This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Turn the Ship Around" by L. David Marquet. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here .
In today’s fast-paced knowledge economy, traditional top-down management often stifles innovation by treating employees as passive followers. Transitioning to a leader-leader model fundamentally shifts this dynamic by distributing decision-making authority to those closest to the information, transforming a disengaged workforce into a proactive team of empowered problem-solvers.
By implementing a leader-leader model, organizations move away from a “one brain” system where only the top executive thinks and everyone else executes. Instead, every individual is encouraged to take initiative and act as a leader within their own domain of responsibility. Continue reading to see how this approach fosters a culture of ownership and high performance.
Originally Published: August 8, 2021
Last Updated: December 19, 2025
Table of Contents
The Leader-Leader Model
In his book Turn the Ship Around!, what Marquet calls the leader-leader model starts from this assumption: Everyone can be a leader, and organizations work best when everyone acts like one. Rather than dividing people into those who make decisions and those who follow orders, this model gives everyone ownership over decisions within their specific domains of responsibility. The person doing the work is also the person deciding how to do it. On a submarine such as Marquet’s, the sonar operator decides when to activate the sonar. The navigation team decides the route. The chiefs decide when their crew members can take leave.
Marquet explains that, in this model, rather than asking for permission to act, people state what they intend to do and why, then proceed with their plan. The commanding officer (CO) still holds accountability for the ship’s performance, but instead of making every decision, they give decision-making authority to the people closest to the information. The key difference is where thinking happens in the organization: In leader-follower, the leader’s brain does the work and everyone else executes the leader’s will—135 people with one brain fully engaged and 134 on autopilot. In leader-leader, everyone is fully engaged in thinking, analyzing, and problem-solving.
| How Roles Become Identities Research on how the brain constructs identity accords with Marquet’s observation that telling people they’re just “followers” affects how they behave at work. According to self-perception theory, people infer who they are by observing their own behavior. When workers have to ask permission and wait for orders, they observe themselves behaving passively, and their brains conclude, “I must be a follower.” Neuroscience supports this: A brain region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex constructs our sense of who we are based on our experiences. Researchers have found that identity is “enacted”: People literally become who they repeatedly perform being. Marquet’s leader-leader model may work because it changes people’s daily experiences in ways that reshape their work identities. By changing what people do, you change who they think they are, which changes how they perform. For example, when you treat workers as leaders within their domain, asking them to think through problems and make their own decisions, they observe themselves acting autonomously and conclude that they are decision-makers. This identity shift leads to stronger self-efficacy—the belief in their capability to succeed—which makes them more likely to take initiative, think critically, and fully engage their intellect. |
The Alternative: The Leader-Follower Model
What Marquet calls the leader-follower model is the default structure in most organizations, from corporations to nonprofits to the military. This model divides people into two roles: one leader who makes decisions, and followers who implement those decisions. The leader figures out what needs to be done and decides how to do it. Everyone else waits for direction, then executes the leader’s orders. The leader gives those orders down the chain of command, and as followers implement those orders, they report information back up the chain. When things go right, the leader gets credit for good decision-making. When things go wrong, the leader adjusts course and issues new orders.
| The Birth of the Leader-Follower Model Management scholars trace the origins of the organizational structure that Marquet calls the leader-follower model to the Industrial Revolution, when the rise of factories created an unprecedented need to coordinate large workforces. Before industrialization, most work took place in family units or artisan workshops where owners and workers labored side by side. The factory system changed this: Owners needed managers to control hundreds of workers performing specialized, repetitive tasks on expensive machinery. Early management theorists such as Frederick Taylor explicitly designed the leader-follower approach—which Taylor called “scientific management”—to maximize efficiency in manufacturing. For Taylor, the goal was to extract the maximum output of physical products (such as steel beams, textiles, or assembled goods) from inputs such as raw materials, machinery, and workers’ time. Success meant standardizing processes, dividing complex work into simple, repetitive tasks, and maintaining top-down control to ensure consistency. For example, instead of one craftsman building an entire product, each worker would perform one small step in an assembly line under a manager’s supervision. But economies have since shifted. By the mid-20th century, “knowledge work”—where value comes from information, analysis, and ideas rather than physical production—became increasingly central to developed economies. Today, the service sector—where most work is knowledge work—employs the vast majority of workers in industrialized nations. Service jobs include roles such as teachers, healthcare workers, financial analysts, software developers, customer service representatives, and consultants: positions where the “output” is expertise, problem-solving, care, or information. But organizations still use management structures meant to optimize factory production to coordinate work that requires judgment, creativity, relationship-building, and adaptation. |
Marquet points out that the leader-follower structure assumes the leader has all the expertise and perspective needed to make the best decisions, while all that followers need to do is comply. This discourages people from fully engaging. In the US Navy, a ship’s CO holds total accountability for everything that happens aboard, so the CO maintains tight control: Subordinates ask permission before acting, and the CO approves or denies each request. On Marquet’s submarine, this meant that of 135 people aboard, only the captain and senior officers were involved in making decisions. Everyone else operated in a “whatever they tell me to do” mode, waiting for instructions rather than thinking independently.
