"People Want To Do the Right Thing": Michael Abrashoff Talks Performance, Safety, and Human Nature

Few people have more credibility to teach about effective leadership than Michael Abrashoff. Captain Abrashoff is, most notably, the former commander of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Benfold, a ship that—when he assumed command at the age of 36—was one of the worst-rated ships in the U.S. Navy. During his two years at the helm, he led a change in culture that unleashed the crew’s potential to transform the Benfold into a ship ranked top in performance, while increasing retention and staff promotions.

The strategies and philosophy that made it possible are the subject of his bestselling first book, It's Your Ship. He’s since also written Get Your Ship Together and It’s Our Ship. He currently advises clients in a wide range of industries on issues of leadership and performance.

Captain Abrashoff will be the opening keynote at the SafeStart Human Factors Conference on November 5th and 6th just outside Nashville, Tennessee. I recently had the opportunity to interview him in advance of the conference.

(If you'd prefer to listen to our conversation, you'll find the recording here.)

Sir, I’ve been looking forward to the interview. Let’s jump right in. Who were your greatest leadership influences before taking command of the USS Benfold?

First and foremost, I had the great honor to be chosen the number two military assistant to the Secretary of Defense. His name was William Perry. I was not in a leadership role; I was an individual contributor.

They never asked me my advice on anything. I executed on what they decided on. I would sit in every meeting in the back of the room and I’d watch how he made decisions. I watched how he was very respectful of people and allowed them to get their points across.

At the end of every briefing, he would summarize what he heard and ask the person if that was correct and if they wanted to correct anything of what his impression was. After that, he would make his decision. Along the way, he treated you with respect and dignity. People seemed to stand taller. They were respected in every interaction with him. He didn’t care what your rank was. You could be a private or you could be a general. If you had an idea how to improve something just one percent, he wanted to hear from you regardless of your rank.

I was able to observe the impact this had on people. People respected him greatly, but people didn’t fear him. As a result, they were able to be open and honest. That enabled him to make better decisions.

Sitting there and watching that for 27 months had an impact on me that I would like my crew to have a similar level of respect for me. In order to get that, I needed to respect them in return in that I don’t care what their age is or what their rank is or how long they’ve been in the organization. If they have an idea how to improve a process one percent, I want to hear from them.

That’s how my first role model in how to lead and how to get the best advice and the best processes in place so that you can be successful.

You told another interviewer that you were quite nervous taking command of the Benfold. Do you believe that nervousness was helpful for you focusing on the challenge, that it motivated you?

Absolutely! I was nervous—not nervous, insecure is a better term—“Am I doing the right thing?” and “Is there a better way?” That insecurity caused me to always be challenging my assumptions.

As you know, accidents happen when complacency sets in. Being insecure caused me never to become complacent. As a result, that caused us to challenge every aspect of operation, but first and foremost with safety. What drove me at this point was not my next promotion. I never wanted to have to write the parents of any of my sailors, telling them that their sons or daughters weren’t coming home because we didn’t give it our best.

I can plainly state that I was insecure every day. That caused me not to become complacent and also to keep my crew from becoming complacent. We had one of the safest ships in the Navy as a result.

Let’s say someone this week gets pulled into managing for the first time. He or she is hired or promoted into a position as a manager over a team of, let’s say, five people. And this person asks if they can have coffee with you to ask for your advice. What would you tell this brand new manager?

Absolutely. Get to know your people and interview them. Find out what motivates them. Find out what they are proud of in their lives. Get them to have a sense of comfort with you that you won’t rip their head off if they come up with a different idea or they do something differently.

What I would also tell a new manager is that whenever I went into a new situation, I didn’t change anything for the first 30 days. Instead, I would sit there and watch and listen and ask questions. I wanted to find out what was working. I wanted to find out what could be done better.

Throughout my years in the military and since I got out, I’d see new managers come in and say, “Well, this is what worked in my last job. It’s going to work here,” and immediately change everything right off the bat. What that did was upset the organization and threw them off balance. Some of them never recovered. What worked for you in your previous job may not work for you in your new job. So I was always careful not to make disruptive changes until I understood the flow of the organization and what was working and why and what wasn’t working and why. In that 30 days, I asked questions. I listened, but I didn’t make any judgments. So that’s what I would advise a new manager. Also during that 30 days, talk to each person. Find out what their goals are and what drives them and what they are most proud of in their life. Get to show them that you are human and you care about them. If your people think you care about them, they will follow you into battle.

You took the time to sit down with all of the 310 crew members of the Benfold. That’s a lot of time talking with people. You admit in the book (It’s Your Ship) that you were maybe a little bit clumsy at it to start with. Tell me, if you would, why you did that, what you learned in the process, and what that did for the performance of the ship.

