QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
What causes us to take control when we should be giving control?
Can you recall a recent incident where your subordinate followed your order because he or she thought you had learned secret information “for executives only”?
What would be the most challenging obstacle to implementing “I intend to . . .” in your place of business?
Could your mid-level managers think through and defend their plan of action for the company’s next big project?
Up Scope!
Do you like to help your people come to the right answers? I did, and that made matters worse.
January 27, 1999: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (153 days to deployment)
The chart table on a submarine gets to be a crowded spot. Lieutenant Dave Adams, Lieutenant Commander Bill Greene, and the XO were crowded around the chart table with me, along with Chief John Larson. We’d pushed Sled Dog, the quartermaster, out of the way.
Where was the enemy going? I scanned the chart and it came to me. I saw that they were likely heading for some congested waters near Maui.
“Here, we need to be here at 0600.” I tapped the chart with the butt end of the flashlight at a spot in the Maui basin. If the enemy was indeed heading toward those congested waters, this location, upslope from them, looking into the deeper, quieter water, would be the spot from which we would launch our attack.
It was midnight. I was exhausted and needed a couple hours of sleep. We’d gone into Pearl Harbor and picked up Commodore Mark Kenny and his inspection team. The ship was doing well, but I felt I needed to be in too many places at once. For this, the overnight supervisors would have to drive Santa Fe into position: accounting for the movements of the enemy, the interfering maritime traffic, the wind and sea conditions, and a number of other factors.
I looked around. Heads nodded. Any questions? There were none. “Okay, call me if anything comes up that interferes with this plan or may make us want to reconsider it.”
A more enlightened approach would have been to engage in a discussion about why I came up with the position and what assumptions were key to making that position work. That’s what I wanted to do, but I just didn’t have the energy or time anymore. All day, every day, it seemed like that’s all I did. It was tiresome. I tried to stay as quiet as possible and let the officers run things with “I intend to . . .” but top-down was ingrained in how we operated and we fell back on bad habits.
January 28, 1999: On Board Santa Fe (152 days to deployment)
When I got up at 0500, I was dismayed to find that we were several miles out of position. Not only that, we were headed in the wrong direction, away from the enemy! Now the enemy was likely to be upslope of us! It would take several hours to reverse the situation, a tactical blunder that would result in a down check during an inspection but could spell death during combat. The watch team had allowed a series of short-term contacts and navigational issues to drive them rather than driving the ship to an optimal tactical position. We were still letting things happen to us rather than proactively making things happen.
Commodore Kenny was in the control room, observing our team’s interactions. I was exasperated but kept my cool. I realized the failure was mine. We weren’t going to be able to go from top-down to bottom-up overnight.
My immediate reaction was to think that I needed to manage everything more carefully—“I should have checked at 0300”—but this would have put me back into the exact same situation I was in on board the Will Rogers. There needed to be a way out of this. Upon reflection, I decided that giving specific direction, as in my statement “We need to be here at 0600,” without the underlying thought processes just didn’t work in the complex and unpredictable world we were in. There were no shortcuts. As the level of control is divested, it becomes more and more important that the team be aligned with the goal of the organization. At this point, although I’d talked about accomplishing our mission (a positive goal), the team was still in the old mind-set of avoiding problems (in this case, avoiding contacts to prevent counterdetection and minimize the risk of collision). When it came to prosecuting the enemy, a correct assessment of risk versus gain would have been more focused on driving the submarine to an optimal tactical position rather than avoiding contacts.
For the next several hours, we worked our way toward a better tactical position. We’d be making good progress, then have to turn back to avoid a fishing boat and lose ground. Santa Fe was operating at periscope depth (PD) in shallow water, so each turn took several minutes. It was slow going.
“Up scope.” The OOD rolled the ring, and the hydraulics began lifting the periscope the eighteen feet to its fully raised position.
Santa Fe was just beneath the surface of the water. Even with the scope raised, a short pole of only about two feet would be visible above the surface. Still, the ocean was quite smooth today and even at our slow speed our periscope could be visible. We’d raise the periscope for just a few seconds, rapidly look around, and lower it again.
We were in the final stages of a cat-and-mouse game with the enemy diesel submarine. The simulated war had escalated to the point where Santa Fe was authorized to sink it.
The enemy had picked this area deliberately. The shallow uneven bottom reduced the effectiveness of the torpedo, and to ensure a hit we would need a precise idea of the enemy’s location. The best way to do this would be to actually see it, which is why we were at periscope depth, looking for the enemy sub visually. To accomplish this, we had packed more than twenty men into the control room, a space roughly half the area of a typical Starbucks.
