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To save an innocent man, the Caine Mutiny court-martial’s defense counsel had to strip away the Navy’s sea-going persona, to reveal Captain Queeg’s flaws. A fantasy? Hardly.
Just as with a baseball swing, timing is everything to leadership. And just as there is no batting stance that is always correct for baseball, there is no guaranteed leadership formula to determine when you should take time out of your busy schedule because today’s little problem is about to spin out of control. But I’ve watched good leaders. They sense something.
Can that trait be learned?
Maybe. But before you can begin to sense, you have to know. In this case, you must know your organization. You can’t simply understand the printed rules and diagramed working relationships, you also must recognize and compensate for the corporate patterns of behavior that run hidden beneath the nap of the corridor rugs. In addition, and perhaps even more important, you must understand the mythology of your organization—its persona.
Every organization has a persona. All successful groups reflect a particular set of characteristics that are either deliberately chosen, derived from observing what proved successful in the marketplace, or patterned after the mores of the stronger individuals in the organization.
This development of a personality is usually good for the organization. Common beliefs and goals build team spirit and esprit. Common attitudes emphasize product “principles” to employees as well as customers. And corporate appeals to “our common values” are an inexpensive mining of the vein of chauvinism that runs near the surface of all our skins.
Nearly everyone has heard the story of how IBM insisted its repairmen wear suits and ties, to imply subliminally that the IBM typewriters of the 1950s and early 1960s were so reliable they did not require frequent or messy repair. That formality of dress perhaps inevitably led to a very structured IBM organization (which later may have interfered with IBM’s flexibility in adapting to a changing market).
On the other hand, Nike, the shoe manufacturer, has adopted informal dress and has constructed an at-one-with- nature headquarters building, to accentuate its casual (although intense) working environment. Nike is interested in attracting upwardly mobile, aggressive young executives who want to work hard and make lots of money while still believing that they remain laid-back yuppies. Its informal dress code and headquarters building reinforce that message.
Most observers believe these very different but deliberate attire decisions have contributed significantly to each company’s success—as well as its corporate weaknesses.
As IBM discovered, no matter how previous management has gone about developing a particular persona, once the mold has cooled, you are largely stuck with the result. There are lots of reasons that an old casting may not exactly fit the organization’s current needs. Times change.
Organizations also must change, but they tend to resist. Even if a company chooses values that remain valid and helpful through the years, those values can develop into a character so overweening and distracting that it may threaten the very viability of the organization. IBM became a large and terrifically successful company. And along the way, its initial coat-and-tie rule metamorphosed into a very formal corporate image with the accompanying baggage of many rules and restrictions.
So what’s the problem for IBM? Simple: if you are a brilliant young person in the 1970s or 1980s with a new computer idea (and truly brilliant people are excused from normal rule-following fairly early in life), would you go to work for IBM...or would you choose Apple...or perhaps someone even less formal?
So, if you are leading IBM, you need periodically to assess whether your adopted persona is continuing to contribute to the well-being of the organization. Perhaps your old mold is preventing you from discovering new success.
In the Navy, we tend to pay respect to individuals based on their length of service—or seniority—and for good reason. The sea is an unforgiving environment. If you have not lived on the sea, it is difficult to explain the constant dangers. A good seaman is careful. To learn proper circumspection, a man (or woman) needs to see (or hear thousands of mid-watch tales about) how the careless perish and the prudent survive.
In the Navy, we have not found anything better than at- sea performance to identify those who can and those who cannot operate effectively on the watery expanse. Thus, at-sea experience is considered invaluable, and length of service—which is a sort of shorthand quantification of time at sea—is greatly respected.
Successful operation at sea also requires personal courage and individual responsibility. We have found no particular academic training or sport that can teach or predict the necessary blend of reliability, capability, emotional strength, and personal courage. The only good determinate is how someone actually performs when lives are on the line. I have been there. Some men and women freeze. Some wilt. Others act. Certain people come out winners again and again. Others fail for no clearly definable reason. In the Navy we spend a great deal of effort trying to ensure that we select only winners to command our ships, aircraft, and submarines.