I’m a stickler for learning people’s names and faces. I just think it tells people you care about them if you can remember their name. I was having a tough time learning people’s names and faces. I was also struggling with how to instill a sense of ownership and a sense of urgency.

In the middle of the night, I’m not sleeping. I’m tossing and turning. And it hit me, I’m just going to interview them. That way I can get to know them. I’ll remember their names and faces. I’ll look them in the eye and tell them what we’re about, that we’re playing to win, that we’re not playing to come in number two, and it’s not about me, it’s about all 310 of us working together as a team. That’s where the idea came from.

You’re right, I wasn’t perfect at it at the beginning. I didn’t know exactly what I was searching for when I started it. But when I saw the results of people smiling and people looking you in the eye and giving you thoughtful ideas and recommendations on how to improve, I saw what the power of these interviews was. That emboldened me to become a better interviewer and to set people at ease and to get the most out of them.

Anyone who’s in leadership or managing ends up being something of a student of human nature. What about human nature made you most nervous as the commander of the Benfold?

That’s a great question. I’ve never heard it phrased like that before. I guess when it came to my crew, I was never nervous about them because I had great confidence in them in that I knew that after we set the tone and we set the culture that they would do the right thing. I can’t honestly tell you that I was ever afraid of anything that they would do.

But there were times when I didn’t get the results that I anticipated. Instead of blaming them, I would take a deep breath and look at what I didn’t do right. I either didn’t communicate to them what my goals were, I didn’t give them the training, I didn’t give them the time or the resources. So if I didn’t get the results I was looking for . . . my assumption about their human nature was that they wanted to do a great job and that I was the one who failed at something. I’ve kept that with me ever since. And when something doesn’t work out, I don’t blame others and instead I look inward and ask myself how I contributed to this.

What I’ve found about human nature is that people want to do the right thing. If they don’t, the process is bad or the culture is bad, or you don’t communicate to them what the goals are, or you don’t give them the training. That’s what I focused on continually: giving them the tools so they could deliver excellence.

Was there a particular aspect of human nature that made you most optimistic in the early days of that command, whether that was reciprocity, or people being naturally attached to accomplishing a mission, or something else about people that gave you great hope people would step up?

I used to tell my sailors: "You never go wrong when you do the right thing." What I found about their human nature was when you treat them decently and with respect, and if they feel emotionally attached to what they are doing, they’ll never let you down. As a result, our motto was “Never go wrong when you do the right thing.” And I’ll support you. I never reprimanded anyone if they came up a little short. If I can get 90 percent out of somebody without me getting involved, just them doing it on their own, that’s something to celebrate. I’m not going to berate them for not getting the final 10 percent. I was never disappointed because I knew they wanted to do a great job . . .

I’m hesitating because there was one time when I was severely disappointed. It was my number one department head. A piece of equipment broke and he didn’t tell me about it for two weeks. As a result, we missed a commitment. He didn’t (fail to) tell me about it because he wanted to hide it. He didn’t tell me about it because he thought he could get it fixed without me ever getting involved. As a result, we missed a very important commitment because this equipment didn’t work. Instead of blaming him for not telling me, I realized I didn’t have a great process in place to get across when a piece of equipment broke. So I blamed myself for missing the commitment.

That officer is an admiral today—and it was my biggest disappointment. I didn’t berate him. I didn’t destroy him. I viewed myself as being the problem. And we put processes in place so that if a piece of equipment broke in the future, they knew exactly what to do and what the timeframe was in notifying me. We never had a recurrence of that situation.

That’s kind of a heavy burden, isn’t it, that if there’s something that falls through, it’s on you as the commander?

Being captain of a ship is a heavy burden. Some people thrive on that burden and some people crumble under it. You could see when captains walk down the pier every morning whether they are smiling and upbeat and enjoy the job or whether they dread the job and they’re just putting a check in the box so that they can get promoted. I could sit at the head of the pier and tell you which captains were enjoying their jobs and which ones weren’t.

That’s our obligation, to understand that it is a tremendous burden. I’m responsible for the lives of 310 men and women, 24/7, for as long as I’m in command of that ship. Whether we’re in port in San Diego and they’re at home and they get involved in a drunk-driving accident—ultimately I need to figure out why I missed the signs or what we could have done to educate people that we want you to be just as safe off the job as you are on the job.

Yeah, it’s a heavy burden. Some people crumble under that burden. Others are invigorated by it. I loved it. I would have done the job for free. That’s how much I loved that job.

The hazards off the job most people would understand, but maybe very few would understand the hazards on the job. What are the greatest risks to life and limb on an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer?

