The answer isn’t ‘out there’ in terms of the best talent and your job is to go and get it. The answer is in you. Can you be inspiring enough to get ordinary people to perform out of their skins, and love doing it? That’s what the best organisations do and that’s what will lead your organisation safely through the downturn.
That’s what Captain Mike Abrashoff did when he turned around a poor-performing US naval ship to become the best-performing ship in the Pacific fleet in just a few months.
When he took command of USS Benfold, one of the most technologically advanced ships in the U.S. Navy’s arsenal, Commander Mike Abrashoff inherited a demoralised crew of “order-takers.” He realised that to be an effective commander, he would not only have to completely revamp USS Benfold’s culture, he would have to do so by abandoning the Navy’s traditional “command and control” model. Employing a grassroots leadership model, Abrashoff transformed his crew from order-takers into empowered decision makers, improving morale, increasing retention from 29% to an unprecedented 100%, and yielding $15 million in savings in one year!
He got his sailors to suggest to him ways of saving money. They did the job, he reasoned, so they were best-placed to suggest how to do it better and cheaper. One nineteen-year-old suggested using stainless steel rivets instead of iron ones. Abrashoff used the ship’s credit card to buy them from Home Depot, because the US Navy’s own procurement people couldn’t supply them. The new rivets, and other initiatives suggested by the crew, saved so much money that in his first year in charge, Abrashoff returned to The Pentagon $600,000 of his $2.4 million maintenance budget and $800,000 of his $3 million repair budget. That year he operated on 75% of his allocated budget. And his ship’s performance figures went through the roof.
“We saved money not because we were consciously trying to,” he explained, “but because my sailors were free to question conventional wisdom and dream up better ways to do their jobs.”
His ability to “envision the ship through the eyes of his crew” became a seminal case study for Fast Company magazine and the Harvard Business Review. This is a back-to-the-basics leadership story that begins at the core of an organisation and transforms its culture from the inside out, and from the top down.
For more on this fascinating story, see - http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/23/grassroots.html
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