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

by D. Michael Abrashoff

Leaders must free their subordinates to fulfill their talents to the utmost.

My experience has shown that helping people realize their full potential can lead to attaining goals that would be impossible to reach under command-and-control.

The book’s structure narrates episodes in Benfold’s two-year voyage through uncharted waters of leadership, and is organized around the lessons I learned. A chapter is given to each one: Lead by example; listen aggressively; communicate purpose and meaning; create a climate of trust; look for results, not salutes; take calculated risks; go beyond standard procedure; build up your people’s confidence; generate unity; and improve everyone’s quality of life as much as possible.

my years in the Navy taught me that the art of leadership lies in simple things—commonsense actions that ensure high morale and increase the odds of winning.

Stasis is death to any organization. Evolve or die: It’s the law of life. Rules that made sense when they were written may well be obsolete. Make them extinct, too.

As a leader, you can change your piece of the world, just as I was able to change mine.

Never before had employees felt so free to tell their bosses what they thought of them. In the long economic boom, people were not afraid of losing their jobs. Other jobs awaited them; even modestly qualified people moved from one company to another in a quest for the perfect position they believed they richly deserved.

What I wanted, in fact, was a crew that bore at least a dim resemblance to the ship’s namesake, Edward C. Benfold, a Navy hospital corpsman who died in action at the age of twenty-one while tending to two wounded Marines in a foxhole during the Korean War. When several enemy soldiers approached the foxhole, throwing grenades into it, Benfold picked up the grenades and stormed the enemy, killing them and himself in the process. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. (Incidentally, he came from the small town of Audubon, New Jersey, which has two other Medal of Honor winners as well, making it the highest per capita Medal of Honor city in the United States.) I wanted my crew to display courage and step up to the plate just as Edward Benfold had done.

instead of constantly scrutinizing the members of my crew with the presumption that they would screw up, I assumed that they wanted to do well and be the best. I wanted everyone to be involved in the common cause of creating the best ship in the Pacific Fleet. And why stop there? Let’s shoot for the best damn ship in the whole damn Navy!

One sailor told me that the crew thought I cared more about performance and about them than about my next promotion. That’s another thing you need to learn about your people: They are more perceptive than you give them credit for, and they always know the score—even when you don’t want them to.

My next assignment was to the destroyer USS Harry W. Hill as the combat systems officer, which made me a department head and also the tactical action officer in charge of running the combat information center. It was a good ship with a good commanding officer, but the executive officer (XO) was the most command-and-control officer I’d ever experienced in the military. Three weeks after I got to the ship in 1987, the XO called me into his stateroom when we finished the first exercise and told me flatly that I was the worst tactical action officer he had ever seen in his life. I think his assessment was right, so I took it as notice that I had to get better. It wasn’t easy, but when I left the ship eighteen months later, he told me I was the best tactical action officer he had ever seen.

The captain and XO could easily have fired me if they chose to, but I was eager to learn. They saw that I had the right attitude and leadership abilities, and they provided the training I needed in the technical skills. It was rough at the beginning, but they gave me chances, and I benefited. It taught me not to give up on people until I have exhausted every opportunity to train them and help them grow.

And I didn’t want to squander this leadership opportunity. I have learned over and over that once you squander an opportunity, you can never get it back. When I am ninety years old and hanging out at Leisure World, I don’t want to look back on my life and say, “If only I had…”

For example, we reduced “mission-degrading” equipment failures from seventy-five in 1997 to twenty-four in 1998. As a result, we returned $600,000 of the ship’s $2.4 million maintenance budget and $800,000 of its $3 million repair budget. Of course, our reward was to have the Navy’s budgeters slash exactly $600,000 and $800,000 from our allotment the following year. Then we saved another 10 percent from that reduced figure, and duly returned it, too.

The fact is that the new environment aboard Benfold created a company of collaborators who were flourishing in a spirit of relaxed discipline, creativity, humor, and pride.

Benfold went on to beat nearly every metric in the Pacific Fleet, and frequently the crew broke the existing record. Directly, I had nothing to do with these triumphs. As I saw it, my job was to create the climate that enabled people to unleash their potential. Given the right environment, there are few limits to what people can achieve.

The difference between thinking as a top performer and thinking like your boss is the difference between individual contribution and real leadership. Some people never make this jump; they keep doing what made them successful, which in a leadership role usually means micromanaging.

You have to train yourself in leadership, and you can’t afford to wait until you get promoted to begin the process. While you’re still an individual contributor, learn to think like your boss, so when the day comes to be a leader, you’re ready to step right in with your game plan in hand.

On the way to Jeddah, Dr. Perry was multitasking again: He was in the cockpit with the pilots because he wanted to understand the avionics of the new C-17s. On the runway at Jeddah, he saw the other C-17 I had on standby there, and he looked at me and said, “Mike, there are only ten of these planes anywhere. What are the odds on another one being here?” I never told him I had set that up, with three more along the route. He didn’t have to know; it wasn’t something he needed to worry about. My job was to make sure the secretary’s mind was free to think about the big problems, and that he didn’t have to give a thought to how to get there or what was next on the schedule. I wanted to lift every other burden off his shoulders. I even called his wife for him from time to time to let her know what we were doing, because he didn’t have time to call her himself. My role was to create the conditions in which the policy makers could do their work. I wanted to be like a helmsman working so deftly, maneuvering the ship in difficult conditions, that the skipper never has to tell me which way to move the rudder or how far to move it.

