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SafeTalk with SafeStart
SafeTalk with SafeStart
S11Ep13 SafeStart Forum: Keynote with Captain Michael Abarashoff
The SafeStart Forum (a more user-centric event than the SafeStart Human Factors Conference) will open with the legendary Captain Michael Abrashoff as the day one keynote speaker. Hear a quick snippet of how the sailors on the ship he was captain of were empowered to take ownership and accountability for their own success and the transformation lessons that can apply to any organization. "No matter what line of work you're in, you're in the people business."
Hosts: Tim Page-Bottorff/Danny Smith
Guest: Captain D. Michael Abrashoff
https://safestartforum.com/?utm_source=safestart.com&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=forum2024
Hey, welcome back to SafeT alk with SafeS tart. Tim Page-Bottorff for joining me. Today is my podcast partner, Danny Smith. Hey, Danny, how's things going in Alabama today?
Danny Smith:Well, it's, uh, we're entering into what I like to call fake fall number two, Uh, and that's where we get a hint of coolness in the air, but you know that he didn't quite over yet. So, you know, I know I'm getting a little older now, but I'm really starting to love the more moderate temps that we see in the fall and also in the spring. So, uh, that's kind of where we're at right now, at least weather- wise. But you know, thinking about the fall and the spring, it really gets me thinking about the spring of 2024. And that's when our upcoming SafeS tart Forum will be taking place in Orlando on April 23rd and 24th of next year, and we're getting really excited about that.
Tim Page-Botorff:Yeah, I'm getting excited about it too. As a matter of fact, we get a chance to introduce our opening keynote speaker in just a minute, but for our long-time users of SafeS tart, you probably picked up on the name change and in the past we've had a human factors conference and next year we're going to be switching the name to The SafeS tart Forum. Danny, why don't you tell our listeners and walk through the reasonings behind the name change?
Danny Smith:Yeah, that's a great question. Comment, Tim. When the planning team started talking about the event for 2024, we knew we wanted something different and, specifically, our desire was to create a curated experience for attendees where they could not only learn from the speakers but, more importantly, learn from each other as they network throughout the event, and we really wanted the content to provide outcomes that they can't really get as effectively at another conference or another event. We wanted to be very interactive, provocative and really relevant to all stages of participants. Human factor journey.
Danny Smith:Sorry, I guess that's kind of a long answer to a short question. I guess you can tell by what I've said, though saying conference just really didn't seem descriptive enough. So, literally, when we were going through what should we call the event, we broke out the thesaurus and we searched for more applicable names and we looked at a lot of different options and in the end we realized that forum, which, if you go to the Oxford dictionary, it defines as a place, a meeting or a medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged. It just felt like that really captured our vision really well. Okay, I'll hush now. Let's get to the big part of what we want to discuss today, and that is our opening keynote speaker.
Tim Page-Botorff:The story of Captain Michael Abarashoff and his command of the USS Benf old has become legendary inside and outside the Navy. This fascinating top-down of change is for anyone trying to navigate today's uncertain business seas. We're proud to announce our 2024 Safe Start Forums opening. Keynote speaker as Captain Michael Abarashoff. Captain, welcome to our podcast and thank you for your service, sir.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:Well, thank you, and I'm looking forward to joining everybody in Florida in the April. Yeah, I look forward to having you.
Tim Page-Botorff:Absolutely.
Danny Smith:For our longtime listeners. The story of how Captain Abarashoff turned around the USS Benf old may be familiar. Back in 2019, he was the first keynote at our opening conference and then when he took the command of the ship, he was well, it was one of the worst performing ships in the US fleet, but when he left it was one of the best and that left us with a lot of and that led him to write his bestselling book It's Your Ship, Captain your title of the book it really captures kind of your leadership philosophy. It's Your Ship. I mean that's. It's largely just about getting everybody to take ownership right.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So I interviewed every sailor on the ship individually, all 310 of them, and I'll never forget it. One of the early interviews, that technician asked me how to do a procedure. In the back of my mind I'm thinking why is he asking me how to do this when he's the technician? And then it hit me. He wanted me to tell him how to do it so that if it didn't work out, he could say I was just doing what I was told to do. And so, instead of telling him how to do it, I said what do you think If you own this ship, how would you do this? And he said well, this is what I would do.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:And he turned in flawless performance because he owned it. Right. If I had told him how to do it, he would just be an order taker, and order takers don't accept ownership and accountability for the results. And what do you think became It's Your Ship? Where I said to my sailors it's your ship, you own it. If you see something that needs to be done, step up to the plate and take action. And that's how the title of the book came about.
