“Where is Sled Dog now?” I asked.
No one was sure, but he was seen heading toward the barracks, the on-base housing for the crew. I thought about that. Why would someone go to the on-base barracks if they wanted to go AWOL? And thinking about what Sled Dog had been through, I’m pretty sure I would have said “Fuck this shit” as well.
By this point I was firmly in the sympathetic camp, but I was having trouble convincing the chiefs that we had an obligation to try and find him. I could have ordered it, but that would have resulted in forced compliance. I decided to find him myself. I departed the ship and headed over to the enlisted barracks a couple blocks from where we were moored at Submarine Base San Diego on Point Loma. I found the barracks manager and, amazingly, Sled Dog had registered and had a room. Strange behavior if he was quitting the Navy. I went to his room and knocked. He was there!
I needed to be careful because I didn’t want to say anything that exonerated his behavior or manifested my displeasure with the chiefs. At the same time, I was sympathetic to his lack of sleep and the uneven treatment he’d received. I had the report chit written up on him in my hand. Going AWOL carries steep penalties. He could be restricted to the ship for sixty days, which would keep him on the ship for a major part of the in-port time prior to deployment; he could lose a month’s pay; and he could get busted down a rank.
We had a conversation. I could see he was emotionally and physically exhausted. In a dramatic move, I tore up the report chit and granted him amnesty but made it clear he needed to be back on the ship the following morning. He probably didn’t know it, but I had tainted any potential captain’s mast I might hold on him by getting personally involved. If it ever went to a court-martial, a lawyer would have a field day. I was betting we would never need to go that far.
I went back to Santa Fe and mustered the chiefs. I reviewed what we’d been through and reminded them of the January meeting we’d had in the old periscope shop in Pearl Harbor. I was upset because it seemed like in some cases they’d taken the increased authority I’d given them and used that to make their own situations easier. Some were missing the sense of obligation toward their men. “Weren’t we all in a meeting together back in January when you accepted responsibility for your men and for running the ship? Didn’t we all understand that that meant being involved, participating, sharing the pain with the crew, not acting like some privileged aristocracy?” I was barking out these words and gesturing toward them with the flashlight. I was pissed.
Well, yes.
I told the chiefs about the deal I made with Sled Dog. Some thought I was setting a bad precedent.
Had they been dishonest in January? I don’t think so. I just don’t think they could picture how much different it would be if they started walking the talk.
No wonder the crew was demoralized, with this kind of behavior going on. No wonder Santa Fe had reenlisted merely three guys the entire previous year. I had an overwhelming urge to take all authority away from the chiefs, to take “local and immediate control” to get them on board. This, of course, would have been entirely expected and made me like every other leader.
The next morning the COB came in with his daily muster report.
“Captain, all present and accounted for.”
He turned and departed. We both knew that meant Sled Dog had returned as promised.
Not all the chiefs were happy with the resolution of the Sled Dog issue. Some worried that I had set a bad standard and that there would be an erosion of military discipline. They feared a host of AWOLs, and if I held those sailors accountable, it would be hypocritical. It was suggested there would be an appearance of favoritism—maybe even a perception that I’d shown deference in the case of a minority. Turns out their predictions were wrong. We never had another AWOL in three years.
I resisted taking more control and continued to let the COB and XO manage the enlisted watch bill. After I got over my anger, I invoked the following rule of “watch bill equitability”: no supervisory watch station could be in a watch rotation better than the worst rotation of any watch station reporting to that supervisor. As this would work its way up the chain, there would be no way the chiefs or officers would be better off than the crew. This wasn’t taken well, but I needed to get the point across, and I was tired of trying to explain things in a noncoercive way. They would just have to experience it.
Mechanism: Continually and Consistently Repeat the Message
The issue I had the hardest time coming to grips with was how I didn’t know all this was happening. Technically, the XO signs the enlisted watch bill so, technically, I wasn’t responsible. Still, I was. I had been in the control room a hundred times during the previous week. I’d frequently seen Sled Dog standing there on watch. Sure, I had excuses. I was focused on other things, whereas managing the watch bill was the direct responsibility of others. No matter how I rationalized it, however, I felt responsible. Perhaps this sense of responsibility colored my actions and perhaps it could have come out badly. Had I carefully weighed the potential impact to me personally, I would never have gone in body to the enlisted barracks. I didn’t think like that, though. I was only worried about my sailor, who was off by himself and dealing with senior management that wasn’t trying to get him on board.
Again, I resigned myself to the fact that my new approach to leadership wasn’t working. It was too hard, and if the chiefs didn’t get it, how could we be successful? I considered going back to barking orders and demanding rigid compliance. Upon reflection, that wasn’t the leader I wanted to be, and I was convinced that my original course was right: giving people authority, paired with responsibility and the tools to do the job, would pay off in the end. I resisted this urge and decided we had to stay the course.
