Measured Results Of Naval Leadership
Developing People, Not Dependence on the Leader
I once heard a line that stayed with me throughout my career: good leaders make great followers, but the best leaders make other leaders. Over more than two decades as a naval officer, I came to believe that one of the worst things a leader can leave behind is an organization that cannot function without them. My responsibility was not simply to get good performance from the people who worked for me, but to recognize potential, give people opportunities to stretch beyond the boundaries of their current positions, and build enough depth that the organization could absorb promotions, transfers and unexpected absences without losing its effectiveness.
Sometimes that meant seeing capability that conventional measures did not capture. While commanding in Milwaukee, I had an outstanding Petty Officer Second Class who excelled at his job but struggled with the standardized advancement examination. Rather than accept that the testing process had accurately defined his potential, I nominated him for a highly competitive national merit-based advancement program. He was one of only two Sailors selected in our nationwide category and was immediately promoted to Petty Officer First Class. Later, at Navy Reserve Forces Command, I supervised a GS-9 civilian whose formal position description no longer reflected the significance of the work she was actually performing for a Navy-wide information system. We carefully documented her responsibilities and successfully pursued the difficult process of having the position reclassified at the GS-11 level. In my final Navy command in Newport, I worked closely with my Executive Officer and senior enlisted leadership to develop people with very different strengths and personalities. My Executive Officer subsequently became a commanding officer himself, while one of the Chiefs we mentored—talented but at times requiring particularly careful coaching—went on to serve on an admiral’s staff and was ultimately selected for commissioning as a Chief Warrant Officer.
Those experiences shaped the philosophy I later brought into city management. I encouraged cross training because no employee should become a single point of organizational failure, and I asked people to look beyond rigid job description boundaries when there was an opportunity to learn, contribute or lead. I also told employees something that can be difficult for managers to embrace: I wanted them to “excel their way up,” even if someday that meant excelling their way out of my organization. A promotion elsewhere is not necessarily a loss if an employee leaves stronger, feels that the organization invested in them, and creates an opportunity for the next person to step forward. Succession planning, in that sense, is not merely identifying who might someday occupy a particular position. It is continually creating more people who are capable of assuming greater responsibility.
I carried that belief from shipboard leadership, through major Navy staffs and two commanding officer assignments, and ultimately into City Hall: the measure of a leader is not how indispensable they become, but how many other people become more capable because they were given the opportunity to work with them.
Modernizing How the Surface Navy Trained for Combat
When I joined the staff of Commander, Naval Surface Force Atlantic, the Navy was introducing increasingly sophisticated weapons, sensors, unmanned systems and concepts of operation, but portions of the system governing how surface ships trained had not kept pace. The Surface Force Training Manual needed significant modernization, while a separate Fleet Exercise Publication still contained exercises dating to the 1970s—including requirements that ships no longer performed or, in some cases, could no longer perform—and was designed around a reporting system that no longer existed. Working as part of a joint Atlantic and Pacific Surface Force team, I helped undertake the difficult, detailed work of rebuilding that framework. We modernized the Surface Force Training Manual as the overarching readiness document and created a new Surface Force Exercise Manual that aligned current exercises and proficiency requirements beneath it, replacing an increasingly disconnected legacy system with a more coherent structure for training and assessing the Fleet. At the same time, we separated annual ship recognition requirements into a standalone Surface Force Awards Manual, giving commanders and crews a clearer statement of the standards governing the Battle Efficiency Award, warfare area excellence awards, and other major ship awards and trophies. This was not glamorous work: senior leaders established the objective, but accomplishing it required our team to work through decades of accumulated requirements, decide what remained relevant, reconcile competing perspectives across the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets, and then organize, write, format and edit policy that thousands of Sailors would ultimately have to use. The experience reinforced a lesson I carried into public administration: organizations accumulate processes faster than they eliminate them, and effective modernization requires more than adding new requirements. Periodically, leaders have to examine the entire system, retire what no longer serves a purpose, clarify how the remaining pieces fit together, and leave the people doing the work with rules they can actually understand and execute.
Rethinking Readiness for a Forward-Deployed Fleet
When the Navy began permanently stationing four ballistic missile defense destroyers in Rota, Spain, it faced a readiness problem that could not be solved simply by exporting the existing stateside training model overseas. A destroyer homeported in Norfolk normally moved through a relatively orderly sequence of maintenance, dedicated training and certification, advanced exercises, and deployment. The Rota ships, by contrast, were already forward deployed and expected to provide persistent operational presence while simultaneously maintaining their equipment, training their crews, and preserving certifications across a broad range of warfare and shipboard disciplines. They also lacked the resident training and assessment infrastructure available in major U.S. fleet concentration areas. The standard could not be lowered simply because the operating environment had changed; we needed a different way to achieve it.
Working with my counterparts on the Atlantic and Pacific Surface Force staffs, I helped develop a new appendix to the Surface Force Training Manual specifically for these Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe ships. We borrowed useful concepts from an existing framework for forward deployed minesweepers in Bahrain, but the substantially broader mission requirements of the Rota destroyers demanded something more sophisticated. Rather than organize readiness principally around a calendar-based sequence of training phases, we built the new framework around continuous certification requirements that could be maintained alongside real world operational tasking. That policy became the foundation from which the Surface Navy’s training organization could determine when specialized assessment teams needed to travel to Spain, what expertise they needed to bring, which events could be combined, and how training and certification could be scheduled around the ships’ operational commitments.
