Chapter Excerpt

OLD SALTS GIVE SHIPS HUMAN TRAITS, USUALLY FEMinine, so I am positive that Benfold was the most beautiful destroyer in the United States Navy. I never tired of returning from shore to board her spectacular hull, as if meeting her for the first time. I could almost see her smiling and murmuring, “Welcome aboard.” I am fantasizing, yes, but then my reverie is often interrupted by memories of a very different ship—my first—and how completely unwelcome that ugly bucket made me feel at all times in all ports. There were times when I actually felt ill at the thought of having to go back to her.

My introduction to the rusty frigate USS Albert David was a brush-off—the total opposite of how to greet an aspiring acolyte. It was a dreary, rainy day in San Diego, as bleak as January gets when the Pacific churns up a winter storm. There I stood on the quarterdeck, waiting for anyone to notice my arrival. I was a new ensign, fresh from the U.S. Naval Academy. I yearned to do everything right, but already felt in the wrong.

As I had been taught at Annapolis, I had written to the captain as soon as I received the assignment, introducing myself and asking what my duty would be. This is a hallowed Navy tradition. My classmates all got cordial replies from their new commanding officers, but I hadn’t heard a word. Soon I wondered whether I’d had the right address, whether the letter had gotten lost in the mail, whether I should send another—aimless, useless fretting. As weeks became months, I worried that I might have said something inappropriate and alienated my new commanding officer.

Now, months later, here I was reporting aboard my frigate, and no one seemed to know or care.

After what must have been half an hour, the officer I was replacing finally turned up to show me around the ship. He hated the Navy and was miserable and not shy about sharing his frustrations with anyone. I met all the other officers except the captain. What a green officer should be told about the ship he would serve on had apparently escaped them. All I heard was complaining about the “challenges” the ship faced. My initiation to Albert David was haphazard, to say the least. I had reported with high enthusiasm; now my concern became dread.

Then I met the captain. When I asked if he had gotten my letter, he said, “Yeah, I have it here in my in-basket.” He had read it but hadn’t bothered to respond—so much for all my agonizing. Now he told me that I would be the ship’s communications officer and that I was inheriting a mess. Talk about a heart-sinking welcome for a new officer. Nevertheless, the captain seemed pleasant enough, at least in port. When we got to sea, he turned out to be what we all considered a tyrant, an officer who yelled at people until pulsating veins popped up on his head and neck. To me, the tension on the ship was palpable, and I had to live in that charged, ulcer-producing climate for twenty-seven months.

The only bright spot in my entire first day came when I met my chief petty officer (CPO), Bob Dooley, who had reported to the ship two weeks before me. Chief petty officers are responsible for training young officers, teaching them the practical facts they never learned in the Naval Academy and how to behave in real-world situations. Navy lore has it that a chief petty officer can make or break a new division officer. Thanks to Chief Dooley, I made it through my first assignment and went on to a successful career in the Navy.

When I asked him how he wanted us to work together, he said, “You stay out of the business down here. I’ll take care of you. You get your qualifications and learn how to drive this ship [at Annapolis, I had chosen to become a ship driver] and represent us well up there.” That was the beginning of a great relationship between the chief and me. I could confide anything to him, knowing it would go no further.

Chief Dooley and I were responsible for all communications to and from the ship, and we read all of the commodore’s personal messages, called P4s (personal for), whenever he was onboard. Once, when an irate commanding officer sent the commodore an inappropriate P4, the chief took the opportunity to impart sound advice. He took me aside and told me, “Now, whenever you’re upset, write your message and then put it in your in-basket. If you still feel the same way forty-eight hours later, send it. But if you’ve calmed down and it might make you look childish, tear it up.” Following that bit of wisdom has saved me many an embarrassing moment.

It was also Chief Dooley who first taught me one of my most important leadership lessons: Put yourself in the boss’s shoes and analyze what he thinks and does to prepare yourself to do his job. We became a great team, and I loved every minute of working with him. He never once let me down, and I learned more from Bob Dooley about how to be an officer than I ever did from my fellow officers.

