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By Rear Admiral Dave Oliver, Jr., U.S. Navy
Some people are exceptional leaders. Most of the rest of us can at least contribute, and are usually eager to do so. But a few who are in leadership positions are downright rotten. They are bad leaders, unable to understand why they are bad, and resistant to change. They don’t appear to comprehend good leadership concepts. These people are destructive to any organization.
They are not just destructive to their own unit or command. When a leader is no good, that influence spreads downwind like the smell from a pulp mill. And it is a smell that can’t be covered up. Three good leaders can’t overcome the impact of one bad one. Peers from other commands see this and are ashamed to be wearing the same uniform. Personnel who are not directly affected also see, listen, and talk. They think about how it would be if they were transferred “over there” someday. Juniors often leave the organization rather than take that chance.
A bad leader in an organization is nothing less than a malignant cancer.
The absence of leadership is most obvious to the people being led, and at the same time it is one of the most difficult abilities for seniors to evaluate. In the nuclear-submarine business, the most limited asset is good people. We recruit exceptional people and spend a great deal of time training them. It is not at all misleading to say that the capability of our submarine force is directly dependent upon the quality of our people. If we do not have enough qualified supervisors with five or ten years of experience, we cannot buy new ones, the way we can replace a broken valve. There is no shortcut. It takes five years at sea on a nuclear submarine to get a nuclear-trained officer with five years of sea-going submarine experience.
Since the submarine force needs to keep people and recognizes this fact, it logically follows that our best leadership talents should be used to keep personnel in the submarine force. But we have had mixed success in doing so.
To illustrate the problem, following is the story of an unhappy submarine wardroom full of officers. For three years they had the same commanding officer and the same executive officer. The commanding officer was a smart commander who kept his distance. He stayed in his room a great deal. In three years, he never praised one officer for anything, even though he had a couple of good ones. The executive officer was a very active, hands-on individual. The commanding officer let him run the ship. In the three years these two teamed, not one officer in that ship chose to remain in the submarine service.
One officer committed suicide. At least a dozen resigned; not one completed his tour and went on to another ship. At the end of three years, every officer on board (except the commanding officer,
U.S. NAVY (R. UNDERWOOD)
the executive officer, and one outlier) had formally announced his intention to resign. That would have put the losses at about 20 for this one ship.
Finally the executive officer left, and a new officer reported to take his place. He also was a hands-on individual, very smart and effective. In the next four months, all the officers on board who had submitted their resignation letters (you had to announce your intentions a year in advance in those days) retracted them. Subsequently, every one of those officers made the submarine force a 30-year career. (Also subsequently, the commanding officer was hospitalized for treatment of alcoholism, and the former executive officer, who also had a drinking problem, Was ordered into treatment for abusing his wife.)
Ten years after these events, 1 had the opportunity to study officer retention in all the ships in one of the submarine forces. We based our study on two assumptions. First, that the ship reflects the character of the commanding officer. (This should be particularly true for a submarine, since submarine officers have longer command tours than those in other Warfare specialties. At the time of our story, the submarine commanding officer tour lasted nearly four years, with the surface officer command tour about two years and the aviation command tour one year.) Second, officers who have been in command for longer than a year have eradicated all good and bad vestiges of their predecessors. (My observation has been that it takes about three months to lose the good things the predecessor was doing and about six months to overcome the poorer practices.)
For the study, we simply looked at each commanding officer in the force who had been in command for at least two years, and we counted up how many of his officers had resigned. Then we compared those numbers with the total number of officers in the force who had resigned in the same two years. We found that 90% of the officer resignations in the Preceding two years were from 10% of our units.
If our assumptions were valid, 5 commanding officers had caused the resignations of more than 35 junior officers. Each of the 5 commanders had at least six resignations from his wardroom. None of the rest of the 50 submarine crews had more than two resignations.
We then looked at the five ships, which, as it happened, all reported to the same boss. He said that he couldn’t believe he would have missed any big problems in the ships. With some urging, he looked again. “Now that you mention it, hadn’t noticed it earlier, but these ships do not look good.”
Ten years later, there was belated confirmation that these officers had not been good leaders. None of the five commanding officers completed command successfully. Four failed to be promoted to the next higher rank; they were among the very few nuclear-trained submarine officers in their peer group not promoted. Obviously they were in the bottom 10%. Perhaps they were unsatisfactory.
After another ten years, we looked anew. This time the sample size was half the force. In the last two years before the evaluation, there had been 28 resignations from 24 ships. Twenty-one resignations were from only 3 ships.
