The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 257: David Marquet - Intent Based Leadership (Turn The Ship Around!)

Episode Date: May 13, 2018

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Episode #257: David Marquet - Intent Based Leadership (Turn The Ship Around!) Captain Dave Marquet is a 1981 U.S. Naval Academy graduate.  He served in the U.S. submarine force for 28 years. After being assigned to command the nuclear powered submarine USS Santa Fe, then ranked last in retention and operational standing, he realized the traditional leadership approach of "take control, give orders," wouldn't work. He "turned his ship around" by treating the crew as leaders, not followers, and giving control, not taking control. This approach took the Santa Fe from "worst to first," achieving the highest retention and operational standings in the navy. Stephen R. Covey said it was the most empowering organization he'd ever seen and wrote about Captain Marquet's leadership practices in his book, The 8th Habit. Captain Marquet is the author of Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders. Fortune magazine called the book the "best how-to manual anywhere for managers on delegating, training, and driving flawless execution." "Leadership is not for the select few at the top. In highly effective organizations, there are leaders at every level. When we give our people more authority, we actually create more effective leaders." Show Notes: Sustaining excellence: "The ability to decouple from their personal feelings their personality. It can't all depend on one person. In a consistent organization, the leader is part of it, but not all of it." How parenting helps you become a better leader: "That's really interesting. As a parent, you're trying to create an independent decision maker." The United States Naval Academy definition of leadership = Leadership can be defined as directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of others... So as to obtain their command and obedience, their confidence, their respect, and their loyal cooperation." --> Why this is wrong and not effective. "I intend to..." -- Intent based leadership How to create the environment for the team to make decisions Intent based environment: People don't need to be told what to do. Lean back, team leans forward. Don't make yourself (as the leader) a bottleneck. Risks = Tune level of control to competence or confidence of the team... Expose my thought process (as the leader) to you to see how I put it together. Ask "what" and "how" questions... If you get hired as a new manager and did not get to choose anyone on your team? "Focus on what you can control.  Do we welcome each other? Do we care? Do we connect?" Making the jump from individual contributor to manager: "Talk less, don't have all the answers... Listen." "Push information to authority.  Be knowing, not telling." The job of the leader is to determine how the team works Minimize cognitive burden -- "The leader defines the structure." "We act our way to new thinking, not think our way to new acting."   Social Media: Read: Turn The Ship Around! Follow Captain Marquet on Twitter: @ldavidmarquet Connect with me on LinkedIn Join our Facebook Group: The Learning Leader Community To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12  

Push authority to information, not information to authority. So in other words, let the people closest to the problem have the authority to make decisions. And number two is you want to be a knowing but not telling leader as opposed to what I always thought and that definition that you read at the beginning of the show. That describes a knowing and telling leader. Know all the answers, make all the decisions. That is a traditional view of leadership. And I think it's much more powerful to be a knowing but not telling leader because then what happens is you create a team that wins in the long run. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show.

I am Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. It is Mindful Monday. Text learners to 44222 in order to join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world. text learners to 4422. Now, on to the night's featured leader. He's back. Love this guest.

Captain David Marque. I was honored to have him on a U.S. Naval Academy graduate for 28 years was a U.S. submarine force commander. He was put in charge of the worst performing submarine in the Navy, the USS Santa Fe, and he details how he took them from worst to first, the top-rated sub, after many years. Incredible story. wrote a book about it called Turn the Ship Around. USA Today named it one of the 12 best business books of all time. It's incredible. A few of the topics we got into why the United States Naval Academy's definition of leadership was wrong and what David did about it. Then he shares what an

intent-based environment is and how to build that into your culture. Then he gives advice to someone promoted to a management role for the first time. I wish I would have had this advice when I was promoted for the first time. It's so good. Ladies and gentlemen, you'll love this one with Captain David Marque. David, it's so good to have you back on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome back, man. Hey, thanks, Ryan.

