“We will.” Chief David Steele reminded me that his department had worked through the night while we were in San Diego to get our VLS missile tubes 100 percent operational so we could participate in the battle group–wide Tomahawk missile exercise. What I didn’t know was that Chief Steele had box seats at the Padres game (they came from behind to win) and had given those up. No one told him he had to do it or ordered him to do it. It was needed to support the mission and he just did it.
“Nav, do you remember when I was PCO sitting in the XO’s stateroom and you ‘checked out’ with him?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, why was it the XO’s job to tell you what you owed?”
“Well, I, uh, I don’t know.”
“It wasn’t. So here’s what we are going to do. You are all going to monitor your own departments and whatever is due. You are responsible, not me and not the XO, for getting it done.”
And with that, we unburdened ourselves of the effort of maintaining the tickler. This had two advantages. First, it would be most efficient because the work would be getting done without the overhead of maintaining the tickler and those darned tickler meetings. Second, there would be no illusion about who was responsible for the performance of the various departments: the department heads were!
No one had ever seen this before, but we were going to give it a try.
ELIMINATING TOP-DOWN MONITORING SYSTEMS is a mechanism for CONTROL.
Sure, I was worried that a lot of stuff would slip through the cracks and Santa Fe would get a reputation for not getting the work done, but that didn’t happen. I won’t say that we never again received a message zinging us for not reporting something, but they were easily remedied and not that important. What was incredibly powerful was the idea that everyone was responsible for their own performance and the performance of their departments; that we weren’t going to spend a lot of effort telling them what to do.
• • •
Supervisors frequently bemoan the “lack of ownership” in their employees. When I observe what they do and what practices they have in their organization, I can see how they defeat any attempt to build ownership.
Worse, if they’ve voiced their frustrations out loud, their employees perceive them as hypocritical and they lose credibility. Don’t preach and hope for ownership; implement mechanisms that actually give ownership. Eliminating the tickler did that for us. Eliminating top-down monitoring systems will do it for you. I’m not talking about eliminating data collection and measuring processes that simply report conditions without judgment. Those are important as they “make the invisible visible.” What you want to avoid are the systems whereby senior personnel are determining what junior personnel should be doing.
When it comes to processes, adherence to the process frequently becomes the objective, as opposed to achieving the objective that the process was put in place to achieve. The goal then becomes to avoid errors in the process, and when errors are made, additional overseers and inspectors are added. These overseers don’t do anything to actually achieve the objective. They only identify when the process has gone bad after the fact.
In his book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming lays out the leadership principles that became known as TQL, or Total Quality Leadership. This had a big effect on me. It showed me how efforts to improve the process made the organization more efficient, while efforts to monitor the process made the organization less efficient. What I hadn’t understood was the pernicious effect that “We are checking up on you” has on initiative, vitality, and passion until I saw it in action on Santa Fe.
TQL is now viewed as a passed fad. The Navy botched the introduction of TQL (done in a non-TQL way) so it’s a bad word to many. That’s too bad, because there are a lot of valuable ideas embedded in Deming’s thinking. I recommend his writings to you.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
Are you underutilizing the ideas, creativity, and passion of your mid-level managers who want to be responsible for their department’s work product?
Can you turn over your counterpart to Santa Fe’s tickler to department heads and rid yourself of meetings in the process?
How many top-down monitoring systems are in play within your organization?
How can you eliminate them?
“A New Ship”
How comfortable are you with showing your gut feelings to your staff? We didn’t even have the language to express doubt, ambiguity, or uncertainty.
January 29, 1999: En Route to Pearl Harbor (151 days to deployment)
A submarine isn’t designed to ride on top of an ocean’s surface because the top of the sail, where the bridge is located, is only twenty feet above the water. On the bridge, you lack the periscope, sonar, contact, and geographic positioning displays you have in the control room, thirty feet below.
What you do have is a nice 360-degree view, something you don’t have observing the world through the narrow lens of a periscope. So we drive the submarine from the bridge when on the surface. The only communication gear the driver has is a microphone into the submarine and a radio to talk to other ships. We came to augment this with a portable commercial radar we would rig up with a GPS display.
I was standing on top of the bridge in a harness. The inspection was essentially over and we were returning to port. Lieutenant Dave Adams was OOD, driving Santa Fe up the channel into Pearl Harbor. He chatted with the bridge phone talker and lookouts. Everyone, it seemed, was in a buoyant mood except me. We had followed the attack on the submarine with a successful attack on an enemy surface ship. We sank two “enemy” vessels, shooting two for two, and hadn’t been counterdetected. We had operated Santa Fe safely and effectively. We’d done well.
Still, I was thinking about how the inspection had gone in more critical terms and how much I’d had to drive solutions to problems.
