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You heard about it here. Again, that's longangle.com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to help you upgrade your life, money, travel, and more. Now, I'm sure we all have that favorite article or video that we've all read and we've watched a dozen times and shared to countless people.

I can't remember how I came across mine first, but for me, it's a talk from David Marquet about leadership. And when I was running my last startup, I watched it every few months and sent it to so many friends and colleagues in leadership roles. So if you sense a bit of excitement in my voice, it's because I'm joined by David himself today.

And for those of you who don't know him, David Marquet is a distinguished submarine captain who, as commander of the USS Santa Fe, took the ship and its crew from being one of the worst performing in the Navy to the most combat effective ship in the squadron. He documented that journey in an incredible bestselling book, Turn the Ship Around, which was listed as one of the 12 best business books of all time, and he followed that up in 2020 with another bestselling book, Leadership is Language.

In our conversation, we'll dive into the unique perspective he has on leadership and break down the tactics you can apply to your own lives, whether you're at the top or bottom of your organization. All right, we have a lot to cover, so let's jump in. David, thank you for being here.

How are you? Good, Chris. Thanks for having me on your show. Welcome all listeners. So I would just love to start by hearing how your definition of leadership has evolved since you first started thinking about it. My definition of leadership was handed to me, like in the Navy, if they want you to have something, they're going to give it to you.

If they haven't given it to you, you don't need it. So my definition of leadership started like this. Leadership can be defined as directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of others so as to command their obedience, confidence, and thorough respect. Basically something like that. But it was about this, it was in this model of the leader is the decision maker, the leader is the brains of the organization, and the team is the body.

The team executes what the leader wants. And it's a model that got the human race a long way. It was a model that was alive during the Industrial Revolution. It was a model that a lot of people cling to because there's psychological seductions in the model when you're the leader and everyone thinks you're important and they got to stand and wait for your word and that kind of thing.

But it's not the best model for the highest performing teams on the planet today, in my opinion. I had to learn the hard way that the model didn't work when the Navy signed me as a submarine commander to a submarine I'd never been on before. I'd finished this 12-month course for the submarine I was supposed to go to, but at the last minute, through some circumstances, I ended up going to Santa Fe, and I'd never been on this kind of submarine, and so now it was a life-and-death thing, like every time I gave an order, it was an X probability we were going to die because it could be right, it could be wrong.

The team was going to do it anyway. And I had to unlearn all my leadership behavior. So leadership to me now is much more like creating the environment where people can be at their best just the way they are, not changing people, not saying, well, you need to be more proactive and you need to have more assertiveness, but just you want to change someone, change yourself, work on that.

So it's about, it's always about other people and it's about creating the environment. So the question is like, under what conditions are humans at our best? Under what conditions are you at your best? And that's what you want to do in your company, because then everyone will be at their best.

They'll be at their best human, which I think means using our brains a lot. And it'll be awesome for everybody. I want to talk about some of those tactics, but was there a moment on the Santa Fe that you said, wow, this has to change? Yeah. Well, yeah, there was, of course I knew that I hadn't been on the submarine and the crew knew that I was trained for a different, I mean, because the captain quit before me, they got airdropped in with basically no notice.

But I was standing in the control room. We were starting a drill. This was our first day at sea and the submarine had a bad reputation. So my mindset was, oh, we're going to train hard. We're going to run all these hard drills on ourselves and we're going to beat performance into the ship.

And then maybe people will be happier because there was two problems, horrible morale, horrible performance. So we start the first exercises. We shut down the reactor, it's called reactor scram and reactor scram. And then you don't have power. You're depleting your battery. Guys are running around and I want to make it harder.

So I say, hey, let's speed up on the backup electric motor. And the officer orders it. Well, it turns out there was only one, it was only one speed motor on the Santa Fe, the Navy was always moves towards simpler equipment. So instead of a two speed motor, like having two gear, two gears on your car is just one.

It's like a fixie for a bicyclist. And I didn't know that. But the scary thing is the officer who I suggested it to ordered it. And then the sailor just looked stupefied and he said, there's no second gear. And this is like not knowing what the color of your car is or something like one of the most basic things like you need to know as a submarine commander.

And I had made this horrendous mistake. I was embarrassed and I was sad. And I had this light bulb moment. Number one, I didn't order it. He did. Number two, all my leadership training was irrelevant because all my leadership training was about making decisions and getting people to do it, but it's all predicated in being right.

And then, oh, in the unlikely event that I'm not correct, I'm going to harangue the team and say, oh, it's your obligation to speak up and tell me I'm wrong. Problem is, as long as you make it harder for people to do something, they're going to do it less.

So step one, the first tactic is shut up. Stop telling people what to do. There's so many negative things that happen from telling people what to do. You give them permission to shut your brains off. You absolve them of responsibility for their behaviors, on and on and on. So you just don't tell them what to do.

Say, well, you tell me, if you were me, what would you do? If you were the captain, what would you do? And so we just embed this language. And it was, for us, the magic word was intent. I said, just stop saying, I would like permission to. Stop saying, I hope to.

Stop saying, would you approve it for me to do this? Just say, this is what I intend to do. And now the bias is the answer is yes, unless you hear no, as opposed to the answer is no, unless you hear yes. And this has a huge impact. The second thing is, it puts you in the role of evaluating decisions rather than making decisions, which is much more powerful.

I tried this at my company. I just said, you know, someone's saying, Oh, what should we do here? I said, what do you, what do you think we should do here? And I think it went well. It's easier, I guess, when you don't have an answer. When you don't know the answer, you genuinely have to ask.

A lot of times people do have an answer or do have an opinion. And it's a little harder and it takes some reinforcement. But when you told the team, Hey, I'm not going to make any decisions. It's on you. Did everyone get it? No, I got the officers together and I was shaken because this was visceral.

This was life and death. We know teams where the leader will make a decision. It'll be a terrible decision, but everyone does it. Winter corn CEO, Volkswagen. We're going to do this thing with the diesel engines. It's a, we, you can't. So the team goes through all these things, cheat of a horrible reputation, but they're absolved of the responsibility because they were told to.