Thanks for having me back on your show. Episode 47. It's been a few years, almost two and a half years. It's gone by pretty fast. So it's cool to regroup. We both have a lot of workout since the last time. we spoke, but I'm curious. There's one question I didn't ask you last time that I would like to ask you this time to get us started. And that's thinking about people and leaders who sustain excellence. And you have obviously quite a background, which we'll get into here in a second for those who don't already know. But thinking about people who sustain excellence over an extended period of time, what do you feel are some of the commonalities those people all seem to have? Well, it's, uh, it's, uh, it. It's an ability to detach the performance of the, or decouple, maybe is a better word,

the performance of the organization from their personal feelings, their personality. And here's the reason why. If your organization depends upon you being right today and you making good decisions day and day out, then that's a fragile place. Because one day you're going to be in a bad mood. One day you didn't sleep right. One day you didn't eat what you were supposed to. One day something that's going on in your personal life is going to be, you know, weighing on your mind.

And you're going to not be focused. And you're going to not make a good decision. And if you want to consistently have an organization that makes good decisions, my approach to that was to get me out of it. In other words, I'd be part of it, but it didn't need to hinge on me. and I needed to create this sort of very resilient network where everyone participated in the decision-making. So if anyone was off, that day, it didn't really matter because the rest of the team would cover that.

And so I think it really has to do with this issue of decoupling performance from our own personality, which comes counterintuitive, at least to me, it was very sort of counterintuitive. It feels like you view leadership how I think most people should view being a parent. And that is that you're trying to raise your kids to be self-sustaining, productive members of society without the need of their parents anymore. And that's hard, right? We love our kids and we always want them to want us to be in their life.

But really our job is to prepare them to do great things without you. And it feels like that is your strategy, not only with parenting, but when it comes to leadership in general. Yeah, I think, yeah, that's really interesting. So as parents, we all instinctively know this. There are certain things we instinctively know as parents that we don't apply when we become leaders. That's one of them, that creating an independent decision maker is better than someone who needs to come and ask me, you know, every day, well, what time should I come home? What time should I come home?

Should I wear my seat? Should I wear my seat? You know, right? So we all know that. The other thing that I think parents all know that we forget as leaders is that the environment really affects people's behaviors. Parents know this. On Tuesday, Johnny played with a bunch of nice kids and Johnny was nice. On Wednesday, played with a bunch of mean kids and Johnny was mean.

We know Johnny didn't change between Tuesday and Wednesday. The DNA didn't change, personality didn't change. The environment was what really triggered the different behavior. But then when we become leaders and we see someone who's behaving not in a helpful way, rather than take a look at the environment, which by the way is us, right? It's the culture that we've created and saying, hmm, why are my people acting in this way? We say, oh, you're broken. And so you need to go to empathy training class.

or something so like that. So, yeah, I like, I don't want people to say, oh, being a leader is like being a parent because I think there's a little bit too much sort of parochial perspective that can come in. But the idea that we want to move people towards independence and that we appreciate the impact of the environment. I think those do go pretty nice. Getting to your background, so you're in the Navy or captain in the Navy. And I'll let you tell part of the story.

but one of the quotes that I found interesting as I was researching for this call, David, is when you were in the Navy, you received, I guess it was a leadership book from the United States Naval Academy. And I pull out this quote from that book. And I don't know if that quote's still in the book or not. I'm not, don't know the military background. I just hold you guys in the highest possible regard. But this was the quote. And then I'd love to hear your response and how you handle this at the time. So, quote, leadership can be defined as directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of others.

So as to obtain their command and obedience, their confidence, their respect, and their cooperation. When you saw that as the definition of leadership, the book of the United States Naval Academy, what were you thinking? First of all, that's exactly, that's well done on the quote, right? I actually, I'm looking at the book right now to cross the room for me, and it's sitting on my shelf. My 1981 Naval Academy Leadership book, when I saw that, I said, that's it. That's what I need to do. And I really tried hard, scary hard. I was scary good at that because, like we all know, the government doesn't

make mistakes, right? You discover it. So, you know, and the background for me was like I was sort of this, I was on the math team, the chess team. It was kind of this introverted kid. I find myself in the Naval Academy, I want to be a submarine officer. And they say, well, this is what leadership is. Well, I was a very serious student. You put it in black and white in front of me on my textbook. I'm like, that's what it is. And so I, along with the sort of the generation of leaders that I grew up with, that's what we were talking. taught. It's about you making decisions about your, your person, and stamping your personality

