Part 2

Get Your Ship Together: How Great Leaders Inspire Ownership from the Keel
by Michael Abrashoff

(Page 2 of 5)

My ship's weakest link was its engineering department. And to make matters worse, I had never served in the engineering department and did not have much technical expertise to offer. The chief engineer's job is the toughest on the ship. In the best of circumstances, serving in this position aboard a warship is so mentally and physically draining that a rotation normally lasts only eighteen months, at which point the typical chief engineer limps off the ship, shoulders stooped and brain practically fried. But our poor, tormented engineer served on Benfold at a time when the navy was grappling with a severe shortage of engineering officers, causing his tour of duty to be extended to three years. When I first met the man, I saw a chain-smoker with trembling hands and weary eyes. I wasn't entirely sure he would live through the night.

The engineer's main problem, it turned out, was that everyone had long blamed him - unfairly, as I came to realize - for whatever went wrong, notably the inspections that Benfold failed with monotonous regularity. All too often we rush to affix blame instead of fixing the problem. I wanted to fix the problem. Even a cursory examination showed me that the worst trouble lay within a few key positions beneath the chief engineer, staffed by people who lacked the technical skills needed to do their jobs. But he was too fine a leader to pass the blame. He took it squarely on his own shoulders.

Imagine all this rancor multiplied by a factor of ten, which was the state of things when recertification loomed. Because the engineers were busy getting the equipment up to speed, they had no time for cleaning the bilge, a filthy job done in the exceedingly cramped bowels of the ship. But no one gives extra points for difficult maneuvering in a limited space. The bilge must be clean to pass inspection, and that's that. With the engineers otherwise engaged, it fell to the rest of the crew to stop working on their own jobs and lend a hand. They spent several weeks, hating every minute of it. As you might imagine, everyone wound up blaming the chief engineer not only for the first certification failure, but for the agony of preparing for the retest.

Benfold did pass its engineering certification the second time because of heroic work by a few indomitable souls. But the outcome was such a squeaker that the ship's engineering reputation sank even further. By the time I came aboard, the engineers had lost any embryonic pride they might have gleaned from their ordeal. They put down their oars, saying in effect, "Whew, we don't have to do that again for another two years." More to the point, and much to their own detriment, they promptly jettisoned whatever knowledge and ambition they had acquired to pass the test.

Unfortunately, that isn't unusual. Many ships tend to give the regulations short shrift until an inspection comes due; then crew members cram 24/7 to get up to speed. In my view, you've got to make your crew see the larger picture: the inspection sets the bar for sailing the ship properly each and every day. Instead of peaks and valleys in performance, you need a steady state of excellence. Your goal is to be able to nail any inspection, any day, without prior notice.

And you should never have to depend on one extraordinary person to save the day. The price for such heroics is too high: not only will the standout's foot-dragging shipmates never know the joy of accomplishment, but the whole ship will be left at risk if the hero is injured or transferred. In other words, you need a crew that is totally clear about who owns the ship: they do. And when someone owns something as magnificent as Benfold, they not only guard, fix, paint, polish, and improve it. They also love it.

I clearly needed a reborn engineering team ASAP. I needed it rebuilt from the keel up, or at least from the bilge just over the keel. I wanted engineers obsessed with keeping this complex ship running like a well-tuned Ferrari in any weather, engineers who were respected by their shipmates. And I wanted our chief engineer to live happily ever after (which he has since he got his own ship to command).

Believe it or not, most of my dream actually came true. Benfold eventually became an award-winning ship, a model of combat readiness that raised the bar for the entire Pacific Fleet. A once dysfunctional vessel operated by a sullen, resentful group of sailors developed into a cohesive, smoothly functioning machine with a crew of inspired problem solvers who were gunning to beat every metric in the Pacific Fleet - and usually did. In fact, our extraordinary skill and competence with Tomahawk cruise missiles put us in a class by ourselves and made us the go-to ship in the simmering Middle East troubles of the late 1990s. But what was particularly heartening to me was our reenlistment success: contrary to the prevailing trend in the navy, Benfold's sailors reupped at unheard-of rates. And why not? Having been made to understand that it was their ship, not mine, the crew realized the importance of their work and took great pride in their accomplishments. As a result, Benfold could rightfully lay claim to being the best damn ship in the navy.

How did it happen? You can get the full story from It's Your Ship, a best seller that chronicles my navy career. But in this very different book, I will describe leadership lessons gleaned from numerous fields that are applicable to businesses everywhere.

One of the key lessons I learned in the navy is that training - constant training - is crucial for top performance in any enterprise, whether you're a brain surgeon, a concert pianist, or a marine general. To that end, the navy has an excellent system for introducing practices that can make a ship successful. Known as the PB for T (Planning Board for Training), it calls for a weekly meeting of the senior officers and chief petty officers representing every major program on the ship to plan the next week's activities and set priorities. On Benfold, my goal was to convert the PB for T from a perfunctory nuisance to a genuine performance enabler.

If real leadership is largely about spotting and defusing trouble, the navy's PB for T is the perfect exercise. The idea behind it is to anticipate problems before they explode. It's also a powerful antidote to the oft-heard complaint that leaders spend too much time responding to crises they could avoid if only they had the luxury of peering and planning ahead.

