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By Rear Admiral I)avc Oliver, Jr., U.S. Navy
I am now old enough that young officers often ask what they should do in their first job, especially if that job is on board a submarine. They want to know how to get their careers off to a good start. I remember wondering the same thing.
I wasn’t sure whether to salute the flag first or the officer of the deck. I thought, “If 1 do get on board, then they are going to give me an impossible job. I’m to tell some guy older than my father what he is supposed to do. He was doing this job before I was born. What happens if he laughs? When I’m giving orders, how will I know they aren’t smirking behind my back? Why in the world is the Navy organized this way—with officers right out of school in charge of people?”
The Navy is organized this way because it works. It is not efficient for all communications and leadership to be Provided directly from one senior officer to all the worker bees. It is much more effective for the senior to speak to a relatively small group of middle-level managers—his officers, in this case—and then have each of these officers be responsible for relaying guidance and transposing the senior’s desires into more specific action for their respective divisions. Big groups can't easily question unclear advice or remind the senior officer about circumstances or a schedule he may have forgotten. They can’t easily talk about coordination between work centers.
In addition, young officers need to get a quick start on the most important part of their education—learning how to lead People. It is not the same as mastering how to read a print, repack a steam valve, or cut a set of slip rings. The difficult part
The most comfortable spots on board ship are where you learn the least. A dirty, cramped bilge, on the other hand, is a great place to learn how equipment works—and breaks—and what makes your shipmates tick.
of being a leader is learning how to get the best from your people. How do you sense and gauge their temperaments? When do they need to be stroked? When is the time to criticize? When is the time to quit work even though the job is not done? When is it best to work through the night? These decisions need judgment. Judgment improves with experience. And experience comes from what is commonly called “time in the chair.”
You need to seize every opportunity to get time in the chair. I know that it seems unbelievable to a new officer in his early twenties, but you have a very limited time to gain the experience you will need for senior positions. The military is a young person’s game. If you are in submarines. by the time you are 45 you are already too old to be at sea. You won’t last in shore jobs much longer. Only admirals are permitted to stay longer than 30 years in the Navy. Twenty or 30 years seems longer than forever when you are young, but at my age, you realize that it was a wholly inadequate slice of time to fit in all you needed.
The officer who is going to compete
for selection to the best and most challenging jobs later in his career must get advanced schooling, experience in different areas of the world, duty ashore as well as at sea, and experience on staffs. He has a very limited time to learn to work with people. The young officer can ill afford to lose even one day of experience when the opportunity is available. This is the reason for immediately placing a young officer in a leadership position with a division of sailors.
You, that young officer, will be surprised at how busy everyone is; much too busy to waste time watching you. Although many of the people working for you are not terribly different in age or capability from your high school classmates, there is one important difference. They aren’t bored with school, standing in groups smoking and joking, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, waiting for a new, green officer. They are, instead, working every minute. On board a submarine, there is always more work than there are pairs of available hands.
Your arrival will thus be largely unnoticed. People are curious about a new officer, but they are most interested in what the officer can do to make their lives easier. No one expects you to immediately be the preeminent technical expert. However, your people and your supervisors do expect you to immediately start caring about your people. They expect you to quickly become a good traffic cop on leadership’s two-way street. Your seniors expect you to explain to your people what the command demands, and they expect you to reliably reflect your people’s concerns back up to the appropriate level.
Representing your people doesn’t require a great deal of special experience. It does require a great deal of effort. It does require that you accept moral responsibility for doing enough and doing what is right for your people. You have to do it all for them. You have to keep track of when they need to apply for special programs, and you have to fight for their appropriate special recognition. You also have to accept the unpleasant task of telling them when their efforts are not adequate. Whatever your job, whether it is your first or your tenth assignment, you start by looking out for your people first. It is a good practice to get into, beginning with your first job.
A second good practice is to observe the “less comfort” rule. You can follow that rule faithfully by always listening carefully to your mind. Your mind is a very capable calculator. Long before you even begin consciously to evaluate a problem, your mind has already computed the relative comfort of different possible courses of action. If you are sitting in your stateroom working on an overdue report and someone calls to tell you that they have found the problem with the steam leak—a galled shaft— your mind has completed its analysis before you have even hung up the phone. Your mind has weighed the alternatives: Is it more comfortable to continue to sit in your stateroom with your cup of coffee and complete your overdue report so the executive officer won’t complain anymore and you can get some sleep? Or is it more comfortable to get up from your chair, walk back, and look at the valve?
There is only one way you are going to find out what a galled shaft really looks like and how it affects the packing and the packing follower. There is only one way you are going to be able to compliment, when it counts and when it is most effective, the tired machinist who disassembled the valve and found the problem that others had overlooked.
Then, while you are back there holding the shaft in your hand, someone calls out from the bilge that they have found trouble in the bearing race. The supervisor looks up from the dirty paperwork he is laboring over and tells the unseen voice to try to ping it over.
You have three choices. They are, in order of comfort:
- Ignore the voice, you can see who won the race in tomorrow’s paper.
- Ask the supervisor to put away the paper and explain the repair process to you.
- Get down on your back, slide under the pump down into the dirty bilge, bang your head twice on a valve, bum your arm just above the elbow on a steam pipe, and see exactly what the man is doing with that hammer.
If you ignore the voice, you are never going to make it as a supervisor. You may be a nice person, and you may look nice in khaki, but you are certainly no leader. Find a job someplace that uses your other assets. If you ask the supervisor to explain what he meant, you may make it as an officer. If you get down in the bilge, you will probably ruin your uniform.
But the bilge is the only place that will significantly broaden your knowledge. It is the only place to learn to lead. The bilge of a submarine is always an uncomfortable place. It is often dirty and always cramped. If you enjoy and are comfortable standing any particular place, that location probably should be caution- posted as a low-leaming-area. In the bilge you will better understand the high rate of failure common to this type of repair. You will understand how difficult some repairs can be. You will have a better feel for how equipment should be designed and arranged.
This personal experience is important because it will last you for the rest of your life. Because your time is limited, during your first few years you aren’t selective. You take in all sorts of raw data. This is good. However, that pace soon slows. You become more selective about information you will accept. You begin to make decisions about how you classify and index information in your mind.
These indexing decisions are essential to help you apply old experience to new situations. But as soon as you start indexing and evaluating information, your perspective is changed and limited. You are no longer accepting the same amount of new information as you did when you believed everything was important and relative. The young officer consciously trying to experience as many professional challenges as possible is storing up samples he can later evaluate.
Twenty years after that night when you lay in the bilge and for the first time contemplated the relationship of available space and quality of maintenance, you will be relying on that experience in making decisions about the spacing of machinery in the design of a new submarine. Admiral Rickover understood this principle exceptionally well. When Westing- house was building the reactor component of the Nautilus (SSN-571), he personally positioned himself at each valve and piece of machinery to ensure there was enough room to perform the maintenance that might be required. An excellent idea, but I often swore at him for not realizing that there were a limited number of men in the average crew who were five feet, four inches tall and weighed 97 pounds.
Your trip to look at the galled valve stem also serves another purpose; people see that you are truly interested in their work. People you work with are always going to talk behind your back. You can’t stop it. They won’t stop it. People are interested in people. They talk about other people. That night they will talk about how much you care.
Always select as your option the low item in your mind’s comfort index. Your mind won’t let you down; it’s reliably lazy. Remember, being a good junior officer is simply a matter of getting up from your chair or bed, walking back, and then getting down and dirty. Learning to run a division is mind over sleep.
Admiral Oliver is the Director, General Planning and Programming Division (OP-80), Office of the Chief of Naval Operations.