Latest / Commander's Intent / Why Great Leaders Ask for Input Instead of Having All the Answers: Lessons from a U.S. Navy Attack Submarine Commander with William Spears

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Why Great Leaders Ask for Input Instead of Having All the Answers: Lessons from a U.S. Navy Attack Submarine Commander with William Spears · Commander's Intent

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oakes.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Derek Oaks and welcome back to another episode of Commander's Intent.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm here with my guest today, William Spears.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: He's a commander in the United States Navy.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: He's an academy graduate.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: He was prior enlisted, which meant before going to Annapolis.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: He was already a sailor, serving, served for three years in the Navy.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: And he has spent his life as a submariner.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to turn it over to him to kind of talk about what that means, what it's like to be a submariner.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: So go ahead.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Turn it over to you, Bill.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, sure thing.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: So first of all, it's a submariner.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not less than a mariner.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a damn fine mariner.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: But uh that yeah, it's it's not like it's an insult or anything.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's an old joke.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: So the first thing I have to say is because I'm actively serving in the Navy, it's important that I say that anything that I say today is just me speaking as myself, William Spears, and doesn't constitute an official position of the U.S.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Navy or, you know, any part of the government or anything like that.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: If I don't say that, then some, you know, I might render some opinion and someone that'll someone will take it as the Navy's opinion.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: And that's just that's not what we're doing here.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna quote you saying you were speaking for the CNO, but I guess I can't now.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: To your question, why submarines?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I you know, I've I've always liked high-tech and I've liked, you know, I wanted to find an elite community.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to be part of something special and elite.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, submarines kind of checked all the blocks for that coming out of the Naval Academy.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: You know, all submarine officers are you go to nuclear power school first.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: You basically are just immersed in nuclear engineering for the first several years of your career.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: And that's just the first hurdle that you have to get over before you can do any of the tactical stuff.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: And why I've continued in submarines since then is just because I love the community so much, the camaraderie.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very tight-knit crew.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: The crews typically are about, you know, 150 to 160 or 70 people.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: And that's pretty big for a submarine, you know, that that compared to a big old surface ship, that's usually a pretty tight crew where everyone knows who everyone is, and you know, officers and enlisted, you know, the ranks kind of the culture is such that the rank kind of blurs a little bit, where really what matters is your technical competence.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we all have roles to play, and those tend to be tied to your rank and everything like that.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: But no one's going to respect you in any way just because of what's on your collar.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's completely about how much you understand about the ship.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: And if you don't understand the ship, you don't know what to do when you know there's an emergency, you don't know where to go, you don't know how things work, then everyone's going to see through it immediately.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: There's no hiding that.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: So and it's a absolutely community where everyone needs to pull their weight.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: And there's just no room for anyone that can't pull their weight.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot of things that follow from that and the culture.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that's kind of why, why I like it and why I've stuck with it.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's definitely some high quality people in the military.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: So let me ask you, what's the ratio, crew ratio between enlisted and officers on a crew?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I can tell you there's rough about 14, 16 officers on a sub, and you know, and then the 150 crew would be the rest, would constitute, would include the so that now I'm showing my bad math, you know, submariners are supposed to be 10 to 1 or so.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: We're supposed to be good at public math.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of like looking through the periscope and like, all right, what's the distance to track?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Do the math in your head, you know, and like having to multiply the angle and say, okay, you know, all right, the angle of the bow is 30 degrees, sine of 30 is half of that.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: So distance to track is gonna be 4,000 yards.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: You got to do all that crap in your head to get good at it.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I've never particularly loved that aspect of it, but that's part of the culture.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: I can relate to that.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: In the flying world, you're always doing math, also.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: We come up with a lot of rules of thumb.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you're a fighter pilot, you're dropping a bomb on a certain target.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: In order to put yourself in the right position to deliver the right weapon on the proper target, you've got to do a lot of math to do there and to get there.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: And flying an airplane, probably like driving a sub, is not always so as precise as you would like it to be.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you're doing constant corrections.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so when your positioning doesn't end up exactly right, you have to do the math of what do I have to do?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: What speed changes do I have to make?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: What angle change do I have to make?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Do I have to delay pulling the trigger or do I need to pull the trigger earlier?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: All those things are math problems that you're always factoring in.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then we would use our sensors.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: I used to have guys who flew with me, and I'm like, I'm flying with Woody.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: That was my call sign.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Go, I'm flying with Woody, he's gonna make me do math again.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, because we're always constantly going, okay, the target plot, how tall is that person over there?