on others and telling them what to do. Now, we now know that this is a fragile leadership approach because we know of many situations where the leader made a bad decision, but the subordinates won't correct it. They won't correct it. We want them to. We think they should. We give them a lecture about it, but they won't. And then we scratch our heads. And the problem is the, well, we think the answer is, well, we need to get better, we need to give better orders. That's not the answer. The answer is to figure out how to stop giving orders and create a team that doesn't need to be told what to do. So how long did it take you or what happened in your story to where you realized, wait a second, I'm not, I'm not trying to, to, to,

obtain their obedience. I certainly want them to be confident. I mean, part of that definition I agree with, right? Like, I want people to be confident in me and to respect me. The obedience part is an interesting word, an interesting phrase, because I prefer to lead people who are intellectually curious, people who are willing to question me. And I have to set the environment for that to happen. And it feels like that's what you figured out when you took over the worst performing submarine in the United States Navy, the Santa Fe.

And I'll let you tell the story. But is that what was what was the moment when you figured out? Maybe you can provide some of the backstory as to to what you did and how you got to be in charge of that sub. But I'm curious of the specific moment or story that you figured that out. Yeah, sure. So I was going merrily along, getting promoted, telling people what to do. do, having them do it. And 17 years later, they said, well, congratulations, you're going to be a submarine commander.

And, of course, I was very, you know, I was very excited about that. And you go to school for a year, 12 months, to learn your particular ship. We know what ship you're going to go to a year out. And they say, okay, you're going to go to this ship and you learn everything about it. And at the last minute, two weeks to go, my ship changed. and it changed to the Santa Fe, which was then the worst performing and had the worst morale ship and fleet. Only three sailors re-enlisted in the Navy off to Santa Fe in the previous 12 months was a resounding record, low number. And the reason I went there is because the person who was there quit early.

And so the Navy hadn't had time to do their program replacement. So anyway, I go over there, and the problem is the Santa Bay was one of the newest ships in the fleet, and so it was different than the one I'd been prepping for for the last 12 months. And I don't want to overdo it, but, you know, because the physics were the same, and the laws of nature were the same, but the specific equipment was all different, like the buttons that you pushed and the drop-down menus and those kind of things. And I took over, at two weeks, it took over, we go to see, I give an order. Like one of the very first orders I give.

And it turns out you can't do it on this ship. It was basically like saying shift into fifth gear, but the car was only a four, you know, only had four gears. Nothing, you know, nothing bad, no big deal. But I made a mistake. The thing that was shocking was that the officer who I passed this order to, the suggestion to, actually repeated it knowing you couldn't do it. And when it came to light, because the sailor is like,

huh, what, you know, like what's going on? And they're like, why are you doing it? And he says, there's no fifth gear on this submarine. Like, you're an idiot, right? He didn't say that, but I could hear it in his voice. And I look over at the officer. Now, he's a guy who's been on the ship over two years. Like, he was the Navigator.

I said, hey, Nav, what's going on? Why did you order? He said, well, you told me to. Because that's what your compliant workforce, worldview gets you. And my head literally blew apart, because I like, look, I wasn't trained for the ship, so I don't know all the things. And if I keep telling you guys what to do, you guys need to speak up and tell me they're wrong. I mean, that was my instinct.

First, I got to give better orders. I can't because I can't learn the complexity of a shit. Number two, you guys speak up also wrong because they're cultural stigmas against telling the captain that he or she is wrong. So we went to option three. We talked about it. And I said, how about this? how about I just never tell you guys what to do. We'll just skip that.

I'll never put you in a position where you've got to tell me I'm wrong because I'm never going to give an order. And they were like, okay, I guess so. And it worked. But we made this deal where I was going to not tell them orders and they were going to not wait to be told what to do. They would say, I intend to. And that's where we came up with this, we call intent-based leadership.

and it was really amazing how well it worked because when the team has to come to you and say, well, here's what I plan on doing. Here's what I intend to do. Here's what I'd like to do. It's really a provocation to think, like you said, and be curious and to come and tell me. So rather than me saying, I think we should turn left, what do you guys think? And making them tell me, no, that's not a good idea. We should turn right.

