“The true test of a leader is not what happens when you are there. It is what happens after you leave.” – L. David Marquet
The transformation of the USS Santa Fe is one of the most remarkable leadership stories in military history. When Marquet took command, the Santa Fe had the worst retention rate, the lowest morale, and the poorest inspection scores in the submarine fleet. Within a year, it was the best. Within two years, it was setting records that had never been achieved before.
But the statistics, while impressive, are not the real story. The real story is what happened after Marquet left.
Under Marquet’s command and the leader-leader model, the Santa Fe achieved:
The last statistic is perhaps the most telling. The Santa Fe did not just perform well. It produced leaders. Officers who served on the Santa Fe went on to command their own submarines and lead their own organizations using the principles they had learned. The leader-leader model was not just a performance strategy. It was a leadership development engine.
In a leader-follower organization, performance is tied to the leader. When a strong leader departs, performance declines. The organization is addicted to that leader’s capability, and without it, it falters. This is the fundamental fragility of the leader-follower model.
The leader-leader model promises something different: an organization that performs at a high level regardless of who is in charge, because leadership capacity is distributed throughout the organization rather than concentrated at the top.
When Marquet departed the Santa Fe, the submarine did not decline. It continued to excel under subsequent commanding officers. The mechanisms Marquet had implemented, the “I intend to” language, the certification process, the deliberate action, the everywhere learning, had become embedded in the culture. They did not depend on Marquet’s personality or presence. They were structural, repeatable, and self-reinforcing.
This is the difference between a program and a mechanism. A program dies when its champion leaves. A mechanism lives on because it is woven into how the organization operates every day.
“Leadership is not about your presence. It is about the structures and culture you leave behind.” – L. David Marquet
The impact of the Santa Fe transformation extended far beyond one submarine. Officers who served under Marquet carried the leader-leader philosophy to their next assignments, spreading it through the Navy and eventually into civilian organizations.
Perhaps the most powerful evidence of the leader-leader model’s effectiveness is the career trajectory of Santa Fe crew members. The submarine produced a disproportionate number of officers who were selected for command of their own submarines, one of the most competitive and selective processes in the military.
This happened because the Santa Fe was not a place where one leader made all the decisions and everyone else followed. It was a place where every officer practiced leadership every day. They made decisions. They took initiative. They thought strategically. They exercised judgment under pressure. By the time they were evaluated for command, they had years of genuine leadership experience, not years of following orders.
Looking back at the entire transformation, Marquet’s approach can be summarized as a complete, interdependent framework built on three pillars supported by specific mechanisms.
Pillar 1: CONTROL - Push authority to where the information is.
Pillar 2: COMPETENCE - Build the knowledge to exercise control wisely.
Pillar 3: CLARITY - Ensure everyone understands purpose, goals, and values.
The three pillars reinforce each other. You cannot have Control without Competence (dangerous). You cannot have Competence without Clarity (misdirected). You cannot have Clarity without Control (frustrating). All three must advance together.
Marquet’s framework is not limited to military environments. The principles have been applied successfully in technology companies, hospitals, schools, manufacturing plants, and nonprofits. The specific mechanisms may need to be adapted, but the underlying logic is universal.
When applying the leader-leader model to your organization, consider these adaptations:
“I intend to…” in a corporate setting might sound like: “I intend to restructure the client proposal to emphasize their cost concerns, because our research shows that’s their primary decision criterion.”
Certification in a software team might mean: before deploying code, the developer explains to a peer not just what the code does but why the approach was chosen and what edge cases were considered.
Everywhere learning in a hospital might mean: during rounds, experienced nurses ask newer nurses probing questions about patient conditions rather than simply telling them what to do.
Achieve excellence in a school might mean: shifting teacher evaluations from “did you follow the lesson plan?” to “did your students learn?”
The key is not to copy the Navy’s specific practices but to internalize the principles and create mechanisms appropriate to your own context.
Marquet closes his book with a challenge that extends beyond organizational leadership. The leader-leader model is ultimately about a fundamental belief about people: that they are capable of far more than most systems allow them to show.
Every leader, whether they realize it or not, operates from one of two assumptions:
Assumption A: People need to be told what to do.
Assumption B: People want to think, contribute, and lead.
The leader-leader model is built on Assumption B. It does not require better people. It requires a better system, one that allows the intelligence, initiative, and leadership that already exists in every person to emerge.
When you create a leader-leader organization:
Begin implementing the leader-leader model in your organization with these steps:
What would your organization look like if every person in it thought of themselves as a leader? Not a manager, not a boss, but a leader at their level, with the authority, competence, and clarity to make decisions and take action. What is the one thing standing between your organization today and that vision? And what are you going to do about it, starting tomorrow?