I am trying to sketch the persona of the Navy, so you will better understand my later example of a situation when those shared beliefs led some astray.
Let me add just one more background ingredient before I get to the story. The hostile sea surrounding a ship Produces a unique environment. It is never easy or safe to get people on or off, once the ship is at sea. We sometimes transfer people at sea because it is absolutely necessary, but each trip carries an element of danger. A safe and controlled transfer to a smaller ship is nearly impossible except in decent weather. This is why you never hear of the cavalry riding up and rescuing a ship in trouble at sea. The men on board the sinking ship either solve the Problem, abandon the ship for the cold sea, or die in their tron mortuary.
Each ship at sea is on its own. It will survive or perish as a result of the men and women on board. And the commanding officer nearly always will be the most important individual in determining which way the scale tips.
Commanding a ship at sea is not the most difficult job in the Navy. There are many jobs ashore more trying, frustrating, and exacting. However, no one drowns in Washington. And we know two facts about sea duty: the sea is merciless and the commanding officer inevitably will influence the end result. Consequently, we spend a disproportionate part of our pageantry and effort emphasizing the importance of the command billet at sea and the individuals selected for that responsibility.
The Navy is a large and complex organization, but I believe the previous paragraphs capture our persona: we respect experience at sea and respect the individuals in command in that environment.
This particular organizational slant presents us with great difficulty in determining when the guy in charge is doing something he shouldn’t—especially when the guy is in charge of a ship or air squadron at sea. And we have nearly 1,000 ships and squadrons!
This leads to inspections. Organizations need to check what’s going on. This does not mean all inspections have the goal of checking on the guy in charge. On the contrary, almost every inspection we conduct in the Navy is to determine whether the worker bees are doing their jobs effectively. At the same time, the inspection team helps the inspectee do better (at least this is what they should be doing). It seems as though no one could object to inspections.
On the contrary, no one likes inspections. None of us enjoys being criticized, and all of us—at least once—have done something less well than it could have been done. So, no matter how nicely and positively the inspection is done, no inspector in the universe has ever been appreciated. A good inspection uncovers failure, and, as a very human result, the process inevitably produces friction and hurt feelings. No matter how many different kinds of inspections we invent or how often we do them, we still have problems. Why? Because it is nearly impossible to inspect the character and quality of the individual we have put in charge.
Twenty years ago, when Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was the senior man in the Navy, he instituted a new inspection for each command. The inspecting team didn’t check the performance of any particular individual or team in the ship against any specific standard. Instead, the team spent a couple of weeks on board the ship or station— looking at records, doing interviews, and asking each man and woman in the unit what they personally thought about their working environment, their seniors’ policies, attitudes of the different people they worked with and for, and how effectively and efficiently work was done. These teams didn’t fool us; they were doing nothing more than taking polls on what the average worker or sailor felt.
The inspection teams listened to the dirtballs as well as the people who knew what was going on. As a result, it was truly amazing what trash and how many unfounded accusations made it all the way into their final reports.
Each ship at sea is on its own. It will survive or perish as a result of the men and women on board. And the commanding officer nearly always will be the most important individual in determining which way the scale tips. . . . Consequently, we spend a disproportionate part of our pageantry and effort emphasizing the importance of the command billet at sea and the individuals selected for that responsibility.
The inspections were supposed to help the guy in command, but they always made more trouble for the commander than for anyone else. I never met anyone in command who liked those reports.
Nobody liked or respected the members of the inspection team, either. Nearly all of the members were softies. None of the inspection team leaders (much less their ragtag members) had been very successful at sea. From our perspective, the inspectors were people who couldn’t do the tougher jobs at sea, had chosen shore jobs to avoid the pressure at sea, and had mistakenly been given the task of inspecting those of us who were still trying. I made an effort to meet as many of these inspectors as possible, and I never met one who was sufficiently aggressive and dynamic to run even the smallest organization.
