create scoring systems that immediately reward employees for the behaviours you want?
  • Have you seen evidence of “gamification” in your workplace?
  • For how far in the future are you optimising your organisation?
  • Are you mentoring solely to instruct or also to learn?
  • Will you know if you’ve accomplished your organisational and personal goals?
  • Are you measuring the things you need to be?
  • Have you assigned a team to write up the companies goals three to five years out?
  • What will it take to redesign your management team’s schedule so you can mentor one another?
  • How can you reward staff members who attain their measurable goals?
  • How do we create resilient organisations where errors are stopped as opposed to propagating through the system?
  • Will your people follow and order that isn’t correct?
  • Do you want obedience or effectiveness?
  • Have you built a culture that embraces a questioning attitude?

 

Don’t do this Do this
Leader-follower Leader-leader
Take control Give control
Give orders Avoid giving orders
When you give orders, be confident, unambiguous, and resolute When you do give orders, leave room for questionning
Brief Certift
Have meetings Have conversations
Have a mentor-mentee program Have a mentor-mentor program
Focus on technology Focus on people
Think short-term Think long-term
Want to be missed after you depart Want not to be missed after you depart
Have high-repetition, low quality training Have low-repetition, high quality training
Limit communication to terse, succinct, formal orders Augment orders with rich, contextual, informal communications
Be questionning Be curious
Make inefficient processes efficient Eliminate entire steps and processes that don’t add value
Increase monitor and inspection points Reduce monitoring and inspection points
Protect information Pass information