Tim Page-Botorff:That's a great little background there. I have to say that you've leveraged literally what a sailor's capabilities are. So in the book you actually mentioned leveraging human capital. Can you speak to that for a little bit?
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So we are all being asked to do more with less.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:These days, no organization, whether it be in government or private sector, suffers from an excess of resources.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:To get our jobs done, we have to figure out how to get it done with what we're allocated and we are in the people business. No matter what line of work you're in, you're in the people business and you can order somebody to get a job done, or you could train them and get them to understand the big picture and leverage their initiative and their technical ability to help you drive performance. And if you can engage your people to do that, they can lift burdens off your shoulders so that you have time in the day to go. Do you know $500 an hour work instead of getting stuck doing $5 an hour work all day long? And we're being asked to do so much these days. We can't afford to let ourselves get stuck doing $5 an hour work. And if we engage our people so that they can lift burdens off our shoulders and leverage them, we can do the truly important work. You know that really makes a difference in the performance of our organizations and in the safety of our organizations.
Danny Smith:Sure, yeah, I'm like Tim. There's a lot of great leadership suggestions in here and tying into that, not only you know getting the people underneath you and downstream from you, if you will, to kind of take responsibility and ownership for things, but also to think upstream a bit as well, and one of the things I noticed in the book that was really, really interesting to me is learn to think like your boss. Can you elaborate on that some?
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So one of the other highlights of my career was getting chosen to be the number two military assistant of the Secretary of Defense, and I wasn't in a leadership role, I was in an individual contributor and my job was to push paper every day. And every four foot a stack of paper would come to the office of stuff people wanted SECDEF to read and it was my job to read it first and get it down to maybe eight or nine inches and I would highlight what I thought was important and I would put it in the senior military assistance in basket. He's the three star who is the senior assistant. It's our most important three- star job in the military. For example, Colin Powell had the job as a three- star and at the beginning he threw 90% of what I thought was important in what's called the burn bag where we put classified material for destruction later that night. As a side note, we're not supposed to take classified material home with us. We're not supposed to store it in our garage. We're supposed to put it in the burn bag for destruction. So he was throwing 90% of what I thought was important away every day and he didn't have time to coach me or train me, and I'm thinking with a 10% effectiveness rating.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:I'm not going to be in this job long, and so I had to figure out how to get to a higher level of performance. When my boss didn't have time to train me and then it hit me. I'm just going to try to train myself to think like him. And every night at 8:30, when he went home from work, I would go into his office, take his burn bag, dump it out on his desk, compare everything of mine that he threw away, and I would compare it to what he said onto the secretary. And what I wanted to do was to find out what was important to him so that it could become important to me. And within about six weeks I had that eight or nine inches of paper down to maybe one or two inches every day, and I would sit there and I'd watch the general work and he would just rubber, stamp it and send it right onto the Secretary.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:And what that taught me was our bosses are under pressure as well. They have to perform for their boss, and if I can train myself to think like my boss, find out what's important to him or her and deliver it, they might give delegate to me more responsibility and they have the time to go do even more important things. And so, by training myself to think like my boss, he started to trust me. He started to delegate to me and eventually I had 45 people reporting to me, people that were reporting to him. He had them report to me and they were senior to me, they were older than me, but he put me in charge of the trip planning team, the security detail and the communications team, something that had never been done before, and it was because I taught myself to find out what was important to him and then it became important to me and he started to trust me.
Tim Page-Botorff:That is a great response. I do have to ask how big was your burn bag when you took over command of those 45 people?
Captain Michael Abrashoff:I'm joking you don't have to answer that.
Tim Page-Botorff:I do have to say I enjoy your straightforwardness, and you mentioned the term listen aggressively. I have a buddy who actually is really fond of saying listening is a lot more than waiting for your turn to talk. So when you say listen aggressively, can you expand on that for us?
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So while I was working for William so as we get more senior, we get more experience and we think we know the answer based on our wisdom and in our experience and I found myself cutting people off as they were talking and I had somebody who meant a lot to me tell me, take me aside and say you know, it's really aggravating when you interrupt people while they're speaking. You should start listening to what they're trying to tell you before you open your mouth. And it hit me. You know the person was right. I must have been irritating to cut people off while they were talking. So I learned how to keep my mouth shut and instead of telling people what the answer was, I would say what do you think? And so that got them to speak and I could listen to them and between us we could find the right solution on what we should be doing. But if you're constantly telling people the solution before they even get done, telling you what the problem is, they're going to be frustrated and you're not going to get great results.