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a kid or is it a military-age male based on the shadow, based on the tree next to him?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me what and how'd you get to that conclusion so that you're always looking at that same target.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure I'm doing a submarine is something similar, but I knew you guys were nerds too.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not the biggest of the nerds.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't good at it, so I practiced it a lot, and I was constantly verbalizing it because I wasn't good at it.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: Now, one thing that'll be a little bit different on a sub is you know, I identify as a ship driver.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm a submarine warfare officer, and you know, colloquially we'd call it driving the ship if I am standing officer of the deck, which is a watch position that I might stand for like an eight-hour watch.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: Now, when I am standing that job, I'm standing watch as the officer of the deck.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: My job is to basically, you know, give the orders that turn the rudder and you know, ring up some engine bell and come to some depth, this or that, and that the ship will respond.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I've got a whole team, a whole watch team that does all the things that, you know, manipulate the ship in such ways to make these things happen and it makes this massive thing move in space, but I don't touch anything.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's no controls of myself.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: And if I were to actually reach over some, you know, operator's panel and touch his stuff, they would smack my hand away.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they're trained to be very possessive of their watch station, and you definitely wouldn't do that.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I wouldn't want to do that.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: But what that means, I've got this whole team of individuals who are feeding, you know, my job is to integrate the picture in terms of, you know, the sonar room is seeing these things.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they've got this idea of the sensor picture.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: I've got my fire control technicians who are integrating that into kind of a, you know, this computer system that's going to integrate the SODAR data into a contact picture around me, you know, but I've also got the navigation team that's going to keep me from running aground.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: I've got my ship control team that's going to keep me on depth and keep the water distributed through the ship so that the ship's trimmed correctly.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: And they're handling the rudder and the engine and stuff like that.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: I've got a whole engine room back there that's running the reactor and everything that comes with that.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so whenever I'm interacting with this team, I want them to provide recommendations based on what they see and what their specific area of expertise is.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: And then it's my job to synthesize those recommendations into a maneuver.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: So what I would like to do typically, I'll know, you know, I'll typically have in my head like, okay, the ship needs to come left, but I've got a few minutes to figure this out.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I've got this thing I got to navigate around or something like that, or maybe I'm trying to maneuver the ship so that the sensors will pick up this contact I'm trying to track correctly.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I need to maneuver the right sensor to pick them up a certain way.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll have it in my head what we need to do.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: But instead of just giving the order, if I've got the time to deal with it, I'll say, you know, hey, SonarCon, analyze for the correct course to, you know, place, you know, Cierra 153 down the correct bearing for my tote array or something like that.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: I will pull four recommendations from the team, whether I really need them or not.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a couple things that does for me.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: One is it checks my math.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if I've got it in my head that we should do this, but the team recommends something else, maybe the team's right.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: And there's going to be reasons if they're coming up with something that I'm not thinking.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: But the other thing that that's going to buy for me is it cultivates buy-in from the team.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: I want every individual operator to feel like he's driving the ship and to feel responsible for what the ship does.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so if I want to come to course one, two, five, but my navigation team recommends, you know, one, two, seven, I'm generally going to order a course one, two, seven because I want them to feel bought in and I want them to feel the weight of like, hey, you just provided a recommendation.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: Now we're doing that.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's where the ship's coming.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: And if that operator feels the weight of his recommendations matter and are going to drive the ship, then he's going to be more bought in.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: He's going to be more on top of his game and not feel like he can drop the pack and things would be okay.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so you'll find some officers who see it differently, who like they don't want to be viewed by the team like a puppet.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so they will, if the team recommends course one, two, seven, they'll specifically order course one, two, five just to show that they're in charge, you know.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: And like that's just my philosophy, is completely opposite.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm fine, I don't need for them to think that I'm a genius.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I need for them to think that they're driving the show.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that is gonna get me more buy-in from the whole team.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating to think about because you've got multiple components giving you recommendations, helping you to create the entire picture.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: You've already got a general idea of where you want to go and what you want to do, and yet you're trying to align all the different teams.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got to be communicating clearly with them.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: You need them to be communicating clearly with you.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I tend to side with you on that, how you want them bought in.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna take the recommendation, unless there's something really wrong with it, you're gonna take the recommendation because you want them to pay attention and do it right every single time and to feel like like their opinion matters.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's almost kind of like an element of micromanagement.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if I am the one that has to make all the decisions, then what do I need them for?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, right?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: What's their value?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas if I am trusting them implicitly, unless there's a minor deviation where we can we need to talk about it, I get a lot more out of them.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: They feel much more empowered to do so.