The problem with empowerment programs is that they contain an inherent contradiction between message and method. The message is “you have power.” The method — it takes me to empower you — fundamentally disempowers. The practice outweighs the rhetoric. You cannot invoke leader-follower rules to direct a shift from leader-follower to leader-leader.
Simple Picture
A submarine with 135 crew members, but only 5 brains are engaged — the captain and four department heads. Everyone else has their brain shut off. They follow checklists, wait for orders, avoid mistakes. The captain never sleeps because every decision routes through him. He is exhausted and indispensable, which means the system is fragile. The question is not “how do I empower 130 people?” — it is “what am I doing that is disempowering them?”
This is self-acceptance at the organizational level. You do not add empowerment on top of disempowerment. You remove the disempowerment. The acceptance — the agency — was there before the system crushed it.
The Avoiding-Achieving Shift
The crew was locked in a self-reinforcing downward spiral: poor practices → mistakes → poor morale → survival mode → doing only what is absolutely necessary → more poor practices. The prime driver for all action was avoiding mistakes. The reward was no punishment.
This is the organizational version of the negative orientation: existing for the sake of avoiding punishment rather than achieving something. When avoiding errors becomes the objective, the best way not to make a mistake is to not do anything or make any decisions. Initiative dies. Ownership vanishes. The crew becomes passive reactors to external events, not proactive agents.
Efforts to improve the process made the organization more efficient. Efforts to monitor the process made the organization less efficient. Inspectors at the end of the assembly line don’t make anything better — they only catalogue what went wrong. The organizational equivalent of fragilista behavior: adding overseers who observe without building, creating the illusion of control while draining the system’s real capacity.
The shift: from avoiding errors to achieving excellence. Not a rhetorical reframe but a structural one — changing what gets measured, what gets rewarded, and where attention flows. When the crew adopted a posture of achievement, they embraced inspectors as learning opportunities rather than threats. The question changed from “will we pass?” to “what have other ships figured out that we haven’t?”
Intent-Based Leadership
The mechanism that made leader-leader work: instead of waiting for orders, people state their intentions. “I intend to submerge the ship” rather than “request permission to submerge.” The benefit is that it forces the speaker to think at the next higher level — the officer of the deck must think like the captain. In effect, by articulating intentions, people act their way into the next higher level of command.
We had no need of leadership development programs. The way we ran the ship was the leadership development program. This is the story made operational: instead of speeches about empowerment, the daily mechanism of intent-based communication practiced leadership continuously. The adults were not produced by training — they were produced by a system that required adult behavior moment by moment.
Delegation has a spectrum, not a binary. At the bottom: “do as I say” — follow instructions exactly. Then: research and report, research and recommend, decide and inform, and finally: act independently — full trust, no check-in needed. Most organizations oscillate between levels 1 and 3. Intent-based leadership operates at level 4: decide and inform. Corporate politics often deliberately stays at level 2-3 — not because the boss lacks trust, but because explicit direction removes the boss’s ability to blame the subordinate when things go wrong. Adding too much value is the boss reflexively pulling level 4 decisions back to level 1.
Two prerequisites must be in place before distributing authority, or the result is chaos:
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Technical competence. As authority is delegated, technical knowledge at all levels takes on greater importance. Control without competence is chaos. You cannot push decisions down to people who lack the knowledge to make them. This is why finger-tip feeling matters — distributed authority requires distributed expertise.
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Organizational clarity. People need to understand what the organization is trying to accomplish, not just what tasks to perform. Vague understanding of the goal results in wasted time and well-meaning but erroneous translations of intent. Giving specific direction without underlying thought processes doesn’t work in complex, unpredictable environments.
Thinking Out Loud
Formal military communication crowds out the contextual information needed for peak team performance. Phrases like “I think…” or “I am assuming…” or “It is likely…” get written up as “informal communications” — a violation. But this is exactly the communication that leader-leader needs.
Lack of certainty is strength. Certainty is arrogance. When the captain thinks out loud, he imparts context and experience to subordinates. He also models that uncertainty is a tool, not a weakness. The foxhog orientation depends on this: broad perception requires admitting what you don’t know, and admitting what you don’t know requires a culture where uncertainty is safe.
There is tremendous reluctance to tell superiors anything other than 100% certified information. No room in the language for hunches, gut feelings, or probabilities. In order to make the fewest mistakes when reporting, people say as little as possible. The system optimized for error-avoidance produces information-starvation — the exact opposite of what complex environments require.
The Cascade Problem
People who are treated as followers treat others as followers when it’s their turn to lead. The leader-follower model reproduces itself generationally. Officers rewarded for being indispensable create organizations that collapse when they leave — and the collapse is taken as proof they were good leaders, not that they failed to develop anyone. The Values Oasis is the well-intentioned version of this failure: a leader uses their personal capital to create a non-conforming environment within a wider organization — shielding their team from politics, buffering them from dysfunction. When the leader departs, the entire team struggles and eventually scatters, because they were sheltered from the forces they needed to learn to navigate. The oasis was real but unsustainable — built on one person’s capital, not on the team’s own capacity.
Supervisors frequently bemoan the “lack of ownership” in their employees. When you observe their practices, you can see how they defeat any attempt to build ownership. Don’t preach and hope for ownership — implement mechanisms that actually give it. The mechanisms matter more than the message. Speeches about initiative backed by systems that punish initiative are worse than nothing — they are hypocritical, and the crew knows it.
This is the power-process in organizational form: the crew needs real goals, real effort, real attainment. Surrogate goals (satisfy the inspector, please the boss, follow the checklist) run the form of the power process without its substance. The self-reinforcing downward spiral breaks only when the orientation flips from avoiding punishment to achieving something genuinely worth achieving.
Dimwit / Midwit / Better Take
The dimwit take is “just empower your people — delegate more, trust more.”
The midwit take is “you can’t trust people with authority until they’ve earned it — control is necessary for quality.”
The better take is that the question is not whether to control or empower but what systems are currently disempowering people — and whether competence and clarity are sufficient for distributed authority to work. Empowerment without competence is chaos. Control without trust is fragility. The leader-leader model is neither — it is a structural commitment to building competence and clarity fast enough that control can be released continuously. The ship doesn’t need a hero captain. It needs 135 people who understand why they are doing what they are doing.
Main Payoff
You don’t want to be accidentally safe. You want to be deliberately excellent. The difference is the difference between an organization that survives because nothing went wrong today and an organization that thrives because everyone is thinking. The first is locally optimal — stable until the unpredicted event arrives. The second is antifragile — it converts small shocks into learning and small mistakes into structural improvement.
The deepest lesson: the caring-but-not-caring paradox. Care intimately about your subordinates and the organization. Care little about the organizational consequences to yourself. This is playing your edge as a leader — the willingness to be wrong, to be fired, to look foolish, because the alternative is a ship where 130 brains are turned off and one exhausted captain holds everything together until the night he makes a mistake.
References:
- L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders