We found this “decentralized” approach to DC central to be much more effective.
• • •
We turned other practices on their head as well, such as the important practice of keeping the ship quiet. Stealth is life for a submarine, and minimizing unnecessary bangs and noises is the lifeblood of every submarine.
I was standing in the control room one evening and my sonar chief, Senior Chief Worshek, announced from the sonar room, “Loud transient, own ship.” A transient was a temporary noise from within Santa Fe. It could be caused by any number of things, from carelessly dropping a wrench on the deck plates in the engine room to opening an air valve too quickly. This wasn’t uncommon; sonar would continuously monitor Santa Fe and announce these sound violations.
At this point, the standard practice would be for the chief of the watch (COW) to call every watch stander on the ship and find out what they were all doing so that we could determine the source of the transient. It was top-down management.
But this time Senior Chief Worshek walked into the control room and suggested we change the practice. Instead of us (in the control room) hunting down the violation, we told the watch standers that if they made a transient they should just call the COW and report it without being prompted. This would save a lot of time, and it turned the handling of this issue of the stealth of the submarine from a top-down approach (We will force you to be stealthy, by God) to one where everyone felt an obligation to maintain the stealth of the ship.
We tried it.
Not everyone was sure this would work. First of all it was different. Old-timers grumbled that we’d lose our acoustic superiority if we let the crew make whatever noise they wanted to so long as they just confessed.
Once again, however, it didn’t turn out that way. We started getting many more reports of transients than those detected by sonar. No one yelled; no one criticized. We just analyzed when, why, and how the noisy events occurred. They were things like pressurizing tanks, shifting valves under pressure, using hydraulics, or shifting steam or lube oil system lineups. Many occurred back in the engine room, and because the main sonar was in the bow they would go undetected.
By unemotionally addressing all the transients that occurred rather than only the ones that our monitoring system detected, we ended up with a quieter ship.
We arrived in San Diego to pick up the inspectors. The night before the inspection, I found that I was quite serene internally about this major test of my leadership ability and the crew. Normally, the vulnerability of being responsible for the performance of the ship yet delegating almost all of the control would have left me anxious. I attributed my peace to my attitude of learning and curiosity.
My confidence was justified. The crew performed superbly and Commodore Mark Kenny certified us for deployment. I was happy to see a large portion of the crew using the three-name rule. Our reputation was riding high. All we needed to do now was return to Pearl Harbor, execute a couple weeks of final preparations and load-outs, and we’d be under way for deployment on June 18, ready to go two weeks early.
• • •
Specifying to the crew that the true objective was to put the fire out as quickly as possible was a mechanism primarily for competence. SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS is a mechanism for COMPETENCE. In our case, this was because the crew was motivated to devise the best approach to putting out the fire. Once they were freed from following a prescribed way of doing things they came up with many ingenious ways to shave seconds off our response time. As another example, we had always berthed the crew strictly according to rank. They realized that certain damage control equipment was easier to get to from some bunks than others. By rearranging the berthing plan and assigning those bunks to the men who had responsibility for the nearby damage control equipment, they were able to respond faster. In a way, SPECIFYING GOALS also served as a mechanism for CLARITY by focusing on achieving excellence rather than avoiding errors. We found over and over again on Santa Fe that compliance with the procedures had supplanted accomplishing the objective as the ultimate goal. Although we don’t want people to founder, and we want adherence to procedures and best practices, we nevertheless should be on guard against this tendency.
The problem with specifying the method along with the goal is one of diminished control.
Provide your people with the objective and let them figure out the method.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
Have your processes become the master rather than the servant?
How can you ensure adherence to procedure while at the same time ensuring that accomplishing the objective remains foremost in everyone’s mind?
Have you reviewed your operations manual lately to replace general terminology with clear, concise, specific directions?
Are your staff complying with procedures to the neglect of accomplishing the company’s overall objectives?
PART IV
CLARITY
As more decision-making authority is pushed down the chain of command, it becomes increasingly important that everyone throughout the organization understands what the organization is about. This is called clarity, and it is the second supporting leg—along with competence—that is needed in order to distribute control.
Clarity means people at all levels of an organization clearly and completely understand what the organization is about. This is needed because people in the organization make decisions against a set of criteria that includes what the organization is trying to accomplish. If clarity of purpose is misunderstood, then the criteria by which a decision is made will be skewed, and suboptimal decisions will be made.
The chapters in this part will introduce you to the mechanisms we devised to implement leader-leader practices by stressing clarity. The mechanisms described are these:
Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors (this was introduced in chapter 7).
Build trust and take care of your people.
Use your legacy for inspiration.