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: And in this case, I don't think it's much different from a lot of other supervisory teams.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a lot of supervisors don't have half a dozen teams or people working for them, all doing something a little bit different, driving the entire team in a certain direction.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: And if you, you know, kind of hold the reins really close and don't give them a lot of responsibility or the feel that they have the responsibility, then you may not get as much out of them.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: I love the way you said that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: I want them to feel bought in.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: I want them to feel the pressure of making a decision and making a valid input to the team.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, I get bad recommendation sometimes.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's part of it, you know.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so I can't just walk around and just do whatever they say.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: And often I will get conflicting recommendations from different teams.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the navigation team is worried about this navigation hazard that's, you know, a few miles down track this way, whereas the sonar team is, you know, they're worried about the angle of my sensors to what I'm trying to listen to.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so they're worried about different things.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I might say, okay, well, I've got some time.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: I can head toward that navigation hazard for a little while and give sonar what they want.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where my perspective is going to come in into play.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: But there have definitely been times where I've been about to do something dumb and you know, by pulling from the team and getting that other recommendation.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: And if I'm unsure, if I'm like, uh, you know, either one could go, then I'll go with what the team recommended typically, because you know, I want them, I get the buy-in out of that, you know, if I was otherwise ambivalent.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: But the, you know, now that I have moved up, so I'm at a rank now where I don't really drive the ship like that anymore.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: So that as an officer of the deck, that's typically like a lieutenant, a department head level job.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: My most recent job was as the executive officer or the second in command.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so at that level, I'm not standing the watch anymore.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm more watching the, you know, I'm training and watching the junior officers stand the watch.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so I often have to coach them on this point that it's a failure mode of the really good, the hot shots, the guys who are just really confident in themselves that it's a failure mode to like cultivate and show off to the team just how smart they are and to get everyone really impressed with how brilliant they are, but they're gonna make a mistake sooner or later.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: And what will happen is you end up with this leader-dependent battle rhythm where the team kind of drops the pack and they won't even, if the leader's making a mistake in the process of making a mistake, even an obvious one, then the operators who have the right answer will second guess themselves and say, Oh, well, you know, I guess LT's right because he's so smart, you know, and like, no, that's not what you want.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you want them to be jumping up and down and say, you know, hey, LT, we're making a mistake.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: I recommend we do this and hopefully save you from, you know, causing some kind of catastrophe.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: So let me step you back.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: You're into the tactical, into the minute by minute leadership as the officer of the watch.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Step it back a little bit to we're getting ready to launch.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: When does the leadership, when does the skipper and the XO, when do they sit down with the team and say, this is what we're gonna do and disseminate that information?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: How do you disseminate the information out so that all the way down to your lowest level, they know what the team is about and they know what the overall mission is about?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: So you do that.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: So, first of all, whenever you said we're getting ready to launch, I think you meant we're getting ready to get underway, like launch the ship, like not launch a missile.
• 13:20
  unknown: Right?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's exactly right.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Get underway, yeah.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: My terms are different than your terms, but yeah.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, coming from a trident ballistic missile submarine, getting ready to launch means something very different.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Not in words, you use that much.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like you would imagine, you know, the leadership is gonna get the leadership together and we're gonna put out what the plan is.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now, this is gonna come after months of planning and getting ready for the underway, and there's lots of checklists.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so in the days getting close to underway, everyone's got their pre-underway checklists where every division has all these things they've got to check off and check all their gear and do all their inventories and all this stuff.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, this is the months of planning and maintenance and all this stuff is coming ahead.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: All your systems are getting put back together because if the ship's import, you're immediately tearing everything apart and fixing stuff, and so getting it ready to go to sea again is always an ordeal.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: But the one thing I would say is you don't want to use email to communicate important things among the crew.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that's another failure mode of kind of junior officers where they're comfortable in the email world and they want to email everything because I can think about what I want to say and no one can argue with me and no one can give me pushback and you know, I can write this big long thing.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: No one's gonna read that, you know.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: So basically, one of the things I say is, you know, always give it face to face because that's immediately accountable.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: You can't act like you didn't hear me, you know, even though I know you read my email and you're gonna choose to ignore it because it's just not as accountable.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: Emails, it's just never gonna be, you know.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: So you want to give that stuff face to face, you want to get everyone together.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: But another point is that as the command at the top, like once is never enough.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: You have to say stuff over and over and over again and just whatever amount of time, especially for a command priority, like this is the thing that's important, this is the priority.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna need you to focus on, you know, this before this, you know, we're gonna train for you know damage control before we train for, you know, tactical procedures or you know, we're gonna get good at our firefighting, fighting fire and flooding before this.