Book: Turn The Ship Around - Contradictions
I’m reading Turn The Ship Around by L. David Marquet. It’s a leadership book similar Extreme Ownership where the author shares their leadership experience lessons from their time in the military.
In Chapter 1 - the author shares three contradictions of leadership:
- Empowerment
- How can we as a species take over and dominate the planet without empowering ourselves?!
- Empowerment must come from within, not given by an authority
- Management Styles
- You want to manage others differently than the way your leader manages you.
- Technical Competency
- A leader’s technical competency and correlation to success
These are fantastic insights. In a way, I don’t see them as contradictions, but almost paradoxes. They are so engulfing that we don’t know them and that those that point them out are almost seen as outliers.
Questions
From the above, these questions come to mind:
- Empowerment: if an authority gives empowerment to leader and that leader is not ready, what can happen?
- Management styles: why do people want different ways of managing others vs. how their leader manages them? Do you have that feeling?
- Technical competency: when a leader leaves - what happens to the team??
Next, I talk about top down leadership attribution.