This chapter draws an entire cargo hold of lessons from my unwelcoming arrival aboard poor old Albert David and my subsequent recovery from feeling sunk before even leaving port. Applicable to all hands from admirals to apprentices, the following lessons focus on the emotional tone needed to get any enterprise started on the right foot. Think of it this way: The most brilliant strategies are useless piles of paper without superb people to carry them out. Recruiting the best people—from what, thanks to globalization, is now a worldwide pool of talent—comes first and long before Day One. Here’s the leader’s challenge: What welcoming tone will lure talented people who not only love the work the organization does but who will also mesh as a unified family? Where can we find and hire them before we even begin to build a roof over their heads?

Consider some answers.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Whether you’re sizing up a college campus, thinking of joining a civic group, or showing up on a new job, first impressions set the tone for all that follows. If you get a sense of order, discipline, and attention to detail, you know what to expect and what will be expected of you. Any hint of carelessness, shabbiness, or goofing off is a telltale that this is not a serious place. That’s why it’s crucial for any leader to make sure a newcomer to the enterprise gets off on the right foot.

As the captain of Benfold, I was determined that new shipmates would never get the kind of non-welcome I received on Albert David. When I was assigned new officers, I didn’t wait for them to write; I sent them a welcome-aboard letter. That put the onus on them to respond to my letter—and it told me a lot about what kind of officer I was getting if I received a careless reply or none at all.

My letter told them what they could expect their jobs to be, and how they should begin to focus on and prepare for the assignment right away. I told them what our schedule was for the next few months, and sent a packet of information on San Diego, our home port, and its housing situation. I also sent a Benfold bumper sticker with the ship’s motto, ONWARD WITH VALOR, and a Benfold baseball cap. It was a thick packet, and I meant it to be taken seriously. (An aside: We also created a similar program to welcome our new sailors.)

Once a newcomer comes aboard, it’s a good idea to show a human side and a flash of humor during the orientation process. The late, great NFL coach Bill Walsh, who revolutionized professional football and led the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl victories, was a master of this trick. In training camp, when the rookies were nervous about what to expect in their initial drug test, Walsh told them it was no big deal. “All they’re going to do is ask for a little sample,” he said—and he reached under his desk and pulled out a two-quart Mason jar. The room rocked with laughter, and the tension dissolved.

I’ll be coming back to Bill Walsh often in the chapters that follow. Often called a genius for his cerebral approach to football, he was a model leader in his willingness to question authority, to challenge received wisdom, and to figure out new ways to capitalize on another team’s shortcomings. His book Finding the Winning Edge has been called required reading for every coach—and other leaders can find lessons in it, too.

When I came to Benfold, the program for welcoming new shipmates consisted of the same old tired procedure that had been used since time out of mind. Sailors would land at the airport and have to figure out for themselves how to get to the ship. Most were young and many came from rural areas. (If you drew a smile across the map of the United States, starting in Baltimore, Maryland, curving through the South and the heartland, and ending in Los Angeles, you would have a good idea of where most new recruits come from nowadays.) Their arrival experience was discouraging at best. They were nervous and scared to begin with, and when they finally got to the ship, no one seemed to know they were coming or had any process for getting them settled.

Soon after I arrived, the depth of dysfunction in this muddle was underscored when a young sailor got beaten up and robbed by a gang after he exited the base through the wrong gate on his first night aboard ship. He didn’t know any better because no one had told him which gates to use. So I hauled in Benfold’s executive officer and our command master chief and told them that we owed our people better than this. I asked the executive officer (XO, in Navy lingo), who had a five-year-old daughter, to picture the girl joining the Navy after she turned eighteen. Then I told the two of them to work together to design a program to bring her aboard. They came up with such a great program that our squadron commander made a film of it as a model for welcoming newly reporting personnel.

I once gave a seminar at one of the regional Federal Reserve banks. Afterward, a senior vice president came up to me and said, “I get it now. I have a woman who works for me, and I have never been able to connect with her. It has been frustrating for both of us, and I have treated her horribly. As I sat there listening to you, it dawned on me that I should treat her the way I’d want my wife treated at work.” Bingo! Treat your people and your shipmates the way you would want your spouse or child treated in the workplace.