We carried the Mk 48 ADCAP (advanced capability) torpedo. It is a devastating weapon against both surface ships and submarines. We launch the torpedo to intercept the target the way a hunter leads a duck. In addition, the torpedo has its own sonar system, looking for the target for a precise intercept. The torpedo streams a wire behind it that stays connected to the submarine, allowing us to see what the torpedo is seeing and redirect the torpedo, sending steering orders down the wire.
“Target!” Amid the buoys and haze, and against the Hawaiian Islands as a backdrop, the OOD saw the enemy’s periscope and immediately lowered ours. If we could see him, he could see us.
“Captain, recommend firing point procedures!” Dave Adams was pushing me to order the attack and I liked that. As weapons officer, he knew we had all the pieces together for a successful shot: weapons loaded and ready in the tubes, an accurate bead on the target, and authorization to engage. Waiting for more precise information would only give the enemy more time to detect us.
“Very well, Weps.” I wanted to acknowledge his initiative.
I ordered the attack. “Firing point procedures, submarine. Tube one primary, tube two backup.”
I wiped the sweat off my brow.
The standard litany followed that order, as principal officer assistants reported readiness to launch. The next words I heard, however, were not part of that litany.
“Request to raise the BRA-34 to download the broadcast.”
What? Raise the radio antenna?
We were at the end of our twelve-hour broadcast cycle. It was time to get our messages. We’d avoided raising this antenna because it sticks out of the water higher than the periscope and would need to remain up for several minutes, making detection of Santa Fe likely.
I resisted the urge to throw a fit. I glanced at Commodore Kenny, who was standing to the side of the control room. He was smiling as if they’d planned this wrinkle just to test me. Clearly, his radio inspector had been keeping him informed that we were approaching twelve hours on the broadcast and that the deadline to download our message traffic would likely come right at the worst time.
By pointing at the chart and giving my crew the solution, I had made things worse. I deprived them of the opportunity and obligation to think.
Tempted as I was to bark orders at this moment, I looked at my shoes instead. “We’re not going to do that,” I
muttered. “We have to find another solution.” Even if we lost the opportunity to attack right then, I needed to get everyone on board thinking.
I waited for several seconds. It worked.
The department heads jumped into a quick discussion. I resisted the urge to say anything, and stayed quiet. Seconds were ticking by and the uncertainties of the enemy’s position were growing. Someone pointed out that if we sank the other ship we would have to report that by communicating, and when we did, we’d get the broadcast then. And oh, by the way, there’d be no one around to counterdetect us at that point!
“Captain, recommend continuing with the attack!”
Voilà!
“Final bearing and shoot!” The scope came up. This time I was on it. I pointed the scope on the enemy submarine and pushed the bearing button, sending the precise bearing to the computers calculating the intercept course.
“Set!” The bearing was entered; calculations were updated and sent to the torpedo.
“Shoot!” Dave Adams announced. By procedure, once I ordered “final bearing and shoot” the Weps ordered the final button push that launched the torpedo.
Woosh! We felt the shudder in the control room as high-pressure water rammed the ADCAP out of tube one, its motor started, and it was on its way.
“Unit running normally, wire good!”
“Unit has merged on the bearing of the target.”
The normal reports were coming in.
Now we waited. Our torpedo would run out to where the enemy was and turn on. If all went well, it would see the target in its first couple of pings and home on in.
“Detect!” It saw the enemy. We checked our torpedo’s location and where we thought the enemy was. We updated the enemy’s position slightly.
“Acquire!” We had them!
“Loud explosion.” (This was simulated by the inspector, who assessed that our torpedo had successfully attacked the enemy submarine.)
Cheers in the control room. We had achieved our first success!
Mechanism: Resist the Urge to Provide Solutions
I reflected on what had taken place and realized that as tired as I was, and despite the time it would have taken, I should have let my officers figure things out.
Emergency situations required snap decision making and clear orders. There’s no time for a big discussion. Yet, the vast majority of situations do not require immediate decisions. You have time to let the team chew on it, but we still apply the crisis model of issuing rapid-fire orders. RESIST THE URGE TO PROVIDE SOLUTIONS is a mechanism for CONTROL. When you follow the leader-leader model, you must take time to let others react to the situation as well. You have to create a space for open decision by the entire team, even if that space is only a few minutes, or a few seconds, long. This is harder than in the leader-follower approach because it requires you to anticipate decisions and alert your team to the need for an upcoming one. In a top-down hierarchy, subordinates don’t need to be thinking ahead because the boss will make a decision when needed.