We looked at these three ships a little more carefully. When compared with all the other submarines, two were last and next-to-last with respect to ship cleanliness and material conditions. No other submarine was close. We then went to sea with them. When compared with their fellow commanding officers, none of the three commanding officers in question seemed comfortable with the decisions and actions required of the person in command. One did everything himself, never permitting anyone to act without his personal supervision. One let his officers do whatever they thought best, appearing not even to involve himself in tough decisions that had to be made. The third commander was negligent in his professional attention to engineering. He avoided even walking in those spaces, although he had received very high grades in the appropriate disciplines in Navy schools and on tests.
Within the following six months, each of the three commanding officers had been involved in a casualty or decision so egregious it had resulted in him being relieved of his command. One drove his ship into a submerged reef, one demonstrated a lack of professional judgment in deciding to continue to operate his ship despite a submerged material casualty, and one hit another ship.
Enlisted retention did not mirror the officer problems. In fact, some of the ships that had very poor officer retention had very good enlisted retention. This wasn’t a real surprise. We have always had a bureaucratic problem with this mismatch. Seldom do we give the annual E for excellence to the ship with the highest enlisted retention. The relative enlisted- retention standing of a ship does not accurately reflect the relative capability of that ship.
We do not use officer retention numbers because the number of officer losses is small. You often have to average them over a couple of years to begin to sec something. On the other hand, we do have enlisted retention figures. We have ten times as many enlisted people as officers. In a year, you can get enough enlistment decisions to be able to calculate some percentages for every unit in the Navy. Everyone in the Navy and Department of Defense keeps track of the enlisted retention. Each submarine force commander issues a monthly message in which he reports how each unit is doing in enlisted retention, which submarines have gone up, and which have gone down. No one usually tracks officer retention by unit.
It is unclear why officer retention reflects commanding officer leadership capabilities but enlisted retention does not. The most common belief is that the enlisted person can reenlist for a specified benefit, such as being assigned earlier to another submarine or to a school or to shore duty. Officers, however, are not normally permitted to get off one particular ship early.
I believe that the reason is more basic. The enlisted looks for leadership, and for his self-image, to his leading petty officer, or division chief, or division officer. Maybe as far as his department head. He may see the commanding officer once every couple of days; often less. But the officers on board a submarine arc in constant contact with the commanding officer. They eat together, watch movies together, go on liberty together, and, of course, work together. All the officers are supposed to aspire to be a commanding officer. They are not working to be a helmsman or an engineer or even an executive officer. They are working to be the commanding officer. When the commanding officer is not very good, is not nice, or is not comfortable being in charge, the self-image conveyed to the junior officer is not good either.
You can’t keep all officers you recruit. You don’t even want to keep them all. But the submarine force has to retain the hearts and minds of the great majority of the accessions. In the long run, the officer-retention rate is a good rough gauge of the commanding officer’s leadership. Given the number of people in a submarine who are trying very hard to make it run right (and thereby often effectively disguising the shortcomings of the commanding officer), poor officer retention may be the senior supervisor’s first bellwether of trouble. This does not mean that we shouldn't closely watch enlisted retention. We need to retain our highly trained people, and enlisted-retention rates may tell us many useful things about policy and relative deficits in pay and
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But all is not lost if you are a young officer or executive working for poor leaders. In fact, you are in a much better learning situation than your peer in another ship.
A poor leader will irritate you so much you will spend days thinking about what he does, how he does it, and exactly why it is wrong. You will learn a great deal, even if it is just the golden rule of treating people the way you would like to be treated. No bad leader observes this rule, so you will at least pick this one up. With a good leader, you probably wouldn’t even notice much of what he was doing right.
When working for a poor leader, you will probably learn to work harder. A poor leader makes it more difficult to do anything well. To do the same job as your peer in another ship, you will have to expend a great deal more time and effort. And those learned work habits will help you accomplish much more when you finally work for a good leader.
Working for a poor leader stresses you more and makes you grow in your capabilities. Anyone can work for a good leader, but it takes real stamina to work for a dolt. A poor leader can make his whole command one big leadership lesson.
Unfortunately, from your boss’s supervisor’s perspective, there is no such silver lining. Poor leadership is never worth a j damn to him. Poor leadership always gets j less from people and produces problems | for the organization. These problems are , disguised as something else (alcoholism, discipline infractions, broken or unreliable equipment), making it harder to trace the problem. And, because the supervisor is not a peer or junior and doesn’t spend months in the environment, poor leadership is tough for the supervisor to evaluate. Since poor leaders are often particularly nice to their seniors, it is difficult for the supervisor to identify immediately when leadership is so poor that the employment or services of that executive should be terminated. Bad leaders are always left in place too long.
The supervisor should remember one thing. Poor officer retention is prima ! facie evidence of poor leadership. If officers are not happy campers, they vote with their feet.
Admiral Oliver is the Director, General Planning and Programming Division (OP-80), office of the Chief of Naval Operations.