On Benfold, new sailors were met at the airport and brought onboard to their quarters and their already-made beds. They met the command duty officer before being ushered into my cabin, from which they called their parents or spouse to report having made it safely to the ship. On the newcomers’ first weekend, we showed them the base, the gym, the health club, and the commissary. We also took them off base to Sea World or the Hotel Del Coronado. We wanted them to feel right at home, not like strangers on a bad trip.

To get its employees off on the right foot, Able Distributors, a Chicago-based wholesaler of heating and cooling equipment and products, sends new hires on the “Able World Tour.” Whether a driver, warehouse person, secretary, or salesperson, a new hand’s first assignment is to accompany a seasoned employee on a visit to the company’s central distribution warehouse and three other sites where contractors come to place and pick up orders.

The new man or woman is introduced to every other person in the company, about fifty people. Besides creating a sense of immediate camaraderie, Michael Bleier, the founder’s son and Able’s vice president, uses the tour to introduce new employees to the company’s most valuable—and valued—bit of cultural wisdom, which he describes this way: “The better we treat each other, the better we treat our customers.”

The welcoming tour is followed by another piece of Michael’s cultural indoctrination process. He hands each newcomer an “Able passport,” which includes a list of to-do training and customer-service classes. For instance, rather than assume that a new employee knows the proper way to answer the phone or read back customer orders, Michael teaches a class on customer service and makes class attendance a passport requirement. Every new hire has to be checked off on these assignments within the first month of employment. The passport procedure itself adds a bit of fun to the training requirements and gives the company insight into a new hire’s ability to complete assigned tasks in an efficient and timely fashion.

As a military commander, I had no voice in deciding who would be assigned to my ship. It was sheer luck that good people showed up. It was also my core challenge to make the best out of the hands we were dealt. I couldn’t choose my crew.

But I could choose to help make them stronger. I’m proud to say that helping those folks become their best became a Benfold specialty. There’s no point fuming about human resources. Work very hard with what you have and stand by for surprises, often happy ones. Of course, if you have a real choice in hiring, you can recruit people best suited for the job—and you’d be a fool to pass up the chance.

Civilian companies are limited in hiring only by their own imaginations. I particularly envy the managers of major sports teams who are both free and forced to create the most potent cocktails of brains and brawn imaginable. Jimmy Johnson, former coach of the Dallas Cowboys, once said that forming a pro football team essentially required “a chemist.”

Surely it takes an emotional mixologist to concoct just the right brew of daring leaders, implacable followers, and human icebergs immune to blood and blame. But according to Tommy Lasorda, the longtime Dodgers manager, the baseball mix requires a talent scout even more than it does a chemist. His recipe calls for hunting and hiring two or three dominant stars as role models and clubhouse leaders. In turn, they help the manager control the team’s two dozen other players, nearly all of them smoldering egotists—a trait that made them major leaguers in the first place.

A business needn’t be glamorous to attract the right kind of help. Beating its rivals to the punch is all it needs. Consider the advantage seized by The Container Store, a nationwide chain of forty-two retail outlets selling ingenious storage gizmos. It dawned on the chain’s leaders that its customers would make excellent employees. Accordingly, all staffers are asked to watch for likely prospects and are given a bonus of $500 for each customer hired as a full-timer and $200 for each one hired as a part-timer. The process includes ten-person interviews encouraging job candidates to show their personalities by offering sales ideas in a friendly group setting.

The Container Store now hires nearly a third of its workers from its customer base. Result: a turnover rate of less than 10 percent, compared with 70 percent for the company’s competitors. The Container Store often goes as long as eight months without placing a single help-wanted advertisement.

It’s also possible to spot candidates with a scarce trait— passion—and help them treat their jobs as more fun than work. Vail Horton is cofounder and chief executive officer of Keen Mobility, an Oregon-based maker of medical devices that improve the lives of the elderly and disabled. Himself born without legs or a fully developed right hand, Horton struggled tenaciously to overcome his handicaps and, while a student at the University of Portland, invented a crutch with a shock absorber to ease the chronic pain in his shoulders that ordinary crutches helped cause. He and his roommate, seeing the potential market for such devices, founded the business to help others overcome disabilities.

