Once a year, all Navy ships undergo a thorough assessment, in which outside inspectors validate the ship's readiness. The ship as a whole and the crew's abilities and proficiencies are rated in twenty-four categories, on a scale ranging from basic Level One to advanced Level Four.
The purpose is to determine who much additional training the crew needs to be ready for combat. But if you assume that the higher a ship's level, the less time it would spend training at sea, you would be wrong. In fact, regardless of its readiness rating, every ship spends the next six months training at sea.
Thus there was no incentive to reach Level Four, and in fact, no ship ever did. Level One was the required minimum, and that was usually considered good enough.
Then Benfold came along.
Originally, my goal was to reach an overall rating of Level Two, but when I recognized the enormous potential of my crew, I raised the bar to Level Three, much to the chagrin of those who saw it as a quantum leap in their labor and my hubris.
I must also admit that, in addition to my noble motive of making the ship as good as it could be, I wanted to blow my archrival out of the water. Their assessment was scheduled to begin the basic Level One. The CO had no idea that we were laying the groundwork to shake things up a little. In fact, we were about to rock his world.
Our first challenge was finding enough senior people to supervise the twenty-four areas of testing. My combat systems officer hit me with the unexpected news that we had only twenty qualified people who were not involved in other critical operations.
Thinking fast, I said, "Fine - pick supervisors from the next group down. You don't always need a senior person in charge. It could be a young, third-class petty officer."
"That's never been done before," he said.
"See what they can do," I said. "The alternative is to do nothing, right? Let's assign senior people to the most demanding areas and work our way down to the junior ones. If we don't get Level Three in some categories, so what? We will get Level One or Two. We have nothing to lose."
As it turns out, the third- and second-class petty officers were so honored to be chosen that they worked hard enough for several of their teams to outshine those supervised by senior people. The search-and-seizure team was particularly impressive. We assigned it to one of the ship's most junior sailors because we suspected he had the ability to honcho it. The outside inspectors protested, saying they could not validate the work of an important team that wasn't headed by a commissioned officer. But I insisted, and the young sailor did such a fantastic job that the inspectors ate their words and placed us at Level Four in that category.
Breaking out of our stratified systems to trust the people who work for us, especially those at or near the low end of the hierarchy, was a useful, progressive change. It let us unleash people with talent and let them rise to levels that no one had expected, simply by challenging them: Make Benfold the readiest ship afloat. In that context, how could we not have done well?
It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy by D. Michael Abrashoff. Grand Central Publishing. 2007. p.146-148
