How Star Trek Made Me a Bad Leader (and Then a Good One)

Summary

• Delegating effectively to others, whether you’re a manager or not, is critical not only to scaling your own impact, to the development and careers of those around you.
• The Star Trek television shows offer entertaining examples of leadership, with different ship Captains using different styles of leadership.
• Captain Kirk put himself at the center of all the action because he saw himself as the best person for the job; Kirk was the hero. Captain Picard usually delegated to his officers because he saw his primary role as creating more “Picards”; Picard put his officers in roles to become heroes.
• Star Trek is fiction, but Picard’s style corresponds to how officers in the U.S. Navy are taught to delegate. This approach, “Command by Negation”, can be traced back to how Napoleon commanded his armies and was a significant factor in his success on the battlefield.
• Managers in business are most effective when they manage like Picard, not Kirk.
• If your own boss is a “Kirk”, you can move them toward Picard’s style by building their, asking them to help with your development, and offering to help them with their workload.

Hot Take

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 hisoutput 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. The commander has two options at this point:
   1. They can say nothing, in which case the officer proceeds to do what they said they were going to do.
   2. 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).
4. 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)

There’s a very important, but subtle point that’s easy to miss in this description of Command by Negation: this “proceed until apprehended” leadership style can only work if the ship’s culture is right. Yes, the ship’s Captain is responsible for setting up the mechanisms for this sort of delegated decision making to work, but even more importantly, the Captain is responsible for creating an organizational culture where Command by Negation can work. That culture is centered around two things: Training and Trust. 

Training: The crew, from senior officers down to individual sailors, need to develop competence and confidence in their roles. This happens through real-life experience augmented by lots and lots of drills that all run through the Command by Negation loop. This final AAR step critically closes this training feedback loop. When a new officer comes aboard, it’s expected that their commander will need to correct their proposed actions frequently, and that the need for that will lessen as the new officer gains experience. Ultimately the commander will just listen and say nothing (other than, perhaps, “my work here is done”).

Trust: Experience with Command by Negation builds bi-directional trust. By conducting drills and real-life operations, the Captain learns to trust that the senior officers know what they’re doing, and the senior officers learn to trust the Captain not to second-guess them.

One might think (particularly if you watched a lot of Star Trek growing up, like I did) that the Captain of a ship is in everyone’s business all the time, but reality is far from that. The Captain’s real job is creating the culture that leads to a high-performing ship and crew.

One thing the original Star Trek got right, however, is the bridge of the Enterprise. All the crew members have zillions of buttons and knobs and screens in front of them… but what does the Captain have? Just a few buttons on the arm of their chair that do little more than call for coffee. Interestingly, this reflects real life. In the U.S. Navy, the equivalent of Star Trek’s bridge is the CIC, or Combat Information Center. Yes, the Captain has a seat there, and yes, there are some screens and buttons in front of them… but the buttons at the Captain’s station don’t do anything! Sure, they can push a button and zoom in the battle map on their screen, but they can’t steer the ship, launch a missile, or take any other actual action. Their job is to sit there and listen to what the TAO (Tactical Action Officer) is ordering people to do, stepping in only if the TAO does something wrong. And, the TAO doesn’t have any buttons that do anything at their station, either!

One important corollary to this approach to delegation is, whose responsibility is it if one of the crew members pushes the wrong button and accidentally sinks a friendly vessel? Under the Command by Negation system, the answer is clear: the Captain is always responsible. The Captain isn’t the one who pushed the wrong button (remember: their console doesn’t have any action buttons!), but the Captain is the one who created the culture and oversaw the training that resulted in the wrong button being pushed. There’s a saying in the Navy that “you can delegate authority, but not responsibility”.

That’s why you see scenes in movies and TV (including in Star Trek) where the Captain of the ship is court-martialed for something a crew member did wrong—that’s really how it works.

Picard and Riker Got it Right

It’s clear that the way Captain Kirk operated wasn’t anything like the way we would expect an actual naval Captain to operate. This was not lost on seafarers in the audience for that first Star Trek show; they sent letters to Gene Roddenberry complaining that that wasn’t how naval leadership worked. Part of the issue was that behind the scenes, William Shatner, the actor playing Kirk, actively pushed things in a direction Roddenberry called “The Adventures of Captain Kirk.” Shatner reportedly took lines from other characters and demanded changes from writers and directors to give Kirk a more central role than Roddenberry and the writers had intended.

