Leading Like a Gardener
This isn't just a new way to lead; it's the only way to truly unlock the human potential within your organization in today's complex world.
Context Not Control
What does Netflix have in common with a nuclear submarine? Although the two could not be more different at first glance, their extraordinary management culture is more similar than one might think. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, prides himself on making as few decisions as possible, preferably none at all for an entire quarter.1 So does Captain David Marquet, who decided on the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe to stop giving orders. Both rely on context rather than control and are incredibly successful.
David Marquet spent over a year preparing for his new role as captain of the USS Olympia. He learned every detail about this particular nuclear submarine. Everything went as planned until he had to take command of the USS Santa Fe at short notice. These two nuclear submarines belong to the same class of nuclear-powered fast attack submarines (Los Angeles-class). Still, as the USS Santa Fe was a much newer type, David Marquet knew relatively little about this submarine when he took command of it. Too little, as it soon turned out.
During an exercise in his first month in command, David Marquet recognized the danger of a team trained to obey combined with a boss whose knowledge was limited. The exercise simulated the failure of the main reactor. For the duration of the reactor repair, the USS Santa Fe had to maneuver with a battery-powered electric propulsion motor. To challenge the crew and increase the pressure, David Marquet finally gave his officer of the deck the command, “Two-thirds ahead!” The officer immediately passed the order on to the helmsman and … nothing happened!
Marquet confronted the helmsman, who explained dutifully, “Sir, we don't have two-thirds here.” Everyone else on board knew that, too. The officer of the deck knew it in particular, but he passed the order on without hesitation because he was trained to obey. A classic HIPPO moment: “Highest-paid person's opinion.” But it was also a moment for David Marquet to question himself. He realized that, with his limited knowledge and experience, he was a dangerous bottleneck in the organization. Beyond that, he saw the potential that lay dormant in his team's collective experience and expertise, intelligence, and creativity.
So he decided not to give any more orders. Besides using the nuclear missiles, David Marquet let his crew make their own decisions. To enable them to make these decisions, he communicated the intention and goal, gave them the full context, and helped them make their decisions increasingly independently by asking specific questions like a coach.
When an officer would ask initially for permission to initiate the dive, for instance, he did not give an order but led him to think about whether it was safe and the right thing to do now regarding the overall mission. Gradually, fewer and fewer officers asked for permission but began to think like the captain and took responsibility for their decisions and the decisions of their teams. Where the crew previously followed commands that were more or less disconnected for the individual, the current situation and the ship's mission were now clearly understood, even in the rearmost engine room. This understanding of the overall situation led to far better decisions, for example, by avoiding noise in the engine room when an enemy ship was nearby.
David Marquet turned the ship around, which is why his book is titled “Turn Around the Ship! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders”. Through this extraordinary leadership culture, the USS Santa Fe went from being the worst to the best submarine in the US Navy and remained so beyond the end of David Marquet's service. On top of that, the USS Santa Fe became de facto a training ground for several aspiring captains who learned their trade under David Marquet.2
Despite this impressive demonstration of the effect of leadership focused on empowerment, examples of this leadership culture in large hierarchical organizations are hard to find. At Netflix, the seventh-largest internet company in the world, though, one will quickly find them. And there in particular in the legendary “Culture Statement.”3 The original 125(!) slides on culture at Netflix were viewed over 17 million times and described by Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) COO Sheryl Sandberg as “perhaps the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.”4 In the now revised version displayed on the Netflix website, it becomes clear who makes the decisions at Netflix:5
We strive to develop good decision-making muscles at every level of the company, priding ourselves on how few, not how many, decisions senior leaders make. We expect managers to practice context not control—giving their teams the context and clarity needed to make good decisions instead of trying to control everything themselves.
Leadership does not mean deciding everything yourself but creating the conditions that enable employees to make their own decisions. That's why Reed Hastings prides himself on making as few decisions as possible at Netflix and David Marquet stopped giving orders on the USS Santa Fe.
Gardener Not Chess Master
Leadership means cultivating and demanding self-management of the people entrusted to it. Like gardeners, leaders create a conducive environment for unleashing human potential.
The military is often cited as an example and blueprint for hierarchical organizations. And rightly so, since in the course of industrialization, many companies were indeed inspired by the organization of the military. However, it is often forgotten that the military has long relied on the speed and effectiveness of autonomy and self-organization, especially in complex and unclear situations.
The Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke (1800-1891) already recognized: “No operational plan extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy force.”6 He, therefore, granted the subsequent levels of command extensive freedom in executing the combat mission. Ultimately, this led to the extraordinarily successful concept of “mission-type tactics (Auftragstaktik).”7 The decisive advantage of this type of leadership is that decisions are made quickly and autonomously on the front line, trying to accomplish a set mission with clear boundary conditions, whereas previously, information had to travel slowly and erroneously up the hierarchy, and corresponding orders had to travel back down again.
The slowness of central decision-making is one thing; the superhuman demands placed on such central decision-makers is another, as Stanley McChrystal, who led much of the special forces operations in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2008 as commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), points out: “Although we intuitively know the world has changed, most leaders reflect a model and leader development process that are sorely out of date. We often demand unrealistic levels of knowledge in leaders and force them into ineffective attempts to micromanage.”8 Hierarchical decision-making is neither efficient nor effective in our VUCA world. David Marquet also recognized this when he took command of the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe. As an alternative to this leadership model of the ingenious chess master, Stanley McChrystal suggests thinking more like a gardener:9
The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an "Eyes-On, Hands-Off" enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.
What McChrystal describes here is a radically different understanding of leadership than we are used to in Taylorist, hierarchical organizations. Managers there usually act like chess masters, thinking through and controlling every move; this is how the manager's role was designed: omniscient, planning, and controlling. In the chess master's worldview, the chess figures are just stupid puppets, and he is the hero.
The gardener's understanding is much more modest: a gardener knows he cannot produce tomatoes or cucumbers himself. He can only create and maintain an environment in which those plants thrive. He is also not the best and most efficient tomato and was promoted to manager because of these skills. As a gardener, he has and needs different skills. That is the difference between management and leadership. And that is precisely what makes a difference today.
Unfortunately, the classic development path in traditional companies often follows a different and relatively simple logic. If you perform outstandingly as a specialist, you get promoted. It almost seems as if leadership qualities such as empathy and trust are secondary to exceptional professional qualifications. As a result, the new boss often remains his best employee, which hinders his and his team's progress.
The task of the tomato plant is to grow and produce tomatoes; the gardener creates the necessary conditions for this. The specialist's task is to gather knowledge and experience to solve problems and ultimately generate value. Leadership creates the proper environment in which this work can succeed today and even better tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, sums up his understanding of leadership in this way:10
As a leader, a lot of your job is to make those people successful. It's less about trying to be successful (yourself), and more about making sure you have good people and your work is to remove that barrier, remove roadblocks for them so that they can be successful in what they do.
Good leadership has a leverage effect by making others successful and effective. Leaders who remain too much specialists—and, in the worst case, their best employees—neglect this leverage effect and thus their actual (new) task. The best tomato does not simply become a good gardener; at best, it becomes a kind of senior tomato who explains the trade to the junior tomatoes and, in doing so, enjoys this expert role far too much.
Table of Contents
The links lead to the parts that are already published here on Substack.
The 14 Principles Behind the Manifesto
Context Not Control
Gardener Not Chess Master
Principles Not Rules
Less is More
Questions Not Answers
Trust Is the Foundation
Safety Not Fear
He Who Says A Does Not Have to Say B
Integrity Over Charisma
Disturbing the Comfort Zone
Get to Work!
Leading by Example
Incitement to Rebellion
Set Priorities
Enduring Dissonance
Doing Your Best
The next chapter will follow next Friday. In case you want to read on as soon as possible, the book is available on Amazon in many countries as hardcover, paperback, and for your Kindle. (also on Leanpub). And all my German readers can get the German edition in every book store.
Anne Quito, “Netflix's CEO Says There Are Months When He Doesn't Have to Make a Single Decision,” Quartz, April 19, 2018, https://qz.com/work/1254183/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-expounds-on-the-netflix-culture-deck-at-ted-2018/.
L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (UK: Penguin Business, 2019).
Reed Hastings, “Culture,” https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664.
Alyson Shontell, “SHERYL SANDBERG: ‘The Most Important Document Ever To Come Out Of The Valley,’” Business Insider, February 4, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/netflixs-management-and-culture-presentation-2013-2.
Netflix, “Netflix Culture,” accessed March 20, 2022, https://jobs.netflix.com/culture.
Helmuth Karl Bernhard Moltke, Militärische Werke, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1900), 291.
“Mission-Type Tactics,” in Wikipedia, August 23, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mission-type_tactics.
G.S. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (Penguin Publishing Group, 2015), 232.
McChrystal et al., 232.
Devjyot Ghoshal, “'Let Others Succeed': Google CEO Sundar Pichai's Simple but Effective Leadership Style,” Quartz, January 6, 2017, https://qz.com/india/879633/let-others-succeed-google-ceo-sundar-pichais-simple-but-effective-leadership-style/.