Danny Smith:It sounds like you had a lot of interaction, just one-on-one certainly, with the men on your ship. And it really kind of brings me to another point that I noticed here, and that is that you you talked about unclogging the chain of command. Certainly you have a chain of command, you have to follow that, but it sounds like you you had a lot of interaction with people just trying to make sure that, as you said, that your vision was getting to the troops, in other words, that you were getting your vision instilled in everybody. So few people would talk a bit about that.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:And we had men and women on my ship.
Danny Smith:I was about to ask that and I thought, boy, I probably just really made a bad mistake there. So my apologies to any ladies who are listening. Yes, absolutely, Captain.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So our ship was the first ship built from the keel up to accommodate both men and women.
Danny Smith:Excellent.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:And so, and in many ways, the women elevated the performance of the men on the ship, because the men didn't want to be shown up by the women on the ship. So I went kicking and screaming to a mixed gender ship because I'd never been on one before, but after having commanded one, I would have never gone back to an all male ship, because the two together elevated the performance. So, having said that, I was so proud of myself for catching your faux pas. What's the question again?
Danny Smith:I was thinking about just you mentioned unclogging the chain of command, just getting your vision down to the troops.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So so you know, obviously we have a chain of command and many times what my intentions are are interpreted as they go down through each level, and the message that ends up with the crew after going through four or five layers of bureaucracy is totally different than what I had intended.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So I had to Q and A the quality of the message that was being communicated to our people on the frontline, and so I'm not gonna call them spies or informants, but I had a feedback loop so that I could determine that what is getting to the people on the frontline is what I actually directed.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:And in instances where somebody within that bureaucracy reinterpreted wrongly, I could then have a conversation and say look, I don't need you to reinterpret, these are the directions. You get a say on how we execute on the directions, but you don't get a say on reinterpreting my directive to our people. So and I think that's what happens in organizations today is that things get reinterpreted and misinterpreted and nobody has that feedback loop of what's actually being received by the people on the frontline. And I had a whole array of things that I used. I had a the senior enlisted guy on the ship is called the command master chief and I would have him go out and pulse various people around the ship to make sure that the message was as I intended, and then I could then come back up the chain in areas where it was not as I intended and find out where it was being interpreted incorrectly.
Tim Page-Botorff:I like the response, especially the feedback loop. It's something that's important to our organization and to all of our listeners, because if you don't have that continuous feedback loop, you're not going to be able to make adjustments. If your communication is being delivered incorrectly, you can lose some trust. You talked about it already creating a climate of trust. How important is that?
Captain Michael Abrashoff:Well, especially when it comes to safety, people need to feel safe to come tell you the truth. If they don't feel safe, you're never going to have a high performing team. You're never going to have a safe organization. I wanted my crew to respect their chain of command, but I didn't want them to fear us. I think fear is a cancer in any organization. If somebody sees something that they think we are doing in an unsafe manner or to think that we can be doing it in a safer manner, I want them to feel confident to raise their hand and tell us and to know that they will be hurt. That is something that everybody at your meeting and on this podcast needs to understand is fear is not healthy in an organization and people need to feel safe to tell you the truth if you're going to have a safe organization.
Danny Smith:I've often said to a lot of people, but certainly to some of my supervisors in the past you don't pay me just to be a yes man, you pay me to tell you what I see and tell me what I see here and what I believe is happening here. I owe that to my superiors, right? I think that's a big point that you talked about in your book is just letting your crew feel free to speak up. I mean, in the business world, particularly in the world of safety now we hear a lot about psychological safety and that's a part of that as well just having people that feel willing to speak up, right?
Captain Michael Abrashoff:Right, and what we don't realize is sometimes, when people do speak up, they're nervous and they're looking for our reaction and sometimes, if we have like a disgust to look on our face, or if a body motion indicates that we're not in agreement, then that chips away at their psychological safety to come tell us what's going on. So we need to understand the power that we have, not only with our words, but with our actions and with our responses, and it's something that we need to consciously think about in order to have the best performing organization.