I would just stay quiet. And they would say, I intend to turn right. And it's that staying quiet that was really hard for me, really hard for me. Because many times I felt like, oh, you know, nothing's happening. When are we going to do it? We need to be doing something. We need to start moving. But I found that when I jumped in and started making things happen, I turned everybody else

into sort of, you know, bobbleheads. So, but the reason why I think this doesn't happen more is just usually based out of insecurity. I mean, most, not most, but a lot of people in roles like to remind people, and some of it's just out of self-preservation. I get it. They have an important job that maybe they get paid a lot and they want to keep the job. And so they have to continue to remind people why they're valuable to the organization. They feel like if I am just there kind of listening and letting other people make decisions, then what do you need me for? Right. I mean, I'm thinking of the person who's in a leadership role within a big corporation who at times spends meeting time

justifying their existence within that organization, right? How annoying is that? It's very annoying, but it's very common, right? And so how speaking directly to that person who does that, and there are thousands of them listening and they're not bad people, but, but they feel this because they feel a responsibility to keep their job and they think this is maybe the best way. What's your advice to them to say, well, I want to make sure everybody knows how valuable I am and how useful I am. And if I'm just sitting kind of on the side and I'm not decisive as maybe Colin Powell would say or others, how can I show that I'm so valuable and that my job needs to exist, especially during a time when corporations are constantly looking to cut headcount, constantly.

I mean, at all times, they want to reduce cost. So what do you say to that person? Look, if you're 22 years old, you're an individual contributor and you got a show that you can build a website or whatever, then yeah, you make decisions and you convey what you're doing. But if you're in charge of a team of 100 people or 50 people or 20 people, 10 people, you got two choices. Either you can be the answer man all the time and you can feel good and you can go home great. But then the other nine people are going home feeling like, oh, well, we've got to depend on Ryan. He's a guy who's got all the answers. By ourselves, we're just a bunch of useless people, okay, which is going to become a self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Or you can say, look, my role is going to be in creating the structure so that this team does the most work, gets the, has a bias for action. and we optimize the thinking of all 10 people as opposed to just me. And that's the decision you've got to make. Now, most people think they're the smartest person around, and they can always do it better, faster yourself. When you become a leader and you've been in the organization a little bit longer, you will probably see the problems first. You might see the solutions first.

You might actually be right about it. but if that's what you keep doing all the time, then you never get out of that box. You're just always, you're just an hourly worker, basically. And once you transition, say, well, I'm going to create an environment where the team can do this. Now you transition to being a leader. People come in feeling good and you will,

the space you open up in your head will be amazing. It's kind of hard to imagine it. You got to run around and make decisions all day long. It's exhausting. I was exhausted. And now people are coming to you. Here's the kind of things. We've had people, one lady lost 50 pounds because she was so much less stressed.

And just a kind of list goes on and on. Where you will see things you didn't see before because you will clear out this clutter out of your head. You'll be in fewer meetings. You'll have time to read, time to reflect, and you'll be, you'll be doing your job much better. So how do you define intent-based leadership or an intent-based environment? So intent-based leadership, we create an environment where people don't need to be told what to do. And the way we do it is in very small, gradual, safe steps. And the leader, the normal view is the leader leans into the team.

Like as captain and I would lean into the officers, tell them what to do, and they would report back. So it's direct and report, direct and report. We even call them direct report. And so what happens is you lean back. We don't lean in and you lean back and that creates the space for the team to lean forward into you. So they're coming to you and saying, hey, here's what I think that we should do. here's what I intend to do. And the difference between those is big.

When people say, here's what I intend to do, the default is it's going to happen. Only if I say no, will I stop it? Versus most organizations are permission-based organizations where we say, I'd like to do this, and the default is no, and I have to get a yes. So, which is why you have all these emails going around and everyone's addicted to their phone

because I know my team is sitting there waiting. For approval. For approval, exactly. And so in a new world, let's say the team says, okay, we're going to let you know what we're doing. For big decisions, we're going to give you 24 hours to respond, but for the small stuff, we're just going to tell you, hey, we're doing this.

