FORMER COMMANDER, USS BENFOLD
QUESTION: When
you were given command of the USS Benfold, it was one of the worst - performing
ships in the navy. A few months later, during Operation Desert Shield, it was
at the top of its class. Many of the changes you enacted became standard
operating procedure throughout the Navy. For that, the Navy awarded you medals
and promotions. Yet, you achieved these improvements from your crew in close
quarters, under strict Navy rules, and without being able to change any of your
sailors or rules. Much of the time you were understaffed, and you were in the
midst of a series of conflict situations. What did you do first?
ABRASHOFF: The
first 30 days after I took command of the ship were critical because people were just getting to know me and I was asking a lot of stupid
questions. So, instead of sitting behind my desk all day long, I went out and about talking to the sailors every day.
From
the beginning, I went to every nook and cranny in the ship. In the bowels of the ship there are eight sewage
pumps: four aft and four forward.
The subcontractor who made them used substandard
materials in all the mechanical seals on the pumps. As a result, they were the weakest link on the ship. Not only
were they breaking, but
because they were breaking on all the other ships too, there weren’t any spare parts in the supply
system. That’s a problem because
you’re out of business if you can’t pump sewage or treat it.
Once
a day, I would either go down to the forward pump room or the aft pump room. To do it, I had to climb down an
escape trunk on a ladder. I went
hand - over - hand four - decks down along this dirty escape trunk. There were cargo nets to catch you at every
level in case you fell off the
ladder. But I would go down there to talk to the guy who maintained the system to let him know how
important he was and that we
couldn’t operate the ship without him. It was important for everyone on the
ship to see I went down there.
QUESTION: Is
there a parallel in businesses?
ABRASHOFF: Yes. I see a lot of businesses today where people think
that everything revolves around them and they are better than anybody else. In
financial services, it’s sometimes the people executing trades. And yet, if the
people doing the mundane work don’t do their jobs - the nuts and bolts work of
maintaining computers, paying the bills, and even cleaning the floors - those
traders wouldn’t be able to do all the great things they do.
So what I tried to do on the ship was to show the crew
that no matter how mundane your job appears to be, you were valuable and the
ship couldn’t operate without you. That’s true in the Navy, it’s true in
business, it’s true everywhere.
QUESTION: How
many sailors were on the ship?
ABRASHOFF: I had
310 sailors on the ship. There were 256 men and 54 women.
QUESTION: The
military, like all but a few companies, runs on hierarchy. And yet, here you
are, the person in charge, climbing those ladders. Were you concerned you
might destroy your own authority?
ABRASHOFF:
Not at all. It was all about showing everybody that, yeah, there are different
levels of pay, different levels of rank, different levels of responsibility,
but if the ship goes down, we all go down, regardless of our rank.
What I found out was that the crew didn’t resent their
officers for having extra perks like private staterooms or private eating
quarters or getting paid more. They didn’t resent us because they knew we didn’t
think we were better than them. That’s the challenge companies need to come to
grips with, especially with regard to CEO pay. If executives start to believe
that they are better than everybody else, that’s when the true problems are
going to come in. So on the ship, what we tried to do was show that we’re all
in this together.
QUESTION: How
else did you demonstrate that you were all in it together?
ABRASHOFF: Well,
you can’t command a ship by sitting behind your desk. I mean it’s awfully
inviting to sit there and hide behind your paperwork and wait for people to
come in and tell you stuff. But if you do that, you won’t know what’s really going
on and you especially won’t hear the bad stuff.
What
I wanted to do was set an example that said, look, I know bad stuff is going to
happen. For me, the key was to get people to tell me about the bad stuff right
away so I could be part of the solution. That meant communicating that I’m not
going to shoot you if you tell me bad news. In two years, I never shot one
person on that ship for bringing me bad news.
QUESTION: What’s
more important, receiving bad news or good news?
ABRASHOFF: Bad
news. Absolutely. I don’t need to know every good thing that’s going on with
the ship. But I do need to know the bad news. That’s what will hurt us and it’s
where I can help.
QUESTION: Was
bad news ever withheld?
ABRASHOFF: Yes.
