Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson has assigned Admiral Phil Davidson the task of “examining individual training and professional development in the surface fleet to include seamanship, navigation, voyage planning and other training.” One piece missing in the CNO’s charge is the importance leadership plays in mission success. (Crew safety is implicit in leadership.) For it’s leadership that creates an environment that promotes teamwork and unity of effort, and will ultimately be the biggest contributor to minimizing accidents like those we’ve seen recently.

As both a parent, and a leader, the most important indicator of my success was that my children and my crew(s) felt comfortable telling me their opinions and ideas. As I had said in an earlier post, I had close calls at sea, and in the post-analysis we discovered that almost every time, someone knew something was being missed but they kept their opinions to themselves. The reasons were many: a lack of confidence in their knowledge; thinking someone else would say something; it must not be a big deal if no one else is saying anything; or fear of being ridiculed or berated for not staying in their assigned lane. I took those feelings as a direct reflection of my leadership.

Thankfully, there were times my people spoke up. During a nighttime transit of the Danish Straits in route to the Baltic Sea my quartermaster chief said: “Captain you have to turn to course 135 or we’ll run aground.” Or during another nighttime operation in the far northern reaches of the Arabian Gulf, my executive officer yelled at me to shift my rudder hard to starboard or we’d have hit the ship we had just commandeered. And even another time after misreading the color scheme on a Cardinal Buoy in the North Atlantic, we would have surely hit a shoal had my navigator not questioned my assessment of the buoy’s markings.

Whenever I evaluated someone’s performance my number one criteria for that person was his or her leadership ability. More specifically, it was an evaluation of their ability to inspire his or her people, and to create an environment that encouraged and valued the input of everyone. I knew that every aspect of the ship’s success could be traced to a positive style of leadership that embraced opinions and opposing views.

Although neither explicit nor implicit in Admiral Davidson’s charter, I trust he’ll put equal emphasis on the command climate—to include crew faith in the leadership, as he will in his examination of the ship’s navigation and seamanship training.