How to Turn the Ship Around When You’re Not the Captain

Sometimes the smartest way to lead is to let somebody else make the decision.

There’s an old saying I picked up during my years in construction.

There’s some wisdom in that.

If you spend your whole working life waiting to be told what to do, you’ll never develop much initiative. Somebody has to be willing to move before the memo arrives.

But I learned another lesson later, and it complicates the first one, and I think it’s the more useful of the two.

Just because you know a better way to do something doesn’t mean you should make your boss look stupid.

Especially if he’s newly promoted, ambitious, and very eager to prove he’s in charge.

I learned how to walk that line on a particular electrical installation, and believe me, I had a deeply personal interest in how it turned out.

Twelve Big-Ass Wires, Fifteen Feet in the Air

We were working a large electrical installation in an outdoor mechanical area.

Three conduit runs came into a junction box and continued out of it. The box itself was massive. Forty-eight inches by forty-eight inches, four feet square.

Each of those three runs carried four individual 750 MCM copper conductors—three hot legs and a neutral—plus a smaller equipment grounding conductor. That meant three sets of four big conductors, twelve in all, plus three grounds to pull, splice, work into position, and close up at that box.

Now, unless you’ve spent time as an electrician, you probably don’t feel that number in your body. Let me try to put it there.

A single 750 MCM copper conductor is more than an inch thick with its insulation on. It weighs about two and a half pounds per foot.

It’s stiff.

Not rigid. It’s stranded copper, so it will bend. But it doesn’t bend willingly. You can’t just grab a handful of the stuff and tuck it wherever you like. You have to work it. Bend it. Shape it. Persuade it, one shoulder at a time.

And when you’ve got twelve of those big bastards coming into one junction box, with splices to make and a cover to put on afterward, you’re in for a real workout.

That’s true even with the box sitting at ground level, in a nice room, with nothing fighting you.

Our box wasn’t at ground level.

It was about fifteen feet in the air.

Outside.

And before we ever got to the bending and the shaping and the splicing, we had to get those conductors into the box in the first place.

Then Came the Greenlee Tugger

Nowadays Greenlee makes the kind of modular cable-pulling equipment that makes you want to just stand back and appreciate it.

The 1990s were not like that.

As I remember it, the tugger motor alone weighed around a hundred pounds. And that motor was only one piece of the setup. There were additional parts we had to assemble and get into position before we could pull anything.

So imagine getting all of that into the air. Fifteen feet up. Then setting up to pull twelve massive copper conductors through six separate conduit runs.

That’s a difficult job under the best possible conditions, and these were nowhere close to the best.

And here’s the part that kept me paying attention long after I might otherwise have drifted off.

I had a strong feeling about who was going to be responsible for the pulling, the splicing, the arranging, and the closing up of that junction box.

Me.

Which is why I was listening closely when our superintendent walked us through his installation plan.

Because he wanted to mount that junction box with the opening facing downward.

Downward.

Picture it.

Twelve conductors, each roughly two and a half pounds per foot. Cables that fight you when you bend them. Splices to make. An arrangement to shape so the cover will go back on. And all of it done fifteen feet above the ground, with the opening facing the ground.

And doing all of this from a ladder because we couldn't get a scissor lift in above the mechanical equipment.

Gravity was not going to be on my side that day.

The superintendent’s plan wasn’t technically wrong on paper. It was workable, in the way that carrying a piano up a flight of stairs is workable. The problem was that it was going to turn an already miserable job into an absolute pain in the ass.

I could see the trouble coming before we started.

I Could Have Told Him He Was Wrong

Our superintendent was young. Recently promoted. Ambitious, and clearly wanting to make a name for himself.

I respected that. I’d been the young guy not long before, trying to prove I belonged.

But I also knew something about how people actually work.

You don’t generally accomplish much by publicly telling a person in authority that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Even when you’ve got a very good reason.

I could have explained exactly why I thought mounting that box opening-down was a terrible idea. I could have made my case, argued for my layout, put the whole thing on the table and dared him to disagree.

And maybe I would have won the argument.

But then what?

I’d have a superintendent who felt embarrassed in front of his own crew. Or undermined while he was still establishing himself in a new position. Either way, I’d have a working relationship that just got heavier, and I’d still have to go pull that wire with him.

All because I knew the practical consequences and he didn’t yet.

So I tried something else.

I played stupid.

I Asked Questions Until He Saw It

Instead of telling him how to do his job, I asked him to walk me through the installation.

I framed it as me wanting to understand how he saw it coming together. How were we going to position the Greenlee tugger? Where did the equipment go? How were we going to run each pull?

And once all that copper was in the box, how did he see us arranging it? Making the splices? Closing it up?

Remember, we’re fifteen feet in the air, and we’ve got a bunch of conductors to wrestle into place.

I didn’t tell him his plan was stupid. I just helped him think through how the work would actually happen, step by step, in the order it would actually happen.

So I kept asking questions.

Not accusing him. Not challenging his authority. Not doing the thing where you ask a question that’s really just a sentence with a question mark on the end, which everybody can see through and nobody appreciates.

Just genuinely walking through the sequence.

And somewhere in that walk-through, he started to see it.

He began thinking through how we would position the tugger fifteen feet up. He considered the pulls. He saw the heavy conductors fighting us while the box opening aimed at the ground. And he started recognizing the same problems I had already spotted.

Then he started turning it over. Considering alternatives. Making the executive calls himself.

We adjusted the plan. The work got more manageable. And the superintendent was still the one in charge, right where he belonged.

As far as he was concerned, the revisions were his own good thinking.

And I was perfectly happy to leave it that way.

Because I didn’t need to win an argument.

I needed to make sure I wasn’t wrestling twelve giant copper snakes fifteen feet in the air with gravity working against me.

