David Marquet with Shane Mac (Part Two)

In the Industrial Revolution, the path to great performance was getting everybody doing stuff as fast as possible. So those companies are run on the Industrial Revolution model. The path now is to get everybody thinking.

As you heard in the last episode of Ask, a truism of leadership is that you help to create more leaders. David Marquet is an example of a life dedicated to servant leadership that most of us can barely wrap our heads around. Marquet is a decorated Navy officer, bestselling author, coach, and the latest Ask is the second part of David and Shane Mac's conversation. In this one, they dig deeper into the terrain that David covers in his upcoming book, Leadership Is Language. Marquet was incredibly generous with both his time and his life experience, and that makes us doubly excited to bring you this second episode. With David Marquet and Shane Mac. Enjoy.

Do you believe that changing our language changes our minds?

Yeah, 100%. I've seen it so many times. So we're on the ship and we're doing a fire drill. And afterward— and it didn't go very well. Took too long to get the hose there. And we get together, we're sitting around the table and people start talking. So, well, what happened? Then I heard this word, they, they didn't hang up the equipment. They, they hung it up twisted. I hadn't— took me 30 seconds to untangle it. They didn't pressurize the hose when we asked for them. There was a 15-second delay. They didn't change the batteries in the thermal imager. So that was another 30-second delay. So that's why it took us 2.5 extra minutes to get there. They, they, they. And I got pissed off. I go, there's no they on Santa Fe. And it was just, just irate. And, but it was really clever. It rhymed. They and Santa Fe. And so people believe things that rhyme and they There's a study on that. And so, and so I said, there's no they on Santa Fe. So the next day the engineer comes up and he says, I got a problem. They, he wants to say they, the supply department. We had everyone, all ranks, they, departments were they, we had all they. And then he looks at me and he says, we ordered the wrong part. And it's like all the stress left his face because there's no blame and recrimination. I just looked at him. He starts walking backwards with his hands, kind of in a surrender position.

Was he laughing?

Not really. He kind of had a screwed up look, but I was laughing. I was like, that was hilarious. And for the next 6 months it was imperceptible. But if you came up to me and said the word they, I just ignored you. It was really awkward. It's very hard to ignore someone. I didn't say, I didn't give you a lecture. Oh, we don't say they. I just ignored you. It was like, I didn't even see you. Then I said, okay, we. Blah, blah, blah. 6 months later, people would visit the ship and they said, this is an amazing culture of teamwork. I would laugh because I hated that word culture. Culture was to me the word that leadership gurus used to blow a cloud of fog over what was kind of a simple idea and result in them being explained. That's another rant anyway.

So we can go on that rant. I also agree with you completely.

Yeah. So, so I would laugh and I look at them. I say, no, no, we don't have a culture. What we have is a rule that we never use the word they when referring to anyone on the team, which includes anyone and 140 people on the cruise ship. So they, we can say headquarters is they, that's okay. But we, and so it was the using the word we that rewired our brains and caused our brains to grow together. So it felt like we, so when I saw you in supply department, I thought of you as a we. If you want to know where the teams are in your company, just ask people, hey, tell me about this group. Oh, we are part of marketing. What about over there? They are in product development. That's the team boundary. The org chart doesn't have anything to do with it. It's where the boundary goes. It's the we-they boundary. And so one thing you can do is just, hey, let's practice expanding the we-they boundary. You're in an executive meeting, you have 10 senior executives from a corporation, and they're talking to each other as well, they, they, they, because they're not a team. Each person is representing his own stovepipe. I'm representing Asia Pacific. You're representing North America. Well, they and they headquarters is the biggest. I see. Well, they is like, well, who's they? Well, you know, headquarters, Vevey, Switzerland, headquarters of Nestlé. They blah, blah, blah. Like, well, yeah, but you're like your headquarters. That's you. Don't give people a lecture to be a team. Just refer to each other as we, you know, feel like a team.

When you did it to the engineer on the ship or on the submarine, you said the stress left his body. Is it ultimately making a less stressful environment?