Now he'll say, I didn't actually tell him that. Yeah, but you've set up, set it up. So that was the only way we think anyway, you know, you know, the story we got together, I was looking at my shoes. They were looking at their shoes. I said, we've got a problem.

And I hit on this idea where I'm going to be this commanding officer of the submarine and never give any commands. I said, because as soon as I start telling you guys what I think there's going to, it's just, it's not going to be binary, but it's just going to be harder for you to speak up and tell me what you think.

So how about this? You tell me what you think first, and then I'll tell you yes or no. And the majority of people wanted it right away, even I, but I know no one really understood the implications. You, I can't say, watch this movie and you'll get a sense of what it was like.

Every movie. I just finished watching this thing that BBC, I don't know if it's it, but it's a UK thing gone vigil is whore. It's hideous. It's horrible. Like the way they portray the Navy is just the worst, the most horrible, like nonsensical, this would never happen. But one thing that they portray, which is correct is the captain's going around giving all these orders.

Like he's always telling people he never wants to see someone come to the cab and say, captain, this is what I intended to do. The cat, we really need to do this. And why? Cause it's a drama. The camera has to go someplace, but that's not the right way to run a company because it's, you just get thinking of one versus the thinking of everyone.

But one of the things we say is don't convince me, commit behaviors, not action. So I was talking to two owners, two, two company founders for the show. And they said, Hey, we've got a situation where one of the guys on the team, like it's coming up with the wrong answer for how to manage a technology product.

And they're reluctant to just tell them what to do, which I can't sense that, but it's okay to sometimes, sometimes do that. They say, well, how much do we explain? And so they said, I want to tell them this when I tell them to do it this way. And like everything that the person cited, if we're going to use this other plat, this platform, which is bigger.

Okay. If you get the person to test and you said, is this platform bigger? And every question would be right. So none of those reasons are the reasons why the person's not doing it. There's some other reason, but in the end, don't, you don't need to convince them they're wrong.

That's really derogatory. So, you know what, you might be right, but we're going to do it this way. Now you leave as much open decision space as possible. So I'm not adverse to leaders quote, making decisions, but there's two things. Number one, you focus that your decision should be on building ownership and creating the structure, not tweaking the decisions.

If you think about it like a car, let's say we're making cars. We start a car company. The old way was we put an inspector at the end of the assembly line. We say, Hey, car defect, refit, car, good, sell car, car, sell, sell, sell defect. And that's how we view ourselves as leaders making decisions.

Oh, I'm going to be the guy who's the quality inspector for decisions as opposed to baking in an assembly line. So the processes in my company just inherently result in better, more resilient, adaptive decisions. And I can get out of the business of being that quality inspector. But the cost is I don't get the psychological juice of everyone.

I'm bend at knee trying to understand, Oh, what's what's Jack Welch telling us to do today? If people are empowered to make the decisions, but management overrides them, does it make it harder or how do you resolve situations where you're giving the team the kind of length of rope to run with it, but they're coming up with the wrong answer, obviously you can coach them, but, but how do you handle that?

Almost all the decisions that we make are reversible or tweakable. So we have in our heads, we have this unspoken structure that we make decisions for all time and they're either work or don't work and it's very binary. And it's not, it's not like that. In my opinion, every decision is really a hypothesis.

If we do this, then that. And then, so what you do is say, okay, so this decision is, we are going to try this, whatever for a month or try it this way for a month, see what we learn. Then we'll tweak it. Which may possibly mean scrapping it, but generally it means like tweaking it and improving it.

But it puts people, number one, it's not so heavy. We're not saying, Oh, we're having initiative from now on. We're going to use Slack and nothing. Everyone goes, Oh my gosh. So we say, Hey, we're going to, let's try this. We're going to run Slack for a month. Let's see what we learn.

And then it puts people in a learning mindset, which allow, and then, then they also have a sense that they can control their outcome because I'm going to be interested in what you've learned so that we can tweak how we use Slack. Whatever happens to be. I mean, sometimes it, as a leader, it's, it's worth letting someone do something that you think might be wrong just to go through the process of learning.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's depends on how I wouldn't let the engineer comes up and says, Hey, I have a new idea for starting the reactor. You're like, yeah, no things that involve the laws of physics. I would not do a lot of experimentation on if they involve humans.

Then yeah, I, I like to think how we manage vacation or who's on the project team or how we select a project teams or how often do they meet or what's the. Things like that. There's no laws of physics are going to be violated if we say, okay, everyone's just working at home or everyone working in the office or has people working in the office, fine, let's just try it.

See what happens. It's not like deciding. For example, the software on an airplane where people die, if it's wrong, for example, and you talk a bit in, in your first book about needing competence and clarity within the org. So a couple of things that, that I took away are, are making sure everyone's hearing the same message, repeating the message, specifying goals, not methods.

Are there other kind of big takeaways there of things that kind of can reinforce a new model of control? Yeah. So one of the things I learned was, is you're giving people the authority to make decisions. They're not always going to make the right decision and there's limits to it.

There's a right and a wrong way to do it. For me, the two input variables, since you're a fellow mathlete, you'll get this, the two input variables for me were technical competence and organizational clarity. So in other words, the function of how much control I'm going to give you is a function of how much technical competence you have, how much understanding of what we're trying to do you have.

And then plus this tiny, I call it the Z factor, which is like a growth factor plus Z. So in other words, if I can perfectly tune your decision-making authority to your skills, that's not what you want. You actually want to do a little bit more because that's where the growth happens and you want people to be excited.

Oh, look, I'm learning new things. Oh, look, I'm making bigger decisions. You want that sense of progress. Otherwise it becomes static and no one wants to play there. Which seems a little counter to a common idea of give this person control once they, once they've earned it and demonstrated that they can handle it, is that turning it on the table and say, no, give them more control and see if they can handle it.