Now, when adding to his staff of seventeen, Horton screens potential recruits for their idealism, choosing candidates who care more about helping people than getting wealthy. He stresses that, in his company’s open culture, anyone on the staff can come up with a new product, make it, and sell it. As a result, he says, Keen Mobility’s workers have “enough passion to sustain them through a job that’s extremely difficult.”

At another small Oregon company, Tec Laboratories Inc., founder and CEO Steve Smith wants his thirty employees to have fun. He succeeds so well that, not long ago, his little pharmaceutical company was number one for the second year in The Scientist magazine’s list of great places to work, competing with organizations employing as many as 5,000 people. With characteristic irreverence, Tec says its market is “the itch niche”—its products prevent and treat poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac, and repel outdoor insects and kill lice. Its prime customers include utility linemen, foresters, and firefighters.

The centerpiece of Tec’s hiring process is a “foolproof interview,” which consists of hours of meetings with managers, followed by more hours of meetings with prospective team members. It takes several days. “When the team finally buys into hiring somebody, they really like them,” Smith told me, “so they’re going to make that person successful.”

Perhaps surprisingly for a company that prizes fun, a key issue for the interviewers is not the candidate’s sense of humor but whether he or she can prove serious devotion to a cause. It might be any cause—Little League, Cub Scouts, a church or civic endeavor—as long as it involves active participation. People who do nothing other than work and watch television need not apply. Someone might have all the technical skills and a great-looking résumé, Steve explained, “but if they don’t know what it feels like to be committed to something, we don’t hire them.” The fun at Tec Labs, it turns out, is a by-product of dedication to a mission well done. That was the case on Benfold, too, and I believe it’s true in almost all really good organizations.

Never delegate hiring to those managers who may see job candidates less in terms of your needs than of their own egos. The danger is what Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen calls “the law of crappy people. ‘A’ people hire ‘A’ people, but ‘B’ people hire ‘C’ people. The minute you let a weak manager in the door, they will hire individuals working for them who are even weaker. . . . Before you know it, your company degenerates.”

According to Lawrence A. Bossidy, former CEO of AlliedSignal, the best way to check on candidates’ performances is to ask their customers first and their supervisors only later.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, says that his employees have already been so conditioned to identify with customers that his company relies on employee judgments. “During our hiring meetings,” he once wrote in the company’s annual report, “we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision:

“1. Do you admire this person? For myself, I’ve always tried hard to work only with people I admire, and I encourage folks here to be just as demanding. Life is definitely too short to do otherwise.

“2. Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering? We want to fight entropy. The bar has to continuously go up. I ask people to visualize the company five years from now. At that point, each of us should look around and say, ‘The standards are so high now—boy, I’m glad I got in when I did!’

“3. Along what dimension might this person be a superstar? Many people have unique skills, interests, and perspectives that enrich the work environment for all of us. It’s often something that’s not even related to their jobs. One person here is a National Spelling Bee champion. I suspect it doesn’t help her in her everyday work, but it does make working here more fun if you can occasionally snag her in the hall with a quick challenge: ‘onomatopoeia!’”

Sooner or later, a new hire has to do the work expected and fit in. It can be the moment of truth when a job turns out to be different than expected. John Wade, one of my best young officers on Benfold, discovered this back in 1991, when he reported to his first ship, the destroyer Arthur W. Radford.

John was from an old Navy family—his grandfather, his father, and two uncles had all served—and he was well aware that Annapolis hadn’t taught him everything he needed to know. So it was with more than a little humility that he approached the Radford chief petty officer in charge of the thirty-five operations specialists (radar operators) that John was nominally leading.

John’s relatives, both officers and enlisted men, had often warned him about smart-alecky young officers who thought they knew everything when they first reported to ship. John cringed at ever being seen as such. So he told the chief he wanted to learn from him: “If he could help grow me, I promised, then I would be his biggest advocate. I would work my ass off for this division and this team.”