In retrospect, this “health inspection” was probably one of the key measures that made Admiral Zumwalt so unpopular with many senior officers. Soon alter he left office, this inspection was made completely voluntary. Within ten years the support units for the inspections had been disbanded and the related instructions and procedures had either been lost, canceled, or committed to some dusty bin.
No one seemed to protest the passing of this era.
Several years later I was running an organization of several thousand men and women. My senior staff and I were concerned about conditions on board one particular laige ship. We were not comfortable that everything was shipshape, but there was nothing specific to put our fingers on. Sometimes different individuals in that ship made decisions that seemed unreasonable. Sometimes pretty normal people did abnormal things. But not all the time.
As we stood around drinking coffee and discussing the latest dumb thing someone from that ship had done the past weekend, Admiral Zumwalt s old health inspection came up. All of us professed to remembei it with disdain. Nobody was quite certain precisely why the Navy had dropped it, but from what we recalled, we decided that the primary reason was because the inspection was inappropriate for small ships and commands (of 100-200 people), and the great majority of Navy commands are relatively small. On small ships, it is dilficult for problems to develop without the senior leadership noticing. A small command certainly didn't need a bunch of do- gooders coming on board and wasting everyone s time to determine some earthshaking news like “Mr. Smith is a son-of-a-bitch.” If you lived on board that ship, you already knew.
But perhaps we could use the health inspection technique on board a bigger ship and discover something useful.
We set the necessary bureaucratic backfires (remember that very few senior officers had positive memories of the inspection), so we had to start by avowing that our inspection was going to be different. We told our boss we were going to try an experiment and promised to limit it to a few ships.
We also decided to inspect a couple of our best units first. We at least suspected that the inspections might become forums for critiquing the commanding officer and his team of senior advisers, and we weren’t sure we wanted to let this particular genie out of the bottle without some controls. One control was to have the team inspect what we believed to be a good unit, to see if its findings generally agreed with our own private opinions. We purposely kept all internal publicity about the effort low key and external knowledge near zero. If the health inspection didn’t generally confirm what we thought about the good units, we wanted to be able to dump the team.
If, on the other hand, we commenced the inspection with a ship we believed to be only average, and the inspection comments were very negative, we would not know if we had uncovered a real problem or if the health inspection was just a dumb concept. In the worst of all possible worlds, the inspection would come up with very critical comments, we would then decide we didn’t know enough to take strong action (and also weren’t sure enough of the command to put our bodies between them and criticism), someone would go public with the results to an ombudsman, the press, or someone senior, and everything would quickly whirl out of control.
Many of us have seen efforts like this in which, in the end, the “system” demanded that someone be pilloried. We did not want to set up some unsuspecting leaders of a randomly chosen command. So we selected our best commands as guinea pigs. And we assured their respective commanders that, if they would cooperate fully, and the inspection turned out badly, we would lie down on the train tracks at the first echo from a far-off whistle.
In selecting the team we worked hard to find individuals who were fairly bland, but bright, reflective, patient and sincere, and interested in people. After our selection experience, we understood why most officers didn’t think Admiral Zumwalt’s inspectors would have made good commanders. They probably wouldn’t. But most naval of- t ficers also wouldn’t make good health inspectors.
The first inspection results were pretty good from my view. The team reported that the ships were generally happy and policies and procedures in use made sense to the inspection team and the people on board the ship. The team also found a couple of bad practices ongoing, and the commands, once informed, took appropriate action. Because the results looked to be in general accord with our own professional opinions, we decided to proceed to step three.
The inspection team’s next assignment included two of (what we believed to be) the troubled commands. The team spent two or three weeks on board each—providing us a couple of interim oral reports—and then another five or six days writing up their results.
By the time the team completed writing up their inspection, we nearly had the criminal investigation finished!