Yeah. So when my daughter was growing up, for example, she wanted a later bedtime. So her bedtime is at nine and she wants to stay up to midnight. So I said, okay, once you demonstrate the ability to stay up to midnight, I'll then extend your bedtime to midnight. And that is the stupid, this is a, well, how can I demonstrate the ability if I don't, but you don't also say, fine, stay up to midnight for all ever.

What, what you say to me as a parent is great. Let's run an experiment for the next two weeks. You can stay up to midnight. We'll see how you do. And then in two weeks, we're going to have a meeting and we're talking about it. And you're going to tell me what you learn.

I'll tell you what I learned. And we're going to tweak the experiment, which including maybe going back to nine o'clock, but you don't pump up a balloon inside a box. And then when the balloons pumped up, make a bigger box. That's not, you make a bigger box and then the balloon can grow into that bigger box.

And then you, that's, that's what you do. You got to make the box bigger so that the person can grow into it. And if, if you let people make decisions in an org and you're no longer the one making decisions, does it abdicate the leader of ever being wrong or, or what happens there?

No, because you're still responsible. You still have a chance to veto it. So for example, someone says, cause something happened in my company recently where someone said, Hey, I want to try this. Oh, this is going to, I was on travel in a faraway place and an overwater bungalow and a significant client wanted an event.

And we contacted the place and said, what kind of bandwidth you have? Oh great. You can do all kinds of, you can do an online zoom event from wherever. Bottom line was it didn't work because they didn't have the bandwidth and the internet was not stable enough. Now I technically didn't make this decision.

My team said, Hey, we think you can do it. We think it'll work. So we tend to go forward, but I had a chance to veto it. So I'm still wrong. It was, it was a harebrained idea in retrospect, but what I liked was the team had a bias for action, the bias for doing stuff as opposed to like, Oh no, we can't like this.

There's just too much of that in my mind. So I think every once in a while you got to push it. So I didn't feel bad, but Hey, it's, it's still your fault. I do think you should know your job, but it's like you said, it's when you know the decision or you quote, think, you know, that it's so hard not to tell people what to do because there's a sense of urgency.

So I always try and say, just tell me more, buy myself some time. Oh, tell me more, especially when what you hear sounds wrong or odd to you. It seems like with every business, you get to a certain size and the cracks start to emerge. Things that you used to do in a day are taking a week and you have too many manual processes and there's no one source of truth.

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So check them out today at allthehacks.com/peak, P-I-Q-U-E. The next question I wanted to ask was about that sense of urgency. And it's something I always struggled with was, you put all the responsibility on other people and you have these important deadlines, how do you create a sense of urgency within that organization when it's not already there?

Obviously a team of more than one person can come up with more actions and more things and more ideas than you as one single person can keep up with. So when you've got a team of a hundred, 150 people, a hundred thousand people, you can't keep up. You don't want that.

You want them pushing on you so hard that you can't keep up. And it happens by you leaning back. Not by leaning in and controlling, like Chris, run more, lose more weight. Oh yeah. That, Oh shit. Thanks. Now I got it. Does that ever work for anybody? I don't think so.

It's not about that. Like, it's gotta come from within. You gotta be intrinsically motivated. Your team's gotta be intrinsic. You tap the intrinsic motivation. And then you get all these people that are intrinsically pushing you so hard, you can't even keep up. When you're feeling that sense of discomfort, like imagine like you're sitting in a go-kart and you got like all these people pushing you.

It's like, ah, you guys are going too fast. That's the feeling you want. And so obviously the way to create that feeling is not to tell everyone to drive faster. Uh, tactics I've tried in the past are things like making sure everyone understands why we're doing what we're doing, talking about the vision, talking about what purpose we have, what the goals are, what's going on in the environment.

Are there other things that can build and create that intrinsic motivation? Sense of agency, a sense of purpose. Like you're talking about a hundred percent sense of agency. And a sense of connectedness. So agency is, okay, I get to make decisions. I have authority over my life. I can control, and my decisions are linked to outcomes.

I make these decisions. I'm going to have this kind of, I made those other decisions, make that kind of a life. And a sense of connection with other human beings. That was one that was hard for me because I tended to be a person who didn't need, I didn't feel like I needed a lot of connection as a human.

And like have this book, Blue Zones of Happiness on the shelf behind me. So I'm reading about these people who live longer and has big network of community and like, you know, I don't feel that way. I'm just perfectly happy doing my own, my own thing. But studies show that it's true.

And there's a sense of connection. Now, maybe the way I connect is different than the way someone else connects, but you want the team to connect. One way we did that was we outlawed the word "they." On a submarine, you have a pretty tight team because everyone dies or we all live, but there's no, it's not like a company where three people can exit and then the rest of the company goes under.

It's not like that. But we had a lot of they's. We had rank, we had enlisted guys, we had officers, we had crew, we had the engineering officer. We had they, they, they, they. Who made this mistake? It was always they. So I got pissed off one day. I said, "There's no they on Santa Fe!" And it rhymed.

So they loved it. They remembered it and they believed it. So he said, "We ordered the wrong parts," or "We didn't set the equipment up correctly," or "We misread the signals," whatever it happened to be. And then our brains rewired and it felt like a team. The action came first.

We activated new thinking. So we use the word "we." When I go into companies, I just listen. I say, "Hey, tell me about these guys." "Oh, yeah, we're the marketing team." "What about these guys?" "Oh, they're engineering." "Ah, that's the team boundary." "Not what the org chart says." Or, "Who made this decision?" "They did, not we." Very clear.

So I get, I have fun when I check into hotels sometimes and I'm talking to the person at the front desk and there's something wrong or whatever. And they'll say, "They, blah, blah, blah." I was like, "Who's they?" Like, "You have a Marriott jersey on." Not me. Is that a simple tactic that companies can experiment with?

And I hear the, "I intend to." Obviously there's some big things, step away, resist the urge to jump in as a leader. But little kind of like, I'll call them hacks because this is the show. It's tell people to tell you what they intend to do. To start using "we" instead of "they." Are there others like that, that are things that you can quickly implement and see if they have big effects?

