Star Trek Made Me a Bad Leader (and Then a Good One)
Captain Kirk Ruined Me: Be a more effective “starship Captain” by using the Navy’s “Command Negation” approach to delegation with your own “crew”
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Have you ever worked for a manager who liked to keep the most interesting and challenging work for themselves? Or who micromanaged you so you couldn’t work, learn, grow, and shine yourself? Or maybe you're a manager yourself who knows your domain so well you don’t trust your team to do the work as well as you could do it?
We are thrilled to bring you a guest post by Forrest Thiessen, Google’s former Director of Program Management Practice. Forrest tells an entertaining story about how his own concept of delegation originally came from his childhood role model, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.
As he moved through the management ranks, though, he realized that Kirk was a horrible role model, not just for Star Fleet, but also for a real navy… and for managers in our world, too! He then talks about how he learned senior-level delegation principles from another Star Trek leader, Captain Picard, and how Picard’s style actually mirrors how leadership delegation is taught to officers in the U.S. Navy.
This article offers an unusual perspective on how you can become a more effective “starship Captain” by using the Navy’s “Command Negation” approach to delegation with your own “crew”.
Forrest is now writing his own newsletter, Order From Chaos, Today!, about how to get things done in teams, illustrated with stories like this from his own experience.
Forrest Thiessen recently retired from Google after 17 years at the company during most of which he was a major contributor to Google’s hiring and promotion processes. While at Google, Forrest worked on data centers, networking, software tools, and most recently was responsible for leading professional and career development programs for Google’s ~10,000 Technical Program Managers.
Apply to be featured as a guest post: If you are an expert and want to share actionable career advice with our readers, get in touch.
How Star Trek Made Me a Bad Leader (and Then a Good One)
Growing up, Captain Kirk was my role model: I was thrilled to watch his adventures across the galaxy in the original Star Trek TV show (or, as Trekkies call it, “TOS” for “The Original Series”)! I adored the show’s outlook on humanity and its optimistic vision of the future.
As a child, I wanted to be just like Kirk: heroic, brave, and smart. The starship Enterprise had a knack for finding trouble in every episode, but Kirk always saved the day.
As I moved into the world of work, though, I came to realize that Kirk’s approach to managing his team… didn’t actually work. No, that’s understating it—Captain Kirk was a horrible role model. He made himself the center of everything happening on his ship, he led every mission and made every decision, and no one did anything without his orders, or at the very least, without his permission. Kirk was not only responsible for the ship—he personally did most of its significant work, too.
Now, think of a manager like that: they’re the center of the team’s activity, do all the important work themselves, and no one on their team can do anything without the manager’s go-ahead.
Sounds fun, right? Just like Star Trek?
Captain Kirk and Me
My career path was a little unusual in that I became a manager of people on the first day of my first job after graduating from college. I was hired into an “up or out” management development program for “high potential” college hires and remained a manager throughout my whole career. I went through no “transition to management”, received no training on how to be a good manager, and almost no real-world experience to form an impression in my mind of how “good” and “bad” managers behaved. What I did have, though, was the example of Captain Kirk.
My early career (w-a-y before my arrival at Google!) involved supervising people—sometimes a lot of people—who hadn’t had the benefits of the background I had (white, cis, male, upper-middle class family, went to an elite college, repeatedly slotted into special development programs, etc.).
I know it sounds bad, but it was true: I was often equipped to do their jobs better than they could. In that kind of setting, if your role model was Captain Kirk, how might you behave? Yep: I would make sure my team’s scope of responsibility was done super well… by either doing it myself, or by closely overseeing the work of my direct reports. You know, “helping” them out. To be sure, I was nice about it, but regardless of how personable I was, it wasn’t good leadership:
I took all the most challenging, interesting work and did it myself, just like Kirk.
Members of my team were there as supporting characters, the same as how the crew of the Enterprise supported Kirk.
When I assigned work to direct reports (because it wasn’t interesting to me), I gave them specific instructions for how the work should be done, just like Kirk.
When my team needed to present to upper management, I was the one who presented, just like Kirk.
You may be thinking, “Well, that’s not going to work out for him…”. Believe it or not, the Captain Kirk approach enabled me to go from college hire to VP of engineering and operations at a large telecom company in just 10 years. So, yes, it very much did work out for me! Just like how despite being a poor leader, Kirk always defeated the Klingons and saved everyone. The end results were all that mattered, right?
What Was Wrong with Kirk’s Approach?
The most obvious thing wrong with Kirk as a leader was that being on his crew was bad for the crew members’ careers (particularly the ones who wore red shirts)! No one ever got promoted (until many years later in the movies), and they never got the chance to achieve anything without Kirk’s intervention. Kirk wasn’t a narcissist, though—he was entirely loyal to his crew and would sacrifice himself for them. He was compassionate to a fault and would always help them, and they were loyal to him in return. Despite this shared loyalty and admiration, though, being stationed on the Enterprise under Kirk wasn’t a good career move.