If your bosses see you lifting burdens off their shoulders, and they find out they can trust you, they stay out of your face. And that gives you the freedom you need to operate independently and improve your ship.

The signals you send are important. You train your crew how to operate through every decision you make and every action you take. IT’S FUNNY HOW OFTEN THE PROBLEM IS YOU.

Well, this was an open-and-shut case—if you are asleep on watch, you are guilty. There was no need to bother with the facts. So I sent the sailor to the captain for punishment, without any further investigation. To my utter surprise, the captain asked the sailor why he had fallen asleep on watch. The sailor said he had been up all night cleaning a dirty workspace. Why did he have to stay up to clean it? Because the chief told him it had to be done by 8 A.M. “Chief, why didn’t you give him more time to get it done?” “Because the division officer told me it had to be done.” I immediately saw where this was heading and started to sweat. The captain turned to the division officer, who turned to the department head (by this time, I was standing in a puddle), who turned to me and said, “The XO told me to get it done by 8 A.M.” How in the world could I have known that they were so short-handed that they would have to keep somebody up all night to get it finished? But in fact I should have known or at least been approachable enough for the officers to feel safe explaining to me why it was a problematic order. I didn’t get all the facts, I didn’t realize that there were not enough resources to get the job done in the time I had allowed. The captain dismissed the case and I felt like a complete, uncaring idiot. Never again, I promised myself, would I give an order without clearly articulating the goal, providing the time and resources to get it done, and ensuring that my crew had th...

NEVER FORGET YOUR EFFECT ON PEOPLE. Leaders need to understand how profoundly they affect people, how their optimism and pessimism are equally infectious, how directly they set the tone and spirit of everyone around them.

Mediocre leaders don’t even take the trouble to know their people.

NO ONE FOLLOWS A LEADER WHO LIES.

NEVER FAIL THE WASHINGTON POST TEST.

If what I’m about to do appeared on the front page of the Washington Post tomorrow, would I be proud or embarrassed? If I knew I would be embarrassed, I would not do it. If I’d be proud, I knew I was generally on the right track.

CHAPTER FOUR LISTEN AGGRESSIVELY

Each person who talked to him had his complete, undivided attention. Everyone blossomed in his presence, because he was so respectful, and I realized I wanted to affect people the same way.

I started with very basic questions: their names; where they were from; their marital status. Did they have children? If so, what were their names? (In time, I came to know not only my crew’s names, but those of their spouses as well.) Then I asked about Benfold: What did they like most? Least? What would they change if they could?

FIND ROUND PEOPLE FOR ROUND HOLES.

USE THE POWER OF WORD MAGIC.

If leaders back their words with action, if they practice what they preach, their words create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Call it “word magic.”

CHAPTER FIVE COMMUNICATE PURPOSE AND MEANING

My only role in this saga was to listen to Rafalko, appreciate his idea, and do my best to press it once I was convinced it was a good one. The force of his talent and thinking did everything else. My only regret was that I was not more forceful sooner in pushing his idea through. This is an example of a time when I should have bypassed the bureaucracy and not tolerated a six-week delay.

AFTER CREATING A GREAT BRAND, DEFEND IT.

My rules for shore-leave behavior in foreign ports were strict, clear, consistent, and non-negotiable. Anyone who discredited USS Benfold would be restricted to the ship for the remainder of the deployment.

In Bahrain, for example, my sailors hung out at the base bar and kept a close eye on the social temperature. The base security people said they could always tell Benfold sailors because they were the best behaved. One night, a serious fight, resulting in casualties, broke out between juiced-up sailors from two other ships. The three-star’s briefing reported that Benfold sailors refused to have anything to do with the rumble. As usual, they were clustered in a group on the far side of the bar, not getting involved.

FREEDOM CREATES DISCIPLINE.

Previously, people were fighting to get off the ship. Now they were fighting to stay aboard. That kind of desire translates into performance. I am absolutely convinced that with good leadership, freedom does not weaken discipline—it strengthens it. Free people have a powerful incentive not to screw up.

CHAPTER SIX CREATE A CLIMATE OF TRUST

NEVER PIT DOG AGAINST DOG.

Internal bickering and posturing does nothing for the bottom line.

EVEN THE WORST SCREWUP MAY BE REDEEMABLE.

In my book, nothing is sadder than people who try to inflate themselves by deflating others.

My work with Elliot produced an unplanned, important benefit. He let me send a crucial signal to the rest of the crew: “You may screw up, but we believe in comebacks. We will help and not give up on you.” Leaders and managers need to understand that their employees are keenly attuned to their actions and reactions. If they see you give up on someone, they understand instantly that there’s no room for redemption in this outfit, and they could be next to go. If they see you intervene to help someone who is worth your effort, they will be reassured. Though the process is tedious and time-consuming, you will benefit if people feel more secure, are more willing to take risks, and have a positive attitude about the organization.

AEGIS is the name of the missile fire control system on ships such as Benfold. In Greek mythology, Aegis was the shield made by Zeus from the head of the snake-headed Medusa. Today, it means the “shield of the fleet.”

The gray areas, in fact, are one reason we need mid-level managers. If everything were black and white, organizations would need only chief executives to make the rules and workers to carry them out without questions. Mid-level managers should be the ones to survey the gray areas and provide direction.

PROTECT YOUR PEOPLE FROM LUNATIC BOSSES.

BEING THE BEST CARRIES RESPONSIBILITY.