Inspire others to lead

Welcome to the fourth and final installment of Lead Like You Give a Damn, a Club 12 series on becoming an effective leader both in your professional life as well as in your personal life.

Over the last three sessions, we’ve talked about defining your core values, becoming a trust-worthy leader, and holding an uncompromising standard for excellence:

If you’re actually practicing the principles I mentioned above, you’ve probably realized something by now:

Being a leader who gives a damn is exhausting…

Some folks might say it’s natural to be drained and exhausted if you genuinely care about the outcomes you’re after and the people you’re leading.

But I disagree.

Leaders don’t get exhausted because they care, they get exhausted because they try to do everything themselves.

I understand this mentality very well, because I’ve suffered from it myself.

I used to tell myself, “No one can do it like me anyway, so I’ll just handle it on my own so it gets done properly and punctually—exactly how I like it.”

Here’s the problem with this mindset: trying to control everything is a losing battle.

It will drain you. It will stunt your growth. It’ll keep you from operating at your peak, and it’ll keep those you lead from reaching their full potential.

If you’ve leaned into this in the past, it might’ve worked out just fine, but I’m willing to bet it hasn’t ever worked as well as you’d like it to…

Because if you’re the only one in control, then you haven’t built a real team. All you’ve done is build a room full of followers — all of whom are completely dependent on you.

And as a result, the moment you leave, get sick, or burn out - everything falls apart.

Master every area of your life. Inside Club 12.

Average leaders command and control. Good leaders direct and delegate. But extraordinary leaders build more leaders: they educate, empower, and coach leadership in others.

My definition of leadership is to communicate to another person their potential and value with so much clarity that they’re inspired to see it in themselves.

Being an extraordinary leader has nothing to do with how many people follow you, and everything to do with how many people you empower to become leaders themselves. It’s about how many capable leaders you can leave behind.

But changing from the type of leader who’s used to “doing everything” to the type of leader “empowers others” can be uncomfortable and uncertain.

So, to show you exactly what it takes to let go and build a culture of true leaders, I want to take you 400 feet underwater….

In 1999, Captain David Marquet was assigned to command a US nuclear submarine called, the USS Santa Fe. It was widely considered the worst-performing submarine in the entire US Navy fleet. Morale was terrible, and the crew was famous for making mistakes.

To make matters worse, Captain Marquet had been trained to command a completely different class of submarine. He didn’t actually know the intricate technical details of the USS Santa Fe.

A few days into his command, he was running a drill.

He ordered his officer: “Ahead two thirds.”

The officer echoed the order to the helmsman: “Ahead two thirds.”

But nothing happened.

Marquet looked at the helmsman and asked what was going on.

The helmsman then nervously replied, “Captain, there is no ‘ahead two thirds’ gear on this submarine.”

Marquet was confused.

He looked at the officer who passed along his orders and asked, “Did you know there was no ‘ahead two thirds’?”

The officer replied, “Yes, sir.”

“Then why did you issue the order?”

The officer looked directly back at him and said, “Because you told me to, sir.”

And that’s when Marquet realized he was leading 135 followers.

His men were so conditioned to blindly obey the chain of command that they were willing to drive a nuclear submarine into a disaster just because the guy in charge said so.

After this experience, Marquet realized that if he kept barking out orders, the entire ship would fail. He didn’t know his own ship well enough, and his crew had stopped using their brains.

So, Marquet decided to switch things up…

He gathered his crew and told them he would never give another order again.

Then, he instituted a new rule: