In his widely acclaimed book Turn the Ship Around!, which Fortune called “the best how-to manual anywhere for managers on delegating, training and driving flawless execution”, former nuclear sub captain David Marquet writes,

“The leader-leader structure is fundamentally different from the leader-follower structure. At its core is the belief that we can all be leaders and, in fact, it’s best when we all are leaders. Leadership is not some mystical quality that some possess and others do not. As humans, we all have what it takes, and we all need to use our leadership abilities in every aspect of our work life.”

Marquet’s entire strategy is based around the idea that everyone must be a leader. When he spoke to his crew, as sub captain, he was speaking as leader of the sub, but he was addressing his crew as leaders as well – leaders of their respective functions. And he expected them to act as leaders – not as followers – leaders who don’t just follow orders but who think, and innovate, and voice opinions in a professional way.

Marquet (shown at the right holding our book) did not simply say “You are all leaders now”. He taught them how to lead. For example, he taught them to “think out loud”. That is, when he asked them a question, even in front of other crew, he told them to share their thought process, not just give a final answer. His goal was to create a thoughtful environment, not a just-follow-orders environment. Of course, a decision needs to be followed, but he wanted the decision process to be intelligent and inclusive. He became the crew’s teacher and mentor in how to make decisions and how to lead – officers and non-officers alike.

His attitude on mentoring and treating his crew as leaders was core to how he managed to turn the worst-performing sub in the Navy to the best-performing.

Marquet wrote about a submarine crew, but his model of leader-leader is more relevant today in business than ever. It is because business has become more dynamic. During the 20th century the pace of change was slow, and so the plodding process of annual planning was effective; and if an issue took months to bubble up to senior managers, that was still timely enough

Today a robust response is needed right away. There is no time for the bubbling up of issues. Annual planning is an order of magnitude too slow for the response time that is needed when situations change.

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That’s why Amazon’s model of “single-threaded” leadership is so effective: because it creates a distributed team focused on an outcome – a team that cuts across the organization. The team is wholly responsible and empowered, and that enables its leaders to respond rapidly, without waiting for hierarchy or planning cycles.

Amazon has planning cycles, but those are for strategy and review of team performance. Teams operate in real time. And when I say “team”, it often consists of hundreds of people, organized as subteams.

That’s not the point though. Just putting people into a cross-cutting team does not solve the problem. A team of any kind needs leadership. If you don’t assign leaders, leaders will emerge. There are always leaders, or nothing gets done. The question is, are the leaders the right ones? Are they people who will move things forward rapidly? Are they inclined to listen to the opinions of others, or do they act as dictators?

Leadership is arguably the most important skill in business, yet hardly anyone receives any training in leadership; or if they do, it is an afternoon seminar. Leadership is behavioral, and a four-hour seminar is not going to change anyone’s behavior.

Some people are naturally good leaders, but most are not. Natural or not, leadership is a journey. You get better over time, through experience. But that journey is slow, and needs to be jump-started.

Imagine someone trying to learn a foreign language on their own, to prepare for a trip. They will likely progress slowly. But if you teach them the basics, their learning will accelerate.

Learning to be an effective leader is like that. If you teach someone the basics, then when they have leadership experiences, they will have a much deeper reflection on those experiences. They will progress more quickly. They will become good leaders in much less time than they would have otherwise.

It is puzzling why so few people receive leadership training. Improving people’s leadership skills is the surest way to increase performance across the board. Perhaps it is because leadership skill is hard to measure – it’s one of those “soft” skills. Also, a lot of senior leaders succeeded without it. Yet most organizations struggle in many ways, so perhaps those leaders are not doing as well as they think they are.

Besides, things have changed, as we have pointed out. Today’s organization needs to react more quickly. Yesterday’s paradigms won’t work. New startups are changing business models. The pace of change is an order of magnitude faster than what it was. Established organization’s need to adapt to survive.

In the end, their pace of change will be governed by their people. Yes barking orders will create quick results, but are they the best results?

Remember what Marquet found: he got the best results by empowering people and treating them as leaders, and teaching them how to lead. So here’s what we recommend.

Have Humility: Check Your Own Knowledge

Okay we know that you are a successful leader – you know what has worked for you. But do you know what works for other people? Not everyone is the same. Plus, there are many kinds of leadership: as Peter Drucker would say, one needs “an inside person, an outside person, and a person of action”. Those are all different kinds of leader.