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: I want you to practice your, you know, focus on your crew certifications and qualifications, whatever your priority is, whatever you think you have to communicate, or however often you think you need to communicate that, like you just multiply it by 10, you know, because you can never say it enough.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: And just the more the more the better.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that that's one of those things that there's you just can't do it too much, you know, as far as communicating those things.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: But it is the hierarchical communication, like like you would imagine, you know, we're gonna put it out to the division leaders, the officers, and the what we call the chief, the chiefs or the you know, the senior enlisted leaders, and they're gonna take those things to their divisions and they're gonna put it out there.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, there's a little bit of telephone game that's gonna happen, which is part of the reason you need to repeat things, you know, over and over again.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: But they're generally gonna those enlisted leaders, they're gonna know what they need to do to get their divisions ready, also.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so a lot of it's you're counting on that.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: I don't need to give them all those specific orders.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: I need to say, hey, have your pre-interways complete by this time, and they're gonna say, Roger that, and then they know what to do with that.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I hope that kind of clears that up.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: I like the idea of repetitiveness, though.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: This is what we're doing.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and once again, this is what we're doing because we think here's the problem with email is that while I put it in black and white, I put it in writing, so you should have that email.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, guess what?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: I got 3,000 today, and even if I read it, I've forgotten it or I've forgotten elements of it.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and yet when something is so important that I need to sit down face to face and talk through it with you, and then one, I can see questions in your eyes, and I can answer those questions and we go back and forth.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: So not we're not just committing it to memory, we're committing it to action.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's part of how we're operating as a team, and you're practicing you know, the communication portion of it or before you get underway, you're already practicing the chain of command or the flow of information, how that happens.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: And the fact that I chose to say this to the team face to face is communicating something that's part of the communication, that is part of the message, and it's the part of the message that says this is important.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: I need you to take it away.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, if I can get away with sending it in a spam email that goes out to everybody, that's basically that message is like this isn't that important.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, if this were important, they would have said it face to face.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: Read it if you want to, yeah, exactly.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: I was gonna say one of the things that became really important as an XO once I made it up to that level, and I'm basically part of the XO's job is I'm demanding all these deliverables from the crew.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the cabin doesn't need to be worrying about when all these different admin and project products come in and when this is due and all that.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's XO stuff to keep track of that.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Demanding communication from below up to me to tell me if you're gonna be late with something, if you're not gonna be able to deliver all these products that I'm telling you to deliver.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: I basically say, like, I'm conceding, I do not know what your bandwidth is.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: I do not know all the things that you're working on right now.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Don't expect me to know that.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's not my job.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's your job.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: And my job is to tell you all the things that are due and tell you when they're due.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: And if you can't meet it, I expect you to tell me that and tell me that when you know that you can't meet it, and such that I have the option to say, do this, not that.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's not your call to make.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I've had to butt heads with people a lot on that because they'll think like, oh, I'm so busy, I've got to get, you know, the diesel generators torn apart and I've got to get that together.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: So obviously XO is not gonna, you know, expect me to turn in this stupid routine admin product.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, my answer is no, no.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that was your responsibility, and don't count on me to track that.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's your job to track that.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: So let me know, and then I will prioritize you appropriately.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: But demanding that uh communication, but part of that demand is that is being reasonable with people and saying and being able to say, you know, not getting mad and biting their head off whenever they obviously can't meet all the demands because they're not.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: There's always gonna be, you know, 10 pounds of crap for a five-pound sock.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's just part of being in a, you know, a tightly wound organization and everyone's busy all the time and you're gonna have to stuff's gonna spill over and you're gonna have to reprioritize.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think that's a key point that you, as the leader, the way you can help prioritize the actions of your subordinates is by them talking to you, by them actually coming up voice and saying, My plate is full right now, I can't handle that.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: But if you need that one thing handled right now, then you say, okay, just put those other things aside and focus on this.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get this off our plate, and then you can go back to those other things.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: But if that communication doesn't happen, then you're in trouble.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: That goes on to the trust element, which is something I talk about a lot.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: You're talking about downhill communication.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then you were also talking earlier about being the officer of the watch, about getting recommendations for your team and recommendations that mattered, recommendations that they'd spend a lot of time on.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: If they don't have trust in you as the leader, they're not going to do that.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like if they know you're gonna ignore their inputs, they're not spending a lot of time on them.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: And similarly, if you're the just in paperwork stuff or whatever task it is, if they know that you're going to make a decision based on what they say, that their input matters, they trust you to make a good input and make a good decision, and then they're gonna give you better information all the time.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that they trust that I'm not gonna bite their head off whenever they're gonna bring me bad news, you know.