Tim Page-Botorff:I got to tell you as a Marine, I had feet here about speaking up and it was tough for me to be able to, especially if I saw something and there were situations where I was literally told to follow orders, do what you're supposed to do, and it really came from the top down. And so I kind of relate to the statement of fear, to relate to the feel let your crew feel free to speak up. But if that feeling isn't there, then you just go to follow orders and just do your four years and probably get out. I just literally saw you in a video in regards to retention rates and that you were losing your sailors because they weren't reenlisting. So, relating that all to the book elements free your crew from top down, itis. Does that all play a part in this?
Captain Michael Abrashoff:Well, to me, the VIPs on the ship are the crew, and whenever an Admiral would come to visit the ship, historically they go to the officer's mess and interact with the officers.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:Well, I love my officers, but to me, the VIPs on that ship are the ones down in the bilges making that ship run. They're the VIPs. They're the ones who I want to have to interact with the Admiral, and so sometimes the officers were got their noses out of joint. But to me, my VIPs are the ones actually doing the work and I treat them as such. And that's who the admirals are going to go see those people on the front line so that they can get the truth and see firsthand what it's taking to keep our ships operating and running, so that they can make better informed decisions when they get back to the Pentagon. You know they don't want to hear, you know, some captain telling them something that may be skewed. You know they need to hear the truth and they need to see the truth, and so I had them interact with my VIPs, my crew, and that's how you get away from the top down itis.
Danny Smith:It reminds me what I used to be before I became a consultant. I was a safety manager with an organization and one of my things and this is back when we all still had smoker sheds around most of the plants I would always go out to the smoker shed. I always said if you really want to know what's going on in an organization, go out to the smoker shed or go to the picnic tables or the break rooms or wherever, and just find those people and they'll tell you what's really going on there for sure, Right.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So you hit on one of my hot buttons. We make it difficult for sailors to smoke on ships, and it used to be. You could smoke in your bunk, you could smoke at your workstation, but you know, those days are long gone, for good reason. But now we make it difficult for you to smoke and so our smoker shed, or area where we smoke, is back on the aft fantail of the ship and you're exposed to the elements rain, wind, cold, heat and it's the idea is, we don't want you to smoke, so we're going to make it difficult for you.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:But if you want to know who, what's going on on the ship, the people who know everything are the smokers, because the smoke break is a very social place. It is. There is no rank. If you're the CEO and you're smoking with the, you know the person who's, you know shining bolts. You're that, you're equal in the eyes of the smokers and so they talk and that's where you hear the unvarnished truth about what's going on. And at night, all the lights on our ship are off and it's pitch black because we don't want our enemies to see us. And when it was really dark, I'd slip out to the smoke break and they could never see me standing there. All you could see are red butts lighting up, and I would just stand there for 45 minutes and listen to what the smokers were talking about and I realized that if the smokers understood what I was doing, that everybody else would understand what I was doing.
Danny Smith:I love it. I love it. There's another thing that I saw in the book I'd love for you to chat about real quickly if you don't mind. I found this one really funny, particularly given today's environment. Forget diversity, strive for unity.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:I think that's a just a really interesting comment there well, in government we have these mandatory diversity training sessions and people end up leaving more upset than when they went in and when and my predecessor was they the crew cheered when my predecessor left and I said I'd like to see the results of the anonymous equal opportunity survey and what it showed was the minorities felt like there was racial prejudice on the ship, the women felt like there was sexual harassment on the ship and the white males felt like there was overwhelming favoritism shown towards minorities and women, and to me, any program that generates that result has to be ineffective.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So I canceled our diversity program and in its place I put our unity program, and it's based on the same concepts. I just wanted to have a positive spin on it instead of a negative spin, and I wanted people to understand it is a strength that we're unified. It is a strength that it takes people with different skill sets, different genders, different races, different levels of creativity and how we make that. All work is going to determine whether we have a high performing organization or not, and you treat each other with respect and dignity and you treat each other in a manner in which you yourself want to be treated by me, and that is the essence of our unity program. But we are stuck on diversity these days needlessly, because we just don't frame it the right way.
Danny Smith:Love it.
Tim Page-Botorff:High-impact conversation. I'll tell you when, when I was a corporal, I don't think I would have been able to articulate marginalized, and because you know, the Marine Corps always talks about one green machine. It doesn't matter what other colors you were or whatever, what other things you do. But I will also bring in the fact that Danny and I have a really good TV show we love. It's called Justified, and there's a guy in their name, Boyd Crowder, and he said, "in Articulate ain't what I am, and I saw something. I saw something in your book, though, that you said and this probably was generated out of fear Articulate, what your crew is afraid to. Can you expand on that?