(Shortform note: Scholars say knowledge in military organizations is hierarchically determined: Research on military culture shows that rank, not evidence or logic, determines what’s considered “true”—senior officers declare how the organization should think, and doctrine sets the boundaries within which thinking is allowed. This explains what Marquet saw on the Santa Fe: It wasn’t just that subordinates waited for orders about what to do—they’d learned that their own observations and judgments about what was true didn’t matter. When everyone accepts that authority determines truth, there’s no need for critical thinking at lower levels, and attempting it can feel like challenging the hierarchy itself.)
Why the “Leader-Leader” Model Works Better
Marquet contends that the “leader-leader” model addresses the flaws of the “leader-follower” model by changing how the entire organization thinks about work and responsibility. First, it engages everyone’s intellectual capacity. In a “leader-follower” system, workers can do their jobs without really thinking—they wait for instructions, execute them, and report back. But when they have authority over decisions in their work, thinking becomes unavoidable. They have to analyze situations, consider options, anticipate consequences, and take responsibility for the outcome. They’re no longer just mindlessly executing on someone else’s thinking—they’re doing critical thinking for themselves.
(Shortform note: When we stop actively thinking at work—whether others micromanage us or technology does the thinking for us—we risk losing our capacity for independent thought. Studies show that people in intellectually demanding jobs score higher on cognitive tests decades later, suggesting that their work builds durable mental reserves. Conversely, chronic workplace boredom leads to depression, anxiety, and stress. AI may exacerbate this problem: By outsourcing our thinking to AI, we risk creating a feedback loop that narrows our thinking patterns, and if AI replaces many jobs involving basic intellectual labor, as some experts predict, it’s an open question how we’ll maintain our cognitive capacity.)
Second, Marquet explains that the “leader-leader” model works better than the “leader-follower” model because it develops leaders throughout the organization. In a “leader-follower” system, you only need to understand your specific task, while your supervisor worries about the bigger picture. But when you have authority to make decisions, you have to weigh whether it’s the right thing to do given the broader context and think through the questions your supervisor is likely to ask—considering competing priorities, resource constraints, organizational goals, and risks. In effect, you’re practicing leadership at the next level before you get promoted to it.
(Shortform note: When Marquet notes that workers learning to be leaders do so in part by learning to anticipate their supervisor’s questions, he’s describing the active processes of learning by doing—and by developing a mental model of expert decision-making. This also aligns with “cognitive apprenticeship,” a method for teaching complex thinking skills. In traditional apprenticeships, you watch a carpenter build a cabinet or observe a tailor sew. But in knowledge work, thinking processes are invisible, so you have to make them visible to help others learn. To do this, an expert models their thinking; provides scaffolding, or support, as learners practice; fades that support as skills improve; and coaches them through the process.)
