It's Your Ship! Where will you go?

Title: It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy

Author: D. Michael Abrashoff

Reviewer: Richard Sesek (educator, wantrepreneur)

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Topic/Intent of book: “It’s Your Ship” blends autobiography with a leadership manual, chronicling how Captain D. Michael Abrashoff transformed the USS Benfold through empowerment, trust, and open communication. Abrashoff highlights modern leadership principles that apply, perhaps more so, to civilian as well as military operations. Leaders that empower their people, actively listen, and create “ownership opportunities” (“it’s your ship”) for their employees or reports enjoy greater success than top-down, typical command-and-control leaders.

I selected this book because: I was scrolling through books from the public library and was intrigued by the title and proposed implications (“management techniques from the ‘best damn’ ship in the Navy”). I like to explore practical leadership books from a variety of sources and gave this a try.

Recommendation: Yes. Highly recommended for leaders in technical, academic, or administrative roles. This is not just applicable to naval or military organizations. Listening to his men and women, he worked to remove bureaucratic barriers and transformed his ship, the USS Benfold, into the pride of the US Navy.

Major lessons from this book: Empowering your people leads to the greatest performance. Teach people to proactively solve problems and let them make “safe” mistakes. Step in when safety or mission criticality are stake, otherwise relinquish as much control as possible. Listen to the people actually performing the work and seek out their ideas. Give them the resources to implement their ideas. Lead by example: be visible, humble, and hands-on. It takes time to build trust and impact culture.

Communicate why their work matters and how it fits into the overall mission. Demonstrate links between daily tasks and duties and broader goals/missions. In his experience, giving people autonomy actually increased discipline and accountability as compared to traditional command-and-control thinking.

Book Inspirations: This book encourages me to create more ownership opportunities for my students and collaborators by giving them more say in shaping projects and research rather than simply executing my vision. I plan to invest more effort in asking for feedback and making sure that they are getting what they need from me. I would like to do a better job in communicating long-term goals and overall vision.

I plan to read more books of this type. I searched for similar books and several popped up. I’ve added two to my reading list: “Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders” (L. David Marquet) and “Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t” (Simon Sinek).