The behavior of the chiefs was totally baffling to me. After two months under my command, how could they not get what we were trying to do? I’d given them much greater authority with Chiefs in Charge; they’d helped write the guiding principles; they’d heard me talk a hundred times about how we were going to run things on Santa Fe. It seemed as if there were some evil force that was pushing against us and kept people in the same old way of thinking.
What I realized, however, is the need for a relentless, consistent repetition of the message.
CONTINUALLY AND CONSISTENTLY REPEAT THE MESSAGE is a mechanism for COMPETENCE.
Repeat the same message day after day, meeting after meeting, event after event. Sounds redundant, repetitive, and boring. But what’s the alternative? Changing the message? That results in confusion and a lack of direction. I didn’t realize the degree to which old habits die hard, even when people are emotionally on board with the change. The chiefs wanted to be on board, but they pictured a leadership approach, a style, they’d seen before on the “USS Ustafish”—the generic term for the submarine I “used to” be on. They just pictured something from their past. It was hard for them to create an image of what we were trying to accomplish. It was something brand new. There wasn’t an existing example or movie we could point to.
• • •
When you bring in something new, something that has never been seen before, you can talk about it and some will get it. On Santa Fe, we did have some chiefs who got it immediately. Senior Chief Worshek got it. Chief Larson got it. Some would get it soon; others would take longer. I discovered that what happens when you explain a change is that the crew hears what you say, but they are thinking, “Oh yeah, I know what he’s talking about. That’s like it was on the USS Ustafish.” They hear and think they know what you mean, but they don’t. They’ve never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can’t see in their imagination how it works. They are not being intentionally deceitful; they just are not picturing what you are picturing.
Moreover, if they understand what you mean they might be skeptical that this new way of doing business, which is different from anything they’ve seen before, could be better. How is it possible to be in the Navy for (fil
l in the years) and not have seen this?
In order to help me remember this and keep my cool, I had a poster made. I got the idea from an article titled “It’s a Dog’s Life,” which I’d read in the November 1995 issue of Fast Company. It profiled VeriFone’s then-CEO Hatim Tyabji. In the poster, I am standing in front of my dog Barclay saying “Sit.” The dog was standing. The first eight frames were identical. “Sit, sit, sit,” etc. No recriminations, no admonishments, just “sit.” In the ninth and last frame, Barclay is sitting and the caption is “Good dog.” I hung this on the back of my stateroom door. Since my door was open most of the time, visitors didn’t see it, but I would.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
Are any of your employees on the brink of going AWOL because they’re overworked and underappreciated?
When is it right for the leader to overturn protocol in the effort to rescue a single stressed-out subordinate?
What messages do you need to keep repeating in your business to make sure your management team doesn’t take care of themselves first, to the neglect of their teams?
Final Preparations
Do you believe that allowing initiative from the bottom won’t work in a crisis? I learned that even in casualties (emergencies), releasing control yields better results.
May 1999: Under Way from Pearl Harbor to San Diego (28 days to deployment)
At sea again, Santa Fe was heading back to San Diego. We needed this time to run a complete set of drills and hone our operational skills. Our final certification for deployment (POMCERT) would happen once we got to San Diego. While it was coming faster than I would have liked, there was a lot going right on Santa Fe. Our sailors were submitting reenlistment requests, and maintenance was going well for the first time. Watch officers were solving problems and department heads were talking to each other. Deliberate action was reducing errors, and more and more of the crew were becoming believers. The chiefs continued to grow into their Chiefs in Charge authority. What started with managing leave chits had now grown into controlling schedules and managing qualifications. We had gotten through the backlog of crew members awaiting tests and interviews for qualification, and the average time to qualify in submarines was steadily marching down. Now when I arrived on board in the morning, the ship was already a beehive of activity as opposed to a bunch of guys waiting for permission.
Still, I wasn’t certain that we would be ready for deployment. The past six weeks had been ones of frenetic activity and tension. After returning to Pearl Harbor, the submarine went into a maintenance period, our last opportunity for nine months to do major maintenance. I had a long list of equipment worries, including sonar equipment, the oxygen generator, missile and torpedo tubes, and updates to the electronics and software for the combat control system, to name a few. Additionally, although we would perform many daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance routines while on deployment to keep our equipment in peak condition, the less frequent routine maintenance would need to be done now. Somehow the crew had gotten it all done and we had gotten under way. We always had the goal of performing training during these maintenance periods, but it rarely happened. Now we had a week to make it all up. There was no going back on our management experiment now—we were going to sink or swim with our new approach.
“Fire, Fire, Fire!”
A fire on a submarine was one of the most life-threatening accidents we could have. Not only would thick black smoke force us to wear our emergency air breathing (EAB) devices; the visibility would be reduced to near zero. Unchecked, the fire would grow in size, and the contained atmosphere in the boat would result in heat and pressure increases that would make human existence impossible. Eleven years previously, in April 1988, a fire aboard the USS Bonefish killed three sailors. In that fire, the heat got so intense that the shoes of crew members standing on the deck above the fire melted.
