Lessons From a Destroyer Captain to Startup Founders

And how to delegate better, faster, and with fewer mistakes.

Most of my professional life I spent as an employee in multinational headquarters. Companies where you do not have much skin in the game, as Nassim Taleb explains.

All this changed in 2017 when I started my first business, in the tourism sector. Like any other first-time founder, there were difficulties with funding, planning targets, and establishing challenging-but-realistic goals. Problems that are already discussed in multiple places.

But once your business is up and running, there is a ghost that haunts entrepreneurs. An issue rarely approached, and with me, it was no different: the overwhelming amount of responsibilities, that often lead you to burnout.

When you invested your savings or investor’s money, it will be difficult to delegate responsibilities. Put together that in a new company you still didn’t build a trust relationship with your team, and the formula for hoarding multiple tasks is ready.

But this is not a problem only for business founders. Imagine the responsibility of the commander of an Arleigh Burke destroyer in the United States Navy. With a crew of near 300 people and responsible for a war-machine costing more than one-billion dollars, any captain should know more than one thing or two about delegation.

More than knowing, one of these captains even wrote a book about his experiences: “It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy.”

The author, Michael Abrashoff, is the former head of the USS Benfold. He received the ship command in a time where the crew was demotivated and below the ideal performance. In only 3 years, he turned the Benfold into one of the best ships in the entire US Navy. They even won the Spokane Trophy, given to the most proficient ship of the US Pacific Fleet

Differently than what someone may think. his book is not about war adventures (although it has some thrilling passages during his stay in the Middle East). It is a book about leadership, people management, and, more than anything, task delegation.

Here, a closer look at some of the insights from Abrashoff’s book.

Create a sense of ownership

It is your ship, it is your company, it is your shift.

If your firm is still small, this is one of the easiest points to apply. But if your company already has hundreds of collaborators with very specific roles, it is not that easy. While specialization has advantages like experts with better task knowledge from experts, it also reduces the feeling of responsibility for the entire process.

Captain Abrashoff had a challenging task. To convince specialized sailors, like the ones responsible for the ship boiler, kitchen, or weapons room, that not only their sectors but the entire ship where their responsibility was difficult.

Lacking a sense of ownership creates a lot of other problems, like the distasteful blame game when one department makes more effort to blame others than looking for joint-solutions.

How captain Abrashoff created a sense of ownership?

First, by rotating people across departments, and understanding better the entire vessel. You cannot have a sense of ownership over something that you do not understand, and rotating staff among different areas solved this question. It has the benefit of increase inter-departmental understanding, bonding the team, and reducing the blame game.

Together with job rotations, he started to praised entire teams, from top to bottom, when a good task is done. And, maybe the most important: give more independence by trusting his people to solve matters on the spot. As he once said to one of his subordinates:

I should be called only in situations that put lives at risk, could injure others, or resulted in significant expenditures.

A phrase like this one above brings the best in people. During the beginning of my business, I was tormented by calls, multiple times a day, even during holidays or medical leaves. It just felt like I was in some kind of prison that I could not escape no matter what.

Then I realized that one of the phrases that I said for everyone that I hired until them, on their first day, was If you have any problem or doubt, you can call me.

While this phrase apparently shows your support for new employees and makes them feel more secure, it is dangerous. Very dangerous. People should not call you if they have any problems. First, they should try to solve the problem! That is why you are hiring and training them in the first place. This does not apply to someone that still didn't go through full training and is not at his entire capabilities. Obviously, in this case, the new-joiner should still be able to call someone.

So now, instead of saying to my staff to call me if they have any problem, I tell them to try to solve the problem first, unless it is something absolutely out of their reach.

Just remember that when people try to solve a problem, they may make mistakes. Do not punish anyone for making mistakes while trying to solve a problem, otherwise, you will just destroy the initiative that you are building in your team.

Walk around, recognize the good stuff, and plan for ‘What if’ situations.

There are two ways to kill the proactivity of an organization. The first, as previously mentioned, is to punish people for mistakes made while trying to solve problems. The second is to not recognize spontaneous and positive initiatives.

Numerous managers and entrepreneurs don’t do positive recognition. I was not doing it. And this is not because we do not know how to do it, or we don’t recognize the positive impacts. It is just because we are frequently isolated inside our offices.

When you walk around your people, you see them working, taking positive action, the recognition of their good performance naturally will come from your mouth. Unless they are doing a bad job, but even in this case, to stroll around and see by yourself, helps to identify flaws and correct the process. This is the job of a leader, according to a legendary CEO.

Positive reinforcement builds self-esteem. A competent and self-confident squad will handle complexities better. Positive, personal reinforcement is the essence of effective leadership. In Captain Abrashoff words: Don’t be disconnected. Don’t be the type of leader that never leaves your office. A compliment online is not as good as a personal one.

If, while walking around, you realize that you have low-performers, design a plan for their improvement. Clarify what they need to correct and train them if needed. Give them improvement targets, with the expectations and consequences of reaching (or not) them. But be clear.

When your organization is already smooth in regular scenarios, start to work with multiple What-If situations. Prepare in advance for unexpected situations turn them, well—expected. This will reduce your time of response for emergencies and avoid situations where you are demanded while out of the country, just because any disruption occurred and nobody was trained for this scenario.

The delegating part

After building the sense of ownership of your team, recognizing their daily victories and results, walking around, and see how they can handle their own tasks, and building your confidence and their self-esteem, delegating tasks happens naturally. You will feel comfortable trusting them in your absence, and they will feel ready to assume new challenges.

They may even ask for new responsibilities. That will be a victory from both sides.

Once you reach this point, together with developing reliable processes to absorb the multiple What-If scenarios, you may even take some holidays knowing that your team will handle everything smoothly.

Levi Borba is CEO of expatriateconsultancy.com and a best-selling author. You can check his books here.