Based on Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet.
Many organizations say they want employees to take ownership, demonstrate initiative, and make good decisions. Yet their management practices often produce the opposite behaviour. Employees are told what to do, managers make the important decisions, and problems are escalated upward for someone else to solve.
In Turn the Ship Around!, former U.S. Navy Captain L. David Marquet challenges this traditional approach to leadership. His central argument is simple: organizations perform better when leaders create more leaders rather than more followers.
From Leader-Follower to Leader-Leader
When Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe, the submarine had serious performance and morale challenges. Rather than responding with greater control and more instructions, he began moving decision-making authority closer to the people actually doing the work. This became what Marquet calls the leader-leader model.
In a traditional leader-follower organization, employees look upward for answers:
Over time, this can create dependency. Employees become good at following instructions rather than exercising judgment.
The leader-leader model changes the expectation. Employees are expected to understand the situation, think through their options, make recommendations and take ownership. The manager's role begins to shift from providing answers to developing people capable of finding answers.
Replace Permission with Intent
One of the most practical concepts in Turn the Ship Around! is the change from asking for permission to stating intent.
Instead of "What do you want me to do?", the employee might say: "I intend to do X because of Y, and I expect the result to be Z."
This seemingly small change in language produces an important change in behaviour. Before stating an intention, the employee must understand the situation, consider the alternatives and take responsibility for a proposed course of action. The manager can still challenge the thinking or intervene when necessary, but it is the employee, not the manager, doing the initial thinking.
The objective isn't to eliminate management oversight. It is to eliminate unnecessary dependency on management.
Control Requires Competence
Empowerment alone isn't enough. Giving employees greater decision-making authority without ensuring they have the necessary knowledge and skills can simply create different problems.
Marquet's model therefore connects control with competence. As employees develop greater technical and professional competence, organizations can safely move more decision-making authority to them. This creates an important responsibility for managers: if you want employees to take greater ownership, you must also invest in their development. Training, coaching, feedback, mentoring and opportunities to solve increasingly difficult problems aren't separate from empowerment; they make empowerment possible.
Managers should therefore ask two questions: does this employee have the authority to make this decision, and have we developed the employee's capability to make the decision well?
Clarity Makes Independence Possible
There is another requirement: clarity. Employees can be highly capable and empowered but still make poor organizational decisions if they don't understand what the organization is trying to accomplish. People need to understand the organization's goals, priorities and principles well enough to use them when making decisions.
Instead of prescribing every action, leaders can provide clarity around the desired outcome. The conversation moves from "Here is exactly how I want you to do this" to "Here is what we're trying to accomplish. How do you think we should accomplish it?"
That distinction becomes particularly important as organizations grow. Senior leaders cannot participate in every decision. Employees need enough context to make decisions that remain aligned with the organization's objectives.
Stop Solving Every Problem
One of the most difficult changes for managers may be resisting the instinct to immediately solve problems. When an employee brings a problem to a manager, providing the answer often feels efficient. Sometimes it is. But repeatedly doing so can unintentionally train employees to escalate problems rather than solve them.
A better response is often: "What do you think we should do?" The employee may initially be uncomfortable with the question. That's part of the transition from following to leading. Over time, employees learn that identifying a problem is only the beginning. They are also expected to think about alternatives and recommend a solution. Managers can then coach the employee's decision-making rather than replacing it.
Accountability and Empowerment Go Together
Giving people greater control doesn't mean eliminating accountability. In fact, greater autonomy should produce greater ownership of outcomes. When employees participate in decisions, understand why they are making them and have the competence to execute them, accountability becomes less about managers monitoring every action and more about employees taking responsibility for results.
This creates an important distinction: micromanagement is not the same thing as accountability. An organization can have high levels of autonomy and extremely high standards of accountability at the same time.
Leadership Is an Organizational Capability
Perhaps the most important lesson from Turn the Ship Around! is that leadership shouldn't exist only at the top of an organization. The goal is to create an environment where leadership occurs at every level: employees take ownership, managers develop decision-makers, leaders provide clarity, and people closest to the work contribute their knowledge rather than simply executing instructions.
The result is an organization that is less dependent on a handful of individuals to make every important decision.
Turning Your Own Ship Around
Organizations don't need to eliminate hierarchy to adopt Marquet's ideas. They can start with small changes:
The ultimate question for leaders is not simply "How well am I leading my people?" It is "Am I creating people who can lead without me?"
That is the shift at the heart of Turn the Ship Around!: from creating followers who execute decisions to creating leaders who have the competence, clarity and ownership to make them.