The key time was two minutes. Studies showed we needed a fire hose applying water to the fire within two minutes.
I was standing just forward of the crew’s mess, which was full of nukes in training, when the fire alarm rang. The department heads ran the drill programs but I approved all the drills, including when and how they would start. The engineer had briefed the drill monitors that the fire would be in the storeroom just aft of the crew’s mess. I wanted to see what would happen because I had been previously frustrated that it took too long to get immediate extinguishing agents and fire hoses to the fire.
The closest fire hose on Santa Fe was in the passageway just forward of the crew’s mess, about fifty feet from the fire’s location.
It should have been easy. The entire engineering department, forty people, was conducting training in the crew’s mess.
The fire was detected and the alarm was sounded. What happened next?
Well, the nukes scattered, running right by the hose and leaving it hanging on the bulkhead. The crew members assigned to that particular hose couldn’t even get to the hose because there were so many nukes in the way. Why didn’t the nukes just take the hose, lay it out, pressurize it, and end the whole thing in sixty seconds?
Because the submarine force hadn’t trained them to do that. Following standard procedure that the Navy had encouraged as a “best practice,” we had determined that watch standers on duty would man the hoses. This was originally decided because in the event of a fire at 0300, we couldn’t count on enough crew members to be up and about to self-organize into an effective response. So we identified watch standers as contingency firefighters who would leave their watch stations and deal with the fire. This was an exception to normal practice; leaving your watch station unattended was not allowed.
Over the next few years, as ships were evaluated by various inspection teams, the inspectors would stand there with a clipboard and ask the nozzleman, when he showed up, who he was. “I’m the on-watch auxiliaryman forward.” The inspector would look at the watch bill and make sure he was the one identified. If not, it would be a deficiency, a watch bill violation.
This was another example of where the procedure had become the master and not the servant. The motivation had shifted from putting the fire out to following the procedure. As a result, we got the crazy behavior observed on the mess deck of Santa Fe.
Yet another problem was underlying and distorting the crew’s behavior. There was no incentive for the crew to put the simulated fire out early.
Drill guides at the time foretold a prescriptive set of events. They weren’t connected in any way to the crew’s response. For instance, even if the crew immediately brought a portable extinguisher the fire would grow. Even if the crew arrived with a pressurized fire hose in less than two minutes and applied water to the base of the fire—using appropriate firefighting techniques, wearing the right equipment and hard-soled shoes—the fire would spread more. It would require multiple hoses and a sustained attack to douse the fire. The submarine would fill with smoke and we would need to go to periscope depth and ventilate. It was a one-hour drill. The thinking behind the guides was that the crew needed to be drilled on and prepared for all possible outcomes.
We changed all that.
Mechanism: Specify Goals, Not Methods
First, we attacked the motivation problem. We authorized the drill monitor at the scene to adapt the drill based on the crew’s response.
If the crew applied a portable extinguisher in the first forty-five seconds, the fire was out. Done.
If it took two minutes to get a pressurized hose to the scene, the fire was out. Done.
These consequences modeled nature.
Now the crew was motivated to actually do what we wanted them to do: attack the fire with portable fire extinguishers and pressurized fire hoses, unencumbered by administrative disincentives and distractions.
Next, I explained to the crew that our objective was to put the fire out, and I didn’t care who was on the hose. They responded, and we significantly improved our response time. Now when the alarm sounded, the closest men self-organized
to achieve the goal. We would later receive awards for our damage control responses.
We also revamped another aspect of responding to casualties like fires.
The force-wide practice was to use terse commands when responding to casualties. For example, during a fire, the man at the scene must verbally paint a picture of what he is seeing. We didn’t have a set of video cameras monitoring the spaces; as a result, the CO in control or others around the ship would not know how extensive the fire was. And our limited language got in the way: all we had was the word fire to cover the spectrum from a wall of flames to a smoking dryer lint trap. Our practice was to use the standard word, but then we started adding context, such as whether there were “open flames” or not. This mechanism of describing what you see is an extension of thinking out loud.
The officers who manned damage control central, or DC central, controlled the ship’s response to casualties. DC central consisted of a department head set up in my stateroom with charts and status boards and phone talkers.
We started to explain to the crew that the casualty drill going forward would be different. We figured, why not just tell them what needed to happen? After all, in the case of a real casualty, this is exactly what I’d want them to do. So, in clear, concise sentences, we’d tell them, “Crew members in the vicinity should attack the fire with portable extinguishers.” And DC central would announce things like “A thermal imager is needed in the auxiliary room.” DC central would not specify who or how. The crew figured it out. The man with the thermal imager would head to the auxiliary room and, as he passed a phone talker, report, “Senior Chief Worshek with the thermal imager proceeding to the auxiliary room.” Again, this was “thinking out loud.”
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders Page 15