My biggest disappointment was from my best officer who was just an
extraordinary leader. He had personality. His people loved him. He was
technically gifted. One day, his sonar broke. We were in port and I didn’t know
it because we don’t use sonar in port. We were getting under way to go out to
sea to participate in a major fleet exercise with the aircraft carrier battle
group when he came to me and said, “ Captain, the sonar’s broken. ”
Now,
whenever bad news happened, the first question I asked was, “How long have you
known about it?” He said, “Two weeks.” In two weeks I could have helped him get
it fixed. That’s part of my job. I could have picked up the phone and gotten
technicians out to help him. His problem was that he took so much pride in his
work that he was afraid to ask me for help. There’s a lesson here. People need
to be on the lookout to make sure that the best people know they’re the best,
but are not so overconfident that they think they don’t need to ask for help.
QUESTION: Could
he have been afraid to ask for help?
ABRASHOFF: Yes.
But I actually think it was simpler than that. He just thought he could fix it.
Period. Now, it wasn’t his fault it broke. Complex
machinery breaks. But he thought he and his people could fix it. It turned out
they couldn’t and so we missed a commitment. We couldn’t participate in a major
fleet exercise. It was overconfidence and it took away all my options.
Confidence is good. But overconfidence is an enemy.
QUESTION: How
did you handle the problem?
ABRASHOFF: We were in my cabin and I looked him in the eye and I
said, “John, I’ve never been more disappointed in anybody than I am with you
right now. ” I said, “Two weeks ago, I could have been part of the solution. I
could have gotten somebody out here to help. But because you chose not to
include me in the solution, we’re going to miss a commitment and it’s your
fault. ” He was ready to slit his wrists. I could have yelled and screamed and
hollered, but the fact that I did it this way just devastated him. And the
message got out to the crew that bad news does not improve with age.
QUESTION: If
you’re seeking out bad news, how do you make certain that people who do good
things day in, day out are not overlooked?
ABRASHOFF: You
don’t seek out only bad news. You need to be on the lookout for people who are
responding to breakdowns and you need to be on the lookout for people who never
have any breakdowns, since they are doing things right. You need to take both
of those into account and then stroke them and communicate with them.
It’s like my sewage pump operator. You never think about
him when things are working well, and yet his equipment had the greatest propensity
for breaking down. That’s why I went down to visit him every day. I wanted him
to know that I was interested in him and in how I can help. I went down just to
make sure everything was working okay. That small act - climbing down four
decks through a dirty trunk - showed him that I cared, and I think that means a
lot to people. It shows them that their efforts are being recognized and that
they know they’re critical to the operation. That they are valuable and that
you value their problem - solving abilities. Paying someone that kind of
attention is a reward in itself.
QUESTION: You
raise an interesting point. How do you balance rewarding the individual and
rewarding the group?
ABRASHOFF: It is
a fine line. One of the things we were lousy at was recognizing people in a
timely manner. And in the Navy, if somebody does something great, a month
later somebody will decide, hey, the person deserves a medal. Well, those
medals are important because sailors gain bonus points in their advancement
exams as a result. You see, I can’t really promote them, but if they get a
medal, they get a bonus point on their standardized exams and they can use
those toward getting a promotion.
QUESTION: A
captain can’t promote people on a ship?
ABRASHOFF: No.
But there is an exception. I can recommend them for promotion and that gives
them the opportunity to take a standardized advancement exam. The entire
promotion process is exam - driven. The exception is a program called Command
Advancements. I’m authorized to advance three people a year to the next highest
grade for meritorious conduct. But this is really important. If these promotions
are not handled properly, they can cause a lot of heartburn among those who don’t
get it. The problem is that it can appear that you’re giving it to a favorite
person. When it’s viewed that way, it ends up causing more division.
When that happens, a good program ends up causing
divisions and even retaliation against the person that gets the advancement. I
saw it myself coming up the ranks. So when I took command of the ship, I laid
out the criteria and qualifications for Command Advancements. No requirements
were listed in the Navy manual. It was up to me. Whomever the captain wants to
advance is advanced. So I laid out my qualifications.
QUESTION: What
were they?
ABRASHOFF: One of
my requirements was how many times a person could take a test and not be
promoted. You see, the advancement process throughout the Navy is numbers - driven.