The extent of Shatner’s changes didn’t come out until decades later, when it was revealed that in 1967, shortly before Star Trek’s second season was to air, Roddenberry had sent a strongly worded private letter to Shatner. The letter told him, among other things, that Shatner’s changes were showing Kirk as a Captain who “can't afford to let anyone else have an idea, give an order, or solve a problem.”

Really fixing how Starfleet leadership worked wouldn’t happen until Roddenberry’s next TV show, Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG). Roddenberry designed the character of Captain Picard in a way that was utterly different from Kirk; a way that was, in fact, very aligned with how naval Captains actually operate with Command by Negation.

This short clip from “Pen Pals”, Season 2, Episode 15, of ST:TNG, is an excellent example of this. Watch this short clip from the episode (it’s less than three and a half minutes long; I’ll wait…).

The scene starts with Picard and Riker arriving for a meeting of the Enterprise’s senior officers. Here’s how it plays out:

Later in the episode, Wesley and his team complete their mission, the planet is saved, and all is well. We don’t see an on-screen rendition of the final step of the Command by Negation loop, an After-Action Report, but we do see AARs in some other episodes of ST:TNG (though they don’t call them that). So, it’s not a leap to believe the writers just didn’t show it this time.

So Long Kirk, Hello Captain Picard

I’m pleased to say that, with the advice of mentors along the way, I got the message. Both my team and myself would be more productive, happier, and develop faster if I delegated more, and let my direct reports do things in their own ways—even if I didn’t completely agree with the approaches they took and even if they made mistakes along the way. In short, I realized I needed to be a leader like Captain Picard, not like Captain Kirk.

I learned from lots of advice and coaching along the way, but one coaching session I had stands out in my mind. It was when my manager sat me down and told me, point blank: “Forrest, you’re not very good at asking for help, are you?” Ooh, that hit home.I had never thought about it that way, but it was absolutely true. It was the Captain Kirk in me, again!

My manager went through several examples of situations where I’d achieved great results… but burned myself out, and several more where I’d procrastinated to the point of damaging projects because I held some work back for myself that I wasn’t actually very good at or that I struggled to get started on because I wanted to be personally involved. Then, my manager opened a door into a world I hadn’t seen before. They told me how effective senior executives—real people we both knew—operated behind the scenes. I hadn’t heard of Command by Negation then, but that was basically my manager revealed other VPs doing:

1. They delegated, both to scale themselves and to develop their direct reports.
2. As long as their directs weren’t going over a cliff, they’d provide advice but wouldn’t interfere, letting their directs “own” their delegated missions.
3. They would then circle back with their directs, either at the end of each “mission,” or, if a project was particularly long, perhaps quarterly in “Engineering Reviews”, to evaluate progress, talk about lessons learned so far, and to hear about next steps. While Eng Reviews were large meetings, for other projects the reviews would happen in 1:1 meetings.

Over time I got better at this style of leadership, and by the time I reached director level at Google (equivalent in some ways to being Captain of a small ship) I had come to understand that the skill I was being paid for wasn’t to do things myself, it was to develop my team and their environment so they could do those things.

What if Your Boss is Captain Kirk?

It can be exciting to work for a “Kirk”—they’re often high-energy and full of ideas… but it can be dispiriting to realize you’re a “supporting actor” in your own job instead of the “star”. So, what should you do?