Anything can go wrong, from not tagging out a piece of electrical equipment when you’re working on it and getting electrocuted to not turning a valve properly and you have an oil spill.

Everything we do on an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer is dangerous. Any minute of any day someone could get seriously injured or killed. That’s why we have to have solid procedures in place, but also we have to have a solid commitment on the part of the crew to adhere to those procedures. You can’t order excellence and you can’t order safety. It’s part of a culture you create. That’s one of the things I’ll be talking about at the conference is you can have the best procedures in the world, but if your people aren’t disciplined and they’re not connected to their work, that’s when accidents happen. The best procedures in the world aren’t going to save you from that.

Your command strategy for keeping people safe, was it a separate area of focus or was it part of an overall, integrated plan for the ship?

Part of every minute of every day is a focus on safety. We have damage-control equipment in our passageways. If we have a fire, we have to put it out ourselves. We can’t call the fire department. So we have fire-suppression equipment that needs to be maintenanced periodically, say every month. There’s a safety tag on every piece of equipment where the maintenance person has to sign his or her name and put the date that they did the maintenance.

When I’m walking down the passageway, I’m looking for trash. People are watching me do this. They know if it’s important to me, it better be important to them. We’re the ones who set the tone for the organization.

Safety for me is not, “Hey, I’m going to set aside today from 4 o’clock to 5 o’clock this afternoon to focus on safety.” It’s from the time I get up in the morning to the time I get to bed at night, I’m focused on safety.

It’s clear from your first book, It’s Your Ship, that you believe an empowered crew member is higher-performing. Is he or she also safer?

Yes, because if you’re empowered, you’re also more engaged. You also take a greater sense of ownership. When you feel ownership of something, you want to adhere to the standards not only to get the best performance, but also to be the safest that you can.

What’s your philosophy about sleep and performance? Particularly, are there decisions a commander can make—or something about his or her leadership style—that ensures the crew is rested enough to perform well and safely?

You’re well briefed. Part of the culture of the surface navy is that we don’t need sleep. When we’re at sea, it’s a 24/7 operation. Typically you stand watch six hours on, 12 hours off. If you stand the midnight to six in the morning, the way it used to be in the Navy is you would be expected to work your full work day starting at 7:30 to 4:30, then it’s time for you to go back on watch from 6 p.m. to midnight again. That’s ludicrous. You weren’t allowed to sleep and get caught up.

So I changed the rotation on the ship so that if you’re tired at the start of the workday, go get some sleep. I’m not trying to monitor who’s sleeping during the day. If you’re tired, do it, because you’re no good to me if you’re dead on your feet. We were the only ship at the time that did that.

I don’t know if you remember the two collisions of the ships in the western Pacific a few years ago, but sleep patterns had a lot to do with it. These young men and women were working 80, 90 hours a week and then expected to stand watch on top of that. Sleep deprivation contributed to that. So now the navy has gone to what they call a circadian watch routine. We were always standing watch at different time periods. Now it’s set so that you can get into a sleep cycle.

My nephew just got back from a seven-month deployment to the Middle East. His watch was from two in the morning until six in the morning and then again in the afternoon. He would have eight hours off between each shift so he could get sleep and be well rested. The Navy has finally acknowledged the fact that sleep deprivation leads to an increase in accidents. I could have told them that 20 years ago because we modified our work routines so that if people did suffer from sleep deprivation, they could go to sleep. It’s not rocket science.

I had the opportunity four years ago to spend some time on the Virginia-class attack submarineUSS California. I had the chance to meet and interview its commander at the time, Eric Sager. Here’s something he told me—I want to get your reaction to it. He told me, “The most fascinating part of this job is the human interaction. The components of the submarine are predictable, because they’re technology. When there’s a problem with a person, you don’t know how they’ll react because you don’t know what’s inside that person. Most of my conversations with my officers are about the men, not the submarine.” I’m curious if this your experience on the Benfold? How would you add to or alter his observation?

That’s a very perceptive observation on his part, because it’s true. For the equipment, we have statistics on failures between maintenances and whatnot. We’ve got all those statistics. But it’s how the people who man it and operate it and bring it to life—that’s the thing that can be influenced. That’s where the culture comes in. It’s called the command climate in the Navy. The captain of the ship or the submarine is the one that sets that climate.

One of the things that struck me when I spent some time on the California was the obsession with ice cream. It turned out that they had been in Norway recently and filled up the boat with supplies and ran out of room, as sometimes happens on a submarine. They had to leave some of the apparently really good Norwegian ice cream on the dock. I asked about this because on land it’s just ice cream. But on the submarine it was something of an obsession. The crew members said, well, underwater for three months and away from everybody, little things take on big meaning. Was there anything on the Benfold that became kind of an interesting obsession that turned out to be a really big deal, that the crew members valued and was important for you to pay attention to as the commander?

