Discuss the concepts and idea of “Begin with the end in mind.”
With your leadership team, develop longer-term organizational goals for three to five years out.
Go through the evaluations and look for statements that express achievement. In every case, ask “How would we know?” and ensure that you have measuring systems in place.
Then have employees write their own evaluations one year, two years, or three years hence. The goals in the employees’ evaluations should cascade down from the organization’s goals; they needn’t necessarily be identical but they should be appropriate at an individual level.
Have conversations with employees to make their desired achievements indisputable (How would I know?) and measurable.
While the end-of-tour awards write-up exercise was beneficial because it forced each officer to get clear in his own mind what he wanted to achieve, it also opened the way to helpful dialogue. In my dialogues with each supervisor, I discussed what I was trying to accomplish on Santa Fe, and collectively they were able to translate that to what they needed to accomplish within their departments in order to support the higher-level goals. These discussions, during which we talked at length about the recursive goals and accomplishments, were very beneficial. BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND is an important mechanism for ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY.
• • •
As you work with individuals in your organization to develop their vision for the future, it is crucial that you establish specific, measurable goals. These goals will help the individuals realize their ambitions. In addition, you as a mentor have to establish that you are sincerely interested in the problems of the person you are mentoring. By taking action to support the individual, you will prove that you are indeed working in their best interest and always keeping the end in mind.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
For how far in the future are you optimizing your organization?
Are you mentoring solely to instruct or also to learn?
Will you know if you’ve accomplished your organizational and personal goals?
Are you measuring the things you need to be?
Have you assigned a team to write up the company’s goals three to five years out?
What will it take to redesign your management team’s schedule so you can mentor one another?
How can you reward staff members who attain their measurable goals?
Combat Effectiveness
Are you looking for resilience in your organization? We realized that resilience and effectiveness sometimes meant questioning orders.
September 1999: Somewhere in the Arabian Gulf
“Up scope.”
In the shallow water of the Arabian Gulf, we were setting up an attack on another submarine—the USS Olympia, which was playing an enemy diesel boat. We were halfway through our deployment period and were about to shoot the first-ever submarine-launched torpedo in the Arabian Gulf. It was an exercise and the target was Oly. (This was the submarine I was originally ordered to command, you might recall.)
We had the Commander, Submarine Group Seven, Rear Admiral Joseph Krol, on board to observe the exercise. Admiral Krol had allowed me to send Rick Panlilio home for the birth of his child and approved the early swap of Lieutenant Commander Tom Stanley as XO. It would be important to show the admiral he’d made the right decision. The pressure was on. This was going to be the test of leader-leader versus leader-follower. Would the mechanisms I had put in place deliver the kind of results I hoped for?
We were in position and I was sure no one would be asking to raise the communications mast this time. So far, so good. Just like the Maui basin, the water in the Arabian Gulf is shallow, and we needed to be in a good tactical position. We were demonstrating not only the capabilities of the USS Santa Fe, but more important, the U.S. submarine force’s ability to attack and sink submarines in this shallow body of water. We wanted any potential adversaries to know that they weren’t safe here or anywhere, and instead of making speeches, we were demonstrating it.
“Target, bearing . . . MARK.” Lieutenant Commander Rick Panlilio was on the scope and saw the “enemy.”
“Down scope.”
Lieutenant Commander Tom Stanley, the XO, announced that we had a firing solution, and Lieutenant Dave Adams recommended we shoot.
I didn’t have to drive the problem and was able to sit back and absorb the whole scene, walking from station to station, looking at the faces and posture of the men in the fire control party.
I ordered, “Shoot tube three.”
A shudder, and the exercise torpedo was on its way.
“Torpedo running hot, straight, and normal” was Weps’s report.
Officially, we were supposed to say, “Wire clearance maneuver complete, torpedo running.” But we’d changed our language to match what the World War II submariners said. Again, this was an example of our mechanism to tap our rich heritage.
I looked over at Admiral Krol and he seemed to be enjoying himself—a good sign.
The exercise torpedo signaled a hit! I announced it on the 1MC to cheers. The torpedo would now surface and a supporting craft with a crane would haul it out of the water and back to shore for refurbishment.
I headed down to the crew’s mess for a cup of coffee. The mess was packed with damage control parties conducting training. Admiral Krol came down and presided over a reenlistment ceremony. Since we were in a combat zone, the bonuses we awarded sailors when they reenlisted were tax-free. Ultimately, we would reenlist thirty-six sailors in 1999, twelve times the number who reenlisted in 1998. I would award more than half a million dollars in reenlistment bonuses, a record then. Leader-leader had paid off again.
December 1999: Somewhere in the Pacific
“Yellow sounding” was announced over the ship’s loudspeaker.