You turn your phone off, right? You're not holding anybody up. They're out there doing stuff. Now, initially it sounds really scary, and people say, well, people come to me, with boneheaded ideas all day long. Yeah, that's because they know you're going to say no. That's because they know they're not truly responsible because you're the approval.

So if you tell them to do it, they can point to you. On the other hand, as they say, when you come to me, I'm going to say yes. I'm just telling you right now, whatever you come to me with, I'm going to say yes. They're not going to come to you with boneheaded ideas. They're going to self-select out those boneheaded ideas because they know they own it. It's their responsibility. And that will really change, it changes their behaviors. What are the risk for creating an environment like this?

Yeah. So empowerment by itself is not a program. What we say is you've got to tune the level of control to competence and the clarity of the team. So what you really want to do is uncover, okay, if I start saying like, this is your idea, it's not like it's your idea and I'm guaranteed to say yes but it's your idea and I want to hear your thinking I get to ask some questions I want you to the way you think about it is the leader says I'm going to give you the opportunity to take control of this decision and the and the subordinates says I'm going to make sure I expose my thinking so that you can fully evaluate whether I'm

ready to take make these decisions so you come up and you say here's a decision Should we release the product on time or delay it because we want to add one more feature? Okay. Team comes up, says here's what we want to do. We want to delay and add the feature. You want to release on time. You set that aside for a minute and you inquire into the team's thinking. Tell me more about it.

How did you guys get here? Ask what and how questions. Try and avoid a why question. Not why do you want to do that. But how did you get to that thinking? you know, what did you consider? Start the questions with what and how. And here I'm out.

And unless it's really a huge deal, then I'd probably let them have their way. So the idea is that we lean back and we let them lean into us. Take ownership of their decisions. And when they own it, they're going to be probably much more invested in the success of it because it's their decision, their idea to then own that. David, one of the other things that's common in the corporate space or maybe any space, I actually had lunch with a football coach yesterday and we talked about this that you don't always get to choose your players, especially if you're a high school coach or you're a manager

anywhere. You can't just come in typically and just fire the whole team. And when you're a submarine commander, you can't just. kick everybody off to submarine, I assume. So for those people relating to the story of David Marque as well as the person who is leading in an organization with 10 people, 50 people, 1,000 people, whatever may be, and firing everybody is not an option. It's typically not the best choice.

How were you able to manage so well without swapping out the player? so to speak, by doing it with the existing team? Google did a study on team performance, and they said, well, what's the most important thing to determine team performance? Now, this was inside of Google, so everyone had already made the cut to be a Google employee. But beyond that, they said, okay,

is it who's on the team? We have superstars, you know, and not superstars, or is it what positions they're in or is it how the team interacts? And the Google study, it's called Project Aristotle, determined it was how the team interacts. In other words, if someone comes up with the dissenting opinion, do we listen to that person? Are we curious about it?

Or do we just kind of stuff them back in a box? And that was my experience on the submarine. We didn't fire anybody yet. Firing everybody is never the right. right answer because it sends a signal that hey the problem is you guys which it probably isn't

and so all you do focus your energy on what you can control which is how you interact do we welcome each other do we greet each other when someone says hey

I saw the new Star Wars movie even though I don't give two hoots about Star Wars do I take 30 seconds and just, you know, it's an invitation to connect. Do I connect with a person? Even though maybe it's not really the thing I want to talk about. And then because those connections then make the work more fun, and then they help people communicate with,

you want people to be vulnerable, but I don't want to connect with them. So it's not going to work. So those are kind of things we talk about in terms of how we interact. It's simply how do you talk to each other? Just focus on how, you know, what do we say? The person comes up to you and says, I want to delay the software release, and you're 99% sure that's wrong. That's the wrong approach. What are the very next words that come out of your mouth?