That’s a great question. For me, it was chocolate chip cookies. We had fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies every day.

Being at sea in a steel tube for long periods of time gets very monotonous. When monotony sets in, complacency sets in. I was very careful to understand the mood of the crew—if we were doing something that was monotonous—to break it up and have fun. I would have Thursday afternoons sunset jazz and cigars on the flight deck. Every late Thursday afternoon we could go out and everybody’s out there smoking a cigar, watching the sunset, listening to the jazz. Every other Friday night, we had happy hour. No ship had ever had happy hour before. Of course, I can’t serve alcohol. But we could serve everything that goes into a happy hour: chicken wings, shrimp. We bought a karaoke machine, so we would sing karaoke.

That’s what that captain was referring to with the ice cream: how do you break up the monotony when you’re doing the same thing over and over again every day, because that’s when accidents happen. And that’s what we tried to do on the ship… was to break things up and relieve the monotony.

Are there people still in the Navy who would look at that and say, “It’s the Navy. It’s not a cruise ship. What kind of an operation are you running if you’re cutting loose and having all this relaxation and happy hour?” Are there people who frown on that? And why would they be getting it wrong?

We got featured in Fast Company magazine in 1999. It started an internal mini-war among the senior admirals in the Navy. Fifty percent of them were with me and 50 percent of them were against me. Over the years, the 50 percent who were against me have come around. Well, mostly they retired and were replaced by people who came up through the ranks and were now starting to experience this and the benefits that could be gained by doing these things.

Now I’d bet you every ship in the navy and every organization in the Navy has these types of things to have fun but mostly to break up the monotony so you remain sharp when you’re on patrol. So I’d bet that 90 percent of the Navy is with me whereas back 20 years ago, I was out on a lonely island and doing it alone for the most part. When people saw the results their realized we needed to change the way we operate.

You’re a believer in incremental improvements. What’s behind that belief?

People who swing for the fences strike out a lot. In our line of work, we can’t strike out. We need to be right 100 percent of the time. If you give me a ship of people who hit singles every time they come to bat, I’m going to take that team to the World Series.

People come in and say, “I’m going to change this organization.” Well, the Navy is 320,000 people. The best of leaders out there in business today can’t change that big an organization, so you focus on your own little piece of it. That’s what I tried to do was to focus on my own little piece of it. I can’t change the rest of the Navy. But I can instill a culture on my own little piece that challenges every process and every procedure and every custom and every tradition and to be intellectually curious and ask, “Is there a better way to get this done?”

Our goal was to improve one percent a day and to be one percent better today than we were yesterday, one percent better tomorrow than we are today. Creating a culture where people are intellectually curious is to me the way to go. I didn’t try to change any other ship. I didn’t try to change the rest of the Navy, because I probably would have failed miserably and not gotten results. You focus on what you can. People should realize, “Stop complaining about the rest of the organization and make our own little piece of it the safest and best that we can.”

There are at least two aspects of a leader’s decision: there’s what he or she directs and the other is the intention behind that decision. How important do you believe is the core intention or, I suppose you could say, the sincerity of the decision?

I think if you asked every member of that crew, they would say that I did not do things for self-promotion. I did things because they were the right way to do it. You can see leaders who are doing things because they are making themselves look good, whereas everything we did was designed to get the best results.

When those results came in, I gave the crew credit for everything because at the end of the day, they were the ones who delivered the excellence. They knew that everything that we did was done with the purpose to improve safety, to improve combat-readiness, and it wasn’t done to make me look good to the brass.

You’re in an interesting, relatively unique position of having gone from the military to the commercial world. What do you think business can learn from the U.S. Navy?

That’s a great question. What most people don’t realize in the civilian world is that I’ve got a budget I have to live within. I’ve got multiple budgets. I’ve got a fuel budget. I’ve got a food budget. I’ve got a maintenance budget. I’ve got a training budget. People think, “You don’t have the pressures that we have in the civilian world.” Yes, I do have those same pressures. And I have the pressures of being in a dangerous profession where people can get killed or injured any time. What people in the civilian world realize by reading the book is how similar our businesses are in that the people are the number one asset.

A lot of people give lip service to that, but at the end of the day, we have 300 ships in the U.S. Navy, roughly give or take. Every ship has the same operating procedures, same budget, same operational requirements, but yet some are performing near the top and some are performing near the bottom. It all comes down to the people aspect and how engaged they are and the ownership that they take. That is the big similarity in any organization whether you are a non-profit, whether you are in government, whether you are in the private sector—is your people are the thing that separates you from every competitor you have in your space.