For the inspection team had discovered some serious Problems. In fact, after the first interim oral report, we had commenced a formal investigation. An accusation had turned into a nasty fact. One of our commanding officers routinely had made advances toward 18- and 19-year-old Women in his command. These high-school age women did not know how to handle him or to whom to turn for help.
Why hadn’t the other men and women on board stopped this obviously egregious behavior?
We found the women in the command largely could be divided into two groups. The first were those who had a great deal of experience dealing with men and had, in the vernacular, “grown up the hard way.” This group didn’t have any sympathy to waste on young girls who let the commanding officer continue to bother them. As one said to me, “He puts a hand on me and he’ll pull back a stub.”
The second group of women had problems of their own. Many of this group were single mothers, had unemployed husbands, parents to support, or some other reason they absolutely had to have their current job. These women Were not going to rock the boat and put their own jobs >n danger.
Many of the senior men on board would not have tolerated this behavior in a more junior officer, but since it Was The Captain...
i The junior men were nearly out of control. They were
; the only people on board who clearly understood what Was going on. It was like any organization in which the ' People at the top don’t obey the rules. Without rock-solid
integrity at the top, misbehavior inevitably seeps down and into minute cracks of the organization, t However, once a group from a senior command (our
• inspection team) came on board and spent a couple of
1 Weeks looking and asking about problems, and people
: °n board the ship realized that what they told the team
Was held in confidence (i.e., not immediately fed back to
- the Captain), and that the inspection team was really in-
t •■crested—and not judgmental—we ended up with a dozen
1 reports of the Captain’s inappropriate behavior. We also t received reports on sexual harassment involving other men 1 in the command who practiced “monkey see, monkey do”
- | followership.
When the formal investigation finished looking into this 3 Proceedings / January 1993
particular senior officer’s background, I became convinced he had been doing the same sort of thing—gradually increasing the inappropriateness of his behavior—for several years. Interestingly enough, in his previous tour, he had been on board one of the “excellent” big ships at which we had first looked, and had also behaved outside the norm there. Too bad we hadn’t done our health inspection earlier.
We terminated that commanding officer. With his departure, we fixed the harassment problem but also lost irreplaceable years of technical experience at sea.
By the way, I had not expected to find this problem. In fact, I hadn’t expected to find any problem on board this particular ship. The ship was a relatively small ship with a small crew. I thought it was a fine command. I also thought the commanding officer was an exceptional officer. I had known and worked with him on and off for nearly 15 years. We had, in fact, thrown in the inspection on this ship to distract anyone who might be looking for some pattern in our selection to criticize. I had expected any problem to surface on board another, much larger, command.
But we didn’t find any particular problem on the ships that I suspected. Perhaps there weren’t any. Perhaps the health inspection isn’t effective enough. Perhaps I am not as prescient as a good leader needs to be. Maybe I’ll have to continue to work hard and try every angle I know. The health inspections certainly didn’t turn out the way we expected.
Sometimes, when I reflect on this story, I am struck by how hard it is for the Navy to critically evaluate anything that disturbs our personal view of ourselves. We respect experience and command at sea. As a result, we often have a difficult time evaluating problems to which this value system does not apply particularly well—such as individuals who do not serve at sea or when one of the people at the top is behaving inappropriately. We have particular difficulty in looking past our ethos of respect for experience and command.
However, recognizing bias is often the initial step to improving the organization—for understanding the organizational persona heightens our sensitivity to our potential blind spots and makes it easier to devise (and accept) floodlights that help illuminate and uncover the problem. Someday I may even get up the nerve to try Admiral Zumwalt’s health inspection ploy again. If I do, I will remember four key points:
> Put together a nonthreatening team
> Give the team plenty of time
> Tell the team to listen to everyone
>■ Follow up everything out of the ordinary
You may find some self-study is in order. Do you understand your group’s persona? Are you alert to the actions or thoughts that members of your organization might find uncomfortable? And what problems is that persona eventually going to cause your organization?
Admiral Oliver currently is the Navy programmer in the Pentagon. He also is the author of Lead On, which was published by Presidio Press last year.