That's where leadership lives and dies, right there in that moment. Charles Duhigg, a previous guest on the show, I think he wrote a story based on that study on the New York Times. What Google learned from its quest to build a perfect team. Yes. Yeah. Do this stuff is great, and that's a great article in the New York. New York Times. Everyone, you guys all check it out.

Do you here. Yeah, it's good. It's really good, especially for those people because I've, I hear that. I mean, it's an easy excuse, and I've actually said it before in the corporate space. And it's terrible. I'm embarrassed. But it said, well, I need to get my own people. I need to get you hear, there was a, for college football fans, there was a tiff between Urban Meyer and Todd Herman, or the Herman, the coach of Texas because he kind of said, well, I don't have my own players in here.

yet and Urban Meyer from Ohio State said, that's not the way it works, buddy. The second that you sign on the dotted line to be the coach, those are your guys. Right. So, and you better act like it. And by the way, you just, you just insulted all of your players. So I think we can all learn from that approach into whatever it is we're doing. We can't blame the people. If you get promoted to be a manager, it's not your place to start complaining and say, well, my team's not any good.

It's not my fault. I mean, you are in control at that point. And it's your duty to then build the culture, as you said, to create a culture of connecting, of caring, of, of talking to each other. I think that's, that's our duty as leaders. The, the, the next interesting part of your work, David, is the fact that you, so your book, we talked about the first time, but I'll briefly touch on it. your book, Turn the Ship Around. USA Today named it one of the 12 best business books of all time. Not, you know, book of the month, book of the year, but one of the 12 best business books

of all time. It's an incredible book. And we did talk about that a lot on episode number 47 here. But now the follow up to that is the turn the ship around workbook. So how to really implement this. What made you want to turn this into a workbook? Why? and what is it about it that can help people in the middle of it right now?

So a couple things happened. So I wrote the book, and it's a story. Here's what happened to me. And since then, we've had a lot of companies and leaders say, well, I want to do that too. I want to try and be that way. And there were a couple things that were not answered in the book. that we want to help people with. Number one is like what, what do you actually do and how do you do it?

So we put some activities. We put some activities together. We do these workshops. And we say, well, let's just put all these activities that we do in workshops in a book. So anyone can buy it for 12 bucks. And secondly, they said, well, what about middle management? How did the team, you were the captain so I can see how it worked from your side. but what are the guys in the middle think?

So one of the middle guys in middle management on the submarine, who was a chief, Andy Worshack, who now works with me and does workshops, wrote kind of his perspective. And so we added that. And then we got some questions, well, is this backed in science? And our story was an experience that was sort of, it's an experiential story, but we now know that there's scientific research that backs up why,

it kind of explains why some of the things that we did worked. And so we added that to the workbook. And so the result is we wanted to make basically sort of a textbook that for implementers that would tell them how to do it. And that's why we came up with this workbook and got launched at the very beginning of the year and we're super excited about this workbook and be able to make this accessible to as wide an audience as possible. David,

one of the, you mentioned this, so I want to hit on it. I pose this question in my learning leader community on my Facebook group that I, I love the engagement with that group. And one of the questions I asked was, what was the training you received when you made the leap from individual contributor to manager?

And it was amazing what I got back. Basically, the overwhelming majority of the people who responded said nothing. Nada. Nothing. I mean, literally nothing. And it was upsetting to hear. And I take it back to my time. And I remember that.

And there was a little bit of a boot camp. I remember for a day or two. But overall, I remember making, I can't even count the number of mistakes that. I made when making that jump. And so you hit on it when you talked about you work with a guy who talks about that middle management. And I'm curious from your perspective, for anyone making the jump from individual contributor to manager for the first time, what's the best, this could be an hour probably, but what's the best piece of advice or pieces of advice you would give to them that could potentially help

them avoid some mistakes? Don't, don't tell. I'll put this talk last. Don't give them the answer, even if you think you know what it is. See, up to now you've always been rewarded for having answers. And when now when you have a team and you're the answer man as the head of the team, you're suppressing their desire and ability and motivation to come up with our own answers, which two things, doesn't develop them.

and two means you're only going to be as good as you. Their answers, their solutions may be better. Probably will be because as you get more and more removed from the actual work, the coal face, as we say, you lose touch with what's really going on and what's really the problem, how really to solve it. So you really need the phrase we use is, we have two phrases. One, push authority to information, not information to authority. So in other words, let the people closest to the problem have the authority to make decisions.