The Line Between Clever and Manipulative

Now, I want to be honest about something, because there’s a version of this story where it makes me sound like a schemer, and I don’t want that version to be the one that sticks.

“I played stupid” is the truth, but it’s a truth with an edge.

There’s a real difference between asking questions to help somebody see clearly, and asking questions to herd them somewhere they didn’t choose.

The first one is leadership. The second one is manipulation with extra steps.

The test, I think, is whether you’re willing to accept the answer that comes back.

When I walked that superintendent through the installation, I wasn’t bluffing. If he’d thought about it hard and still decided the downward box was genuinely the right call for reasons I hadn’t considered, I would have had to live with that, and I knew it going in.

I didn’t secretly change the installation behind his back and wait to ask forgiveness later. That would have been the “forgiveness over permission” saying taken to a place it shouldn’t go.

Instead, I put my knowledge into the conversation and let him make the decision with better information. He kept the authority. He kept the credit.

Nobody got outshined. The work got better.

That’s the whole trick, and it isn’t really a trick at all.

The Lesson I Later Recognized in Turn the Ship Around!

Years later I read L. David Marquet’s book, and something clicked into place.

Marquet was a Navy submarine commander who decided the old model, where everyone waits for orders and the captain does all the thinking, was holding his crew back. So he built something he called leader-leader, where competence and responsibility get pushed down through the whole crew instead of pooled at the top.

One of his best-known practices is the phrase sailors learn to use:

Instead of just asking what to do, a sailor states the action he intends to take and the reasoning behind it. It builds initiative while still leaving room for the person in charge to say stop.

That one’s good. But there’s a second idea from Marquet’s work that landed on me even harder.

Think about that for a second.

Sometimes the smartest person in the room isn’t the one announcing the answer. It’s the one asking the question that finally gets everyone else thinking.

That’s exactly what happened with my superintendent. I didn’t hold the authority to redesign that installation. But I had the practical knowledge of how the job would actually get done, and I used it to help the man with the authority make a better call.

He stayed in command. And I helped turn the ship.

Never Outshine the Master

There’s another book that shaped how I think about all this.

Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, and his very first law:

Look, I don’t think you should go through life manipulating people, flattering your boss, or acting dumber than you are. I genuinely don’t. And there’s a hard limit to this principle that I want to name, because people skip it.

This is not a license to stay quiet about something dangerous, or unethical, or illegal, or flat-out wrong in a way that’s going to hurt somebody.

If a superintendent is about to energize something unsafe, you don’t play stupid and let him discover it through his mistakes. You speak up. Directly.

And if you have to escalate, you escalate.

Safety always outranks anybody’s ego, including the boss’s.

But not every disagreement is a safety issue. Plenty of them are just two people with different ideas about how to get a hard thing done, and in those moments, Greene’s law has a quieter truth hiding under the provocative title.

People have egos. Bosses are people. And a person who feels publicly challenged will often pour every ounce of energy into defending their position instead of actually evaluating a better solution.

So you make a choice, case by case.

Some situations call for a direct challenge. Some call for patience. Some call for asking better questions.

The skill isn’t learning one move. It’s learning to read which move the moment calls for.

You Don’t Need to Be the Captain

Here’s the lesson I carried away from those years, and it’s held up everywhere I’ve applied it since.

Leadership isn’t always about being in charge.

Sometimes it’s about helping the person in charge make a better decision.

You can do that as an apprentice, as a journeyman, as an employee, as a martial arts student, or as anybody who can see a problem the other person hasn’t spotted yet.

You don’t have to seize authority. You don’t have to embarrass somebody. You don’t have to make sure you get the credit.

What you need is competence, so you actually know what you’re talking about. You need to understand the real objective, so you’re pointing at the right thing. And you need enough judgment to know when a question will do more than an argument.

That last part is the one people skip, because it isn’t flashy.

Anybody can fight. It takes restraint to help somebody else arrive at the right answer on their own, and then stand back while they take ownership of it.

That’s a form of leadership too. Maybe the quietest form, and often the one that sticks.

Because life hands you the opportunity far more often than it hands you the title.

You won’t always be the captain.

But you can still help turn the ship around.

⚔️ The Dojo Drill: Lead When You’re Not in Charge

Think of a situation right now where you believe there’s a better way to do something, but somebody else holds the authority to decide.

Before you tell them what they should do, ask three questions.

1. What are we trying to accomplish?

Nail the real objective first. You might be arguing about the route when you actually just agreed on the destination.

2. How do you envision this working?

Let them explain their thinking first. You might learn something you’d missed, and even if you don’t, you’ll know where their plan lives or dies.

3. What happens when we get to this part?

Walk through the practical consequences together, step by step, the hard parts included.

Maybe they discover the flaw on their own. Maybe you discover your idea wasn’t as good as you thought. Either way, the conversation just got smarter than it was before it started.

And sometimes that’s all the leadership a moment requires.

You don’t need the title. You don’t need the credit. You don’t need to be the captain.

You just need to be the person asking the question that gets the ship pointed the right way.

📚 From the Leader’s Library

​Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders — L. David Marquet​

Why?

Most people spend their lives waiting for instructions, following expectations, or repeating habits they’ve never questioned. But Marquet challenges us to think differently: stop being a passive follower and start taking responsibility for the direction of our own lives.

Turn the Ship Around! tells the remarkable story of how a Navy captain transformed the culture of a struggling submarine by replacing blind obedience with initiative, competence, and shared responsibility. Through the simple but powerful phrase “I intend to…”, Marquet shows how leadership can develop at every level.

It’s a reminder that personal leadership isn’t about having all the answers or holding a position of authority. It’s about learning to think for yourself, making deliberate decisions, and developing the courage and competence to steer your own course.