Following is an excerpt from an interview with retired Navy Commander Mike Abrashoff. During the first Gulf War, Abrashoff took the guided missile destroyer USS Benfold from its position as one of the worst-performing ships in the Navy to the top of its class in only a few months’ time. The lessons he learned from this experience are explained in his book, It’s your ship. Now retired, Abrashoff helps companies and their executives understand and embrace this new leadership order.

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 US Navy. 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 were 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 go down to either 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.

Q: 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 nutsand- 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.

Q: 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-incommand and the five department heads. Nobody else ever saw him. So, just opening my door changed things.

Another tactic I used was to interview every crew member on the ship. I did it in my cabin one on one. When I did the interviews, I used something I learned from former Defense Secretary William Perry, whom I worked for at the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, whenever a foreign minister or defense minister came by, the first thing Perry did was to take pains to put the visitor at ease. He would walk the person around his office – and it was a huge office – and he would show the visitor all his pictures on the wall and explain their significance. For example, he had a series of pictures of nuclear-tipped missiles that were taken as the former Soviet Union was breaking up. He would talk about them and their significance. That technique put everybody at ease. 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.

Q: 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 13 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.

I had a post office, and the Navy says it’s supposed to have so many one-cent stamps and so many 41 cents and so on. And once a year, a Navy postal guy would come and do a surprise audit of our post office to make sure that the books balanced and that we had all the stamps we were supposed to have. 

So the bottom line is we inspected and measured everything – laundry, the ship’s store and every financial function on the ship. In addition, how well we employed our weapon systems got measured, our maintenance programs got inspected and our safety programs got inspected. So we have all the metrics in the world to determine how well a ship is doing.

We have all these metrics, but the truth is they don’t turn people on. So, I started thinking about metrics that make more sense.

Q: What did you come up with?

Abrashoff: Retention was one of my metrics. When I took over the ship, we were at 71 percent of our operating strength. That meant that 100 percent of the work was being done by a crew that was only 71 percent of its full component. And 29 percent 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. 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.

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. 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; 14 were young African-American males, even though they made up only 10 percent of the workforce. And so you have a subset of the population that’s getting placed on report 50 percent 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. I was looking at who they were and determined they were all white males. 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 10 months after I left the ship until the next black male got placed on report.

So for 27 months, a subset of the population that used to make up 50 percent 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 them and found there was a 100 percent correlation. Ships that had the highest disciplinary rates and the highest workmen’s compensation rates had the lowest standings in the fleet.

It was a direct correlation. A month later, the commanding officers’ fitness reports were changed to include these metrics – their retention rates, their disciplinary rates and their workmen’s compensation rates. It’s now a standard by which captains are getting judged. My point is, like a lot of companies, we collected all the statistics; we were just paying attention to the wrong ones.