I think one of the reasons the stress left his body is I was looking at his face, and it was because he surrendered to the new rule. The way I think about it is we have these language prompts that we've been programmed into. 99% of what we say all day long, we never even think about. It just bleh comes out of our mouth. And it's easier that way because thinking about every word coming out would be very cognitively taxing. So if you're used to saying, "Are you sure? Will it work?" then it's hard to change that to, "How sure are you?

How likely is it to work?" But in your new book, Language of Leadership, are some of the phrases or the intention of the book to make it a calmer or more sane place to work? What is the ultimate goal of the leadership?

Yes, the answer is yes. The goal of the new book— well, the hypothesis of the new book is that we've been programmed by a language of the Industrial Revolution which was focused on doing and a particular kind of doing, a kind of doing that benefited from reducing variability. So if you imagine a nail, what a nail looked like before the Industrial Revolution, so it's a hand-pounded, each one has different welts and it's slightly longer or shorter. And then in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, there were these die-cut nails. And then at the end, there are whole boxes of nails where you can't tell them apart. The variability in the nail goes reduced. So all the whole organization was designed to reduce variability. And the way we spoke was designed to reduce variability. That's why It's easier to say, are you sure? Because it reduces the variability in the response to two, yes or no. It's just cognitively simpler. So that's what you've been programmed for. And but what we want to do now is have more thinking. Thinking is an embrace variability game. Hey, how do you see it different than me? The problem is we're using a reduced variability language in an embrace variability game. So we're not getting the results. So people say, well, I have an innovation problem. The core of the innovation problem is you're using the wrong language. You're using language that for 500 years has been developed to go from a hand-pounded nail to a wire nail that's indistinguishable from the 1,000 other nails that's in the box. Your organization is designed to go from a hand-pounded nail. Your organization is about doing and it's about reducing variability. And if you don't— haven't deliberately changed your organization, that's what you inherited. Then we say, oh, but now we want you to pause and think. All thinking starts with pause.

Interesting.

What we say is we control the clock. In the Industrial Revolution, you wanted to obey the clock. That's why you have words like clockwork, and that's why we clocked in, and that's why we have these punch cards, and that's why we pay people by the hour, because it's clockwork. We obey the clock. Now, for thinking, you got to control the clock. We got to say timeout, because if you have that assembly line going, and the things coming in on you and say, "And what's a better idea? How can we run this better?" Like, I can't do it. I got to do this thing right now because the next one's coming down the line. So we need calm and serene to open our minds, to have really good ideas, to put things together that we wouldn't otherwise put together. So you haven't thought about that way, but that's exactly right. We control the clock so we can pause and get thinking. And one of the, one of the environmental conditions that allows thinking is calm, serenity, not feeling the pressure of the clock, because that closes us down our prefrontal cortex and it just makes it harder to think.

And a less stressful work environment.

Correct. Are you a millennial?

I think I am. I mean, what is the age? What makes me a millennial?

I don't know. We could look it up. This is actual— you have to be born between something and something.

Can I be born there and not be a millennial because I don't feel like one? Or am I just—

no, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it okay to be a millennial.

Okay.

I think all three of my kids are millennials. They're all very close. They're like low 30s and 20s. So we're going to play opposite day. Mark Twain said something like, if you're in the majority, you might start thinking a second. Yeah.

If you find yourself on the side of the majority, pause and reflect.

Exactly. Okay, so here's pause and reflect. Oh, millennials are so fucked up. Oh, millennials are so lazy. Oh, millennials are, you know, avocado toast eating, latte drinking. Bubble water drinking people who, who as soon as the work gets tough will quit, self-entitled, blah, blah, blah. They're so much different than the rest of us. Okay, so this is the first thing. Millennials are exactly like the rest of us. Human race, your DNA is exactly like my DNA. The DNA of the human race did not change in one generation. Number one. Number two, I would assert that the way millennials are asking to be treated in the workplace. Here's the difference. My grandfather wanted a job with meaning. You don't think so? The difference was he needed to feed the family. That trumped the meaning thing. Now, because there's so much wealth in so many parts of the world, we take it for granted. Hey, we're gonna eat. I'm not worried about me starving. That frees me to say no to a job where I get treated badly. I imagine a world where every bad boss opens the door one day and there's no one there, 'cause they all quit. What an awesome world that would be if no asshole could ever hire anybody. That would be the best possible world. So let's move in that direction. And the lesson from millennials is the way millennials are asking to be treated is the way we should be treating every human being. It's just that the millennials have the ability to say, I'm not taking this job. I'm going to go back and move into my mom's basement, which is not an ability that I had. So I'm kind of flipped on millennials. I'm like, thank God.