For sure. Stop asking binary questions. So when someone comes to you and says, "I want to try this," or, "Here's a new idea," your instinct's going to be, "Is it safe? Will it work? Are you sure?" Those are all binary questions. COVID vaccine. Is it safe? Stupid question. Meaningless question.

Doesn't, if you say yes or no, it really means you think you're going to get it or not. It doesn't really tell us much about the safety of it. How safe is it? So my trick is start the question with the word, "How?" How safe is, how sure are you?

How likely is this assumption to come true? Now someone can say, "Ah, I'm 99% confident," or, "I'm 51%, but we should try it anyway." Now you're learning something. And it all starts with the word, "How?" The second thing is, next, in meetings, pay attention to what we call share of voice.

Share of voice is, if you were to count the number of words that each person in the meeting said, it would be that word, it would be that histogram of the distribution of words. Traditionally, unless you've been thinking about this, the higher-paid people will say more words than the lower-paid people.

The more skewed that is, the more fragile your decision-making structure is. The extreme case, the leader just tells people what to do. Everyone shuts up and walks out the door. So you can imagine how extreme and how fragile that is. So you've got six people, you're in a decision meeting, the share of voice should be about a sixth per person, because then you're hearing what everyone sees, you know what everyone knows, and the group benefits.

And science shows that those are more resilient and adaptive teams. So when you're, if you're leading the meeting, the point of leading the meeting is not to get your quote point across. That's just coercion and with the hope of compliance. The point of leading a meeting is to pay attention to the structure of the meeting so that you can even the share of voice, which means if someone's talking too much, you've got to control them.

And if someone's not speaking, well, you have to make it safer than speak up. And how do you do that? I think it's easier to know how to tell someone, hey, you've said a lot. Chris, I think we know what you, yeah, well, first of all, it starts from the structure of the meeting.

Most meetings are run, discuss, then vote. Hey, we have to make a decision. Are we going to put our new plant in Seattle or North Carolina? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

OK, so what's everyone think? And then it's this binary vote, Seattle versus North Carolina. So the problem with that is because the discussion is a series discussion, the initial, the very first people to speak have an overweighted importance in the discussion in terms of anchoring the group, which which makes the people who think differently than them less and less likely to contribute.

So what you want to do is vote first, then discuss. So we would say, OK, let's take a vote on this. We could use cards. We could use our hands. We say, OK, five, let's use our hands. Five fingers means I'm one hundred percent or ninety nine percent. We don't like to say one hundred percent because that assumes an arrogance for the future that you is unfounded.

But I'm ninety nine percent sure Seattle's the right place. Zero means I'm ninety nine percent sure Raleigh's the right place or any number in between. Two or three means you basically don't know or don't care. Ready one, two, three, pop up your hands. Now I'm looking for the fives and the zeros.

I'm looking for the extremes. And then we say, OK, let's hear from. And I got a whole bunch of fives, but not too many zeros. So now I say, OK, great. Let's hear from zeros. Let's hear from the people who voted zero, not the zeros, but people voted zero.

Why? The fives are going to want to talk. The fives, there's a majority of them. But we already know, like if that's the majority opinion, we already know the majority opinion. We don't need to spend more time on it. Let's end. And the more we talk about the majority opinion, harder it is for the minority opinion to say what they really think.

They may say, oh, yeah, you're right, but I was thinking something different. But that's the kind of thing you want to do. Vote first and discuss and then spotlight the dissenting and outlying opinions by letting those people speak. It's always hard to get people to speak up. Are there tactics if you notice the person who's a zero is like, well, you know, I just don't like is there encouraging things?

Is it best done offline? Have you tried doing it asynchronously with written communication for those who don't love talking? Yeah, that's all good stuff. One of the things. So it's always about safety. People are speaking up because it's not it doesn't feel safe to speak up. So choice and small makes it safe.

The other thing that makes it safe is the level of cognitive involvement, description, assessment, action. It goes in that order. So description is the safest thing. If I just said, tell me about the Riverside platform that we're using to make the show, it's fine. You're just like, well, here it is that it costs this much, whatever.

Then I say, well, give me an assessment, like on a scale of one to nine. How effective is it? OK, now. But now it requires more vulnerability. But and then finally, if I say, give me take action. Well, what platform should we use for our podcast show? Now I can be wrong.

So we always invite people on this. There's two sequences you want to follow. Number one is description, assessment, action, because it it moves from safe to vulnerable. The second one is we call it one sum all. So imagine you have a group of people, five groups of you have twenty five people, five tables of five.

If you just said to the group, hey, what does everyone think about this? Raise your hand. You might not get any hands. So what you say is at your everyone right down on a card, three, three things about ABC. This let's say let's go back to the seat. Where's the new plan going to be?

Write down which of the two places you want the plan to go in three reasons. And one reason why you it might be a bad idea. You have two minutes. And so that's the one. It's safe, right? I just it's me and it's my car. Like, why wouldn't I write anything down?

So people write things down and they say, OK, now at your table, share what's on your card. Now, the key there is don't share what you could say that will share what you think. That would be what you might say. But you say share what's on your card because now you sort of distance it from you.

I'm just reading what's on my card. Yeah, of course it is like what you think, but just even these little things help a little bit. OK, let's just share what's on your card. And then as a table, you could give them another thing, OK, come up with the top five and bottom, whatever, something like that.

And you give them more time. So if you give them two minutes by themselves, you might give them five minutes at a table. You say, OK, now who would like to share or does it which table has something that they'd like to share with the group? Now you get a bunch of hands pop right off the bat.

So it's one sum, S-O-M-E, sum all is the progression. And then it's description, assessment, action. The other way to think about it is description is pause, like VCR buttons pause. I'm just here's what it is. Here's what I see. Assessment where that's rewind, where does it come from? That feels more that pause is the most certain thing.

