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Concept

Leader-leader

Leader-leader is David Marquet's alternative to leader-follower: instead of one brain deciding and many hands executing, authority moves to wherever the information is, so a team gets as many decision-makers as it has people and stops being only as good as the manager's attention.

Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe, the worst-performing submarine in its fleet, and on his first patrol gave an order that could not be carried out on that class of boat; his officer relayed it anyway, because the crew had been trained to wait for orders and follow them. That is leader-follower: it produces obedience, and a ship exactly as good as the captain. Leader-leader reverses the flow. The person with the information owns the decision, states it as an intention with their reasoning, and the leader checks the reasoning rather than making the call. It only works with two other pillars in place, competence and clarity, which is why half of Marquet's book is about building them. For a first-time manager the model explains why delegating tasks while keeping decisions produces a team that does what it is told and waits at the door: every decision that must pass through you is a queue, and the queue is your calendar.

A real-life example

Aylin runs a twelve-person restaurant kitchen in Antalya and approves every substitution, early clock-off and supplier reorder from a phone that never stops. She hands the reorders to her sous-chef with the rule that he states his intention and reason. By the fourth week the orders are better than hers, because he is the one who sees what runs out.

How to use it

  1. 1Delegate the decision to whoever has the information, not to whoever is most senior.
  2. 2State the goal and the constraints, then ask what they intend to do; check the reasoning, not the choice.
  3. 3Expect the first few decisions to be slightly worse than yours, and the team to be permanently faster.