This was a hard habit to break, both for my team and for me. Early in my command of the Santa Fe, we went to the training simulator where we practiced torpedo attacks. I had the fire control party with me, about thirty guys. I told them at the outset that I was not going to give any orders unless someone recommended it. We ended up driving in a straight line for thirty minutes because they all just thought I’d order the turn. It was painful.
• • •
How many times do issues that require decisions come up on short notice? If this is happening a lot, you have a reactive organization locked in a downward spiral. When issues aren’t foreseen, the team doesn’t get time to think about them; a quick decision by the boss is required, which doesn’t train the team, and so on. No one has time to actually think through the issue.
You need to change that cycle. Here are a few ways to try to get your team thinking for themselves:
If the decision needs to be made urgently, make it, then have the team “red-team” the decision and evaluate it.
If the decision needs to be made reasonably soon, ask for team input, even briefly, then make the decision.
If the decision can be delayed, then force the team to provide inputs. Do not force the team to come to consensus; that results in whitewashing differences and dissenting votes. Cherish the dissension. If everyone thinks like you, you don’t need them.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
How deeply is the top-down, leader-follower structure ingrained in how your business operates?
Do you recognize situations in which you need to resist the urge to provide solutions?
When problems occur, do you immediately think you just need to manage everything more carefully?
What can you do at your next meeting with senior staff to create a space for open decision making by the entire team?
Who’s Responsible?
Are you inadvertently sending a message that erodes ownership and responsibility among subordinates? We were.
January 28, 1999: On Board Santa Fe (152 days to deployment)
In addition to observing the ship perform its tactical maneuvers, the inspection team also looks at administrative issues. In this case, they identified that Santa Fe had not responded to several messages we owed to higher authority—the squadron, Pacific Submarine Force (SUBPAC), and the maintenance facility. Naturally I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t want to shift too much attention away from the torpedo and missile shooting. After those events were over, however, I asked the XO about the missed items, and he brought out the “tickler” (add ominous music here), a three-inch binder maintained by his yeomen that had all of the messages—such as this one—that we received. They were sorted by department and due date. He looked in the book and proudly reported that, sure enough, we were tracking this particular message and knew we hadn’t responded.
So we had a system that was focused on understanding the status instead of actually getting the work done. Unfortunately, everyone was too busy to look at the binder, and in any event, it was stuck up in a locker in the XO’s stateroom. Like every other submarine we would have weekly “tickler” meetings where the department chiefs and department heads would sit in the wardroom for an hour or more going through the binder page by page. Of course, none of this activity actually resulted in getting any of the work done; it simply allowed us to catalogue what we were supposed to do and what we were delinquent on. It sucked up a lot of time, valuable supervisory time.
This was how everyone did it, always had.
There is no requirement to maintain a tickler, only a requirement to get the work done. What happened was that in the leader-follower structure that we teach, some commands long ago started keeping ticklers. Those ticklers then became seen as a useful tool for managing the work. The underlying message behind that method of doing business is not helpful; it’s top-down, leader-follower, and it limits the authority, the initiative, the creativity, the job satisfaction, and ultimately the happiness of the team.
Fundamentally, this tickler process sends the following message: we will keep track and monitor you and your job performance. We will enforce (somehow) the proper performance of your job.
This erodes a more powerful message: you are responsible for your job.
The next tickler meeting was coming up and I invited myself.
I resisted the instinct to move into micromanagement mode. That would be moving in the wrong direction. How could we turn this on its head and reinforce the central tenet that the department heads, not the XO, were responsible for their departments?
We talked about how well the tickler had worked on other submarines and staffs that we’d worked on and with. Our experiences fell into several categories.
Some commands had a broken tickler and didn’t get anything done. They didn’t even know what they owed and were chronically late in completing tasking.
Other commands had a tickler and a sense of what they were missing, but they weren’t effici
ently getting the work done. This is the most inefficient because it has the lowest ratio of actual work accomplishment to effort. This was where we were.
Still other commands were “well run.” They had a tickler, knew what was due, and got it done. This is moderately efficient because the work gets done, but there is still the overhead of maintaining the tickler and having those supervisory meetings.
We set out to invent an even more efficient way to do it, a new way.
Mechanism: Eliminate Top-Down Monitoring Systems
I reviewed the checking-out scenario, which was actually starting to work well. When checking out with the XO, the department heads were now telling him what they were doing, hadn’t done, and needed help with. It was a bottom-up dialogue. Why couldn’t we model our management of the tickler the same way?
The discussion went like this.
“Weps, who’s responsible for your department?”
“I am, sir.”
“Not the XO?”
“No.”
“Then why should he spend time keeping a tickler for you and have you all sit in these agonizing tickler meetings?”
“He shouldn’t.”
“Okay. But here’s the deal; you guys need to get the work done.”
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders Page 10