“Bridge, navigator. Mark the turn.” I overheard Lieutenant Commander Bill Greene’s voice on the bridge loudspeaker. The navigation team in the control room was using bearings from the periscope and GPS to determine where Santa Fe was in the channel and when we needed to turn.
“Nav, bridge, aye,” Dave acknowledged, holding the microphone to his mouth, but he didn’t order the turn. I waited a second.
“Weps, are you going to turn?” I asked directly. In the narrow channel, every second counted. I glanced sideways at the familiar day markers and palm trees and knew we were at the point where we needed to turn.
“Yes, three seconds. I thought they were early.” He seemed miffed I had prodded him.
“Helm, right fifteen degrees rudder.” Santa Fe started a slow turn to the right, lining up with the next leg of the channel. It worked out just fine.
But I could see Dave had lost initiative, lost confidence, and lost control. He was no longer driving the submarine, I was. His job satisfaction had just taken a big hit.
Thinking Out Loud
Once we were safely moored at the pier, I pondered what had happened during our two days at sea: mispositioning the ship despite my explicit instructions; the inappropriate and surprising request to raise the communications mast in the middle of the attack; my interfering when Dave was driving the ship into port without my knowing what he was thinking. On top of all that, only about 10 percent of the crew were actually practicing the “three-name” greeting. Because we were in the middle of an inspection, I’d said nothing. As much as I had vowed not to give orders and to let an empowered group of officers “intend” the way to victory, I found myself on too many occasions running to the control room, or torpedo room, or sonar room, to solve some crisis and set things right. The successes we’d had still relied too much on my personal involvement. I wanted to be able to have a heart attack and have the ship continue to effectively take the fight to the enemy.
Why did these things happen? How did we get here?
While we waited for the inspection team to finish their report, I discussed these problems with the remaining department heads. We came up
with several causes.
First, the crew had lost perspective about what was important. My guys assured me that “during a real war” it would never happen, but I wasn’t so sure. The Navy’s experience at the beginning of World War II was that too many submarine crews and captains took their peacetime practices into war with them. The result was overly cautious operations that failed to inflict significant damage on the enemy. To me this was another manifestation of a lack of organizational clarity, and a tendency to avoid mistakes rather than achieve excellence.
Second, there was an absence of informal communication. There had been no “in an hour we will need to download the broadcast” and “the broadcast is coming down in five minutes,” which would have kept the issue front and center. We were our own worst enemy here.
As naval officers, we stress formal communications and even have a book, the Interior Communications Manual, that specifies exactly how equipment, watch stations, and evolutions are spoken, written, and abbreviated. By consistently using these terms, we avoid confusion. For example, we shut valves, we don’t close them, because “close” could be confused with “blow.” We prepare to snorkel, but then we report being ready—not prepared—to snorkel.
This adherence to formal communications unfortunately crowds out the less formal but highly important contextual information needed for peak team performance. Words like “I think . . .” or “I am assuming . . .” or “It is likely . . .” that are not specific and concise orders get written up by inspection teams as examples of informal communications, a big no-no. But that is just the communication we need to make leader-leader work.
We also discussed what had happened on the bridge as we approached Pearl Harbor. Here’s what I wish Dave had been saying: “Captain, the navigator has been marking the turns early. I am planning on waiting five seconds, then ordering the turn,” or “I’m seeing the current running past this buoy pretty strongly and I’m going to turn early because of it.” Now the captain can let the scene play out. The OOD retains control of his job, his initiative; he learns more and becomes a more effective officer. He’s driving the submarine! He loves his job and stays in the Navy.
We called this “thinking out loud.”
We worked hard on this issue of communication. It was for everyone. I would think out loud when I’d say, in general, here’s where we need to be, and here’s why. They would think out loud with worries, concerns, and thoughts. It’s not what we picture when we think of the movie image of the charismatic and confident leader, but it creates a much more resilient system. Later, even though Santa Fe was performing at the top of the fleet, officers steeped in the leader-follower mind-set would criticize what they viewed as the informal communications on Santa Fe. If you limit all discussion to crisp orders and eliminate all contextual discussion, you get a pretty quiet control room. That was viewed as good. We cultivated the opposite approach and encouraged a constant buzz of discussions among the watch officers and crew. By monitoring that level of buzz, more than the actual content, I got a good gauge of how well the ship was running and whether everyone was sharing information.
Inspection Debrief
“SUBRON Seven, arriving.” Commodore Mark Kenny was back on board to do the inspection debrief. If the grades had been bad he would have called me up to his office in Building 660. Nevertheless, I was apprehensive about our grades. I desperately wanted a win for the crew to build on.
“David, congratulations. Santa Fe is a new ship. You and your crew earned an above average.” I was stunned. In the submarine force, an “above average” actually is above the mathematical average for the fleet.
