Articulating the feelings that your people are afraid to speak is a large part of what leaders, including ship captains, do for a living.
Show me an organization in which employees take ownership, and I will show you one that beats its competitors.
A Gallup study found that when people leave their companies, 65 percent of them are actually leaving their managers.
If your bosses see you lifting burdens off their shoulders, and they find out they can trust you, they stay out of your face. And that gives you the freedom you need to operate independently and improve your ship.
Leaders need to understand how profoundly they affect people, how their optimism and pessimism are equally infectious, how directly they set the tone and spirit of everyone around them.
As a manager, the one signal you need to steadily send to your people is how important they are to you. In fact, nothing is more important to you. Realize your influence, and use it wisely. Be there for your people. Find out who they are. Recognize the effects you have on them and how you can make them grow taller.
The timeless challenge in the real world is to help less-talented people transcend their limitations.
What’s needed now is a dramatic new way of inspiring people to excel while things are happening at lightning speed.
The key to being a successful skipper is to see the ship through the eyes of the crew.
I found that the more people knew what the goals were, the better buy-in I got – and the better results we achieved together.
If what I’m about to do appeared on the front page of the Washington Post tomorrow, would I be proud or embarrassed? If.
Short of those contingencies, the crew was authorized to make their own decisions. Even if the decisions were wrong, I would stand by them. Hopefully, they would learn from their mistakes. And the more responsibility they were given, the more they learned.
The key to being a successful skipper is to see the ship through the eyes of the crew. Only then can you find out what’s really wrong and, in so doing, help the sailors empower themselves to fix it.
The achievement in my life of which I am the most proud was turning that crew into a tight-knit, smoothly functioning team that boasted – accurately – that Benfold was the best damn ship in the Navy.
Innovation and progress are achieved only by those who venture beyond standard operating procedure.
I’m absolutely convinced that positive, personal reinforcement is the essence of effective leadership.