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: That if you do that, then you're just gonna stop getting the bad news, but the bad news is still gonna happen.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, this is a question that just popped in my head.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: I have been around submariners very little, and I don't know what the community is like, other than it takes a special class of person to want to live under the sea for three months, four months, six months, or longer.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: What is the community like?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: You talked about it being a close-knit community, but from a leadership perspective, have you compared yourself to you know, the surface ships or aviators or anything like that and other folks that you've worked with on how they handle leadership, how they communicate with their, you know, down to the lowest level?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think that submariners have a tendency to be a little bit less formal and rigid with the formality, where the captain is happy to hear from you know, junior sailor has got something on his mind, and you know, you don't have to fill out a form to come talk to the captain.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: You can just go talk to the captain.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's pretty normal in every sub I've been on.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then a lot of just the rank rigidity, it's still there.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're still going to adhere to the naval custom, but maybe it's not the most important thing right now.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's there's other stuff that's going to be more important.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then I think that the submarine force is probably to a greater degree than most other military cultures, is going to demand and expect the junior operators to question their orders.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's not like, you know, I tell you to jump, don't question why and jump how high.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of like if you don't understand, you darn well better ask, you know, how high, or you know, you're going to the expectation is that operator is going to speak up if he doesn't.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Disagrees with the order.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: And there's several reasons for that.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: One is that things most of the time don't happen so fast that, you know, you need that immediate reaction.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: Now, there are times that, you know, there are emergencies where that is the case.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, you've got immediate actions that you need to take and take them without delay.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: But most of the time that's not the case.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other piece of it is that the systems are so complex and the consequences are so catastrophic if things are operated incorrectly that the operator is, you know, A, likely to know, likely to understand whenever a manipulation that he's going to do would be dangerous or destructive in some way.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: And it's easy enough to mess up the orders because just things are just so crazy complex.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I depend on the operators to know their business well enough to basically provide me backup.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: So, like a good example is that, you know, in the first watch you stand as an officer, the first like area you learn is the engine room.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: Think like Jordy or Scotty from Star Trek being back in charge of the reactor plant and all of the panels, and you've got all your guys, you know, with the reactor plant control panel.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: I say, you know, reactor operator, shift reactor coolant pumps into such and such speed.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and if that order is incorrect or is gonna violate reactor safety or in some way, then the results could be really bad.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that operator is absolutely expected to say, recommend that we don't do that because here's the reasons, you know, according to this part of the manual, which he's gonna have in his head, he's gonna know exactly what the right answer is.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I expect that of him, you know, and I'm not gonna bite his head off.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, I'm gonna, you know, that I would expect him to keep me from messing up in that way.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: And if he does, he carries out my wrong order and he causes some kind of problem, he's in just as much trouble as I am for carrying out a dumb order.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that's just kind of, and that culture is basically propagates throughout the ship where everyone is expected to basically back up and you know and question what order they were just given and make sure it's correct from what their understanding of their systems.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: You talked about two different things there that I think are really key to consider.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: And my follow-up question is gonna be how do they apply to the rest of the world?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: When you're dealing with a nuclear reactor, you're dealing with, in some cases, nuclear tip weapons, and you're dealing with the sea surface, which doesn't take highly to submarines running up against it.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then you or it doesn't care really, like we were saying earlier, the submarine's gonna care.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then you also talked about the speed with which things happen, that sometimes they happen quickly, and sometimes you have a real need to make something happen right away.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's a slower, more deliberate approach to something.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: You take yourself out of a submarine, put yourself on a surface ship, or put yourself in the corporate world.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: How is that different?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: How would those same kind of skills and that same approach apply?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, gravity and speed, because I think sometimes in the corporate world, I see it all the time, we think the gravity is catastrophic.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: The gravity is life and death when it's really just about what the quarterly earnings are going to look like.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then we think the speed with which something is happening has to happen yesterday when sometimes it doesn't.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: It needs to happen right.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't need to happen yesterday necessarily.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: So think of your time in in submarines and how you can apply that outside of a submarine, how it can be beneficial for somebody who's selling widgets to his neighborhood.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think that there's a lot of power of being able to just to be able to say, wait, okay, is this an emergency?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: And if it's not, like let's say that, and then we can calm down a little bit and say, okay, and that a lot of times whenever the the stress gets really high and we've got this thing that's it was due yesterday, and the deadline, everything seems the train cars seem to be piling up.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the reality is if we take a breath and we realize that, like, okay, it's the building is not going to sink into the ground.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we're gonna come through this.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: There is a right action.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: Let's put one step in front of foot in front of the other.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: That can be a source of calm.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, I work at the Pentagon right now as part of my you know, in-between sea tours.