The good news about Captain Kirk is that he really does care for his crew. He’s not a narcissist, he just believes  that he’s the best person for almost every job (including yours). The fact that “Captain Kirks” have good intentions gives you an opening to work with. Here are some suggestions:

• Command by Negation in a low-trust environment looks a lot like micromanaging, so build and deepen your manager’s trust in you by showing them you can deliver. It’s difficult to move any further until you have their trust.
• Have a serious discussion with your manager about your own career development. Tell them how you’d like to develop, and ask for their advice on how to do so. Enlist their aid, which will typically mean asking them to give you ownership of important projects (which they won’t do until you have the trust we just talked about).
• When they’re going to be in an important meeting that you are running, talk to them privately in advance, ask them to support, but not step in. Ask them to help you showcase your talents by letting you present, lead discussion, and answer questions (think of how Picard supported Riker in his meeting).
• “Kirks” are almost always overloaded with work because—of course—they’re doing everyone else’s jobs in addition to their own! Tell them you’ve seen that they’re carrying a heavy load and that you want to help them by taking some things off their plate. Ideally, these are things that will help you develop, too. Again, they need to trust that you can get the job done, and they need to be convinced that lightening their load won’t happen just by delegating—they have to honestly give you ownership, too.

These kinds of steps work because Kirks really do want to help you. However, what if your boss is more like the evil Kirk from the “Mirror Universe?” Evil Kirk is not a misguided hero, but rather a real narcissist who is only interested in his own needs and success. In this situation, building their trust and asking for their help with your career won’t improve anything for you.

I hate to say it, but if you’re not going to be able to get the support you deserve from your boss, you may need to “fire” them by finding a new role with another manager, or in extreme cases, in another company. Mentors can help you understand whether you’re reading the situation right and suggest ways to navigate it, but if your manager is truly working against you, you need to leave. Personally, the biggest mistake of my career was staying with a bad manager too long.

How You Can Bring Order From Chaos, Today

You and I aren’t commissioned Starfleet officers, nor are we (most of us) in the Navy, so how does all this apply to leadership in a tech company, or in any office in general? Note that while we’ve been talking about Starfleet Captains, naval officers, and senior executives, this approach to leadership isn’t something you need to be a people manager to apply.

It’s important to point out that Command by Negation isn’t something you can just switch on. It requires bi-directional trust, which only comes from experience working together, and  both parties demonstrating trustworthy behavior. So, start building that trust now.

Here are some things you can do now to apply these ideas:

• What are the most interesting, challenging projects you’re responsible for? Who can you give them away (delegate) them to?
• When you delegate work, explain the desired outcome, less in terms of concrete details and more in terms of your vision behind it. Do this so the person taking the work from you buys in and internalizes it in a way that will enable them to creatively work through it in their own way. Explain the context so they know why this work needs to be done and why it’s important, and leave the rest to them.
• Set up a way for you to get updates on delegated work and stay aware of the decisions and actions the owner  intends to take.
• Build trust by letting people make their own decisions, and then backing them, even if you would have done things differently yourself. Be ready with advice and counsel, but only intervene if something they're about to do is irreversible and could cause harm.
• At the completion of assignments, or at regular intervals in a lengthy one, hold informal or formal retrospectives so the team can reflect on what’s going well, what can be improved, and what to do differently next time. This feedback loop creates a “learning organization”.

Want to Learn More?

• “Understanding Mission Command,” article by Col. (Ret.) James D. Sharpe Jr. and Lt. Col. (Ret.) Thomas E. Creviston, US Army, explaining the U.S. Army’s take on Command by Negation (the short version: they’ve adopted the same principles, for the same reasons, in slightly different form; I’d be down for a Picard-like version of Starship Troopers!).
• Team of Teams, book by General Stanley McChrystal about using technology to scale the sort of team operations we talked about here to large organizations. (Amazon affiliate link).
• High Output Management, book by former Intel CEO Andy Grove, that goes into depth on the role of a leader. (Spoiler: Grove says the role of a senior leader isn’t to do the work or even to make the big decisions—it’s to build and reinforce the organization’s culture, and validate their team’s decisions, period). (Amazon affiliate link).
• “What Do Executives Do, Anyway?”, blog post by Avery Pennarun, former Google engineer and now CEO of TailScale, about the results of research he did at Google about how senior executives operate, how they can be most effective, and what everyone else needs to do to help them be effective.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Jon Thiessen, Jr., LCDR, USNR, USNA ‘92 for his advice and consultation on this article. He explained how Command by Negation works in real life to me, using examples from his time as an officer onboard the USS JOHN S McCAIN (DDG-56).

This article originally appeared in Ethan Evans' excellent LevelUp newsletter. Thanks to Ethan, Jason Yoong, and Daniel Hickey for their feedback and contributions.