John met the chief clutching his rookie ensign’s binder of official training materials—presumably everything he needed to know to master his new job. The grizzled old chief took the binder from him and set it on a desk. “Mr. Wade,” he said, “you’ll get to this volume in due time. But right now, in order to lead the division effectively, you need to know this.” He tossed a different book to John, and Wade caught it. It was the training requirements for the sailors he would be leading.

John practically inhaled that book, spent weeks standing watches with his sailors, and wound up knowing how to man the radar and performing their duties as well as they could. John was rightly proud of his achievement. He not only learned every job in his division, but also earned his sailors’ respect as a good man and a good leader. You can’t ask more of a junior officer.

John Wade, of course, credited his CPO for showing him the way. I could cite scores of similar cases. Chief petty officers are the backbone of the Navy and can be, in some ways, more useful than admirals. Successful officers in the Navy will tell you that they learned the most from their very first chief. As a beneficiary of their wisdom, I’ve been delighted to find CPO counterparts in business, too. They are the go-to people, the committed men and women who embody the corporate memory because they stay in their jobs while others come and go. They can make all the difference in how fast and how well a management trainee understands the business. Bottom line? Make sure your company teams up promising newcomers with your own chief petty officers.

Unfortunately, on most ships new sailors start off being matched with their division’s poorest performer, mainly because poor performers have extra time on their hands. On Benfold, I wanted my new people to learn from the best, not the worst. In our welcome-aboard program, newcomers were matched with the number one sailor in their division. Sure, it was an extra burden for that great sailor, but with ability comes responsibility, and I wanted my new sailors to learn from the best. Who are your newbies learning from?

I learned much of what I know about hiring (and leadership, for that matter) from President Bill Clinton’s defense secretary Dr. William Perry. The secretary picked me, a decided dark horse, to be his military assistant in 1994. At the time, I thought he alone had made the decision, probably with the blessing of the senior military assistant, a two-star Army general named Paul Kern. A year later, I heard the real story from Dr. Perry himself.

While we were off on a trip together, I asked why he had hired me. “I didn’t hire you,” he said. “The staff did. I’ve been in business and government for forty years, and I know how to hire the smartest person. But that’s never been a marker for my success.” The real key, he said, was creating a team of people who would support one another to help him get the mission accomplished. “Out of the twelve candidates for the job, you were the only one who took the time to talk to the rest of the staff as if they were people,” he said. “When I asked them who they wanted to work with, they said they wanted to work with you.”

As you think about your own journey, ask yourself if you’re the one with whom your fellow workers would choose to work. If not, is that important to you? It’s something to think about.

After leaving the Navy, I found that a surprising number of senior managers don’t know anything about their company’s welcome-aboard program. They don’t know how daunting it can be for new people to go through all the wickets with the human relations people, enrolling in the health-care plan, settling in at a desk, getting comfortable with their assigned computers, and getting access to the Internet—not to mention meeting their supervisors and colleagues. A more creative process would help new people start off on a much happier and less stressful note.

My chief engineer once told me that we were recruiting our people every day, even though we already had them aboard. Thinking of hiring as being a continuous process is a great incentive to keep people happy and productive—in short, to keep them. I work with companies that spend a lot of money recruiting the most promising candidates on college campuses. But that’s where the recruiting process ends—a neglect that likely costs a lot more money and time than keeping workers happy and productive. If a company loses a promising trainee and has to recruit a replacement, it will spend at least twice as much to fill the position and waste a year of training in the process. If you’re the manager in charge, you have the headache of repeating the training.

It’s clearly in your own best interest to recruit your people every day, starting with Day One and never stopping. Make sure your recruits get off on the right foot, fired with enthusiasm and with the proper road map in hand. But the work doesn’t stop there. A beginning is only a beginning, and the next step is to inspire all your people to hit the highest level they can possibly reach. That’s the message of the next chapter.

Copyright © 2008 by D. Michael Abrashoff