I feel most certain about it because I'm just looking at it right here. And then, well, how does that like what does this happen? It's from the past, so it's knowable, but I might not have seen everything, but it feels relatively knowable. Then finally, we go to the future.

So it's pause, rewind, future, pause, rewind, future. And then when we trained our team, so the sailors would call me, the officers would call me in the middle of night, three in the morning. We have a situation, the tankers bearing down on us, whatever it happens to be. They always they always reported these things in this exact sequence, which was description, assessment, action.

Captain, we're on we're at this location. We're on this course. We're heading north at five knots, 400 feet. We have a sonar contact assessment. I think it's a tanker coming straight at us. Action. I intend to turn right and go deeper, something like that. Always in the exact same sequence.

And sometimes they wouldn't get the whole way. They would say assessment, description, assessment. I don't and then then action. I have no idea what to do. Come to the control room. But it's OK because I move through. But if I started with what you want to do about it, I get nothing.

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You're going back to your submarine example, so I feel like I want to ask something that I think I mentioned in the intro, but you started this whole project with the Santa Fe with a pretty low team morale and low performance, and you took over this whole new model of control and communication.

And can you just share a little bit about the impact and the result that happened during your tenure? Yeah, I had less stress in my life. Now, we set records for performance. We set records for morale. 100% of our sailors signed up to stay in the Navy, which is a record.

Can't go higher than that. And over the next 10 years, more officers on the Santa Fe became submarine commanders than any other submarine anyone has ever heard of. 10 from just that one group over that three-year period. But the key is I was always, as a leader, so exhausted and nervous about being wrong.

I don't know how some of these command and control leaders do it. They run around telling people what to do. It's like, "Aren't you afraid you're going to be wrong?" I was like, "What am I missing?" And if I was wrong, people would die and companies go out of business and we pollute the environment, whatever it happens to be.

And now I had this rich network, this sort of spider web safety net of people telling me what they thought all the time. And we weren't always perfect, we weren't always right, but I just had so much less stress. I always had felt like I'm always putting energy into the system as the leader.

I'm running around, making it happen. I'm exhausted. I'm checking on people. I always see more. I know more. I could do it better. I could do it faster. It was exhausting and it all flipped on its head. And it felt like the energy was coming to me all day long.

At the end of the day, I had more energy than when I started. And I stopped going to all these silly meetings that were just theater. We didn't need them. We had meetings, but they were real. And it was great. Just to touch on the meetings, do you have any rules for how to get rid of the silly meetings or identify which ones are a waste of time?

Because I think most of the people listening here would probably tell you that a good portion of their day is spent in meetings that seem like a waste. So I guess the follow-up then is how do you convince people that? I never convince anyone of anything. They already know it.

And we help people do the stuff they already believe in doing. But I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't need a lot of convincing to say, "Hey, can we do it with fewer meetings?" I think vote first. So they think, "Oh, this is going to take longer because I have to hear all these different opinions." No.

It actually is faster because you get to the actual issues way quicker. And then the other thing is decisions aren't unilateral, and they're not forever. So we always say, "Okay, a decision on this." Again, for some reason, this is the submarine decisions. We work with all kinds of businesses now.

But let's say we're in a submarine again, and we're arguing about turning north or south, we could argue about that all day long. Or we could just pick, "Let's go north and see how it works." But knowing that we can turn around and go back south, it's not irreversible.

Now, we lost the time that we went north. We could have been going south. But we always keep a little bit in the back of our mind that we're going to revisit this decision. We put an expiration date on the decision, like cheese, and we're going to revisit it.

And it minimizes the barriers to transitioning from the decision to the action. You want to minimize the barriers from decision to action, and you want to minimize the barriers from action back to decision, because that will create an agility in your business where you say, "Think about it. All in.

Work, work, work, work, work. Wait a minute. Time out. Out. Think broad perspective, and then commit in." And you want to have super focus. You don't want to have, "Oh, we're in with just two toes and half my brain is thinking about, 'Is this really the right thing to do?'" That's not what you want.

And I love the approach of realizing that a reversible decision should be made faster. I remember so many decisions we debated in the early days of my company where we were like, "What microwave should we buy in the office?" It's like, "We should just literally just bought the first microwave." You have these decisions that feel like you could get stuck in analysis paralysis.

And this constant reminder, for me, actually, was like a sticky note on my computer. It was just like, "Is this reversible?" And if this is an easy, reversible decision, and it's low impact on the business, just make it. It doesn't matter. And then the other one, I haven't always adhered to vote first.

"Buy two microwaves. Who cares?" And I haven't always adhered to vote first. But sometimes, I've done kind of vote in the middle, which is you're in the middle of a discussion, you didn't vote at first, you haven't listened to this episode yet. And you realize like, "Maybe we're all just on the same page." And we've done a...

Hey, quick pause here. Does anyone... And obviously, it needs to be a small group where people feel comfortable speaking up. Yeah. But if it's... Is anyone opposed to just doing this thing? And I can't tell you the number of meetings I've been in where people were just going around the room discussing something that we all agreed on.

And I think one of the other advantages of voting first, aside from just getting out opinions that you might not know, is that you might all agree. And you could have just wasted 45 minutes on a meeting talking about why everyone thinks we should do something that we all agree on.

And we could just do it. And you could end the meeting in two minutes. Right. So that's another one that... Another benefit that I found of voting first. If everyone agrees, I would be still a little worried. I would say, "Okay, great." It's like that scene in World War Z where they have like the 13th person has to disagree deal.

It's like, "Okay, now let's make up five reasons why this is not a good... We're still... Okay, we're going to do it. But let's just come up with five reasons why this would go bad." Imagine we're sitting here in six months, and this has been a giant shit show.

What would be the top five reasons? And just game through that a little bit, maybe, if you want. But yeah, you save a lot of time. Bill Marris, who used to run Google Ventures where I worked, if ever the entire team voted yes on an investment, and we moved to blind voting so that we didn't have groups involved.

