It’s 9.00am. You get to your desk, fire up your emails and attempt to get to inbox zero. Before you’ve opened the first message, you’re called for a meeting. Meeting over, you’re back at your desk. Just as you’re about to reply to that first email, you’re called into another meeting. Second meeting done, you’re back at your desk, but now it’s lunchtime – and you’ve achieved nothing.

Whether it’s meetings for meetings’ sake or being micromanaged every second of the day, office life can sometimes leave us feeling frustrated, dehumanised and, frankly, unhappy. But according to Mr L David Marquet, author of Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power Of What You Say And What You Don’t, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Mr Marquet, a top-grade graduate of the US Naval Academy who is renowned for his success commanding submarine crews, knows what it takes to empower a team.  “I needed to entrust people with authority and autonomy in order to give them the opportunity to prove themselves,” he writes of his time as captain of the nuclear-powered submarine USS Santa Fe. “Once people were given autonomy over their work, became connected to a purpose that mattered and felt like part of a team, they became happier. Morale soared. Then the performance improved.”

Leadership Is Language promises to turn everything you thought you knew about effective leadership on its head. Take this advice from Mr Marquet: stop machine gunning orders at your team and start empowering and inspiring them instead.

“Bosses try to be compelling, not curious,” writes Mr Marquet. “They ask leading and self-affirming questions. They supress dissent and push for consensus. This is not collaboration. This is all coercion disguised as collaboration.” Instead of pretending you have all the answers and being the first to speak, Mr Marquet suggests withholding your opinion. The higher up you are in your organisation, the more likely it is that people will want to mirror your thoughts. “We don’t need anyone to change their thinking,” he continues. “As long as the group supports whatever decision comes out of the meeting with their behaviours, leaders are happy if individuals think differently from them. There is power and resilience in a diversity of ideas.”

To get people to enjoy and excel at the work they do, they have to be committed to it. “Commitment comes from within, whereas compliance is forced by an external force,” writes Mr Marquet. “Commitment is more powerful, because it is an intrinsic motivator. Commitment invites full participation, engagement and discretionary effort. Compliance invites doing just enough to get by, get through or get it done.” So, how do you encourage your team members to commit? For Mr Marquet, it’s all about putting the focus on learning, not just doing. Exploration versus performance, if you will. “Our brains are wired to respond positively to the novelty of seeing what is around the next corner,” writes Mr Marquet. “When we set ourselves into a period of doing, and we have a playful curiosity about what might happen, life is more interesting.”

We’re all guilty of it, reaching our goals, only to knuckle down and move on to the next project straightaway. According to Mr Marquet, this is a less than optimal way of working, which ultimately makes us “dispirited”. Instead, we should take a minute (or a day) to celebrate our achievements. “Celebrations need to cause us to pause and cheer the accomplishments of the team,” writes Mr Marquet. “Even when the outcome of the period was not strictly positive, we should celebrate the fact that we have something we can learn from.

“The act of celebrating creates a sense of progress that makes us feel good. Those good feelings help us be more creative, more open, more vulnerable and more connected at work. The environment is healthier and we come up with better solutions. Plus, it’s more fun.”