It’s all about vacancies at the top. Somebody can take a test ten times and
pass it every time but that person won’t get promoted if there aren’t any
vacancies at the next level. In some areas, there are very few jobs. In other
areas it’s wide open, and if you take the test and get even a minimal rating
you get promoted. Numbers drive the promotion process. It’s all based on
filling empty slots or billets.
ABRASHOFF: I’ll
give you an example. I had a sailor who was a machinery repairman. Each ship
gets one machinery repairman. Contrast that with the fact that I would get 40 fire
control technicians. As a result, there are only 300 machinery repairmen in the
entire Navy - one per shop. So there’s not much opportunity for advancement for
a machinery repairman. And to top it off, the sailor on my ship was Filipino
and English was his second language. As a result, he was stuck. He had been a
second class petty officer for ten years. Normally you get promoted after two
or three years. And this sailor would help everybody on the ship. He would stay
late. If he could fabricate a piece of equipment that wasn’t in the supply
system to help somebody keep the equipment running, he would do it. So, my
criterion was you’ve got to pass the test. He always passed the test, however,
there were never any and there billets or opportunities for advancement. When I
made this machinery repairman my first advancement promotion, the entire crew
cheered. They cheered because they knew what my criteria were and that he fit
it and deserved it.
QUESTION: What
about simply recognizing good individual and group performance.
ABRASHOFF: Yes.
We did that too. We instituted a program called Top Dog in the League. It
recognized the best sailor and I was very careful to rotate it among the
departments so that every department was being represented.
QUESTION: There’s
a lot of literature that says recognizing individuals can result in alienating
others. Do you agree with that view?
ABRASHOFF: Well,
even with the best of intentions, you can still screw up. We had a surprise
dispersing audit. It resulted in 50% of the ship flunking this inspection.
QUESTION:
What’s a dispersing audit?
ABRASHOFF: It’s
when they come and audit your pay records to make sure everyone is drawing all
the proper allowances and not overdrawing and that the records are being
processed in a certain manner. We had a dispersing office and it got the best
score in the Pacific Fleet, ever. So I got on the public address system and
talked about how great the dispersing office was to have done this and how
they’re really taking care of the crew. I thought everybody would be happy.
Now
the dispersing office works for the supply officer and then we have an admin
officer that the personnel office works for. Within 30 seconds, the personnel
officer was in my cabin. “Did you know that your personnel men are ready to
quit right now? ”I said, “What on earth for?” I asked. She said, “Don’t you
know that they are 50% of the dispersing audit? ”
It
turned out the personnel office processed the personnel forms before the
dispersing clerks got them. I never knew that. I said, “Oh my God. ” I turned
what should have been great celebration for everybody into one where 50% of the
people were angry. So recognition has both upsides and downsides and you have
to plan out very carefully how you recognize people and teams. You can make
some awful mistakes. You also have to think carefully about what types of
behavior you are rewarding. If you don’t do it right, the downsides can
outweigh the upsides.
QUESTION: As you
settled into your command, the culture of the ship changed. Many companies want
to change their cultures to enhance performance and increase employee retention
rates and satisfaction, among other things. How did you change your ship’s
culture?
ABRASHOFF: It
happened because of a lot of little things. There is no big silver bullet to
changing culture. And I’m not here to bad - mouth my predecessor on the ship.
But he sat in his cabin all day long with the door locked. It wasn’t just shut;
it was locked. If the major change agent is the person at the top - and I
believe that’s the case - then it’s a pretty bad idea for that person to keep
the door closed and locked. With my predecessor, the only people who could see
him were the second - in - command and the five department heads. Nobody else
ever saw him. So, just opening my door changed things.
I
also had pictures on my wall and when sailors would come into my cabin, I’d
walk them around the room and show them all these pictures of things from my
career. Then I’d ask them to take a seat. You should have seen the looks on
sailors’ faces when they would come in and sit down in the chair across from me
in the Captain’s Room. The expression was like, “I’ve never known what was in here.”
These sailors didn’t begrudge me for having beautiful quarters - my predecessor
spent a lot of money outfitting the cabin - even though they lived in berthing
apartments that could house 106 sailors in one space, sleeping in bunk beds
triple deep. But despite the disparity in quarters, the sailors were happy to
be in my cabin, sitting with me and having a conversation. Becoming accessible
and demystifying the office resulted in having the sailors respect me but not
fear me.