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: And when I first came to the Pentagon, I was really frustrated a lot.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: And another Navy guy in my office, you know, I'm frustrated because the meetings, you know, seem to not be as efficient as I'm used to.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, we how do we leave that meeting without knowing exactly who is gonna do what by when?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I'm just like wound wound tight from a ship.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, my office mate's like, hey man, the building's not gonna get underway.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a thing that I have to be reminded sometimes is like, you know what, it's gonna be all right.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's important.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, these are important decisions.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, the consequences are serious, but it isn't that's not the same thing as saying is an emergency.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: And if we take a second to breathe, then we're often going to, you know, get a much better answer than the alternative and add no real consequence to you know having waited a little bit.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the sayings that we have is if you want it bad, you get it bad, you know.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: So whenever you come over the top and say, I need this within an hour, hey, everyone, deliver this deliverable and have it done in an hour, like, okay, you know, you don't know what you're gonna get.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's important to remember that sometimes the emergency is that your boss or your boss's boss worries about looking bad in front of his boss.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And his boss set a deadline, and so that becomes an emergency.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the number of times I was in the Pentagon 20-something years ago, and the number of times I came in on Sunday to prep briefings for the three-star to then go brief the four-stars or go to talk to a congressional delegation, like not that I'm upset about working on the weekend, but sometimes we made emergencies out of things that were not emergencies, and we deemed catastrophic things that really weren't catastrophic, you know, if something failed.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that can be a little frustrating.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of organizations are that way.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: They get that way.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: You have type A people who want to do things well, they want to succeed at all costs, and sometimes the cost is the team, and boring the lines between important and absolutely necessary right now and emergency, and those aren't all the same exact thing.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't mean that we go slower and we just take a chill and not worry about deadlines, but we have to put these in perspective.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and being neurotic about things that aren't really emergencies, treating things like emergencies when they're not, is going to come at some other cost.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's not just people's happiness.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna come at some performance cost to the team.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that there's a lot of value there in recognizing that.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we want to prioritize things appropriately and not be neurotic, not just because it'll make people miserable if we're neurotic, but also because we're gonna underperform, you know, in all these kinds of ways.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: And if we make the people miserable, they're gonna underperform in all kinds of ways.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: If everything's important, then nothing's important.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: If everything's an emergency, then nothing's an emergency.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes the status quo, and then you're not gonna get peak performance out of people when you really need that peak performance.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm gonna step away a little bit from just operating the ship.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's been fascinating.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think I could talk for another hour or two with you about it.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: But the leadership challenge of getting underway with a submarine crew, so now you got you know 150, 170 people.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what the numbers would be.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say that 75% of them are married, they get underway and now they're not talking to their spouses for three months, four months, six months, and they're not getting regular emails, not getting anything.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: How do you manage that?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: And how you mentioned your wife earlier.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: How does spouse leadership manage keeping the lid on all that and keeping people on the same team?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's important and it can be complicated.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, what I'll say is so a typical a deployment for a fast attack submarine is typically like a six-month period, but you're not like out of comms for that long.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: You might be out of comms for like a month or so, you know, depending on what you're doing is kind of typical.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: Just depends on the activity of the ship.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: Basically, whenever you pull in and out of port, that's whenever you're at a low enough state of communications that you can you'll transmit and clear all your email and stuff.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you'll go, you're doing something interesting, you're not going to be communicating.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: And all the emails just kind of piling up.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so emails to the, you know, individual crew members can get emails from off the ship, but that you're not clearing them, you're not communicating while you're on the mission, and it's all piling up.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: And what's funny is they will come in an order that is it like you'll get the last thing first, and you'll just have thousands of emails like piled up whenever you're coming off station and clearing communications.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so, like a consequence of that is on my last deployment on a fast attack back, but you know, this is you know over a decade ago.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I found out that we were gonna have a boy before I found out that we were pregnant.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'm reading the emails, I'm like, hey, it's a boy, hey Captain, guess what?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: So hey, it's mine, all right.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's funny.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think that the hard, you know, that's all just funny.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: The hardest part emotionally for me, just for me as you know, a family guy, is not knowing that the family's okay and knowing that I would not know it if something bad happened right away.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: You know, yeah, it sucks.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: And you get over it, you know, but basically my wife and I have the understanding that that whenever I'm in communication again, the thing I want to know is is everyone okay?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: And if everyone's okay, then it doesn't matter, you know, the house could have burned down.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: I don't care.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to know that everyone's okay, and then everything else is just gravy from there.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: But how do you deal with it with the crew whenever, you know, bad news comes from home?