Third, the “leader-leader” model also creates lasting organizational excellence. Marquet explains that in “leader-follower” organizations, performance depends on having an excellent leader at the top and often collapses when that leader leaves. But when decision-making authority is distributed throughout the organization—when the systems, procedures, and culture all reinforce people taking ownership—performance doesn’t depend on any one person. The capability is embedded in how the organization operates.
| How Distributing Authority Also Distributes Knowledge Marquet’s insight about lasting organizational excellence connects to a problem familiar in startups: the founder’s curse. This occurs when a charismatic founder becomes the sole source of innovation and decision-making in a company, rewarding people who execute their vision efficiently while discouraging independent thinking. When this happens, the startup grows rapidly in the short term but collapses after the founder leaves. By then, everyone has learned how to execute the founder’s decisions, but all the crucial decision-making knowledge stays locked in the founder’s head. Organizations preserve different types of knowledge in different ways: Explicit knowledge like documented procedures transfers easily through manuals, but the most valuable knowledge is often tacit: the judgment developed through experience that’s difficult to articulate or transfer. In organizations that are overly dependent on their founder, this knowledge never gets distributed. Marquet solves this by distributing not just authority but the knowledge people gain as they make decisions and articulate their reasoning. Research confirms that this matters: Startups become 50% less likely to successfully adapt after losing their founder, but when knowledge is distributed, the ability to adapt persists even as people come and go. |
The “Leader-Leader” Model on the Santa Fe
Marquet explains that his experience on the Santa Fe demonstrates all three advantages of the “leader-leader” model. When he took command in January 1999, the submarine was the worst performer in the fleet, and he had six months to prepare it for a high-stakes combat exercise. Instead of introducing stricter discipline or closer supervision, he gave decision-making authority to the chiefs and crew, changed how people communicated, and made them responsible for tracking their own work. Marquet explains that the transformation was dramatic: Crew members who had operated in “whatever they tell me to do” mode became active problem-solvers who noticed inefficiencies and proposed improvements.
Reenlistments also skyrocketed from three to 36 in one year—people wanted to stay because their work finally required and valued their full capacity. The submarine went from worst to first in the fleet, earning the Arleigh Burke Fleet Trophy for the unit that improved in battle efficiency the most in a year. It produced far more promoted officers and senior enlisted personnel than comparable ships, and 12 years after Marquet took command, one of his former weapons officers became the Santa Fe’s commanding officer, while several other officers went on to command their own submarines.
After Marquet left, the Santa Fe continued performing at the highest level, earning the Battle “E” award for most combat-effective submarine three times in 10 years.
| Different Types of Excellence May Require Different Leadership Structures Marquet’s results on the Santa Fe demonstrate operational excellence: getting complex equipment to run reliably, maintaining combat readiness, and keeping people engaged in executing well-defined procedures. But achieving different types of organizational goals may require different leadership structures. Consider Bell Labs, the industrial research laboratory that earned 10 Nobel Prizes and invented the transistor, laser, and solar cell. Bell Labs’ work was fundamentally different from the operational procedures Marquet’s crew performed. Neither Bell Labs’ researchers nor its development engineers were executing established protocols—they were creating new knowledge and translating it into new products. Bell Labs’ director Mervin Kelly structured the organization accordingly. Kelly gave extraordinary freedom to an elite group of researchers who received no deadlines, filed no progress reports, and had the freedom to choose their own methods and collaborators. Kelly would identify important problems within the field of telecommunications, then give researchers complete freedom to solve those problems, sometimes only checking back years later. Outside of this research group, many Bell Labs employees were development engineers who translated research discoveries into manufacturable products. These engineers worked within more traditional hierarchies, with managers who assigned projects and set goals. Yet within their assigned work, these engineers had significant technical autonomy. They made complex decisions balancing functional performance, manufacturing costs, and service requirements, and could freely consult expertise across the organization. This suggests that “distributing authority” isn’t an all-or-nothing choice—it’s multiple choices about different types of authority. You can distribute technical problem-solving (how to do the work) while centralizing strategic decisions (what work to do). You can give people access to organizational expertise while maintaining hierarchical reporting structures. The question isn’t whether to distribute authority, but which types of authority to distribute, to whom, and under what conditions. |
———End of Preview———
Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of L. David Marquet's "Turn the Ship Around" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Turn the Ship Around summary :
- How a captain turned the U.S. Navy’s worst-performing nuclear submarine crew into one of the best
- The principles for developing leaders at all levels to create a passionate, high-performing workforce
- Why the "leader-leader" model works better than the "leader-follower" model
