K E N T M A T S U O K A
K E N T M A T S U O K A
USCG Management Techniques for Civilians
Sailing offshore is taxing on the human mind and body. It is a 24 hour/7 day week operation that requires trust, communication, teamwork, and the ability to delegate in order to accomplish. Add unpredictable weather, distance from any aid or resupply should the need require, dangerous coastal shoal waters, and sometimes even pirates...that even when you’re “off the clock”, you know you could be called back to work at a moment’s notice.
I was recently invited by the United States Coast Guard to sail aboard their training ship Eagle (WIX-327) to witness first hand how they teach their officer candidates leadership and teamwork through sail, and the application of military protocol and customs in a real world situation.
Embedded with the officer candidates, we were being trained by the enlisted men and women aboard to help the OC's to better understand the skills and abilities of those they will be asked to lead, an eye opening experience for me as most of my prior experience has been with professional public affairs officers whose experiences are more closely aligned to my own.
Aboard Eagle, I worked mostly within my command structure, but with the unique access to step out of the structure and question the trainers and officers of the ship about their reasoning and application of what we in the civilian world call Crew Resource Management (CRM).
Have you ever watched a movie about the Navy and wondered who all those people on the bridge were and why they were there?
Perhaps you have been on a fishing boat where the captain was the only guy on the bridge or have even single-handed a small boat yourself which really made you wonder how any boat could possibly need so much manpower to do what you do every weekend with a couple buddies who don’t do much more than drink all the beer.
The basis for all these positions is due to a practice in USCG and the maritime industry called Bridge Resource Management (BRM) that has proven to be effective in reducing potential accidents due to human error. It's worth looking into how it can be applied to both Hollywood and in general business management principles.
Simply put, BRM is the process and practice of using all available information to insure that the person in charge makes the best possible decisions, and mitigate inevitable human mistakes before they cause any harm. Application of BRM should foster situational awareness, leadership, decision making, flexibility, and communication amongst its team members.
Originally called Cockpit Resource Management when it was developed by NASA for the aviation industry in the late seventies following a spate of airline accidents determined to be result of pilot error, it has since been adapted by the maritime industry (BRM) and in many other industries (CRM) dependent on human ability to manage high risk and quick paced activities such as fire fighting, emergency rooms, and in military aviation and naval units.
However, even a leisurely day sail around the harbor can benefit from BRM if the need arises, and recreational captains can practice the theories of BRM by simply inquiring what the skill level of each guest might be, and by communicating each evolution in simple and easy terms that even the most inexperienced sailor might understand.
First and foremost in good BRM is training. When you’re 30,000 feet in the air or 300 miles from shore and you are incapacitated by food poisoning, can you trust the rest of the crew to step up to the task and safely complete the mission? In the Coast Guard, the crew is always training for this and other eventualities.
One day it might be the Operations Officer running the drill, the next it might be a BM1 (Boatswain’s Mate, First Class). This gives the crew members a wider range of experience in understanding how and why certain evolutions are conducted in the way they are so they can step into the position should something befall their superior, understand different ways of running the drill, and confidently speak up when something doesn’t seem right.
At sea, you learn to depend on your shipmates to have your back and they in turn depend on you to have theirs as you literally put your life in their hands every day. A normal ship will break up responsibility for the ship into several teams or “watches”, each with the skill and ability to handle the ship entirely on their own in normal conditions from the steering and navigation of the boat to engineering and damage control watches deep in the hull.
Sebastian Junger spoke about this very feeling in his TED Talk about "Why veterans miss war". This feeling is the very basis of BRM, that "(brotherhood) is a mutual agreement in a group that you will put the welfare of the group, you will put the safety of everyone in the group above your own."
This "brotherhood" is what links a disparate group of people, officers, enlisted, educated, high school dropouts, from a good family or not, and put them together on a ship or in the trenches and they will form a bond closer than in any office, movie set, or classroom. It's no longer about who one needs to step over to get the promotion or to get on the dean's list but what we as a team need to do to get home together in one piece.
