Turn Your Ship Around with David Marquet

OutsideVoices with Mark Bidwell

In this episode, we are joined by David Marquet, who was the Captain of the USS Santa Fe from 1990 to 2001 and now works as a leadership expert with businesses worldwide. We cover his book, Turn The Ship Around! A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking Rules, which has been recently re-released with a new companion workbook.

What Is Covered

• Why it is essential to have a longer-term perspective in your people development processes. Because while achievement scorecard runs while you're at an organization, your leadership scorecard starts counting the day you leave
• Why leadership should be centered on ‘leaning back’ and inviting your team to ‘lean forward’
• Why David believes it is important to alternate between two sets of behaviors, languages, and mindsets to optimize between production and decision-making scenarios

Key Takeaways and Learnings

• How pausing – and fighting the urge to take immediate action – is essential to developing the ‘leadership muscle’ of a team
• The differences between a ‘prove’ and ‘improve’ mindset and how to signal to your team which mindset should be adopted in different situations
• Actions to create a system thinkers and leaders at every level, how this develops organizational resilience and inoculates it against stupid decisions
• How leaders need to ‘flatten the power gradient’, to make themselves accessible and create the environment for others to contribute

Links and Resources Covered in this Episode

• Get in touch with David Marquet via LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook
• David Marquet's website
• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, a book by David Marquet
• United States Naval Academy, website
• Talking 100% Entrepreneurship & 0% Bureaucracy with Heiko Fischer of Resourceful Humans on OutsideVoices