And number two is you want to be a knowing but not telling leader as opposed to what I always thought and that definition that you read at the beginning of the show. That describes a knowing and telling leader. Know all the answers, make all the decisions. That is a traditional view of leadership. And I think it's much more powerful to be a knowing but not telling leader because then what happens is you create a team that wins in the long run. You build and develop your talent. So new leaders, new managers, they want to show their competence. They want to show their level of confidence.

And they want to start earning respect. and if again, I'll push on this a little bit. I agree with you, but I think for the sake of the show and for everybody listening, it's my job to kind of push is how do you show confidence and competence and earning respect if you don't say anything, for lack of a better phrase? Okay, okay. You are saying things. You're directing how the team interact, how we do work.

So for example, someone comes up to you and says, what do you want me to do? You stand firm. You say, I'm not going to tell you. You're going to go away. You're going to talk to three other people and you're going to come back and you're going to tell me what you would do if I weren't here. And you're going to stand firm on that. And you're going to say that over and over and over and over again. The job of the leader is to decide how the team interacts, not what the team does.

That's the problem. I'll give you another example. Now, this is a very simple example is based on a construction company that I work with. So I go into the construction trailer and they have the site, they have charts of drawings

of the site taped up on the wall. But the drawings are all going in different direction. In one case is, one case, north is up, in the next case, north is to the right,

and the next case, north to the left. Because different people from different subcontract, one's the drawing of the concrete, another is the drawing, of the electrical and others the drawing of the plumbing so the plumber taped up his drawing one way okay so when we look at drawings and they're all different directions it require us to do a mental

translation and say okay north is here here but over here it's here so this piece of concrete which is in the upper left of this drawing is actually the lower right of that drawing right so so anytime and so that adds a cognitive tax or burden and whenever we add cognitive tax or burden with no benefit, it simply increases the probability of someone making a mistake. So one of the principles is minimize cognitive burden by requiring unnecessary translation. So the job of the leader is to say, okay, north is up. Every time you guys tape a drawing on the board, it's always going to be north up. Okay?

Maybe the leader's not saying what's on the drawings or how many drawings or which drawings, you know, that kind of thing. But making the rule, drawings are tight with North up. Unless someone says that and then enforces it, there's no leadership. It's just a mess. And people mistake it. I say, well, I don't want to tell people what to do. No, you're not telling what to your design on how we do business in the correct way.

You're really defining the operating system, it sounds like. Exactly. We're defining it. Like Facebook doesn't say, here's a blank sheet of paper. type stuff, they say, you know, you have fields to fill in. What's your name? What's your relationship? What's your business affiliation?

Yeah. Otherwise, it's just chaos. So the leader has to define that. The leader defines that structure. And I think the more energy you put into defining the structure and being, And being pretty, here's another example, sorry. There you're good. Agile, anything like, like, we say, look, we're going to work agile.

We're going to work our software in an agile way. That means we're going to have a daily stand-up, and we're going to work for, we're going to have a three-week sprint. At the end of three weeks, we're going to have a sprint review, and then we're going to do a sprint planning session. We're going to burn down charge. So basically all the manifestations of Agile. And you say that's how we work. That as a job, as a leader, that's your. that's your purview. And if someone says, well, I don't want to show up to the standup. Oh, I'm not going to participate in the review and celebration or I'm not going to put my numbers into the burned down chart. You say, no. You can't be on this team because this is, I'm not telling you what to work on. I'm not telling you which features to add, but I'm telling you this is how we work. This is the role of the leader.

David hey man I thanks again for being here and and I certainly want to continue and keep this dialogue going as we both progress and hopefully next time we'll we won't have such a big gap in between our conversation business is a lot of fun man all right thanks a lot all right thanks Dave cheers all right I love that talk with captain Marquet thank you to David

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