At sea, the Captain is ultimately responsible for the safety of the ship, and he must train and delegate this responsibility to his junior officers to take command while he tends to other matters. He must trust them to maintain the course set and communicate clearly if there is any deviation from his standing orders.
Likewise, division leaders such as the Chief Engineering Officer or the Bosun must train and delegate members of their teams to insure the needs of the Watch Officer can be met so they can get much needed rest below without the someone calling them up every 5 minutes with a question, otherwise even a short three day sail down the coast could result in a long 72 hour continuous watch that would put the ship in danger should a vital crew member fall asleep or is subject to the effects of sleep deprivation.
Of course sailing ships have practiced the delegation of authority into multiple watches for hundreds of years in order to sail across the world’s oceans for months on end without a day off,or even the definite expectation of land on the other side. What has changed with BRM is the ability of junior officers to confidently speak up if they believe something to be amiss.
Communication is key. The clear and comprehensive transfer of appropriate information from one watch stander to the next and a defined and acknowledged transfer of who has the watch. It sounds simple, but if one party mistakenly assumes that the other has already accepted responsibility (or vice versa), neither party might be invested in the immediate supervision of the task at hand.
Confidence to speak up when something seems amiss is crucial to CRM. Not the constant countermanding of a junior’s orders by the senior or the undermining of a senior’s authority with endless questions from a junior, but appropriate mission specific concerns that clearly state what might be an overlooked concern and valid solutions to mitigate the situation so that the person responsible doesn’t feel their authority is being threatened by the questioning party.
I witnessed many examples of the above while aboard Eagle. Every evolution involved a quick brief and debrief after to discuss potential problem areas and discuss ways things could be improved next time. Everyone, including the Commanding Officer (CO) gave their subordinates opportunities to step up and do the next higher job in the hierarchy. During a man overboard drill in which a junior officer had the con, the CO was confident letting the JO make minor mistakes to see how the crew would come together to fix them. Only when necessary did the CO calmly step in with advice, and then in a way to let the JO retain authority with the crew and come to the correct conclusion on his own.
Two examples where CRM training might have helped were United Flight 173 in 1978 where the flight crew was too preoccupied attempting to diagnose an error with the landing gear that they failed to realize that they had run out of fuel, and more recently in 2013 when the Asiana Flight 214 crash at SFO was determined to be the result of inadequate crew communication, a strict hierarchy culture that discourages junior officers from speaking up, and over dependence on automatic flight controls.
These accidents and others in the maritime industry are the primary reasons for having so many people on the bridge. It’s an opportunity for the crew to train and practice specific skills and to back up the officer on the con with another set of eyes who can process some of the vital information they are required to handle a vessel with limited ability to maneuver.
Should something happen such as a steering failure or the loss of engine control, we've been conditioned to believe that the appropriate response would be to drop everything to fix the problem and save the day.
Fortunately, those that have been trained in BRM understand that the unsung hero is the one that ignores the chaos and steadfastly continues at the task at hand, adapting to the situation and insuring that the rudimentary needs such as the depth of the water or the position of the other vessels in the immediate vicinity doesn’t exceed safe operating parameters that would put the vessel in greater danger.
Even if you're not at sea and failure to meet your quarterly sales goals might not be considered life-or-death, whether called Crew Resource Management, Bridge Resource Management, or Business Management, a good executive understands that teamwork and communication within the team are necessary to accomplish team goals when complications arise, and that members of the team are willing and able to support each other to insure the primary needs of the company are still being met while other teammates are pulled away to deal with the problem at hand.
Figure out what it takes to bring the team together against a common cause instead of promoting a culture of individuals who are constantly on edge, looking over their shoulders at rivals gunning for their job and you'll be surprised at what you can accomplish. If you have a couple veterans on your team already, understanding this principle will help get them on board much quicker, and feel more confident about their experiences and bring a unique viewpoint to whatever project you're working on.
Wednesday, September 2, 2015