Use guiding principles for decision criteria.
Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors.
Begin with the end in mind.
Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.
Under Way for Deployment
How can you take care of your people? Turns out, there are lots of ways.
June 18, 1999: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (deployed!)
We’d done it. I’d been in command of Santa Fe for 161 days and we were ready to deploy, two weeks early. Everything was ready for our deployment: stores loaded, weapons loaded and checked, all personnel on board, reactor operating and main engines warmed up. The tug was tied up alongside, ready to pull Santa Fe away from the pier and back us into the channel. At that point, we would cast off from the tug and head out the main shipping channel toward the Pacific Ocean. No inspectors, no riders, no straphangers. Just 135 highly empowered sailors eager to serve their country.
Santa Fe would head west from Pearl Harbor and make a stop in Japan. For several weeks thereafter, we would operate in the western Pacific before transiting the Strait of Malacca between Singapore and Indonesia into the Indian Ocean and then across to the Middle East. We’d then operate in and around the Arabian Sea for a couple of months before returning to Pearl Harbor. Altogether, we would be gone for six months.
On the pier, a large group of wives and children and other family members stood together. As we cast off the lines and tossed them to the pier, we sounded one prolonged blast from the whistle. Most of the family members looked up at the bridge.
In that moment, I realized exactly what my job was. I was to take these 134 men under my command thousands of miles from home, potentially engaging in combat, and bring them back safely to all those upturned faces. It gave me a renewed sense of purpose.
The transit out the channel went quickly, and we were soon submerged and heading west. I gathered the chiefs and officers and we discussed what we wanted to accomplish. “Look, we’re going to be go
ne for six months,” Lieutenant Commander Rick Panlilio advocated. “We should encourage each person in the crew to establish personal goals—take courses, read books, exercise, that kind of thing—in addition to the goals we have for Santa Fe.”
I agreed and was impressed that after everything we’d done to get ready for deployment, he didn’t just want to take a long nap.
Rick was right. I asked around to get a pulse of the crew on this idea. Chief David Steele was enthusiastic. He wanted to start taking courses toward a college degree. The Navy has a program for that, but most people don’t have the time or the initiative to take advantage of it.
We decided to let the chiefs talk to their sailors about their individual goals, but we’d define some ship-wide goals for everyone to focus on during the deployment. We came up with three themes: empowerment, efficiency, and tactical excellence. When we were done, we discussed whether or not we should tell people off the ship about our intentions. I thought, why not? It seemed to me that writing down our three ship-wide goals in an outgoing message would add clarity to our thinking, keep my bosses informed about what we were doing, and add weight to our initiatives.
Here’s the message we transmitted to our superiors on June 21, a little before crossing the international date line. I deliberately sent it to as broad an audience as possible.
From: USS Santa Fe
Subject: Santa Fe deployment objectives
Remarks:
1. Santa Fe express is now headed west. My officers and crew are looking forward to the challenges and opportunities of being deployed on the front lines for our nation’s security. . . .
2. Working with my department heads and senior advisers . . . I have set empowerment efficiency and tactical excellence as the guiding themes for continuously improving our performance during deployment.
a. Empowerment: I intend to empower the crew to achieve their personal and professional goals through initiatives such as a focused effort to improve advancement exam performance, encouraging PACE [Program for Afloat College Education] and other independent study programs, and providing incentives for increased physical conditioning. I further intend to push authority and responsibility downward wherever practical to improve job satisfaction. This is a continuation of a theme I have already started to work on and I think we are having some success. I already have ten crewmen who have submitted reenlistment requests for the gulf. [Reenlisting in the Arabian Gulf carried tax benefits.]
b. Efficiency: reaching our empowerment goals will require us to significantly improve crew efficiency . . . we will strive for greater efficiency in everything from running tighter drill scenarios to removing inefficiencies in meal preparation and service.
c. Tactical excellence: I intend to continue our pursuit of tactical excellence by encouraging innovative methods of leveraging Santa Fe’s combat power with particular emphasis on submarine support to the battle group, national tasking, strike warfare and special operations. . . .
3. I am working to establish measures of effectiveness for each of our goals. I will keep you posted on our progress toward empowerment, efficiency, and tactical excellence.
Very respectfully, CDR David Marquet.
Mechanism: Build Trust and Take Care of Your People
During the first few days out of port, I spent a fair amount of time walking about the ship. We’d received some bad news: the promotion announcements were in, based on the advancement examinations, and we hadn’t done well. I knew this was tough on the men after all the work they had done getting Santa Fe ready for deployment and after leaving their families for six months. I wanted to get a sense of just how much that disappointment was affecting the crew.
