David Marquet

L. David Marquet is a student of leadership and organizational design, former nuclear submarine Commander, and named one of the Top 100 Leadership Speakers by Inc. Magazine. David is the Author of the Amazon #1 Best Seller: Turn the Ship Around!, and The Turn the Ship Around Workbook. David’s recently released book, Leadership is Language, is the new playbook for leaders. “It’s time to ditch the Industrial Age playbook of leadership.” His book provides a structure as well as the specific language for dramatically improving decision-making and execution for teams. It is a Wall Street Journal and Washington Post Bestseller and has been named the Business Book of the Month by The Financial Times of London.

David Marquet imagines a work place where everyone engages and contributes their full intellectual capacity, a place where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work – a place where everyone is a leader. A 1981 U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Captain Marquet 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 the 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.

After Captain Marquet’s departure, the Santa Fe continued to win awards and promoted a disproportionate number of officers and enlisted men to leadership positions, including ten subsequent submarine captains. 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.

MAIN SPEAKING TOPICS:

The New Playbook for Leaders:

Why do we organize the way we do? Why do we run meetings the way we do? Why do we use the words we use when communicating and asking questions? Turns out, most of us are using language, meeting formats, and organizational design inherited from the industrial age, where the leaders were the thinkers and the workers were the doers. In today’s work environment, we want every team member to be both a thinker and a doer. This makes Industrial Age language obsolete. Instead of running industrial age plays better, we need to cast them aside for a new playbook. Based on the WSJ Bestseller Leadership is Language, David Marquet explores the origins of our language at work, how it was shaped by the industrial age and the language we want to use in its place. What is revealed is a pattern of 6 “plays” that leaders can run that will optimally balance the rhythm between thinking and doing. Leaders will be equipped to build environments where people think deeply and broadly, and work is disciplined and focused. The structure results in adaptive, agile, and enduring organizations in volatile and uncertain times. This is something your organization needs to hear, now more than ever.

Leadership is Language

Do you ever feel like the language we use at work doesn’t quite fit the modern workplace? Well, there’s a reason for that. We’ve been programmed to use a playbook from the Industrial Age – and it is a language focused above all on conformity and doing.

What we need now is a language the balances that with creativity and thinking. This requires us to rewrite the Industrial Age playbook for the modern era. The new playbook balances doing with thinking, and conformity with creativity.

In this session, David will show audiences how our language anchors us to the past, and how the new playbook needs to sound at work. Not only will your team walk away with “aha moments” about why we say the things we do, but they will also have immediately actionable tools they can implement such as how to ask better questions, and how to run better meetings.

Creating Leadership and Engagement at Every Level

David Marquet delivers the powerful Intent-Based Leadership message: that leadership is not for the select few at the top. In highly effective organizations, there are leaders at every level.

Creating Intent-Based Leadership organizations results in a workplace where everyone engages and contributes their full intellectual capacity. A place where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work – a place where everyone is a leader.

Intent-Based Leadership organizations create an environment for people to contribute so that they feel valued. They set clear goals, so their people know how to do their jobs. They push control and decision-making down the organization so people take responsibility and rise to the occasion. They maintain unity of effort by ensuring the supporting pillars of technical competence and organizational clarity are in place.

As a result, they achieve:

A highly effective organization with superior morale.

The capacity for greatness in the people and practices of an organization, removed from the personality of leaders.

An organizational culture that creates additional leaders throughout every level of the organization.

Intent-Based Leadership starts with rejecting the idea that leadership is for the select few at the top and instead embracing the idea that in highly effective organizations, there are leaders at every level. This method of leadership is based on empowerment, not ego, and process, not personality.

Practical Empowerment: When we give our people more authority, we actually create more effective leaders.

Technical Competence: When we engage our minds in what we are doing, we perform with better results.

Organizational Clarity: When leaders set clear goals and people know how to do their jobs, they can take deliberate action.

Objectives:

• Think afresh about what leadership means.
• Practice language that empowers your people.
• Understand organizational design in the context of how to push decision-making downward.
• Commit to change behaviors today

What you will learn from attending:

• How to create an environment where people actively engage and think.
• How to have a personal commitment to talk with to their co-workers in an empowering way.
• How to implement the idea of leadership as creating more leaders – not more followers.
• How to implement the idea of leadership as giving control – not taking control.

Leadership is Language

In this interactive and fast-moving multimedia keynote, David takes your team on a journey that illustrates how to create a culture of safety. Safety does not come from “wanting to be safe” but rather from establishing a set of interlocking organizational practices and individual behaviors that create optimal conditions for thinking, responsibility, and team intervention.

David covers key, proven principles and practices from nuclear submarine operations and improves upon them – offering practices that move away from a strictly compliance-driven approach, going further to embed safety into the culture of the organization. Some key ideas:

• Always be thinking. Safety results when everyone is engaged and thinking.
• Brake pedal leadership: the person at the top can only say stop.
• Certify, Don’t Brief. Instead of telling people what to do before an operation, certify the team’s readiness.
• Deliberate Action. Apply a deliberate pause before operating a switch, valve, or breaker – how and why this works.
• Embrace dissent. Avoid trap of building consensus, instead embrace dissenting viewpoints. In most accidents, someone saw a warning sign but didn’t speak up. Encouraging dissent can save lives.

These practices apply at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels in the organization.

When done, your team will have a better perspective of what makes people safe, as well as a toolbox of practices for immediate implementation.

Captain Marquet retired from the Navy in 2009, and now speaks to audiences around the globe who want to create empowering work environments that release the passion, initiative, and intellect of each person. This bold and highly effective framework is summarized as “give control, create leaders.” Events are offered live on-line, recorded, and in-person.