I was walking the ship with my flashlight and bolted for the control room. It was 0300, and we were carefully positioned to pick up a SEAL team coming out from land nearby. It had taken a lot to get to this point, and now we were about to muck it all up. Yellow sounding meant the water depth was less than we’d planned and we needed to move.
It was nearly a year into my tour as the captain of Santa Fe. We were back from deployment and conducting an exercise with the SEALs. We were in the last of three phases.
For phase one, we rendezvoused with a helicopter and picked up the SEAL team. Eleven burly guys, their weapons, two rolled-up Zodiac inflatable boats, two motors for the Zodiacs, and a bunch of equipment to blow stuff up left the helicopter, came on board the submarine, and went down the hatch. The helicopter flew away. Total elapsed time: less than a minute.
Together with the SEAL team we planned the mission for phase two. We transited near the location and scoped it out. We noticed where the shore lights were, where the fishing boats were, and—more important—where they weren’t. We checked local currents and the angle of the moon at various times in the night. After finding a good drop-off and recover point, we surfaced at night and launched the SEALs toward the beach. That had been three days earlier.
Now, it was time to pick them up, phase three. I imagined being one of those SEALs: having successfully accomplished the mission, getting back into the Zodiac, and heading out into the ocean in the middle of the night, hoping to find the submarine. Even though this was an exercise, the ocean was real, the near-empty gas tanks were real, and the darkness was real. It was important that we were in position for these guys.
It was pitch-black in the control room; we wanted to keep it dark inside so that the periscope operator could see outside. The speakers from our early warning receiver were chirping away. These are pulses from other radars that are being intercepted by our equipment and are translated to this audible tone. By the characteristics of the chirps—regular, of a certain tone—I could tell they were indicating regular fishing boats and merchants in the distance. Nothing to worry about.
Reports were coming into the control room from different parts of the shi
p: readiness to pick up the SEALs; the status of other contacts also confirmed we were all set. Things seemed to be going well.
I passed through the crew’s mess, one deck below the control room. Here, the lights were on and blankets were stacked in piles in case they were needed. Even though it was three o’clock in the morning, the crew was still ready to serve these guys soup as soon as they arrived on board.
Aft of the crew’s mess is the escape trunk. This is the main hatch that we would open to allow the SEALs to come down into the ship. This is where we would triage any injured SEALs.
Beyond that, I passed into the engine room where the nukes were ready to provide maximum propulsion even though we were sitting at all stop right now on the surface. The nuclear reactor was still running to provide us electric power and steam in case we needed it. If something happened—if a patrol craft or an enemy airplane came by, and we had to make a choice between getting out of there and leaving the SEALs or saving the ship—we were going to save the ship. It was important to plan, to pick the right location.
Forward, in the lowest level, in the torpedo room, torpedoes were loaded and ready. We didn’t expect trouble, but we were prepared to face it.
The wardroom, where the officers eat, was set up like an operating room by Doc Hill. This was where he would deal with any injured SEALs.
Now, here’s the thing: almost none of these preparations had happened because of my orders. They happened because someone on the crew thought, “Hey, those guys are going to be wet. They’re going to be cold. They’re going to be hungry. They might be injured. And we should get ready for them.” My crew didn’t wait for orders. They just did what needed to be done and informed the appropriate personnel. It was leader-leader all the way.
That’s when the yellow sounding was announced.
Mechanism: Encourage a Questioning Attitude over Blind Obedience
I entered the control room, where things were strangely calm. Surely my guys knew that if we moved out of position it would make it much harder for us to find the SEALs and for them to find us. The OOD on the bridge had already ordered “Ahead one third.”
I looked at the digital chart. A little arrow indicated our direction of motion, and it was pointing slightly toward the beach. I thought, “We don’t want to go ahead, we need to back out.” So I shouted out, “That’s wrong. We need to back.” (This meant order a backing bell.)
In the darkness, we recognized each other’s voices. Sled Dog was standing quartermaster. There was a pause and silence for half a second, then he said frankly, “No, Captain, you’re wrong.”
It stunned me, and I shut up and just started looking at the indications in the control room, including the compass repeaters showing the heading of the ship. I thought about what it takes for a young sailor to say, “Captain, you’re wrong.”
It dawned on me. The bow was pointing away from land and we were being set astern. That was what the arrow on the digital chart was showing. And I remembered that the watch team had planned it this way, with the bow out, in case we needed to make a quick getaway.
The small arrow shrank and grew in the direction away from land. The OOD ordered all stop. We’d moved one hundred yards, but that was all it took to reach deeper water.
Moments later we saw the Zodiacs. Had the men followed my order, we would have gone in the wrong direction; we might have missed them.
