Most leaders believe their job is to motivate. The contemporary version of this belief goes by a friendlier name: empowerment. But the assumption is the same. Drive originates with the leader and flows downward to the team.
Both frames get the direction of causality wrong.
Three layers of leadership
Leadership operates across three layers. The first is problems: the actual work a team exists to do, whether that is shipping software or landing reusable rockets. The second is systems: how decisions get made, how information flows, what rules govern daily work. The third is people: the human beings doing the work, with their fears, ambitions, and habits of thought.
Most leadership writing focuses on the people layer, and for good reason. But that focus is incomplete. Systems determine whether good intentions survive contact with the organization. A leader who inspires people but leaves broken systems in place has changed nothing that lasts.
The mark of transformative leadership is irreversible change. Change that persists when the leader goes on vacation has met that bar. Cultural change matters, but culture without supporting systems is fragile. The goal is a learning organization with the structural backbone to sustain itself.
Two books make this case from opposite ends of the organizational spectrum: one from Silicon Valley, the other from the deck of a nuclear submarine. What makes them worth reading together is that they solve different layers of the same problem.
Netflix: the systems are the problem
In Powerful, former Netflix Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord argues that Netflix did not empower anyone. They hired capable people and removed the systems that would have constrained them: no vacation tracking, no travel expense approvals, no formal performance review process.
The radical move was not giving people power. It was dismantling the machinery that had been taking it away. McCord’s core observation: most corporate policies exist to manage the small percentage of employees who would take advantage of their absence. Those same policies slow down everyone else. Netflix chose to hire only people it trusted to operate without guardrails, then eliminated the guardrails.
This is primarily a systems intervention. But it comes with a cost. Without policies as defaults, alignment has to come from somewhere else. At Netflix, that somewhere was radical transparency: every employee understood the company’s financials, strategy, and competitive threats in detail. The communication burden increased precisely because the rule burden decreased. McCord treats this as a trade worth making: a team of informed adults making judgment calls outperforms a team of constrained employees following procedures.
The USS Santa Fe: growing decision-makers
L. David Marquet faced a different constraint. As captain of the submarine USS Santa Fe, he could not choose his crew. He inherited the worst-performing submarine in the fleet and had to work with the sailors already aboard. Where Netflix could select for capable adults at the hiring stage, Marquet had to develop them.
His intervention, described in Turn the Ship Around!, combined systems and people. The system change: replace the command-and-control language. Instead of “Captain, request permission to submerge the ship,” crew members said “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship.” The captain’s role shifted from directing every action to certifying that the person taking action had considered the relevant factors.
Language alone would have been theater. Marquet paired the new communication protocol with deliberate competence-building. Each crew member needed enough technical knowledge to make sound decisions in their domain. The “I intend to…” formula worked only when the person speaking it could back it up with understanding.
This is where the people layer becomes essential. By giving control and building competence simultaneously, Marquet changed how his crew understood their own role. Sailors who had spent their careers waiting for orders began thinking as decision-makers. The Santa Fe went from worst to first in its fleet and sustained that performance after Marquet left. The change was structural, not personal.
The wrong question
Both books reject the motivation frame, but from different directions. McCord points to systems that treat motivated adults like children; Marquet, to a command structure that trains passivity into capable people.
Leaders who try to motivate are working on the wrong layer. An organization’s systems either suppress the capability that already exists or develop capability that wasn’t there before. A leader who changes those systems, and builds the competence to operate within them, creates an organization that no longer depends on any single person’s presence to perform.
That is the transformation worth pursuing: structure that makes leadership everyone’s work.