A deeper, less obvious, problem was that Kirk’s behavior limited the results he could deliver, and the results that the Enterprise could deliver. Ultimately, this limited the results that Starfleet as a whole could deliver, too. There was only one Kirk, after all, which means he was a bottleneck at every level. Yes, his “results” were good… but imagine how much more amazing those results could have been if his output wasn’t measured in the number of planets he saved but instead by the number of “extra Kirks” he created by focusing on developing his team?
What could Kirk, the Enterprise, and Starfleet have accomplished not with just one Kirk, but a whole fleet of Kirk-like officers?
Recognizing how Kirk could have been a better leader was exactly the transition I needed to go through in my own career and development. I needed to learn that my job wasn’t to personally deliver results—it was to develop my “crew,” growing their capabilities and careers and thus generate far better and broader results than if I continued to do everything myself.
Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, took heavy inspiration from C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels about the career of an officer in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. He based Starfleet on real navies, and Kirk on real Captains. However, something got lost in the translation. Let’s talk about how real naval Captains delegate… but first we need a little history.
A Side Trip into Military History
Napoleon is remembered for many things, but one of his lesser-known innovations was the system of command he put in place in his army. During his time as a commander he won battle after battle, many times against amazing odds. He was a genius on the battlefield, but one of his secrets wasn’t in strategy or tactics. It was in giving his officers the freedom to operate independently, within broad objectives he assigned to them. He didn’t just issue orders like other commanders of his day, he explained his goals and strategies to his officers and left all the details to them. When the situation changed (as situations always would), or when something went sideways (as things always would), Napoleon told them they were free to combine their own intelligence with their knowledge of his goals to come up with new, creative ways to achieve those goals. And it worked. Compared to the traditional command structures of the armies he was up against, it worked really well. Really really well!
One nation that was on the receiving end of this, losing to Napoleon over and over again, was Prussia. After Napoleon was eventually defeated, the Prussians spent time analyzing Napoleon’s approach to try to learn what made him so successful. One pattern they identified was that, whereas the Prussian army (and pretty much all armies of the time) trained their soldiers and officers to strictly obey detailed commands, Napoleon gave his officers ownership of the objectives, and coached his soldiers to use their own initiative.
The Prussians learned from this, and then developed and rolled out (along with many other reforms) a new approach to leadership that focused on mission-oriented goals instead of rigid obedience to detailed instructions. Prussian Chief of General Staff Helmuth von Moltke famously summarized the importance of independent action by Prussian forces in an essay he wrote in 1871. In the essay, he famously says (in a paraphrase you may have heard before) “No plan survives contact with the enemy”.
This change in leadership philosophy was one factor that resulted in turning the Prussians into the premier European military power for the rest of the 19th century, and well into the 20th…
Fast forward to the 1980s, when a technological flood of information was threatening to overwhelm commanders’ ability to function effectively. In World War II Navy officers had their own eyes, radio, and maybe radar and sonar, and had to control a few very large guns; by the 1980s they also had to deal with satellite communications and imagery, data links to every other ship and aircraft in the theater of operation, computers, and a variety of missiles and other advanced weapons beyond the guns that were their mainstay in earlier eras. The U.S. Navy recognized that this flood of information was overwhelming commanding officers, and that leaders no longer had the personal “bandwidth” to review everything that needed to be seen. They couldn’t possibly make all the decisions that needed to be made. If they wanted to succeed (and in warfare, that often meant wanting to survive), they had to delegate more effectively than ever before. Thus, the U.S. Navy evolved the Prussian model to fit this new agile, information-rich environment into the modern concept of Command by Negation (other military branches made similar updates to their approaches, too, but since Starfleet is in essence a “navy”, I’m going to focus on the U.S. Navy’s method).
How Delegation Works in the Real U.S. Navy
The essence of the Navy’s Command by Negation is not just allowing independent action, but requiring it. It would be bad if everyone went off in incompatible directions of course, so Command by Negation aligns the crew’s independent action with the commander’s goals by using a structured leadership framework.
It works like this:
The commander gives an order and includes an explanation of their thinking and the larger strategic environment. The person given the order then “owns” the mission of carrying out the order in whatever way they see fit, within the framework of the order itself.
When the officer who received the order is ready to take action, they announce what they’re going to do so the commander can hear them (verbally if they’re in the same room, over radio or satellite if not). Sometimes the timing makes this impossible, but they do their best to keep the commander in the loop. This is essentially a “speak now or forever hold your peace” moment.
The commander has two options at this point:
They can say nothing, in which case the officer proceeds to do what they said they were going to do.
Or, if the commander believes the officer’s announced action has a fundamental flaw, the commander can step in and make a correction. (This is the “negation” that “Command by Negation” is referring to).
Later, when things have calmed down, the commander and officers will conduct an After Action Report (“AAR”, what we in the software industry call a “retrospective” or “postmortem”) to discuss what happened and how things could have been done differently, including explanations from the commander about why they stepped in.
This whole cycle applies to missions that range from sending an email requesting supplies to launching an airstrike, and it applies at all levels: between an Admiral and their Captains, between a Captain and their senior officers, between the senior officers and the junior officers in their department, and so on.
The Captain’s Role (and the Role of Any Leader)
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