And it's our fault as the leaders and the bosses to create environments that they don't want to work in.

Right. Well, then it also reflects the other thing. It's your problem. It's the millennials' problem. It's not like we've created a shitty workplace that no one wants to be at because there's no purpose. You don't have any control over your life. And you're just a one unending day after the next. No, no, no. That can't be my fault. That's your fault. You just showed up, but I'm still going to blame you. Yeah, that makes sense.

People think it's like a title problem and all they're really asking for is to be in control.

Yeah, they want their life to matter, right? I'm with you on that. And I want the ability to affect it. I'm with you on that too.

Then why do they get such a bad rap?

Because we don't understand. First of all, we blame the person, not the process, the system. It's psychologically easier to say, well, you quit, you must be— it's your problem, you couldn't handle it. I had a job for 6 months after I got out of the Navy and I'd written my book.

Doing what?

I was the head of HR for a tech company. Really? Yeah.

Where's this part of the story?

It's a secret. I don't really tell it. Yeah. So a guy came to me and he was running the startup in New York City. There was a lot of energy. And he said, uh, hey, I read your book. I love it. How about being the head of HR for us? And there was a problem. Every number that was good got rounded up and every number that was bad got rounded down.

What do you mean?

If sales were up 16%, then we talked about it like they were up 20%. And if errors were up 13%, then they were only up 10%. Like that.

Why was that? Like, what was happening?

That— I think he just thought that he was spinning things in a positive light. Got it. And he was trying to— he was trying to win the war on talent by creating this, uh, sense of, hey, we're making— we're, you know, we're doing really good. You're on a rocket ship. Take a— you know, don't ask what seat you get. But another problem, right? That's a whole nother thing. So, but, but for me, this was a big problem because I was linking my, my leadership model to this. The weird thing was the story was great without the fibbing.

Yeah, this is what a lot of people I think don't understand is it, it never ends up mattering, and then stretching that is the downfall of it all.

Yeah, so everyone in company knew that this is how the CEO's behavior was, so what do you think their behavior was? No one's telling the truth to anybody, and I'm in this morass But more importantly, I couldn't risk my brand being attached to this, what I call the lack of integrity. Some people argue with me, "No, no, no, they're just, that's what businesses do." But I said, "Well, they're not mine." I mean, that's why Theranos happened. Exactly. Like, oh, let me tick 'em off. Theranos, Wells Fargo, Volkswagen, blah, blah, blah. That's how it all starts.

Tiny little change.

Yeah.

Start small.

Exactly. And when it comes from the top, you give everyone permission to not be honest. Yeah. So the reasons I'm telling the story— so I went to him, I figured out very quickly that it wasn't going to work. And I said, hey, this isn't going to work, blah, blah, blah. You know what he says to me? What? He says, so I guess when it got hard, you quit. He said, for a submarine guy who used to be a submarine commander, you don't seem very tough.

That was what he said.

Yeah.

So the, like, a belittling power kind of vibe.

Yeah, exactly. And in other words, it was, it was me. I'm all fucked up. Yeah, doesn't have anything to do with you. And maybe I was, but there was still no, oh, hey, I'm sorry. And by the way, I had been telling him, like, leading up to this, like, this behavior isn't going to work for me. Didn't change. The point is, it's easier to blame the millennials than to look at, say, the system we've created for work is fundamentally not good for human beings.

Do you believe that? Do you believe industrialization is bad for humans?

It wasn't bad when it happened. There were environments in factories which were worse than they needed to be. That was bad. But the Industrial Revolution was a good thing. Yeah, we're so much better off than we were. The life expectancy is longer. We don't have to spend hours handwashing clothes and the water is better and on and on and on and on. So the Industrial Revolution was a good thing, but now we're past that and now we can make machines wash the clothes for us. So it frees us to do other things like thinking, which is what humans love to do. Go on the subway like everyone's playing their own games or they're thinking, they're solving problems. They're not getting paid. They like that and they're connecting as humans. Either that or they're on— they're connecting. And so the industrial workplace was on aggregate good for humanity, but in the individual was not good.

