Part 3

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

(Page 3 of 5)

When the ship is under way, the anchor is secured by several sets of brakes and stoppers to make sure it doesn't accidentally let go. But as you prepare to drop anchor, all these fail-safe devices come off, one by one, until only the main brake on the anchor chain is left.

On this occasion, we were about fifteen hundred yards from the anchorage and steaming at fifteen knots when the main brake failed and the anchor let go. I was watching from the bridge as the anchor suddenly plunged into the water, the chain whipping out behind it. I immediately ordered the helmsman to reverse all engines at full speed to avoid a crash. But the chain was still hurtling out of the locker, and a runaway red end could kill someone as it left the ship.

Relentless training saved us. This was a freak accident, but we had rehearsed what to do. When I gave the order to reverse the engines, everyone leaped in and did his or her job. The helmsman followed my order instantly, and the engineers below prepared to complete the maneuver manually if the automatic controls broke down. Benfold reversed so quickly that the anchor, still dropping, was now ahead of us instead of under the ship.

The man who stopped the anchor was the chief boatswain's mate Scott Moede, a big, hardworking, and likable fellow with forearms like Popeye's. Moede ran up right beside the anchor locker and started cranking the manual wheel that acts as an emergency brake. The chain was flying out at fifteen to twenty feet per second, making an awful racket, and Moede was spinning the wheel furiously, with his eyes primed for yellow. The first yellow link was only three or four seconds from emerging when the brake grabbed hold, the chain slowed, and disaster was averted.

Moede was the hero of the day. But even more important, the situation was saved because everyone, including our engineers, knew exactly what to do and did it automatically. Apart from the clatter made by the flying chain, there was dead silence on the ship as everyone concentrated on following the scenario we had rehearsed. And besides saving the anchor and the chain, we prevented the sonar dome under the fo'c'sle from being crushed as the chain ran wild. My commodore was so astonished that navy divers were sent out to investigate our feat, confirming that the ship had suffered no damage. There was really nothing to investigate. It was all thanks to forethought, discipline, and training.

On my ship, success sprang from the magic of motivating ordinary people to buy into a good cause, give it their best shot, and thereby produce extraordinary results. The chief lesson was clear and simple: once your people really know something cold, they become proprietary about it and strive to perform with excellence. My crew became so possessive that they busted their butts to make Benfold the best ship in the entire U.S. Navy. Given where they started, it was miracle enough that they made her - by official citation - the finest ship in the Pacific Fleet.

Could our experience be repeated elsewhere? It could and is: every single day hundreds of thousands of people in our armed forces deliver phenomenal performances. Having already published one book about my navy past, I decided there was a lot more to say about leadership in organizations of all kinds, not just the military. I began collecting examples from both military and civilian fields. Soon I discovered that the most refreshing leadership examples involved not the grossly overpaid corporate CEOs whose names dominate the headlines, but, rather, unsung leaders, remarkable people with remarkable stories that never receive the media hype. I hope you will like these people as much as I do. For one thing, their high performance is invariably leavened with self-effacing charm and a lack of pretense, which means they are easy to identify with. They could be us, and vice versa.

What follows is a series of lessons distilled from their experiences and mine. Each chapter briefly introduces one of these exemplary people, then explores his or her most interesting leadership insights and how they came to perceive them. Here's a quick rundown of the unsung leaders I want you to meet.

• Buddy Gengler, age twenty-six, went to Iraq in March of 2003, just as the war began. A West Point graduate and first lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Buddy was no stranger to hard work and trying times. But shortly after his arrival in the Middle East, he was confronted with an unexpectedly harrowing challenge: deployed to lead a platoon of rocket launchers, Buddy discovered that the soldiers under his command would, instead, be used as a street-fighting quick-reaction force - an extremely dangerous job for which they had received scant training. In chapter 1, you'll learn how Buddy met an extreme test of leadership while earning the respect of both his soldiers and his superiors.

• Trish Karter, forty-seven, is cofounder and chief executive of Dancing Deer Baking Company, headquartered in one of Boston's poorest areas. I discovered Dancing Deer while living in Boston. I love its products and became intrigued with the company itself and what makes it so special after I started doing a little digging. Trish switched her career from fine arts to business in order to help people in need. First, when her father's company was being reorganized under Chapter 11 proceedings, she dropped out of Wheaton College and worked side by side with him to get the company back on its feet. Then, when Suzanne Lombardi, the operator of a small bakery Trish and her husband had invested in, got overextended, Trish jumped in. Now Dancing Deer is nationally famous for its distinctive line of all-natural cakes and cookies that munchers find as sinfully tasty as they are environmentally pure. Result: Dancing Deer currently grosses $5 million a year, with annual sales rising rapidly. That's not all: Trish Karter and colleagues give away almost 10 percent of their revenues (that's not a misprint) to the bakery's needy neighbors. For more on Trish Karter's capitalistically incorrect enterprise and what we can learn from it, see chapter 2.

• Roger Valine is a fifty-five-year-old sociologist turned chief executive whose old-fashioned respect and concern for his employees has helped make Vision Service Plan, a Sacramento, California-based benefits provider, a paragon of civilized employer-employee relations. In these days of outsourcing and 24/7 workplaces, Roger sees no reason why a company man can't also be a family man, and he encourages his employees to follow his example by providing the kind of perks and benefits that make life easier and help stabilize families. But that doesn't mean he's a pushover for poor performance. On the contrary, Roger demands top-notch performance from every member of his crew and gets it: under his leadership, VSP has gone from a $500 million regional company to a national organization with over $2 billion in sales, and growing. In chapter 3, you'll learn more about the clear-eyed vision of Roger Valine and VSP.