QUESTION: What
else did you do to change the culture?
ABRASHOFF: Communicating is essential. Technology can be a curse because
if you send an e-mail, you expect everybody picks up the same message. I found
that was not true. If I sent an e-mail it would be interpreted differently by
every person on the ship. So the challenge was to make sure the message was
not being misinterpreted as it makes its way down the chain of command. The
only way I could do that was to walk around and talk to the sailors and ask
them about their priorities for the day. If they knew their priorities, great. If
they didn’t, I knew who was in their chain of command and who was falling down
and blocking the flow of information.
QUESTION: Did
you use other tools?
ABRASHOFF: Yes.
You can’t smoke inside the skin of the ship anymore. There’s a designated
smoking area outside the skin of the ship. For us it was on the fantail, way
back at the stern of the ship. Smokers know everything that goes on in an
organization. It’s because there’s no rank structure involved in smoking. You’re
all up there, you’re all equals, you can’t smoke inside the building, so you
have to go stand out in the cold.
Well, at night there were no lights on the fantail. I’d go
out and just stand there on the deck and nobody would know I was there, and I
would listen to the smokers. For reasons I said, smokers talk about everything
that’s going on in the ship and about everyone. I could just sit there picking
up intelligence.
The challenge for leaders is to figure out where there are
pulse points in their organization and then to figure out a way to tap into
them, whether overt or covert. If you understand what people are talking and
thinking about, you’ll get a pretty good understanding of what you have to do.
QUESTION: What
metrics did you use to make sure your change efforts were on track?
ABRASHOFF: On a
Navy ship, you’ve got all these inspections you have to pass like the
engineering inspection. It inspects thirteen major programs and is the most
thorough and intrusive inspection ever known to man. In addition, every other
function on the ship gets inspected. It’s the way the Navy does things.
QUESTION: What
did you come up with?
ABRASHOFF: Retention
was one of my metrics. When I took over the ship we were at 71% of our
operating strength. That meant that 100% of the work was being done by a crew
that was only 71% of its full component. 29% of our billets - jobs - were unfilled.
Before me, no one in the Navy really looked at retention.
I
also looked at our disciplinary rate and at our Workmen’s Compensation Rate.
We have a form of Workmen’s Compensation in the Navy called Limited Duty. And
if you have a headache or a bad back - some malady like that - you get
transferred to a hospital. And because the Navy doesn’t have enough doctors,
you’re assigned to the hospital and it might take six months until a doctor can
even look at you.
So
during that time you’re picking up trash in the parking lot of the hospital
instead of working on a ship. Nobody ever checks these soft metrics. I never
knew to check them either. And I started adding up how many sailors had
Workmen’s Comp in my predecessor’s last year - 31 sailors took Workmen’s Comp
in that previous year - whereas in my last year only two sailors took Workmen’s Comp.
The
other metrics that turned me on were the disciplinary statistics. Twenty eight
sailors in my predecessor’s last 12 months got placed on report. And of those
28 sailors, 23 got thrown out of the Navy; and 14 were young African - American
males even though they only made up 10% of the workforce. And so you have a
subset of the population that’s getting placed on report 50% of the time.
What
we tried to do on the ship was to get across to sailors that we’re all in this
together. We developed what we called a unity program instead of a diversity
program. I wanted the crew to focus on our common purposes as opposed to our
differences.
You
can’t legislate what people do in their off time, but I sure as heck can
legislate what goes on in my workplace. And the crew knew that we weren’t going
to tolerate sexual harassment or racial prejudice. We had only five
disciplinary cases on four sailors in my last 12 months in command - one guy
went twice. And I was looking at who they were and they were all white males.
And I went back to the last time a black male got placed on a report - it was
17 months prior to that. It was a statistic that I followed after I left the
ship and it was ten months after I left the ship till the next black male got
placed on report.
So
for 27 months, a subset of the population that used to make up 50% of the cases
now made up essentially none. And it wasn’t because we lowered standards or
told people not to put black men on report. It was, hey, we’re all in this
together - you treat each other with respect and dignity and everybody rises up
to perform at a higher level because that’s what the expectations were.
