For countless mariners in distress, the difference between life and death is a towline connected to a U.S. Coast Guard vessel, and mine had just broken. We were 70 miles off the coast of Northern California attempting to rescue three endangered mariners whose sailboat was disabled in a storm and bring them back to San Francisco. They had been in tow for an hour but were now once again adrift. Our ship, the USCGC Tern (WPB-87343), and her 12-sailor crew had been battling brutal beam-to seas and gale force winds since the early hours of the morning. Fatigue and nausea had set about the ship many hours earlier, but now there was something new.
As the commanding officer responsible for guiding the team through the situation, uncertainty filled my mind and body as I pondered the next steps. My lungs felt constricted, my throat felt choked, and my words would not come. The captain’s chair suddenly felt much larger. The commanding officer insignia weighed heavy over my left breast-pocket, and my next thought was to call my boss. What an awful idea.
We were in the middle of conducting our primary mission, search and rescue—a challenging, engaging, and meaningful evolution. It is one for which we were well-trained to safely conduct and which we were fully capable of completing.
Yet, the first moment things went wrong, my gut feeling was to look to my chain of command for guidance. That instinct told me to call for help. At sea, I trust my instincts with my life and with the lives of my crew. So, why were my instincts telling me to do something I knew to be wrong? I needed to learn more.
Manage Your Gut Instincts
On the day described, I had been commanding officer of the Tern for ten months and had promoted to the rank of lieutenant earlier that week. Having commissioned as an officer just four years earlier, I took immense pride in the responsibility the Coast Guard entrusted me with so early in my career. Yet, I was, and continue to be, acutely aware of the skepticism many have about junior officers holding positions seemingly greater than their experience might suggest. I was sensitive to the perception that too frequently requesting guidance from my supervisors would erode my credibility as a leader. This creates the dilemma that anyone with leadership experience understands: When is the right time to call the boss?
Coast Guard deck watch officer training is a crucible. It is a challenge of the mind, body, and spirit, sometimes in equal measure. The point of the challenge is to train a different kind of thinking for a different kind of skill. It is not enough to know the right answer; a trainee must feel the right answer. It is not enough to get 18 of 20 multiple choice questions correct or to say enough correct things to satisfy an oral examination. In a sense, deck watch officer training is like an ideological indoctrination rather than a skills curriculum. The point is to understand the concepts so deeply that you could not get them wrong. With enough time, wrong answers are not wrong, they are anathema, sometimes even nausea inducing.
It follows that intangibles such as senses, gut feelings, and instincts can be a deck watch officer’s best tools. Adages such as “You can’t go wrong with doing the right thing” and “If it feels wrong, it probably is wrong,” are commonplace across the seagoing services. By the time a leader rises to a position of authority, feelings such as anxiety, guilt, and shame typically are well-founded and should be heeded. These negative instincts should be thoroughly understood, sharpened through every experience, and trusted. In the scenario above, my gut was telling me to call for help.
Back at sea, I kicked the feeling to call back to land. Not only were land-side commanders in no position to help, but their help was not needed. My crew was already hard at work repairing the towline. Now, well into a pitch-black, moonless night at sea, we passed the towline again. Cool and collected, we took the sailboat and her mariners back in tow toward San Francisco. Just for good measure, the towline broke again, chafing through on the gunwale of the sailboat. But now closer to port, we organized a relief crew, handed off the disabled sailboat and her sailors to another Coast Guard unit to finish the tow, and headed home.
Yet, I could not shake my concern about why my instincts tempted me to seek reassurance from land. I suppressed my gut instinct and chose the opposite course of action. This wrongness sent me on an exploration.
Build A Decision-Making Framework
On board a ship, help is always a phone call away. That is how it is supposed to be. Each ship has an internal phone network whose primary function is to connect leaders to their subordinates. Often a list of phone numbers is next to it. It is so easy. In an age of instant communication, however, there is little difference between a ship’s internal phone and a satellite phone. As communication technology continues to improve and expand, field operators will grow ever closer to command-and-control centers. But then, what is a military leader? Are they just the flesh-and-bone avatars of their various bosses’ directions, waiting patiently for orders at the business end of a telecommunications node? No.
Leaders are at their best when they maintain autonomy for appropriate decision-making. To make these decisions, leaders need a framework for risk management and value judgment, areas in which anyone in a position of authority—military or otherwise—needs to excel.