• My friend Captain Al Collins, now forty-eight, was raised poor and black in rural Georgia and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1972. Al stood out from the start, rising rapidly to chief petty officer and handling many duties normally reserved for commissioned officers. He took college courses in his off-duty hours and was commissioned as an officer in a special program. He rose to be skipper of two U.S. Navy warships, one of which, USS Fitzgerald, like USS Benfold before it, won the coveted Spokane Trophy as the most battle-ready ship in the whole Pacific Fleet. Al went on to serve on the Iraq crisis action team of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, preparing the briefs for President George W. Bush on the daily progress of the war. He is one of the best men I've ever known, and a model for leaders everywhere, as you will see in chapter 4.

• Laura Folse, the forty-five-year-old vice president of technology for BP PLC, is a rarity in the decidedly male-dominated world of petroleum and gas exploration. But then Laura has been traveling the unbeaten path since she was a girl growing up in small-town Alabama. Freed by her parents from the typical limits placed on women in that place and time, she worked and studied alongside boys and men from an early age. Her intelligence and hard work earned Laura degrees in geology from Auburn University and the University of Alabama, and one in management from Stanford. It takes more than brainpower to succeed, however, and Laura has shown an uncommon talent for a gutsy yet compassionate style of leadership that makes her a standout at BP. "There's nothing better than working with a group of people toward a common goal," Laura told me, and in chapter 5, she shares her methods and philosophy for creating superior cohesive teams.

• Ward Clapham, age forty-five, joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1980. From his first assignment in an isolated backwater in Northern Alberta to his current job as superintendent of the 215-member detachment in the British Columbia city of Richmond, Ward has shown a natural bent for leadership and community interaction. When the Mounties took an official interest in the community policing philosophy back in 1991, Clapham was an early convert and eloquent proselytizer. He has lectured on the topic across three continents and is the author of several related articles. As Ward will tell you, though, no community can be successfully integrated into police work until the leader gains the buy in and respect of the men and women under his or her command. Chapter 6 relates the techniques Ward has used working with those fabled Mounties in a series of operations across Canada.

Now let's weigh anchor and sail at flank speed into the amazing sea of my favorite unsung leaders.

Your platoon is dumped in the middle of a war zone with inadequate training for its assigned mission. What do you do? You bust your butt to make sure this small band of brothers survives.

WHAT DOES A LEADER LOOK LIKE? WE ALL HAVE OUR OWN preconceived notions. For some people, it's easy to envision the Arnold Schwarzenegger action-oriented person as a leader. Others may unconsciously look for clues that bespeak status - expensive shoes, a good haircut, and well-tailored clothes made of good fabric. But in the U.S. military, where shoes and haircuts and uniforms are all the same, another indicator noted in certain studies on the topic may be the most reliable of all: a steady gaze. We Americans value a gaze that seems to absorb and process everything in sight (and quite a few things that aren't).

I thought about this tricky business of recognizing a leader while watching a homemade DVD sent by First Lieutenant Gabriel J. "Buddy" Gengler III. Made up of still photos and movies taken of Gengler and others in his army unit, it depicts his tour of duty in Iraq - from the time he crossed the berm from Kuwait and rode across the desert to Baghdad, all the way to his return stateside. In the twelve months from March 2003 to March 2004, Buddy captured scenes of tent life, sandstorm-riddled convoys, nighttime rocket attacks, military engagements on the streets of Baghdad, soldiers' softball games, visits with Iraqi schoolchildren, and much more. It's a 360-degree view of the war that TV news can't duplicate.

But for the first three or four minutes of the video, I couldn't pick out Buddy. Scenes moved too fast in the blur of soldiers in desert camouflage for me to identify rank or read a name tag. At that point, I hadn't yet met Buddy in person, and I knew him only through our correspondence. I'd heard tales of his successes as a military leader and the techniques he'd used to build a cohesive fighting unit after he read It's Your Ship. Maybe part of me was looking for that tall football-hero type, or maybe his exploits had given me a mental picture of a much older, more hard-bitten figure. For whatever reason, I didn't spot Buddy Gengler until I really started looking at faces. Then, suddenly, Buddy came into focus - a young spark plug of a guy with a steady gaze, the look of a leader.

And what a leader he is: deployed to Iraq to lead a platoon trained to fire a multiple-launch rocket system, Buddy soon discovered that the army planned instead to use his unit as a street-fighting, quick-reaction force to chase down bad guys, round up illegal weapons, and battle terrorists and insurgents in more than eight major operating locations spanning from Iraq's eastern border near Iran, to the northeast, and across central Iraq. Never mind that neither he nor his troops had received more than the most basic of training for this kind of combat. In the army you can't pick your missions.

Buddy didn't complain or throw up his hands; he just went to work putting his men through simulated raid after raid to build their instincts and improve their chances of surviving what lay ahead. In the end, Buddy's platoon earned a reputation as one of the most successful strike forces around, especially when it came to seizing caches of illegal weapons. Miraculously, not one member of the unit was lost or even seriously injured.

In this chapter are several stories of how Buddy protected his men, won their respect, helped them excel, and rewarded their success.

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.