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Government Leader home > news stories
04/17/06
A little listening turned this ship around
By Trudy Walsh
Government Leader Staff
When D. Michael Abrashoff took command of the USS Benfold in July 1997, it had one of the lowest retention rates of any ship in the Navy. Only 28 percent of the crew signed up for another tour on the ship after their time was up.
Abrashoff assumed the low retention rate was because of low pay. After some exit interviews with the sailors, however, he found out that low pay was the fifth most important reason sailors gave for leaving. The top four reasons for quitting were:
- Not being treated with respect or dignity
- Being prevented from making an impact on the organization
- Not being listened to
- Not being rewarded with more responsibility.
One of the first changes Abrashoff made when he came onboard was to spend more time listening to the crew. He sat down and talked individually with every sailor on the ship. He learned their names, hometowns, spouses’ names, and what they wanted out of life.
It turned out that they “were just like me 20 years earlier,” Abrashoff said during a keynote speech at the FOSE conference in Washington last month. “Except they had body parts pierced that I had never dreamed of piercing.”
Abrashoff asked each sailor three questions:
- What do you like most about the Benfold?
- What do you like least?
- What would you change if you were captain?
More than half of the sailors said they had joined the Navy to receive college tuition assistance. So Abrashoff requested that an administrator from the Scholastic Aptitude Test be made available to the crew. Taking the test onboard, a member of the crew scored a 1490 on the exam (out of a perfect 1600). Abrashoff then arranged to have college courses offered on the ship.
Abrashoff took the sailors’ suggestions to heart. For example, every other month the ship had to be painted because all the hardware was made of metal that corroded in salt water. One of the sailors asked, “What about stainless steel?” Abrashoff went to Home Depot and charged $25,000 worth of stainless steel and nylon hardware on his government Visa card. The crew replaced the old metal with the new hardware and didn’t have to paint the ship again for 10 months.
Listening to the sailors and acting on their suggestions helped “to create the glue that’s part of every high-performing organization,” he said. “Just because the Benfold sailors didn’t start out at the top didn’t mean they should be treated like second-class citizens,” Abrashoff said. “Benfold was about treating these people like they are the best.”
By the end of Abrashoff’s 20-month tenure on the Benfold, 100 percent of the crew had signed on for another tour. The Benfold went on to win the Spokane trophy, which is awarded to the ship with the best level of combat readiness.
Abrashoff, now CEO of Agent Science Technology Inc. of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, also described the journey of the USS Benfold in detail in his book, It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy (Warner Business Books, 2002).
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