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's a tough like leadership position because the emails that come into the ship, you know, they all go through a system and the system will flag things that are concerning, you know, or the and the radio men is what you call the the technicians who handle the communications and they're really they're computer technicians, you know, they're information technicians, but they will, you know, they'll bring you as the XO, they'll bring you, hey, sir, we saw this message, you know, the system flagged it, we looked at it, and over to you if we want to deliver this message to Sailor, you know, Smith or so and so.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it might be that, you know, Sailor Smith's father died, or wife is leaving him, you know, or just some kind of horrible news.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_02: And you're about to go on station doing something really sensitive.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: And you need Sailor Smith.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Sailor Smith is your guy for you know, he's the guy that can do this job, and I need him on point.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: Is this the time to deliver that message?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's a tough decision, you know, and knowing that somebody else be might be making that decision about me is a thing you got to live with, you know.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: And then once you've delivered some tough message, what's the right thing to do with the sailor?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know, okay, your mom just died, you know, your dad just died, something like that.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: Is the right thing to like, okay, let me take that guy off his job, you know, let him off for a little while, we'll take him off the watch bill.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think most of the time that's not the right idea because now this guy's just gonna stew in his thoughts.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, maybe the right thing to do is like, hey, I need you to fix this piece of gear over here, you know, just like we need to give him something to do to keep him, you know, let the time, let the juices flow, let them, you know, give them, let them feel important and busy.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: But like suddenly taking all the duties off of them, I find more often than not, it's always situational, but more often than not, that ends up being worse.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that ends up being the wrong answer.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: I I think there's definitely a lot to be said for being needed.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: People need to feel needed and they need to feel the weight of if I'm not pulling my weight, it sucks for everyone.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone's gonna suffer from that.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that a lot of performance is you know contingent on that, basically.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: I I do what I do for the man next to me, you know, because if I don't do it, then he's gonna suffer.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: And there's just no avoiding that, there's no escaping that.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that's an important part of holding the crew together.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and we're we were on deployment once a number of years ago, and they changed our deployment.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now you'll consider the whining, but we they changed our deployment from four to six months.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: But it's you kind of cage your brain of I'm gonna be gone for four months.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: My wife knows I'm gonna be gone for four months, my significant other knows I'm gonna be gone for four months.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then they said, guess what?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna be gone for six months.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a tough thing to take.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: To avoid the entire squadron crashing, our boss, I was the second in command at the time, I was the DO.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: He got up and he said, It's time to embrace the suck.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're all in this together.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's six months for all of us.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: We've all got a job to do.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just, you know, put our nose to the grindstone and get after it.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's a tough helping people recognize their role matters for the guy sitting next to them.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: It makes a big difference.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's so important.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't imagine how important it is in a submarine where let's say the guy sitting next to you is not pulling his weight and you're having to do it for him, or you know you're not pulling your weight and you know it's hurting the person next to you, and they happen to have a bunk that is you know 22 inches away from you at that point, and that'd be a tough situation, I would think.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: The having the job to do, there's so much that follows from that I think is good and constructive.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, people have asked how you know things like you know, political divisions and you know, identity politics and all that stuff.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we just don't have that.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like once the hatch shuts, it's like there's this sound out there telling everyone they should be angry, and it just and it's just like now, well, we've actually got real stuff to do now, so none of that matters, you know.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: And now we're going, you know, on a submarine and and we've got a job to do, and just it's amazing how many things, differences between people just turned out to be completely superficial once you've actually got real work to do.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that's true.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: If only every if only everybody had real work to do.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: I I know that I'm 10 years out of the service, so I'm over 10 years out of the service now, and I remember getting out and seeing other people and posting on social media.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't on social media at all when I was on active duty.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Posting on social media, their political view is like, I didn't know he was a Democrat.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know he was a Republican.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't know any of that stuff because you never talked about it.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: You talked about the tasks that were staring you in the face and how you were taking care of the team and the mission that you were given.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think it needs to be that way.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the spouses, I don't want to say yeah, I don't want to skip this before we leave.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's a leadership challenge for the spouse.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the spouse group, the the unpaid heroes of a crew like a submarine crew.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: How do they manage that leadership?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: What are some of the key qualities?
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you look at your wife, say she is awesome at this, this, and this, and that save three marriages or something like that.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Is there anything specifically you would want to say?