• • •
As I write this, the news is filled with the tragedy in Italy. On January 13, 2012, the cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground off Isola del Giglio. It appears the captain ordered a course deviation to take the ship close to the island as a nautical tribute to one of the employees. I wonder if anyone spoke up. How about the officer of the deck? How about the second in command? How about the helmsman, who must have seen the lights of the island less than a mile away? I sure wish some of them had had a questioning attitude. ENCOURAGE A QUESTIONING ATTITUDE OVER BLIND OBEDIENCE is a mechanism for CLARITY.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
How do we create resilient organizations where errors are stopped as opposed to propagating through the system?
Will your people follow an order that isn’t correct?
Do you want obedience or effectiveness?
Have you built a culture that embraces a questioning attitude?
Homecoming
Do you have the fortitude to go against the grain? There are significant benefits to thinking differently about leadership.
January 2000: At Anchor off Lahaina, Maui
We were thrilled to get back from deployment before Christmas and be reunited with our families. After the holidays, we got under way for a short period in the Hawaiian Islands for proficiency training. I had already been using some of Dr. Stephen Covey’s material from 7 Habits, so when he expressed a desire to ride a submarine, it was a natural fit for him to come ride Santa Fe. During his visit on board the Santa Fe, Dr. Covey asked me what the ship had accomplished. I ticked off the following list of accomplishments:
We steamed forty thousand miles safely.
We made nine port calls in six different countries, and the crew had acted as perfect ambassadors.
We hadn’t had a single liberty incident, something that I was reminded to avoid by my various bosses prior to the arrival of every port visit.
We maintained the submarine at 100 percent operational readiness, with zero operational impact due to repair, maintenance, personnel, or any other issue.
While on deployment, we reenlisted nineteen crew members for a total of more than half a million dollars in reenlistment bonuses, a record at the time.
We awarded 22 submarine qualifications (dolphins), and the crew qualified 290 individual watch stations, an average of 2.4 qualifications for each crew member.
Operationally, we had demonstrated some key capabilities, including our torpedo exercise in the Arabian Gulf, transiting the Strait of Hormuz several times and the Strait of Malacca twice, and picking up the U.S. Navy SEALs.
Of course, there were some things I couldn’t tell him about. To my mind, the most impressive statistic was the improvement in our retention results. The numbers came out like this:
CATEGORY
1998
1999
Enlisted reenlistments
3
36
Officer retention
0%
100%
Enlisted personnel selected for officer programs
1
3
Enlisted personnel advanced
30
48
Personnel determined to be ineligible for reenlistment (a bad thing)
8
1
Weeks (average) to qualify in submarines
45
38
Enlisted contact coordinators
1
8
E6 qualified diving officers
0
2
Port/starboard watch stations
7
0
Engineering assessment
Below average
Above average
Training program effectiveness
“Not effective”
“Very effective”
Medical assessment
Worst of 6 in Squadron Seven
Best of 6 in Squadron Seven
Contact coordination
Below average
Excellent
Tactical effectiveness in various mission areas
Below average to average
Above average to excellent
Why had the retention numbers gone up so much? Well, there were a number of reasons, but one of the key ones was that the junior enlisted men used to look to see what their chiefs did to get a sense of whether they wanted to stick around and have that job. The old-school chiefs didn’t have a particularly hard life, emphasizing the privilege of rank over obligation, but it wasn’t relevant. They weren’t in charge of anything.
&
nbsp; With the concept of Chiefs in Charge, the chiefs were working twice as hard. They needed to be out and about, being in charge of evolutions and ensuring that things went properly. They were the ones standing in front of the CO explaining why things hadn’t gone as well as they should have. Yet, their jobs now mattered and the decisions they made—they actually had decisions to make—affected the lives of 135 sailors and the combat effectiveness of a $2 billion warship. This was a job people could sign up for.
Two junior officers withdrew their resignation requests.
Santa Fe was awarded the Arleigh Burke Fleet Trophy. This award is given to the submarine, ship, or aircraft squadron having achieved the greatest improvement in battle efficiency during the calendar year. I attribute this to the leader-leader structure we developed on board Santa Fe.
Dr. Covey told me it was the most empowered organization he’d seen anywhere, not just in the military. (I was gratified to receive this recognition from a man whose work we had used to get us there.) Unfettered by the mental image of leader-follower, the crew approached the business of making every evolution, every operation excellent. At the time, we knew we were developing something new, but we didn’t know what it was. Through trial and error, the crew arrived at a body of practices and principles that were dramatically more effective than those within the leader-follower model. It was only toward the end that we understood we had replaced the leader-follower model with the leader-leader model.
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders Page 19