“My staff is very impressed,” the commodore continued. “They’ve been telling me all week how sailors have been welcoming them to Santa Fe, asking questions, being curious, and taking initiative. I was worried about the situations where your team let you down, and you handled those well.”
We were both thinking back to my behavior during PCO operations when I stepped over a fellow PCO to get the job done. Neither of us needed to mention it.
I grabbed the loudspeaker (1MC) and broadcast to the ship the great news. I could hear the men cheering. I cited specific examples of enthusiasm, initiative, and technical competence among the crew. The officers were congratulated on their enthusiasm and the initiative demonstrated throughout the command. All were smiles. Along with Chiefs in Charge and our nascent “I intend to . . . ,” the 10 percent of the crew who practiced the three-name rule were enough to create a major change in impression.
This affirmation brought us important credibility and served as a sturdy foundation for the changes we wanted to make going forward. Turns out we were going to need it.
The good times lasted less than an hour.
Mechanism: Think Out Loud
THINK OUT LOUD is a mechanism for CONTROL because when I heard what my watch officers were thinking, it made it much easier for me to keep my mouth shut and let them execute their plans. It was generally when they were quiet and I didn’t know what they would do next that I was tempted to step in. Thinking out loud is essential for making the leap from leader-follower to leader-leader.
Later, when I was the head of the tactical inspection team for two years, I rode most of the submarines in the Pacific. I can tell you that forward or aft, attack submarine or ballistic missile submarine, there is a tremendous reluctance for the junior officers to tell their superiors anything other than 100 percent certified information. There’s no room in our military language and no pictures in our heads for the kinds of context-rich conversations that are critical to good team performance. We aren’t comfortable talking about hunches or gut feelings or anything with probabilities attached to it.
Santa Fe was no exception. There was a strong cultural bias against thinking out loud. In the hierarchical structure I inherited, there wasn’t much need for it, and the language for thinking out loud hadn’t been exercised. We worked hard to ingrain this informal yet informative manner of speaking into the crew, and then along came a new sailor straight from school, and he wouldn’t want to say anything. I often wondered why we aren’t naturally learning the most effective way to communicate as a team. We say submarining is a team sport, but in practice it often amounts to a bunch of individuals, each working in his own shell, rather than a rich collaboration.
So, in order to make the fewest mistakes when reporting on things, we say as little as possible. This is a problem throughout the submarine force, and we worked hard to encourage the entire crew to say what they saw, thought, believed, were skeptical about, feared, worried about, and hoped for the future. In other words, all the things that don’t show up in the Interior Communications Manual. We realized we didn’t even have a language with which to express uncertainty and we needed to build that.
THINK OUT LOUD also works as a mechanism for ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY. If all you need your people to do is follow orders, it isn’t important that they understand what you are trying to accomplish. But we operate in a highly complex world, with the vagaries of an ever-changing environment and the opposition of a diligent and patient enemy. It’s not enough to put a finger on the chart and hope things come out well.
When I, as the captain, would “think out loud,” I was in essence imparting important context and experience to my subordinates. I was also modeling that lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
Do you ever walk around your facility listening solely to what is being communicated through informal language?
How comfortable are people in your organization with talking about their hunches and their gut feelings?
How can you create an environment in which men and women freely express their uncertainties and fears as well as their innovative ideas and hopes?
Are you willing to let your staff see that your lack of certainty is strength and certainty is arrogance?
To what degree does trust factor in the above?
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��We Have a Problem”
Who are your company’s inspectors, and how can you use them to best advantage? An approach of embracing external organizations helped Santa Fe retain control of our destiny.
January 29, 1999: In Port, Pearl Harbor (151 days to deployment)
“Captain, I intend to bring on shore power and shut down the reactor.”
“Very well, Eng.” Lieutenant Commander Rick Panlilio had quickly embraced our “I intend to . . .” approach and was off and running. When the ship came into port, we would hook up to shore power through four massive cables powered from a pier bunker supplying 440-volt electricity. Then we could shut down the reactor.
In order to safely execute this, and many other evolutions, we hung red danger tags on breakers, valves, or switches that, if operated during the procedure, would endanger someone’s life. These red tags are held inviolate, and any violation of the system is heavily scrutinized.
The tags would be hung first so that while the crew were connecting the four cables those cables were not inadvertently energized. This would be an electrical shock hazard to personnel as well as an equipment damage hazard because the submarine and pier electrical systems needed to be deliberately synchronized before being connected. This was a common routine, something we did every time Santa Fe returned from sea.
I was walking the ship thanking the crew for their hard work on the inspection. It was a big shot in the arm to do so well, and morale, for the moment, was high. As soon as I saw Rick, I knew something was wrong. The engineer was approaching with a cloud over his face.
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders Page 11