Leadership is a rich field of study. People like John Kotter and Amy Edmondson and countless others have studied actual organizations to understand what effective leadership actually looks like in different situations. Leadership is situational: what works well at Google might not work well at the Department of Transportation; and what works well in a crisis probably won’t be the right approach when there is no crisis.

If your people are going to receive leadership training, you should be on the same page: you should have awareness of what they are learning, so that you can use the same vocabulary. It is really important to establish an organization-wide language about leading and how to lead.

See the Risk Clearly

Examine your strategic initiatives, and ask yourself: How much does each depend on good leadership at all levels? Remember Marquet’s epiphany that everyone is a leader.

For example, suppose that there are three teams working on an initiative, and a team member realizes that there is a problem with an approach that another team is working on. Should the team member speak up? Or should they just keep their head down and do their tasks?

Speaking up is a form of leadership. Proposing new ideas is a form of leadership. Advocating for your perspective is a form of leadership. Coordinating with others is a form of leadership. Being inclusive is too. And so is knowing how to collaborate with others who work differently than you.

Once you realize how much everything depends on good leadership from everyone, you will see just how vulnerable you are, given that few people have had leadership training.

Set Expectations

Realize that leadership is a journey and that your goal should be to put everyone on a leadership improvement journey. A seminar or even a week-long course will not turn everyone into a better leader. What it will do is accelerate their leadership development, putting them on a steep arc of improvement over time.

They will become better leaders much faster than they would have otherwise. Given time, you will see dramatic improvement. That’s why we encourage measurement (see below).

It’s About Them – Not You

Do this in a way in which they are all co-designers of it, energized. Make it a community effort. We can help you to do that, through outreach workshops and by creating an active community with monthly presentations by them and discussions that we facilitate until they are ready to take that over.

It’s about them: they need to feel ownership of this. They need to feel like the training taught them good ideas, but now it is theirs. They need opportunities and forums in which to talk about their successes and their own perspectives on what worked.

Provide Training!

Give them the cognitive food for thought that will start them on their journey.

People don’t know what they don’t know. A recent study, The illusion of information adequacy, reinforced this. It was found that,

“people presume that they possess adequate information—even when they lack half the relevant information or [are] missing an important point of view. Furthermore, they assume a moderately high level of competence to make a fair, careful evaluation of the information in reaching their decisions.”

But once you give people new knowledge, it opens their eyes and they will grow their abilities rapidly. You have to provide the mental fuel to launch them on that journey.

Of course we recommend our own training program, but this comes from a place of authenticity. We developed this program expressly to cover the full spectrum of leadership, not just a narrow aspect. This is because since everyone needs to be a leader, leadership contexts change all the time, and people need to be ready for each situation.

Measure!

Measurement is really important. Through measurement you can see what is working and fine-tune.

Measure both leading and trailing indicators. Leading indicators are about adoption of new approaches. Trailing behaviors are about outcomes. Both are crucial.

The figure above shows an idealized version of our dashboard system. The actual dashboard flows down over a series of pages, but this depiction enables us to show the leading and trailing indicators side-by-side.

The metrics here are rollup categories. Importantly, the leading indicators are about behavior – specifically behaviors that indicate things about leadership. As leadership improves, which is evident on the left, outcomes will improve, evident on the right.

Provide Experts to Discuss Situations With

We hesitate to use the word “coaching”, because “Agile” coaching has been such a dysfunction, but in truth, coaching – quality coaching by people who have deep and broad leadership experience and who also understand the research – is really valuable.

When people try out methods that they have learned, they often make mistakes. It is then up to then to interpret those mistakes. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to learn the wrong lesson from a mistake.

Research tells us that those wrong lessons can compound, and become embedded in how someone thinks. Without external correction by a knowledgeable coach or mentor, individuals may reinforce their own incorrect learned lessons.

Providing experts with whom to discuss real world situations can help to prevent this, and ensure that people learn the right lessons. Remember that while a seminar or class provides a foundation of knowledge, most internalization of the knowledge occurs in the period after the seminar or class (recall the diagram in “Set Expectations”).

Conclusion

There is no silver bullet for improving effectiveness. It takes work. But there is a common thread: leadership. Leadership is what it is all about, if we view everyone as a leader, which we must. There is no more sure way to improve everyone’s performance and thereby the organization’s performance than by improving everyone’s leadership skills.

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