So
when I left the ship, I sent an e-mail to the Three Star Admiral and I said
to him,“Why don’t you hold us captains responsible for these metrics? ” And
the Three Star comes out - he’d been in the Navy for 35 years - and turns to
his assistant and asks, “How can we gather these statistics?” And the assistant
said we already collect them. He said to the Three Star, “All you do is push
this button, and you can get them for every ship.” Though we collected the
information, nobody had ever used it before. So the Three Star ran the
statistics and looked at it and found there was a 100% correlation. Ships that
had the highest disciplinary rates and the highest Workmen’s Compensation
rates had the lowest standings in the Fleet.
QUESTION: Retention,
disciplinary, and Workmen’s Compensation rates are one thing. But in business,
aren’t the financial metrics the one’s that really matter?
ABRASHOFF: The criticism from people who hear me speak is that, in
the Navy, I never had to worry about a top line or a bottom line. And it’s true
- I didn’t. I had a different type of pressure to worry about. What I had to
live with was that if I didn’t do my job correctly, I would have to write to
parents and tell them their sons or daughters weren’t coming home. My point is,
you need to use metrics that matter in your line of work. Financial metrics are
only one type of performance measurement.
QUESTION: You
said you were at only 71% of your full component of crew. How did you deal with
recruitment and retention issues?
ABRASHOFF: You
can’t just go out and pick somebody off the street. You have to recruit them,
get them through nine weeks of boot camp, and get them through additional
training for the job they’re going to fill. It takes a minimum of nine months
after you lose somebody to get a replacement. And then the replacement that you
get is somebody that’s eighteen years old and has no experience. So, what we
tried to do was to recruit our people every day so that they would stay and
allow us to focus our time and get it from the basic level to the intermediate
level or even to the advanced level.
QUESTION: What
do you mean recruit them every day?
ABRASHOFF: I mean
give them recognition, talk with them, listen to them, and, most importantly,
get them to engage their brains. I would always ask sailors why we’d do things
a certain way. And they’d always respond, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
So
the biggest thing I had to get over with them was that we don’t do things
because that’s the way we’ve always done them. We do things because we’ve
examined every alternative and this is the best way. And so by changing that
mentality, when they had to research things and find out why we had to do
things a certain way, they started coming up with ideas of how we could do
things better and then got invested in it. They got excited and engaged. I
mean, if you develop a new process or procedure, you have a stake in it. It’s
yours. That’s what I mean by recruiting them every day.
Let
me give you an example. To shoot Tomahawk cruise missiles is a very laborious
procedure where you get the mission via satellite and sometimes you get the
missions at the last minute — like when Saddam (Hussein) was still in power.
The way it works is you have to program the missile to get to the first land
point then the next and so on. This process can take about two hours.
Well,
we knew we were going to be targeting Saddam because he had just thrown the
weapons’ inspectors out back in 1997, and we were being given probable
scenarios for launches. Back then, none of the ships could meet the time
requirements because we were getting the missions too late and we didn’t have
enough time to program and execute.
So,
my Tomahawk guys got together and researched every step of the launch
procedures. When the Tomahawk was first used in Desert
Storm, it used a terrestrial navigation system. But, as the decade wore on,
the missile was upgraded to a GPS Navigation system. But Navy had never taken
the terrestrial navigation system steps out of the procedures! So when my
sailors did their research, they said, “Gee, these procedures no longer apply.”
We then sent a rapid critique to the powers in Honolulu who said, “Hey,
you’re right - you’re authorized to use these new procedures. ” Letting my guys
figure it all out was recruiting them every day. By the way, the processes they
developed are now called the Benfold Procedures throughout the Navy. Four
enlisted guys who were Tomahawk technicians came up with it. And if we didn’t
have a culture that asks, “Where does every step come from and why is it there?
” we would have never been able to do that. Letting people think is really
important if you want them to stay.
What we tried to do was to constantly challenge every
aspect of our job to see if we couldn’t do it better and be more efficient or
to get something done faster. And we also push responsibility down to the
lowest level. That keeps people motivated. And, by the way, if somebody had the
aptitude I didn’t care what their rank was or how many years they had in the
job. If they had the aptitude and wanted to do it, we’d train them for it. That
created a lot of commitment.