Because it created a mentality where you don't think anymore.

Correct. You comply, conform, you're no longer an individual. So we have to do better. We gotta fix that.

The main thing that I see—

Yeah.

I mean, even coming from being a CEO, my worst feeling was feeling like people were stressed.

Yeah.

It made me stressed. And I feel like it was this thing you didn't want that of your people. But it's so hard in this corporate capitalist grow work environment that we're in to not feel that way and be able to say pause, right? And stop. And even at— with my intentions of creating a culture of that, I still felt stress at times. And then that would make me stressed and it compounded. And I think I made worse decisions. And how do you really, as a leader, get everyone to understand that and feel empowered to do that?

Because I look at—

I met with someone that met— it was at a big car company last week, and they said to me, we want to be more innovative, we're crazy right now, it's chaos, there's so much change. And all the language was just stress.

Mm-hmm.

And I was like, first off, is it a stressful place to work? And they were like, it's so stressful. Because I think it's almost like an obligation of what you're working on to save what is today how companies are built, because they feel all the same. They just get to this size and everyone is just running around trying to go faster and no one slows down, right? How do you change that on a global level? That's a big fucking question. What if like one person at a time, even on a corporate level, like how do you change one company to think like this?

So I'm not saying we're going to give up performance because no one cares about your company that was a great place to work and then you went bankrupt 2 years later. Yeah, but I don't think it's an either-or situation. What I'm saying is that the path to great performance— and the Industrial Revolution, the path to great performance was getting everybody doing stuff as fast as possible. So those companies are run on the Industrial Revolution model. The path now is to get everybody thinking. Imagine you have a needle that says, what's the total cognitive brain power of our company that's actually being used right now? If everybody's contributing 10% of the brain, then it's 10%. If half the people are doing 50% and the other half are doing zero, then it's 25%. But I think the way for companies to do better now— this was the key to the Santa Fe's two things, one, our short-term performance improvement and keeping our people, attracting and keeping the best people was not by getting them to do more faster, it's by opening up the thinking. It's about the decisions. So many times the problem manifests itself in, it looks like a performance problem, but it's really a decision problem that happened 6 months earlier. So someone way back when makes a decision that we're gonna change the way we're gonna apply paint to the cars. And then we buy new paint, we buy new nozzles, we change the temperature of the baking, and then the cars start coming out. But there's a problem. We haven't researched it all, and a certain paint combination with the metal flakes or something, they start coming out badly. So it looks like a performance problem and we blame the person, but it really stems from some decision we made 6 months earlier. It's those decisions, that's where the competitive advantage is. Everyone's doing is fast as you can. I work with, so a construction company, I said, where are you going to get more advantage? The guy running the nail gun, punching nails faster, or the foundation's poured, the plumber's done, and now we're going to start erecting walls. What happens there? There's a 2-day lag because we haven't lined up the nail gunners, or they're there, but they don't have the nail gunners, whatever it is. Like close that seam. That's going to buy you a lot more than flogging the nail gunner and say, punch nails faster. That requires me to be thinking ahead about my job and reflects the issue back onto me. Here's another thing that, that's really odd. If I went to that construction company and I said, well, how much does this nail cost? They could tell me. How much does it cost to insert one nail? How much does it cost to drive one pile? They know all that number to the penny. Then I said, well, how much did it cost to make this decision? That instead of using concrete, we're going to make it concrete for the first 2 floors and then wooden frame for the next 3. How much did that decision cost you? No idea. Hmm. How many executives spent how many hours contemplating that? How many outsourced outside consultants? No idea. But that's the competitive advantage.

No one puts cost on decisions.

Not that I've run into. 'Cause I asked the question, how much did that decision cost you? Like, they think I'm asking it like, well, we made a bad decision. It cost us $100,000 'cause we had to go back and redo some stuff. No, no, no. How much did it cost to make the decision? No idea. But if your competitive advantage is gonna be able to make decisions faster and better than somebody else, then you better know what it costs you.

How do I measure that?

