Pain

“What I had seen was a leadership model that was fundamentally flawed. It was a model where one person, the leader, had all the authority and everyone else was trained to follow.” – L. David Marquet

The Problem with How We Lead

David Marquet opens his story not with a triumph but with a failure that would reshape his entire understanding of leadership. As a rising star in the U.S. Navy submarine force, he had absorbed every lesson of the traditional leadership playbook: be decisive, give clear orders, hold people accountable, and inspire through force of personality. He was, by every conventional measure, an excellent leader-follower leader.

But something gnawed at him. On every submarine he served, he noticed the same pattern. When the captain was strong and decisive, the boat performed well. When the captain departed, performance dropped. The organization was only as good as its leader, and it could never be better. The system was designed to produce compliant followers, not thinking leaders.

The Leader-Follower Legacy

The leader-follower model has deep roots. It traces back to the industrial age when workers were hired for their physical labor, not their minds. The model assumes:

• One person has the vision and everyone else executes
• Information flows up, decisions flow down
• Obedience is the primary virtue of subordinates
• The leader is the bottleneck for all significant decisions
• Success depends on finding great leaders, not on building great organizations

This model worked when the environment was stable and tasks were repetitive. But in a world of increasing complexity and rapid change, it fails catastrophically.

The USS Will Rogers Experience

Marquet’s first real taste of the leader-follower model’s limitations came aboard a submarine early in his career. He watched as talented, intelligent sailors shut off their brains the moment they walked up the gangway. They had been trained, both explicitly and implicitly, that thinking was someone else’s job. Their job was to do what they were told.

A Culture of Compliance

The signs were everywhere. Sailors would stand at a piece of equipment watching it malfunction, waiting for an officer to tell them what to do. Junior officers would bring every decision, no matter how small, to the captain. The entire organization was structured so that authority and decision-making resided at the top, while the people with the most direct knowledge of the work had the least authority to act on it.

The irony was devastating: the Navy was recruiting some of the brightest young people in the country, putting them through rigorous training, and then creating an environment that systematically discouraged them from using their intelligence.

“We were taking the people who were the best and the brightest and turning them into the most compliant and obedient.” – L. David Marquet

The Cost of Followership

The leader-follower model does not just limit performance. It extracts a profound human cost. Marquet began to see it everywhere:

• Disengagement: Sailors went through the motions, counting the days until their enlistment ended
• Learned helplessness: Capable people stopped trying to solve problems because they had been conditioned to wait for direction
• Brain drain: The most talented people left because they were frustrated by a system that did not value their thinking
• Fragility: When the leader was absent, wrong, or overwhelmed, the entire organization stalled

The Engagement Crisis

Marquet draws a direct line between the leader-follower model and the engagement crisis that plagues organizations worldwide. When people are told what to do all day, every day, they disengage. They bring their hands to work but leave their minds at home. The statistics are staggering: in most organizations, the majority of workers are either passively disengaged or actively working against the organization’s interests.

This is not a people problem. It is a system problem. The leader-follower model is designed to produce followers, and that is exactly what it does. It should not surprise us when followers act like followers: waiting, deferring, avoiding risk, and doing the minimum required.

The Seed of a Different Idea

Despite the dominance of the leader-follower model, Marquet began to imagine an alternative. What if, instead of concentrating authority at the top, you pushed it down to where the information was? What if, instead of training people to follow, you trained them to lead?

The Leader-Leader Vision

The core idea that would eventually transform the USS Santa Fe began to form:

• Every person is a leader at their level of the organization
• Decision-making authority resides with the person closest to the information
• The role of senior leaders is to create the conditions for others to lead, not to make all the decisions themselves
• The organization’s capability is not limited by one person’s capacity to give orders

This was not yet a fully formed model. It was a conviction born of frustration with the status quo and a belief that people are capable of far more than traditional leadership allows.

Reflection

Think about your own organization. How many decisions require approval from someone who is not closest to the information? How many talented people in your organization have been trained to wait rather than act? What would change if everyone in your organization thought of themselves as a leader?

Key Takeaways

• The leader-follower model concentrates decision-making at the top and trains everyone else to comply
• This model creates fragile organizations that are only as good as their current leader
• Intelligent, capable people become disengaged when they are not allowed to think and decide
• The cost of followership includes learned helplessness, brain drain, and organizational brittleness
• The alternative is a leader-leader model where authority is pushed to the people closest to the information
• The fundamental shift is from controlling people to releasing their potential