It didn’t take me long to realize that my young crew was smart, talented, and full of good ideas that frequently came to nothing because no one in charge had ever listened to them. Like most organizations, the Navy seemed to put managers in a transmitting mode, which minimized their receptivity. They were conditioned to promulgate orders from above, not to welcome suggestions from below.
I decided that my job was to listen aggressively and to pick up every good idea the crew had for improving the ship’s operation. Some traditionalists might consider this heresy, but it’s actually just common sense. After all, the people who do the nuts-and-bolts work on a ship constantly see things that officers don’t. It seemed to me only prudent for the captain to work hard at seeing the ship through the crew’s eyes. My first step was trying to learn the names of everyone aboard. It wasn’t easy. Try attaching 310 names to 310 faces in one month.
At two o’clock one morning, I woke up suddenly and said to myself, “The only way I can create the right climate is to tell every sailor, in person, that this is the climate I want to create.” I decided to interview each crew member on the ship so he or she could hear my expectations directly.
I raced to work that morning, and, without informing my chain of command, I began to interview five crew members a day, one at a time.
I didn’t know where I was headed when I started the interviews. I just knew I was desperate to set a different tone. 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?
I tried to establish a personal relationship with each crew member. I wanted to link our goals, so that they would see my priority of improving Benfold as an opportunity for them to apply their talents and give their jobs a real purpose.
My interviews included more detailed questions: Did they have special memories from high school? How about from their hometowns? I asked if they had goals for their time in the Navy; what about for the future? I always asked them why they had joined the Navy. Until this point, I never knew why people signed up. I learned by listening that 50 percent enlisted because their families could not afford to send them to college, and 30 percent joined to get away from bad situations at home—drugs, gangs, and other violence, for example. Some of their stories broke my heart.
One sailor was raised by a distant relative after his parents were killed in a car accident when he was very young. Another grew up in a neighborhood where gunfire at night was not an uncommon occurrence. Yet another sailor’s family
were immigrants who arrived in this country with nothing and worked any jobs they could get to support their children.
In just about every case, my sailors were not born with anything remotely resembling a silver spoon in their mouths. But each and every one of them was trying to make something meaningful of their lives. This is one of the greatest strengths of our all-volunteer military force. They are all good, young, hardworking men and women. They deserve nothing but our respect and admiration.
Something happened in me as a result of those interviews. I came to respect my crew enormously. No longer were they nameless bodies at which I barked orders. I realized that they were just like me: They had hopes, dreams, loved ones, and they wanted to believe that what they were doing was important. And they wanted to be treated with respect.
I became their biggest cheerleader. How can you treat people poorly when you know and respect them? How can you put people down when you realize that the journey they are on will not only improve the workplace and help you, but will improve society as well? I enjoyed helping them figure out what they wanted in life and charting a course to get there.
Most of these sailors had never been in a commanding officer’s cabin before.
But once they saw that the invitation was sincere, the response was overwhelming. I had a microphone for the ship’s public-address system on my desk. Whenever I got a good suggestion, I hit the button and told the whole ship about it. I didn’t have to go through a management committee—the turnaround time for launching a good idea was about five minutes.
From those conversations, I compiled two lists of all the jobs performed on the ship. List A consisted of all our mission-critical tasks. On list B were all our non-value-added chores—the dreary, repetitive stuff, such as chipping and painting.
I tackled list B with gusto. One sailor I interviewed early on reminded me that we repainted the ship six times a year. Every other month, my youngest sailors—the ones I most wanted to connect with—had to spend entire days sanding down rust and repainting the ship. It was a huge waste of time and effort, mental as well as physical, and a drain on morale to boot.
The sailor suggested a better way: Use stainless steel bolts and nuts to replace the ferrous-metal ones that streaked rust down the sides of the ship. Great idea, I said. Then we checked the Navy supply system. Sorry, no stainless steel fasteners in stock. Pushing the envelope, we went shopping at the nearest Home Depot (as well as a few other stores), and used the ship’s credit card to pick up thousands of dollars’ worth of stainless steel fasteners. Once installed, they got
us out of painting for nearly a year. By the way, the entire Navy has now adopted stainless steel fasteners for installation on every ship.
Next we investigated every piece of removable metal that was topside on the ship and was susceptible to corrosion. There was a relatively new process for preserving the metal that involved baking it to remove surface impurities, then flame-spraying it with a rust-inhibiting paint. This highly effective process was already in use by the Navy, but the facilities to do it were so small that it was impossible to treat even a fraction of what was required. So we found a steel- finishing company in San Diego that could do the job. The entire process cost
$25,000, and the paint job was guaranteed to last for years. The sailors never touched a paintbrush again. With more time to learn their jobs, they began boosting readiness indicators all over the ship. The Navy has since dramatically increased the capacity to do this for every ship.