Just start by this. If you can, I say, X-level person, regional managers who on the average make $125,000 are able to make the decision. Let's say we're running a retail organization. Regional managers can decide the product mix in the store. And when we shift from say springtime to summer, summer to fall, fall to Christmas, and regional managers, and they make $125,000. Okay. But then I'd say, you know what, I'm going to let the store manager make that decision. The store manager makes on average $75,000. Now I'm winning because I'm paying $75,000 for that decision. The person who makes that decision in my company only makes $75,000. The person who makes that decision in your company makes $125,000. Got it. So then you multiply that by 10,000. Now I'm winning. And by the way, the people in my company are going to stay in my company because people like to be in charge. And I'm just pushing that decision. We call it push the authority to where the information is, not channel the information to where the authority is, because the store manager knows best about their clientele. They know best. They have the information if they've been paying attention. So why don't we let them choose?

Where does the buck stop if leaders are empowered at all levels?

It stops everywhere and it stops at the top. So people say, well, what is— if all these people are making decisions, then what's my job as a CEO? You're the one who designed, you built the decision-making factory. So if bad decisions are coming out of the decision-making factory, that's on you. That's every leader's fear. So there's two ways to approach it. One, build better decision-makers, build a better decision-making factory, or make all the decisions yourself. Too often, We're like, well, I'm afraid so. And building a better decision factory is hard and it's risky 'cause now I have to rely on other people to make the decisions. Yeah, but now I got 1,000 people thinking. If they have to make decisions, they're gonna pay more attention. They're gonna open up their brains. They're gonna be engaged. I laugh at all these, how to have 10 ways to have more engaged employees. And it's these— put a ping pong table, whatever.

My worst nightmare.

Free lunch.

Free lunch.

Yeah, that'll make a difference. No, here it is. Step 1, give them decision-making authority. Step 2, repeat step 1. That's it. Everything else is nonsense. Now there's a lot into step 1. Because you want that to be successful. And so there's a lot that you have to unpack to get that successfully to happen. But that's all there is to it in my mind. All the rest of it is because you just didn't have the courage to do step one. Hmm. So we're going to skip step one and we're going to do all this other pretend stuff and it's going to be a bunch of nonsense, but the consultant's going to get paid. So that's all that matters. The engagement consultant.

Unengaged corporations have fueled Accenture and Deloitte's rise.

Exactly. Well, yeah, I'm jealous.

Our work life actually is impacting our personal life. And if we have a negative environment at work, we're bringing that home.

Yeah, there's no work life and personal life. There's life. And it's— you don't shed your skin and come in to come home. It's the same you. So if you've been treated badly at work or you have stresses at work, that's what you're going to show up at home with. And then you're going to manifest that in your family and it's going to stress them out and then it's going to cascade down the generation. So I think there's a connection between bad workplaces and bullying in high school, for example, or these mass shootings. Like, how messed up did your family life need to be for this to kind of come out? I'm not blaming the families on this, but— and because some of these guys have chemical imbalances too, but it all adds up. Yeah, from a society point of view.

And one thing I've gained from you is if all we're doing is programming our brains with language, you don't think you're doing anything wrong if your boss is treating you like this and you just start copying it.

I'm super glad you came back to that. The problem isn't evil people. There are a few evil people, very few. The problem is the vast majority of us trying to do the right thing, but using the wrong playbook, using the wrong language, simply repeating what we've heard, simply repeating how we treated each other in high school. And that just becomes the pattern for everything when we— it's terrible. And because we haven't deliberately thought about what the helpful language is, and to take a 50-year-old executive and say, "Now we're going to give you listening training or language training," they're like, "I don't need that.

That's insulting." I've learned my whole life how to speak.

Exactly. I'm better than you at speaking. That's why I make 500 grand a year. Meh. And everyone in your company hates you. But it's not necessarily as black and white as that. It's little tweaks that over time add up. Just say, start the question with how. It'll be a better question.

And a better world.

And a better world. Less stress.

And there you go. Language is Leadership is the new one from David Marquet. This is #Ask. Say hey @startbyasking on Twitter, and please, if you would, share this with the people that you appreciate. Thanks for giving us some of your time today. It really is the greatest gift that you could give us. We're glad you're here with us, and stick around for another one from #Ask sometime soon. Enjoy your day.