Sublime

Rather than approaching the officers and telling them what to do (a typical command-and-control approach that rarely works in the long term), Abrashoff simply went to the end of the line.

From the start, Abrashoff knew you can’t simply order people to be better. Even if that appears to work, the results are short term and the consequences enormous. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a ship or running a manufacturing company. You don’t tap into people’s resourcefulness, intelligence, and skills by command-and-control. “Show me an organiz

The best teams—like the three snipers on the deck of the Bainbridge—know their coach (or commander or boss) trusts them to trust each other. Those horizontal anti-MECE bonds of trust and overlapping definitions of purpose enable them to “do the right thing.”

All my leadership training up to that point had been abour mak ing decisions and getting the team to implement them. I had peven questioned this paradigm until that moment aboard Santa Fe. Improw ing my decisions simply couldn't happen fast enough to matter. I needed a different solution entirely. The problem, I realized, wasn't that I'd given a ba

“The new leader of Boat Crew Six focused his team on the mission. Rather than tolerate their bickering and infighting, he pulled the team together and focused their collective efforts on the single specific goal of winning the race. He established a new and higher standard of performance and accepted nothing less from the men in his boat crew.”

But something soon changed in his perspective. Whyte knew the captain was new and far less familiar with that particular boat than himself and the other crew member. Every boat has its quirks, and experience counts for more than seniority when it comes to knowing them. He’d also felt sure the night before that they needed to put down a second ancho