The more I saw and heard, the more I became aware that we’d done a great disservice to our crew back in March regarding the advancement exams. I vowed to do something about it, but one thing that continued to trouble me was why I had to drive this from the top. Couldn’t we get the chiefs themselves involved in their own guys’ advancement prospects? After all, as chiefs they had somehow figured out how to get advanced, that’s why they were chiefs. I kept this gripe to myself and focused on understanding the problem.
The first issue was that our crew—by which I mean the enlisted men who were not yet chiefs, and made up 80 percent of the ship’s company—did not thoroughly understand how the advancement system worked. The crew had heard so many myths and had been given so much misinformation, they had come to believe that the advancement system was a mystical process over which they had no control. It was this issue of control that we had to attack first.
The process worked like this: All petty officers received a composite advancement score after taking the exam to determine if they would be advanced. This composite score was made up of a weighing of the following marks: a score for their performance evaluation marks; a score for their grade on the Navy-wide advancement examination; and scores for awards, time in the Navy, time in rate, and the number of times they’d previously taken the exam but not been advanced. Roughly a third of the final composite was based on the performance evaluation marks, a third was based on the examination, and a third was based on the remaining components.
Not everyone who is eligible gets promoted. The higher positions are scarce. There are several reasons why promotions are not unlimited. First, the number of jobs gets smaller as the ranks get higher. This pyramid is a deliberate personnel-planning mechanism for the Navy. Even if the Navy wanted to promote everyone eligible, they can’t because Congress appropriates money for the Navy’s personnel programs and pay, and hence sets a cap on how many people the Navy can have at each rank level. The naval personnel command would then determine the cutoff score based on how many total openings we had for the next higher rank. Sailors below that level were “PNA” (Passed, Not Advanced). This meant that they’d passed the exam but did not achieve a final multiple high enough for advancement.
Fortunately, the Navy provides each command with detailed results for each person who took the test. In the past, we’d always handed these sheets to the sailors and let them deal with it on an individual basis. This time, I made a copy of all of the results and performed some mathematical analysis on the aggregate population. I had spreadsheets of the data. I spent hours sorting, correlating, and graphing the data.
The analysis showed that even though the exam made up about 33 percent of the total score it accounted for more than 80 percent of the variation in points between those who were advanced and those who were not. In all the other components that made up the final multiple—performance marks as well as awards, time in Navy, and time in rate, et cetera—the candidates were tightly grouped and the difference between those advanced and those not advanced was small. The exam, therefore, made all the difference. Our guys had averaged fifty-one points on the exam, whereas the average sailor who was advanced averaged sixty-four. Guys who were losing ten to twenty points on the exam couldn’t make it up with a couple of extra awards. You’d need ten Navy Achievement Medals to do that.
Ironically, this was great news, because examination performance was something we could control. My overwhelming theme for the men would be “You CAN get advanced, and we CAN help you.” We went to work fixing this.
Next, we looked at the areas in which our petty officers did poorly. Again, the detailed reports the Navy provided had the detailed data, but they needed to be analyzed in an aggregated manner. The yeomen did poorly on “travel administration.” Well, arranging travel wasn’t something you did as a yeoman assigned to a submarine, so we augmented that topic with training. The auxiliarymen did poorly on “fuels.” On a conventional ship, the management of fuels is a key activity, but not so much on a nuclear submarine, so we needed additional training there. We decided to give practice examinations. As the petty officers were studying for the next exam cycle, we asked them to write down sample multiple-choice questions based on what they were reading. In addition to shifting their study habits from passive reading to actively th
inking about test questions, we began to generate our own internal “advancement exam,” sprinkling these multiple-choice questions into our continuing training program. These did not entirely replace but rather augmented the short-answer questions we normally tested on. We also made our questions harder than the ones on the actual advancement examination. For example, our multiple-choice questions could have none, one, or more than one right answer. This required significantly more in-depth knowledge and helped build on the technical competence of the crew. Prior to the September advancement exam (the dates are Navy-wide, in March and September) we gave full practice advancement exams. Rather than looking at the advancement process as a separate activity, we integrated it into the operations of the submarine. Now all our interests were aligned.
Taking Care of Your People Extends Beyond Their Work Lives
Our first stop after transiting the western Pacific would be Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa is in the middle of the Ryuku island chain, which stretches in an arc from the southern tip of the main island group of Japan to Taiwan, six hundred miles away. Okinawa was the scene of a major battle in World War II between April and June 1945. Currently it is the home of a U.S. Marine Corps base. As we approached Okinawa, two things became apparent.
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders Page 16