We actually built a piece of software where you could vote on deals and add feedback. And he wouldn't tell people the results of the vote. He would just come in and disagree vehemently if everyone... And you'd all be... Take the counter perspective. And he felt like his role as a leader was to take the counter if everyone was supportive.

Yeah, yeah. I think at least to discuss it and then, "Okay, great. We're going to make the investment." But you want to explore that. If this is such a no-brainer, why didn't someone else... Why hasn't someone else already bought the company? It should be for sale. So without even mentioning it, we moved from the story you first wrote in your first book about your experience on the Santa Fe to your most recent book, where you talk about six leadership plays that you've used revolving around the language of how you operate.

But what, after writing a bestselling book about leadership, led you to feel the need to write another book on leadership? I don't know about other writers, but all my stuff starts with self-help. I just felt... Even at the end of the experience on the submarine, the very next day, the next year, five years later...

And now I was running my company and we were interacting with these companies around the world, helping them change their cultures. But it all started with me. I kept feeling like my language was programmed by some other... Some evil thing in my head that made me say, "Right? Does that make sense?

We good?" Like these kind of things, phrases that I actually didn't want to say, but I was still saying them. And so I was trying to analyze the structure and the patterns in the language and why they held so much sway over me and why they were so powerful and what I wanted to say instead.

We say we act our way to new thinking, but if you don't see the words that you can say... So if you don't realize that you could say, "How sure are you?" as opposed to, "Are you sure?" then you're just going to keep asking, "Are you sure?" If you don't realize that you could ask something simple like, "Just tell me more," as opposed to, "Well, let me explain," then you won't do that.

And so I feel like basically it's just a whole book of "don't say this, say that." It's a bunch of book of sentence starters, which is how it started. But it turns out there's a very interesting structure behind why the language is the way we use it, is the way we say now, and what we've inherited, what we're programmed to say.

And I think there's a coherent structure in the solar system as we knew it, where the sun revolved around the earth, and the solar system as we want it, where the earth revolves around the sun. I don't want to jump into all six leadership plays because you wrote a book and anyone listening can go read this book.

And I've done it and I encourage you. But there's a couple I wanted to hit on. So one is that my wife loves baking. And I, unfortunately, also love baked goods, which is a terrible combination. (laughs) We call that enabling behavior. I know. And my recommendation is always, "Hey, why don't you just not bake?" And she's like, "No, why don't you learn to not eat all the cookies in one sitting?" Just because I bake it doesn't mean you have to eat it.

I've heard that countless times. Right. And in 2021, I had bouts where I said, "You know what? I'm just not allowed to eat the cookies." And this year, thanks to reading your book, I've decided I am not the kind of person that overindulges on baked goods. And I haven't put that to the test.

We're only a few days into the year. But can you talk about why that distinction is so important and why commitment can actually be more effective than compliance? Yeah. This came from work where we looked at the language of teams that were fragile and made mistakes versus ones that were more resilient.

And it's called "Leadership is Language." So here's a simple example. You could say, let's say you have this self-talk about this baked good thing. You could say, "I can't eat baked goods." You're sitting there, the baked goods are sitting on the table, you've already had a slice of bread, you don't want to eat more.

"Oh, I can't eat that." Versus, "I don't eat that." And you want to say, "I don't eat baked goods." For me, I don't think it's binary. It's not like you're never going to eat a baked good. But I don't eat a lot. So it's just a subliminal thing. But the reason why I don't eat it—studies show when people say, "I don't do something," they have a higher rate of sticking with their commitment than when they say, "I can't." Why?

Because when they say, "I can't," it's this outside force that's imposing on me that you can't, you shouldn't do it, you can't do it. Versus when you say, "You don't do it," you're giving yourself agency over your life. You're tapping into your own intrinsic desire to control your life and say, "I don't eat.

I don't go to those kind of meetings. I don't eat baked. I don't eat that," or that kind of thing. Now—and no one can argue with you. If I go to my mom and I say, "Mom, oh, I can't eat. Oh, no, you look fine. You're not going to—oh, just a little bit." Like, she's arguing with me when I say, "No, I don't eat that." There's nothing to say.

Okay, so you want to use language as much as possible that makes you powerful as opposed to powerless. And that's why you want to say to yourself, "I don't do whatever it is that you're trying not to do," as opposed to, "I can't do it." I'm just now realizing how much more effective "don't" is in a peer pressure situation of, "Gosh, I just—I can't have another drink tonight.

I've been drinking this week." And it's like, your friends are like, "Nah, nah, you can't." And then if you have a friend who doesn't drink, they're at the table, they're like, "I don't drink." And no one's pushing them. They're just sitting there totally fine with whatever. Yeah, imagine that.

Like, the person—that's what they say. They don't say, "Oh, I can't drink." They say, "I don't drink." And that's like, boom, shut down. Great, I respect that. You have a code. Exactly. I don't drink more than—or whatever it is. I don't drink after 11. I don't drink after two drinks.

I don't drink. Or I don't drink and drive—like, I don't drink and drive. Not, "I can't drink and drive," because obviously you could drink and drive, but— I've had situations where I'm like, "You know what? I just don't want to drink tonight." And instead of just being more, you know, a sort of having—saying, "I don't do that," I would just drive intentionally.

So I could say, "Oh, I drove here. I can't drink." You know, like, "I don't drink and drive." That was my, like, out, was if I just drove, then I could absolve myself of any peer pressure. Because it's socially—that's okay. Like, it's, "Oh, well, you have an excuse not to drink." So we all respect—we understand and respect that.

Versus, "I'm not drinking tonight," or whatever it happens to be. - Yeah. How does this kind of play in the role of work and organizations? - So much of the language we use has subtle markers of the industrial age structure, where leaders made decisions and got the team to do it.

In the industrial age, you want people to comply and keep moving forward. We want the assembly line to run as long as possible, because any stoppages are lost output. When Ford was building Model T, the assembly line essentially ran—it ran for almost 15 years, into the '20s, by which time the country had changed.