The risk-management aspect is measured by the level of psychological comfort or discomfort felt by a decision-maker. In this framework, comfort and discomfort are sliding scales on the left-right axis, measured by the level of personal accountability a leader assumes. Discomfort, for example, is when a leader must make a decision or series of decisions with little guidance from superiors, a written policy, or a premission briefing. Phrased another way, decision-making is easier, and thus more comfortable, when the correct or preferred answer is clear and harder when it is not. Following a well-written checklist, for instance, is very comfortable, likely between a seven and ten on the one-to-ten scale of comfort (see Table 1). Carrying out general tasking with broad discretion is closer to the center, possibly a two in comfort or up to a two in discomfort. Finally, emergency circumstances with little guidance or that break from prior guidance are strongly uncomfortable, between a five and a ten in discomfort.
The value-judgment aspect is measured by the assessed level of impact a decision will have. High upside decisions create tangible, immediate, positive results. In this framework, they are measured on a sliding scale on the y axis. Leaders face these decisions during operations and mission-critical support, and these decisions will range between one and ten in high upside. Low upside decisions will have minimal or unclear impact. For example, leaders likely face dozens of low-consequence decisions each day related to administration and communication that may be between a four and eight in low upside. Thus, a leader knowingly or unknowingly makes a value judgment for each decision about its importance and upside.
Get in the Right Zone
Using risk management and value judgment, a leader can place him- or herself in one of four decision-making zones: Performance, Followership, Don’t Do It, and Leadership/Call the Boss.
Performance is a decision made with high upside and clear guidance. This includes checklists, prebriefed operations, and areas written policy or supervisor guidance clearly covers. Some decisions will be more clearly outlined than others; however, they all should feel like a supervisor guided the plan and should result in substantive contributions. This space makes up a major portion of military operations.
Had I been using this framework in the search-and-rescue case described above, I would have recognized there was no need for this decision space to feel uncomfortable. I had clear supervisor guidance, standard procedures, and substantial training to handle the scenario we were facing. My subsequent actions carried out standard procedure as intended. It was a difficult situation, but there was no need for it to be a psychologically uncomfortable situation as a leader.
Followership is a decision made with marginal upside and clear guidance. Most administrative tasks, as well as routine preparations and training fall within this decision space. Decisions should feel clearly guided by policy or specific guidance, and outcomes may be related to maintenance or will arise in future activities. This space is important because it often is prone to complacency. Deviations from guidance in this space should be minimal to nonexistent. A leader should do everything he or she can to ensure accidents, mistakes, or failures never occur because of decisions in the followership space.
The Don’t Do zone is that decision space with marginal or unclear upside and no policy guidance or supervisor direction. Decisions in this space feel uncomfortable, as if a leader is assuming significant liability, and do not further concrete objectives. Examples of decisions in this space include whether to allow an unauthorized tradition or initiation ceremony, permit unconventional money expenditures, or use operational assets for unapproved purposes. If any of the above examples can be modified to contribute to concrete objectives, then they may be worthwhile. However, decisions in this space should generally not be pursued. Phrased another way: If it feels wrong, and does not clearly advance objectives, it is wrong.
Leadership is a decision with high upside in the absence of policy or supervisor guidance. Examples include an innovative new training strategy, first-time use of new hardware or technology, or addressing an emergent mission need. These decisions should feel uncomfortable. Responsibility for these decisions will fall squarely on the person who makes them. These decisions, however, will result in clear upside, tangible results, and concrete benefits. Leaders are in positions of authority because they are trusted to make decisions when there is minimal guidance. Policy and supervisor guidance are crafted with the explicit or implicit understanding that they will not cover all possible scenarios. Adaptive, field-level decision-making is necessary to best achieve operational objectives. However, the decision-maker pays a price in discomfort.
Naturally, some decisions will be more uncomfortable than others, and some will stray further into the uncharted waters outside and between policy and guidance than others. Leaders must have the judgment to understand where the line is. In the instances in which a decision is over the line, then it is time to call the boss. “I am uncomfortable making a decision on my own because it is well outside the scope of my guidance, but it may have clear, concrete benefits. I need some help.”
Preserve Autonomy
Discomfort is key to preserving autonomy. More than a century ago, the telegraph was first used to relay directions to military commanders deployed far from command-and-control centers. This must have been a seismic and painful change for commanders at sea. They went from having total autonomy to—as Admiral Casper Goodrich depicted in his book Sea Power in the Old World (Greenwood Press, 1980)—being an “errand boy at the end of a telegraph wire.” Those officers received telegraph orders the length of text messages and went weeks or months without direct tasking. Yet, they saw the new technology as an insulting encroachment. A clear framework that allows leaders to balance risk and value judgments is a good start to ensuring the services preserve at least some of their spirit of autonomy, even if it comes at the price of discomfort.