Captain Michael Abrashoff:So that's where listen aggressively comes in, that they may be trying to describe a problem, but they don't quite know how to wrap words around it, and so to listen aggressively means to listen to what they're saying, but try to see if there's a deeper message that they're not able to articulate. Just quite right, and so, in here, instead of me telling them or finishing their sentence, I would go hmm, you know what is it? That's the true. What is the root of this problem? They're just describing the effects of it. What is the root cause?
Danny Smith:so it and listening aggressively enabled me to get to the bottom of the problem instead of just Attempting to treat the the effects of the problem, one of the things I'd like to just toss out is actually part of part of our company mission with SafeS tart that you mentioned in the book, as well as just having fun in everything that you do and that you know sometimes what's the old thing. One of our other Advisors, Rodd Wagner, loves to talk about how that was from the 70s show. The famous quote work is work, and if it wasn't work they would call it something totally different. But it is. It is nice to be able to enjoy your work and to have fun, no matter what it is and that you're doing. So can you elaborate on that something? Just, you know having fun with what you're doing, so my mother taught junior high school for 41 years.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:Retired at age 62 and then they can continue to substitute teach in the same school district Three days a week for $50 a day for the next 24 years, finally retiring at age 86 and she did, she loved it. She did it. That caused her to get up every morning is to love what you do, and you know we're in the safety business, and what could be a better mission than to love safety and love our people so much that we want them to be safe at work and that we leave no stone unturned in our desire to create the safest and the best work experience? That's something that you can get satisfaction of at the end of the day when you go home and say, gee, you know, I did this. That's gonna have somebody keep all ten fingers and all ten toes so that they can play with their grandkids someday, and so it's. It's easier to get people on board when they believe passionately in what they're doing and that they're making a difference, and your listeners and your attendees are making that difference.
Tim Page-Botorff:Thank you so much for that statement. Reading your book was an eye-opener for me. I'll tell you what. For all of our listeners, it's definitely well worth the read to capture some of these moments, just like we did. So, Captain, can you tell everybody how to get your book?
Captain Michael Abrashoff:Well, the best place is on Amazon. It's Your Ship. You can get it in Audible If you liked hearing my voice order the Audible, because I read for the Audible book but you can get it on Amazon. I have many corporate customers that buy it in bulk and there's an outfit in Milwaukee called Porch-like books that get you the best discount on bulk orders.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:But I've heard feedback not only from people in business but from parents who use it to have conversations with their kids, so that instead of having dinner, everybody watching their iPhone while they're eating the parent gives the book to their children and say read chapter one. And then I want you to tell us at dinner what you learned from chapter one. Then the parent can say this is how it really works. So it's a way to have a discussion of real life issues where the child can report back what they read. But the parent can then say here's my experience and this is what you need to look out for. It's a way to unclog the communication pipes that exist within families today because everybody is focused on their iPhone.
Danny Smith:Sure, that's great If folks get the book and bring that to the conference. I'm sure you'd love to just have an opportunity to assign those books for them. If they have a chance, bring those.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:I would assign everyone.
Danny Smith:Absolutely. Thank you so much for that. That'd be great.
Tim Page-Botorff:Captain, I can't really put into words what an honor and a pleasure it has been to have you on our show today. I'm sure Danny feels the same way.
Danny Smith:Absolutely. I think you did say thank you there. You put it in good words there, Tim. I think so. Captain Abrashoff, we're really looking forward to seeing you again in April down in the Orlando Kissimmee area and seeing you at the conference.
Captain Michael Abrashoff:You got it. Thanks for your time and to your listeners, thanks for tuning in.
Danny Smith:For more information on the 2024 Safe Start Forum, be sure to check out our website. It's wwwSafeStartForum. com. The Early Bird registrations are open as well. Those will be out there for a few months, but you don't want to wait too long because they will close out really, really quickly. So again, SafeStartForum. com.
Tim Page-Botorff:So that's our time for today and, on behalf of Captain Abrashoff, my partner Danny Smith and the entire Safe Talk team, thanks for listening and remember to share this episode, and for Safe Talk with Safe Start. I'm Tim Page-Botter from both, inviting you to join us in beautiful Orlando next April. We'll see you down the road.