There was a lot more wealth, and it was an old, tired thing. And then they had to shut down for, like, three months. And GM, at this point, was building flashier cars, which were in vogue. And then GM—GM should have never caught up. They should have never—they should never be in business, if Ford had done it right.

But it was because of this opening, and so now it's been neck-and-neck ever since. So one of the things I hear a lot are people say things—they say some version of, "Does that make sense? Are we good? We're all good here? Everyone happy?" Something like that. And we say it more times than we even realize we were saying it.

I say it. And then you say, "Well, why did we say that? Why did I say, 'Oh, so we're going to turn north, right? We all look good to launch the product, okay? So the product launch will happen as scheduled next Wednesday. Everybody happy?'" It's because it's a vestige of this coercion and compliance.

It just makes it a little bit harder for someone to say, "No, I'm not happy," and to get compliance from the team, as opposed to what I'm trying—what I try to say is, "How could this be wrong? Hey, next month we have this scheduled launch of this product. This is kind of what I wish Boeing had done.

Hey, how could this go wrong? How are we feeling about the project?" as opposed to this inevitability towards making it happen. So you want to listen to those little language markers for you and remove them, and actually go the opposite. Every time your instinct is to say, "Is that wrong?

No." Or, "How could that be wrong?" Ask it in a neutral way, which invites the other opinion. It's already hard to disagree—to be the person who disagrees with the group for the box. That's hard. So rather than making that harder, let me make that easier. I also want to talk about one of the other leadership plays about taking time to pause and reflect and fixing that into a project.

And you talk about it in saying, "Complete, not just continue." Why is this important? And how do you determine when to schedule those kind of completions? If we never complete, then you never celebrate. If you never celebrate, you never reinforce fun and the reasons why we do things. And it just becomes—in the Navy we say, "SSDD," which means "same stuff, different day." And everything just runs into the next day.

The problem with that is we're trying to do two different things with our brains. One is we're trying to be focused on tasks. I'm coding. I'm swimming. I'm bringing a SEAL team onto the submarine. It requires focus. It requires excluding distractors. The other thing we're trying to do with our brain is to make decisions.

How should we bring the SEAL team on the submarine? How are we going to do that? And what did we learn from the last time we did it? We complete this period of activity and then we want to pause and reflect. This requires an expansive view. It requires raising our head up, looking left and right, broadening our perspective, bringing in those things which otherwise we would find, quote, "distraction." In short, it's about avoiding variability and being allergic to variability when we want to be focused and on tasks.

And then it's about embracing variability when we're in the thinking space. If you don't make it clear, are we in one side or the other, then you're always in the middle and you're neither optimized for focused work and you're not optimized for thinking work and you get muddled thinking and half-committed action.

So what we think is really important to make it clear, okay, we're thinking, we're broadening our perspective, and you have to release the pressure of the clock because it's that time pressure that shrinks our perspective and our prefrontal cortex ability to take in all these inputs and we just see what's in front of us.

And we've all done these activities where, like, the gorilla walks across the basketball court and you don't even see it because you're counting the number of balls, those kind of things. So we have to release the pressure of the time. The leader is the person who has to do that.

The team is going to want to commit, they're going to want to persist in their actions because that's what they're paid to do and deliver something. The leader is going to say, "Time out, everyone put your pencils down, I want to make sure we're on track, see how everyone's doing, how do we think about what we've done, what we want to make decisions about the future." Now, you can do that, you can just call an audible on that, but we think it's probably better to schedule those.

Agile, for example, Agile software development kind of has this baked in with these sprint cycles and then allows you, also, you can celebrate, pause, reflect on what you've done, you celebrate, make commitments about the future and move on. And are there situations where, or I guess, what is the downside of not doing this?

Are there companies or projects that never took the time to pause and complete and just kept continuing that kind of probably regret it based on the outcomes? Yeah, sure. Kodak kept making print film, Blockbuster kept running DVDs, as opposed to, like, there's a story Andy Grove tells in "Only the Paranoid Survived" during the Intel.

Now, this is after he and Gordon Moore, they'd founded this company, it was going very, very well, they were rich, and they were making storage, basically memory storage. And memory storage, at this point, was becoming a commodity because the Japanese and Koreans were getting into it, and it was just becoming a commoditized product.

And they ran an experiment, they said, "Imagine we got fired and a new team, CEO, president, was brought in. The decision they needed to make was do a shift out of storage and go to microprocessors. What would they do?" And they said, "Well, that'd be easy. We'd get out of storage and go to microprocessors." But storage is why they were rich, why they were successful, why Intel was the company it was.

But because they had made the decision, their psyches were connected to those decisions, and they had to distance themselves. And they did it through this thought experiment, which was genius. And they said, "Well, that's obvious." And then so that's when they made the shift, and they came out with the 8088, the processors, and that's the Intel you know today.

Yeah. And is it possible to make those completions too frequent? Oh, yeah. We can overdrive the process. So for example, if I say, "Hey, let's run an experiment." So for example, so here's what happened to my company. Okay, we're going to redesign the website, for example. And then we're going to make a commitment.

New design, we're going to watch it for two months, take data, blah, blah, blah. We're going to make another redesign. Redesign the website, we launch it. Now we're in the data. Two weeks goes by. I go to an event, a conference, I give a speech, but there's other speakers there.

And so I'm here sitting in the room, and one guy's talking about website design. And I have all these ideas I write down, blah, blah, blah, blah. I go back. Now it's only been two weeks, but I have all these ideas. And I start telling him, "No, no, we need to do this.

I can see. Oh, no, we may have got to make this happen. Oh, it's overdriving the process." So on the one hand, we want to deliberately inject points for changing course. But on the other hand, we also deliberately protect against changing course while we're in the decision-making process. And I'm not going to say never do it.

It might be time to change. Don't look up. All of a sudden, there's a comet coming to hit the earth. Yeah, maybe we should reevaluate. Let's not wait for the next two weeks. But I call that the good idea, Ferry. So A, you protect the team from being whipsawing, because then you never stabilize the experiment.