PB for T can be as elaborate or as elementary as the captain cares to make it. In my view, Benfold succeeded largely because our program was inclusive and interactive. Chaired by my second in command, the executive officer, the board included all five department heads and representatives of every program, from damage control to drug abuse, that cut across the entire ship. The planning was comprehensive. The engineers, for instance, knew when they had to be ready with extra power because a combat-systems exercise had been scheduled, while the chief corpsman knew when a slack period would allow crew members to schedule medical and dental appointments. People began making short-term plans only in the context of long-range and middle-range goals. The more they got involved, the less we got bogged down by sudden surprises.

But that didn't happen right away. In the first month or so after the power loss, the weekly PB for T often ended up in a squabble because people had their own agendas and couldn't agree on priorities for the ship as a whole. Subordinating individual interests to the common good was hard work. For me, it was a little like settling a new country.

It was tough overcoming old biases about the engineering department. An Aegis-class destroyer like Benfold is sleek and sexy with an array of neat toys, while the engineers, who toil in time-honored fashion, were viewed as a drag on performance. Traditionally, engineering training always came second or third behind training for activities like firing a torpedo or a Tomahawk missile. Ships tend to schedule more glamorous operations during the daylight hours, and the chief engineer gets his training time from midnight to 0600. That means his people work all day supporting the other departments' exercises, and then work all night too. Meanwhile, the captain and the executive officer are fast asleep, oblivious to the opportunity to help the engineers improve their training.

A more discouraging, negative atmosphere is hard to imagine. You can't treat engineers like no-accounts and then expect them to perform flawlessly. If you treat people poorly, they will perform poorly. Treat them well and you may be surprised at what they can accomplish. It's so easy to acknowledge their work, their skill, their importance. How can any skipper do less? Without these incredible men and women, your hotshot ship would be a powerless barge stuck in the sand.

It took a while for these perfectly logical sentiments to pierce my own scrambled-egg cap. Like many captains, I was just as glad to leave engineering to the engineers. Looking under the ship's hood wasn't what interested me. The open-air world of combat systems and ship driving was my forte. I let engineering skills slide.

But the loss of power in San Diego Harbor had shaken us all. So early on we decided to set aside sufficient daylight time to allow the engineers to get the maximum benefit from their own training. It was a trade-off: the ship might have to settle for only 99 percent of its possible performance in combat operations, but engineering would rise from its 50 percent rating to 80 percent. The revised schedule also gave me the chance to observe the engineers' training and show a personal interest in what they were doing.

The department had 110 people, a little more than one third of the entire crew, and they controlled all of the ship's core systems. They included electricians, mechanics, generator operators, damage-control teams, even the person who runs the ship's sewage system - and each and every one of them had to be brought up to speed on how to respond quickly and intelligently to every possible contingency.

We developed a mind-boggling sequence of exercises designed to keep identifying, and mastering, worst-case scenarios so as to make it virtually certain we could handle anything less. To test an engineer's alertness on watch, for instance, we programmed a computer to order a sudden plunge in the oil pressure of one of the main engines. If the operator failed to notice and respond correctly, the whole power plant would shut down automatically. (Of course, as a precautionary measure, other people were forewarned and ready to prevent any shutdown. Had a major power fluctuation actually occurred - say, when the radar system was operating - the damage could have been horrendous.) All this training was tedious and time-consuming, but everyone agreed that it was the ship's first priority.

One immediate payoff was the discovery that the engineers doing the training were highly skilled operators, but lousy trainers. After they were shown how to improve their teaching skills, the engineering department progressed in giant leaps. We didn't have bad people, just bad processes. Soon we began working toward the ideal situation in which nearly every specialist would have a backup who could do his or her job in the event of illness, accident, transfer, or other sudden change. It was equivalent to doubling our expertise, a process that steadily improved the crew's readiness for just about anything.

A memorable reward for all our hard work came several months later when we were being graded on an anchorage exercise off San Diego. This is an operation performed in open water. You pick a point on your chart and see how close you can come to dropping your anchor on that precise spot. It's a major test of seamanship and navigation, requiring knowledge and understanding of wind, tide, the local currents, and the characteristics of your ship. The exercise is so demanding that if a ship successfully approaches an anchorage, it's taken for granted that it can also perform all the lesser mooring tasks, such as maneuvering into a slip or tying up alongside another ship.

As you approach your chosen anchorage, you disengage the propellers about five hundred yards out and float a little past the spot on momentum. Then you back into the spot very slowly because if you are moving forward when the anchor bites, it can damage the sonar dome. Bearing in mind the wind blowing in one direction and the tide moving you in another, the current at the surface and the contrary current fifty feet down, the depth of the water and how fast the anchor will drop, you let it go. Ideally, it will hit bottom within twenty-five yards of the chosen spot. You stop the chain and let the anchor dig into the bottom; then you snug up the chain, set the stoppers to hold it hard, and turn off your engines, safely moored.

But before you reach the anchorage, you have to prepare the anchor for letting go. The anchor is huge - Benfold's weighed ten thousand pounds - and the chain holding it is a lethal string of football-size links, each weighing forty pounds. The chain is divided into fifteen-foot segments called shots that are painted different colors near the end to indicate the number of links left in the anchor locker as the chain is paid out. The next-to-last shot is yellow and the last is red, which you don't want to ever see because it signals trouble: the chain is out so far that it may foul the ship's hull, or worse yet, break its last link and burst out of the anchor locker with enough force to decapitate anyone in the vicinity.

Copyright © 2004 Michael Abrashoff. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

D. Michael Abrashoff served for almost twenty years in the U.S. Navy, culminating in a tour of duty as captain of the $1 billion warship USS Benfold. After leaving the navy, he wrote a bestseller about progressive leadership called It's Your Ship. He lectures to business audiences around the country.