QUESTION: Are
you saying that to get the job done you would ignore rank and seniority?
ABRASHOFF: Yes.
Absolutely. When we’re at sea, we’d have to stand watch 24 hours a day. And
there are many positions on the ship where previously, only officers or chief
petty officers would sit in that position. But when I took command of the ship,
in six or seven of these critical mission areas, we only had one trained
officer or petty officer to do the job. If I lost that one person, I couldn’t
have gotten the ship underway. That’s not good. So, my first job was to train a
second backup team to my first string. It worked so well we trained a third
string. Eventually, we were three deep in every critical position. It worked
so well that I asked the question why we had a rank attached to this position
in the first place. Why couldn’t we just open it up to anybody who had the
aptitude and ambition to do it? The answer was there was no reason. For
example, the watch on the bridge is manned by the Officer of the Deck followed
by the Junior Officer of the Deck. In the history of the Navy, these positions
have always been manned by officers. But I qualified a Chief Petty Officer in
the job and I eventually qualified a First Class Signalman to be an Officer of
the Deck. He was the Officer of the Deck and he had Lieutenant Junior Grade
underneath him as Junior Officer of the Deck. Now that’s creative! And that’s
certainly not the typical Navy hierarchy. And the sailors loved it.
QUESTION: Did you get any pushback from your superiors on that?
ABRASHOFF: One of
the lowliest jobs among all the high - level Navy commanders is the
interception operations job where we would stop cargo ships going into and out
of Iraq and inspect for contraband. It was hot, dirty, grimy work - none of
the ships wanted to do it. And there was this squadron commander who was in
charge of it. So, I said, “Well, you know, let’s make him look good.”
So we became the best inspection ship in the Gulf. And he
flew over and we would communicate with him through a console on the ship that
was traditionally manned by an officer. The day he came onto our ship, he said
he wanted to talk to the person he’d been talking to on the radio for this
operation. I said “ Here he is, ” and it was a Second Class Petty Officer. He
said, “Seriously, where’s the officer?” I replied, “Well, I’ve got him standing
the watch. ” He asked, “You mean that I’ve been talking to a Second Class Petty
Officer for the last three hours? ” I said, “Yes, you were.”
I thought I was going to get reprimanded but instead he
was utterly amazed because he thought the person he was talking to was an officer
because of the quality of the work that the guy was providing. So, in my view,
if you’ve got the aptitude, I don’t care what your rank is. People feel that.
They understand it.
QUESTION: What you have described is really a leadership story. Is
that a fair way to characterize your message?
ABRASHOFF: Yes.
We are talking about leadership. One critical component of leadership is how
effectively the leader communicates with his or her people. Most importantly is
what the mission is and whether people understand its importance. The problem
is that a lot of people just aren’t clear as to what the mission is. That leads
to uncertainly and to conflicting priorities. Communicating with the greatest
amount of clarity so that everybody understands where you’re going, what you’re
doing, and why it’s important, is critical.
The other critical thing is that your people have to
respect your technical abilities in order to believe you have sound judgment
and can lead them in the right direction. I was at one large aerospace company
doing a presentation on the day the CEO got fired. Somebody asked me, “Do you
think you could be CEO of the company? ”I said, “ No, I don’t. ” I said it
because I don’t know the first thing about how to make a plane fly. I don’t
know how to make rockets go through space and I don’t have the technical
competence to understand how the aerospace industry works. So no matter how
great a leader I might be, if I don’t have the technical competence, I’ll never
gain the respect of the people.
When I took command of the ship, the crew thought that
their mission was to get their captain promoted. That’s wrong. The mission of
the ship is to be able to defend itself and the country’s interests. I tried to
show the crew that I understood this and I gave them reason to be confident in
my decision - making ability and my knowledge and understanding of where we
needed to go. They “rogered out” and got behind it.
A lot of CEOs forget that their employees want them to be
competent in the areas that their company does business, not just in
specialized skills, like finance. Leaders have to be technically competent and
then they have to be able to engage their people so that they understand where
they are being taken and why. The bottom line is, a leader has to convey to the
people why it’s in their own best interest to support him or her.