Leadership (noun)
Embedding the capacity for greatness in the people and practices of an organization, and decoupling it from the personality of the leader.
Please forgive my terrible pun of a title. One of my coworkers (shout out Iwan, leader of the Service Reliability Architects (SRA)) recently shared with me a video of Former-Captain David Marquet’s talk on Leadership. If you have an extra 24 minutes or so, please take the time to watch the video.
It’s one of those talks where, by the end of it, the listener is inspired – inspired to work, inspired to lead. I was working while listening to this the first time, and I remember chuckling at some of David Marquet’s anecdotes, and having a few really thought provoking moments. David talks about how when he was first promoted to Captain a submarine, he trained for 12 months on every detail of the USS Olympia, a very specific submarine, but at the last minute, was reassigned to the USS Santa Fe; he didn’t know the ins and outs of the Santa Fe the way he did the Olympia. But his crew knew their jobs. Instead of barking orders, especially since he wasn’t totally sure how everything on the submarine worked or ran, he let the crew take charge. He literally stopped giving orders. The crew stopped bringing him problems sans solutions; they stopped saying ‘I recommend…’ they stopped saying ‘I would like to…’ and they started saying ‘I intend to. . . .” Everything changed – this submarine went from the worst performing submarine in the fleet to the highest score for operating a submarine in the history of the navy.
Iwan and I had just left an SRA Sprint Demo, where the SRAs show off the cool new things they’re doing/developing to improve our products and product Cloud Maturity (ability for products to function on the Cloud instead of on premise; Software as a Service). The first demo of the call was incredible to watch – the automation, the streamline, the problems it promised to solve. I can’t get into specifics (partially due to lack of understanding technical aspects), but suffice to say this demo was revolutionary for Infor. Iwan messaged me after the call and asked how I liked the demo – a lot of it went over my head, but I told him it was fascinating. Iwan then shared a piece of advice I will never forget:
This is what happens when managers don’t tell people how to do their jobs, but explain where they want to go.
Some of my favorite lines from David Marquet’s talk:
“Going into combat? Not scary. Admitting you don’t know something when you’re the Captain of a nuclear submarine? Scary.”
“I now think these words ‘I don’t know’ are the most important words a leader can say. Because those are the words that open the door to learning.”
Please feel free to reach out with any questions (in the comments section below)! And remember to subscribe (check out the widgets on the side)!
My door is always open.