It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy

by D. Michael Abrashoff

People ask how I got along with the other commanding officers. I have to be honest: less well than I should have. If one ship in a ten-ship group is doing conspicuously well, it’s hard to imagine the other nine feeling good about it. Yet I never stopped to consider those feelings, which, of course, included my own competitiveness. That was a mistake on my part. I certainly made life uncomfortable for the nine other commanding officers in my battle group. Their sailors would complain that Benfold was doing this or that, so why couldn’t they? I was proud of our accomplishments, and to me it was logical for the other ships to simply adopt what we were doing. After all, top performance was what everyone was supposedly trying to achieve. That was one area where I failed to put myself in other people’s shoes and see things their way. You might say I was arrogantly naive. In hindsight, I could have been much more supportive of my colleagues—for example, by telling them in advance what we were doing, so they could join us voluntarily rather than having to be ordered to join us later. Being compared unfavorably to Benfold—time after time—must have caused the wrong kind of competition. In my eyes, I was merely competing with myself to have the best ship possible. I never cared what the competition was doing. But in retrospect, it’s obvious that they cared what we were doing, and they didn’t like it one bit. I wish I had seen that at the time. If you decide to go the Benfold route in...