Let me ask the converse. What could the U.S. Navy learn from how commercial businesses are run?

That’s another great question that no one’s ever asked me before. I would think the speed by which decisions are made. When I’m at sea—say I’m in the Persian Gulf—I can make decisions automatically when it comes to operational things. I can see a situation developing and I can take action without having to ask permission to do it. But when we’re not forward-deployed and not operational, then we revert back to the bureaucracy and things grind slowly when you’re dealing with a big bureaucracy.

What the Navy could learn is how to minimize the bureaucratic processes that don’t improve our ability to defend ourselves and ultimately that slows things down. The speed at which decisions are made back in the United States grinds very slowly, whereas I’m finding in organizations, decisions can be made much more rapidly than what we do in the military today.

Not a lot of former Navy commanders sit down to write a book. What did you learn about yourself when you sat down to write that first book, It’s Your Ship?

Good question. The first writing of it I used to settle scores with the people who I did not think put their people first and who were in it for their own self-promotion. I did the first writing of it and I put it aside and didn’t look at it. I came back to it a month later and said, “No, I’m better than that. I’m not going to settle scores. I’m not going to be that mean and petty.”

There was a fair amount of score-settling in the first draft. Once I thought about it for a long time, I thought, “That’s not the purpose of this book.” What’s interesting is that the book has now been out 17 years and there’s not one thing in that book that I’m embarrassed about. If I had gone with the first draft, I would have been embarrassed about it.

So the advice is maybe write and then set it aside and then come back to it?

Exactly. If you’re upset and trying to settle a score, set it down and then come back to it. That has worked well for me. I never sent an email or an operational message when I was upset. When I was captain of the ship, I would put it in my in-basket, I’d let it sit there for two days, and if I still felt the same way after two days then I would send it. But if I felt differently, I would word it differently. Never send anything off when you are emotional or upset.

Did the writing come easily because you were settling scores on the first draft?

The way I wrote it was I talked into a tape recorder. I can’t type very well. I hired a transcriber to transcribe it for me. I had the 10 chapters laid out in my mind. And I populated each chapter with stories. Then it was just a process of going back and reflecting on the actual lessons that I learned along the way and what I learned about people along the way. That’s how the book came about—constant reflection on what we did, and what the results were, and how it can be applied elsewhere.

You’ve written It’s Your Ship. You’ve written Get Your Ship Together, It’s Our Ship and What I Learned at the Naval Academy. Is there another book in the works?

I’ve got a consulting group now. I’ll be honest, everything I know was put in those books. I’m not going to write another book if I don’t learn anything else. I’ve got a consulting group that’s doing phenomenal work and getting a lot of change. A future book—it’s probably four or five years down the road—is what I’ve learned from the consulting business and bringing leadership to organizations around the world.

You write at the end of It’s Your Ship about untapped potential. How deep do you believe is that reserve of energy in most organizations?

It’s huge. I still don’t think I uncovered all the potential in our ship. What I’ve learned in the 19 years since I got out of the Navy… I mentor a lot of people now. In the last 19 years, I’ve never done anything for myself. But if I can help somebody else, to put them in a position so that they can get a job, so that they can be successful—all people need is the opportunity and I think you can uncover tremendous potential.

What William Perry gave to me was that opportunity that unleashed my potential. And so what I’m focused on now is mentoring and helping others so that they can be put in positions to untap their potential.

Every organization I see, I see things that could be done differently or better to unleash that potential. That’s where the satisfaction comes from—making a difference.

One final question: What do you want your personal legacy to be?

It’s just now coming into view. In the Navy, we have roughly 300 ships. For those 300 ships, we have roughly 70 admirals. Statistically, every four ships will produce one admiral. Well, my second in command is a two-star admiral today. He’s president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, our most prestigious two-star job in the Navy. My one department head is now commander of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier battle group. They just got sent to the Persian Gulf. Several of my division officers are about to be selected for admiral. Historically, in an organization where four ships produce one admiral, that one ship has produced many admirals.

It’s taken me 19 years to figure out what I wanted my legacy to be. It wasn’t the medals, and awards, and the promotions. It was untapping that potential among my officers and crew so they could go on and do better things as a result. I think that’s what I want my legacy to be: putting people in a position to unleash their potential and deliver greatness.

Captain Michael Abrashoff, it’s been an honor and a pleasure. I look forward to seeing you at the SafeStart Human Factors Conference in November.

I’m looking forward to it as well. Thanks for your time, Rodd.