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's so fuzzy and nebulous, you know, because there's no regulation, you know, there's no training.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: There's a little bit of training, you know, there's not much.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing that really I can hold on to and say, this is how you here's the book on how to be a submarine wife, you know, like you can't hand them over the book.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: There's just so much interpersonal skill that's got to be just there.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: A couple things that I think my wife does particularly well is not wearing my rank, you know, around that I'd say that's a failure mode.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not just wives, submarine spouses, submarines are integrated now, although it's about a decade old now and it's fine, it's going great.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: But to be a spouse for the crew, you know, not wearing the spouse's rank around, you know, basically being approachable by everyone and not barking orders or anything like that.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, that is typically going to get a very negative reaction.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: But basically finding ways to interact with people that keeps the drama down and solves problems for the people, especially the new members to the crew who are afraid, they're angry, they feel like husbands getting mistreated in some way.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's all very common and they're defensive.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: How to keep the drama down, but help the people to solve the problem at the same time.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's a delicate needle to thread.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: Another piece of it that has been challenging is managing like traditional versus kind of modern constructs and whether we can all really even communicate.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: So, what I'm talking about there is like if I'm on a ship, a lot of the ships are all male.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so you're gonna have all the officers' wives will typically have, you know, they will meet at the various gatherings and things like that.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, but now maybe one of those officers has a husband.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that, you know, that's a relatively new phenomenon.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so, how do we bring this new spouse into our wardrobe and to our how do we interact like normal people and ensure that they're welcome?
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: Or you have the construct where, you know, half of the officers' spouses are like stay-at-home moms, and then the other half are typically with the newer junior ones, are not.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, maybe they have their own careers and now they feel like some of them, if you don't handle that well, then some of the new members may feel like, oh, well, I'm never going to be accepted by all these, you know, traditional stay-at-home moms like it's some political thing or something like that.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's a delicate needle to thread.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think the right answer there is to be at least sensitive to it.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: Don't make it weird.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's not weird if you don't make it weird, you know, but above all, be welcoming and make it very clear that what we're doing here does serve a purpose.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: The families of the crew have a very particular burden of this shared mission of this ship and being able to serve them and help them and then ensure that they feel welcome, they feel like a part of the crew, whether they are holding down a job too, or if they're a stay-at-home parent, sensitivity to those things and doing it right and focusing on being welcoming, I think has been very important and it's made us successful in the crews that I've been on.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, as you're talking, I'm thinking about you're right, they don't get treated, they don't get a paycheck, they get part of yours, you know, or all of yours, depending on how it is.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: And yet they play a critical role in the success of the crew.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: And because if the crew's not happy, if they're worried and distracted about their family life and what's going on at home, they're not focused on their job, and that can get people killed, you know, and it can lead to an unsuccessful mission.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: So they need to be taken care of in a way where they're not a distraction and they're not fighting against the system.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then that allows the crew members to focus on their specific duties in there.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the other part is that if the family's not happy when they're gone, and some are never going to be happy.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you know being a summer is tough and not it's not for everybody, but you don't want people to leave who are good at it and love it because they can't find happy medium with their family, they can't make it work with their family.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: Then the navy is lost and the individual is lost.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't want that if you can avoid it.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a tough job.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Hats off to spouses.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: I know my wife did yeoman's work, keeping the wives together and keeping them supportive of the squadron when we were deployed.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: And it's very important that the crew member knows that their spouse is taken care of, you know, and that their spouse is gonna be communicated with and is going to have people checking in on them and helping them out if they're if, you know, they can't figure out the dental system or something like that.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I love that.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate your time.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: I've loved this conversation and it's been fascinating to me.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think the fascinating thing is that what you do and what subcrews do is critical for the defense of our nation.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very unique leadership and technical challenge, but those skills actually apply across really any venture.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, to what level do I have time?
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: To what level is to make decisions, to what level do I need to get feedback and input from the lowest level of my teams?
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: Those all can be a little bit different, but I think the basic structure and the need for trust up and down the chain of command and the need for technical excellence up and down the chain of command, I think that applies to really any business venture.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, I really appreciate you having me on board.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: I agree with that.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think that it is a very, I agree, it's very unique.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: When people think military, they're not typically thinking submarines, you know.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_02: And that's we kind of want it that way.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: You know, out of sight, out of mind, kind of part of the deal.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: But I definitely love that it's been a wonderful career for me.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I have a niece who's actually on a sub right now, and I'm not even sure which one she's on, but she's been doing it for a couple of years now, and she absolutely loves it.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll tell you, like I said at the very beginning, I'm so grateful for people who are willing to climb underwater, get underway in a submarine for months on end so that nobody makes me do it.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: I get to fly airplanes, I get to do something I loved because someone else is willing to do something else that I'm glad that you love it.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm glad that there are enough people to love it so they don't make me do something like that.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I appreciate that.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks for joining us.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm grateful for everybody who joined in today to listen to learn a little bit about how US Navy submarines work and U.S.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: Navy submarine crews work and the transferability of the leadership skill sets that they demonstrate they have to do their job well.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Commander's Intent.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: And if you haven't already done so, subscribe or follow us and keep listening so that together we can all become better decision makers for better results.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: All right, thanks.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intent Podcast.
• 42:56
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• 43:01
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• 43:16
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