I'm a little bit allergic to the phrase "continuous improvement," because it implies I'm just continually tweaking the process, which I don't think is the right way to do it. I think you want to do some batch tweaks, and then measure performance, and then batch tweaks, and measure performance. And so it's "continue us," or it's incremental in that way, and it doesn't ever end.

So in that sense, it's continuous or continual, but we're not always tweaking things. The last leadership play I want to touch on, and there are a few we didn't hit that you all should check out, was all about connecting with the team. And it reminded me a bit of the book "Radical Candor." And I just want to know what role you think emotions have in decision-making and leadership.

All decisions are emotional. If we didn't have emotion, we would be unable to make a decision. We wouldn't make a decision. We would do things, they might look like decisions, but they're not decisions. So if I'm looking at an ant, and it runs three inches that way, and turns left and runs four inches that way, it didn't decide to do that.

It just did it through its innate programming. When people have suffered brain damage, which removes their ability to feel emotions, it's linked with an inability to make decisions. And I tell a story about a patient that Dr. Demasio, who's a neurosurgeon, had where they did—and this is exactly what happened.

We know that all decision-making, basically the wiring for your decision-making calculus in your brain passes through an emotional part of your brain. That's why we move from description to assessment, then action, because action involves decision-making. Let's say I'm trying to buy a new house. One of the things that my wife and I like to do is watch these house-hunting shows, and we try and guess which house they're going to buy.

I spend more time than you—I've watched a lot of these. Never once does someone say, "Well, I've run the numbers, and this house has this square footage, and this, and this, and this, and this, so it's the right house to buy." Okay, let's get it. It's never like that.

I have 100% prediction ability because I ignore whatever the man says. And this irritates my wife, but it's always whatever the woman says, that's what they're going to get. And it's always something like, "Hey, I can see our family." It's an emotional thing. So all decisions at the end of the day, because they involve the future, are emotional.

And yeah, you want data. And so if we don't have a healthy emotional environment at work, we can't make healthy decisions. And if we don't have an emotional environment at work for 80% of the people who work there, then 80% of the people are not going to contribute to the decision-making ability of the organization.

And I like to ask leaders, "What did it cost for you to make this decision?" Like, I hold up, "What do you make?" I make pens, like the one I'm holding in my hand. "What did it cost for this, this, this, this?" "Oh, I can tell you. It's a .01 penny." "But what did it cost for you to make the decision that you're going to make this pen?" "No idea." "That you're going to market in the following ways?" "No idea." "That you're selling it on Amazon, but not on whatever?" No, we don't know to orders of magnitude what it costs to make decisions in our company, but as a product, as an output, we should know.

And once you start thinking about it, you're like, "Well, the higher the decision is made in the company, the more it costs me, because I'm paying a senior vice president who makes 500 grand to make a decision, whereas the guy across the street is paying the floor manager who makes 120 grand to make that decision.

They're going to win." So think about the cost of your decisions. Get them as low as possible. All right. So I feel like everything else, definitely check out the book. But I do want to say, if someone's listening and they're not in the leadership role to make a lot of these changes themselves, what can they do to help push an organization towards a more healthy set of languages and a more productive team?

The cool thing is you can just start doing stuff. You just stop asking people, "Are you sure?" You just start asking, "Hey, how sure are you?" You start using probabilistic language. You start with your team at your level. Now, one of the questions I get is, "What if my boss is this way, and it's very stressful for me because they keep telling me what to do.

They don't really care what I think." And if I'm in a bad mood, I'll say, "Well, you should quit, because the toll on your life and your health is not worth whatever it is you're making from this job." It might feel like it is. "Well, my kid's about to go to college." You'll be dead.

But a more helpful answer is it's always about safety. Safety for you, but safety for them. When you go to your boss and you say, "Hey, I have an idea about how to do this thing you told us to do a little bit better," or maybe not even do it at all, it becomes a contest of authority, which immediately provokes their defense mechanisms.

So what we would advise is to say, "Hey, this is your call. You want us to do this? We're going to do it." And then what's the sequence? Description, assessment, action. Would you like to know—choice—how we see it? Description. Don't jump to action, because that's too far. That's too much vulnerability for you and them.

So we start with description, safe. And again, remember, also one, some, all. So it's just you and me in this room. So you can tell me to pack sand, no one's losing face, that kind of thing. Then, once you earn the right to be heard, then you can have influence.

And I did this wrong so many times. That's why I'm such an expert on pissing my boss off. But it sounds like the playbook for someone not in the leadership role is to just do the same things from beneath. And you mentioned earlier that it takes a lot of mental stress out of your head to be in a leadership role like this.

By starting to do that, maybe you can encourage someone to feel that and perpetuate it. Yeah, but I don't want to take quitting off the table. That's always got to be on the table. I'm not in the Navy anymore. At some point, it was great for me for a while, but at some point it became not a good environment for me, so I'm not there.

The leader's job is to create the environment where people can be at their best just the way they are. It might mean putting someone in a different environment, and it might mean you. You're not good in this environment. Be in a different environment. Don't say, "What do I need to do to be great here?" Say, "Where do I need to be so that I'll be great the way I am?" I agree a lot of people don't put quitting on the table.

Well, it's happening a lot more now. Yeah. This has been fantastic. Aside from the books, where can people find out what you're working on and get in touch? Yeah, YouTube channel, Leadership Nudges. I put these little one to two minute things out. Give me your comments. Give me your thoughts.

The little tidbits, a lot of things that we've talked about, One Sum All or Describe, Assess, Act, those kinds of things. And then companies called Intempus Leadership International. That's our movement. And you can go on LinkedIn. We have a website. You can go on LinkedIn and let us know what you think.

Tell us your story. I will also post a link in the show notes to the original video that I've shared dozens of times. David, thank you for being here. Yeah, thanks so much. And thank you, listeners, for what you guys do. Leadership is hard. It's often about going against your innate wiring.

I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it, especially Spotify, since they just added podcast ratings. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

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