The experience taught me an important lesson about organizational change: when circumstances make an established process unworkable, the answer is not necessarily to lower the standard—it may be to redesign the process by which the standard is achieved. We did not exempt the Rota ships from readiness requirements because their circumstances were difficult. We created a framework suited to their circumstances while preserving the outcomes the Navy required. That distinction has stayed with me throughout my subsequent leadership roles: good policy should establish clear standards and accountability, but it also has to recognize operational reality and give the people responsible for execution a workable path to success.
Command in Milwaukee: Taking Ownership of an Organization
My first command taught me that executive leadership begins with taking ownership of the organization you have rather than wishing for different circumstances. Navy Operational Support Center Milwaukee was a functioning command with a capable team, but it was geographically removed from the Navy’s major concentration areas and operated from an aging 1950s-era facility on leased Port of Milwaukee property. For me, however, commanding in my home state of Wisconsin was a rare privilege, and I wanted the people who worked there to feel that same sense of purpose and investment in the organization.
One area demanding attention was physical security. The 2015 terrorist attack on a similar Navy reserve center in Chattanooga, Tennessee had demonstrated the vulnerability of military facilities located outside the protected perimeter of a larger federal installation. Milwaukee shared some of those characteristics: our facility was publicly exposed, and its existing perimeter fence offered little protection against a vehicle intrusion. I worked with the Navy’s regional public works organization to secure and execute substantial facility and force protection investments, including reinforcing the perimeter with vehicle-resistant cabling, installing modern remotely operated gates and surveillance equipment, and applying protective window film intended to reduce fragmentation if the building were attacked. We complemented those physical improvements by building stronger relationships with the Milwaukee Police and Fire Departments and conducting response exercises so that local first responders understood who we were, where we were located, and why the facility presented unusual security considerations. My objective was simple: if we ever had to make the worst possible 911 call, I did not want the emergency response to begin with someone asking, “What is NOSC Milwaukee?”
That same philosophy extended beyond security. Because an isolated command cannot assume every capability will exist locally, we built relationships that solved practical problems. An Air National Guard unit helped our Sailors complete specialized administrative requirements for assignments in the Middle East when our Navy facility lacked compatible secure information systems, while our relationship with Marquette University’s Naval ROTC program created meaningful temporary leadership opportunities for newly commissioned officers awaiting their first assignments. Inside the command, I emphasized cross-training, delegated meaningful responsibility, and expected people to understand enough of one another’s work that the organization would not depend upon any single individual—including me.
That last principle was unexpectedly tested when I was sent to Pennsylvania to investigate a serious weapons safety allegation at another Navy reserve center. What began as a preliminary inquiry became a formal investigation requiring several days on site and substantial follow-on work. My own command did not stop because its commanding officer had been pulled elsewhere. Our Senior Enlisted Leader and staff continued operating effectively because they understood their responsibilities, were accustomed to exercising initiative, and did not need me standing over them to make routine decisions. That experience reinforced what became one of my core beliefs about executive leadership: taking ownership of an organization does not mean personally owning every decision. It means creating the people, relationships, infrastructure and systems that allow the organization to perform whether the leader is in the room or not.
Breaking Down Silos to Fix a 19,000 Case Backlog
When I arrived at Navy Reserve Forces Command in 2019, we were confronting a growing problem involving two separate information systems used to send Reserve Sailors on active duty orders and reimburse their travel. The systems had been cleverly integrated years earlier so that funding approved in the Navy Reserve Orders Writing System could flow electronically into the Defense Travel System, allowing Reservists to arrange official travel themselves while charging expenses to the correct Reserve accounts. But an enterprise accounting system change in late 2018 had disrupted that delicate interface. What initially appeared to be the normal trickle of individual transaction errors became an avalanche of rejection codes that our help desk could no longer resolve one case at a time. Ultimately, approximately 19,000 travel vouchers were affected.
Behind those numbers were people. Reservists had completed their Annual Training or other periods of active duty and received their military pay through a separate system, but months could pass without reimbursement for the travel expenses they had incurred while serving. Some paid their individually billed Government Travel Charge Cards out of their own pockets while waiting for the Navy to reimburse them; others who could not afford to do so became delinquent through no fault of their own. To me, that transformed the issue from an information technology problem into a basic question of organizational trust. We had asked people to travel on the government’s behalf, and we had an obligation to pay them correctly and promptly.
Once it became clear that individual help desk tickets could not solve a systemic failure, I established a recurring interdisciplinary working group that brought together the people who understood Reserve orders, travel, accounting, program management and the underlying information systems. Rather than allowing each organization to address the portion of the problem within its own boundaries, we worked backward across those boundaries to identify root causes, develop technical corrections, assist with the individual vouchers already trapped in the system, and prevent the backlog from continuing to grow. The effort initially released nearly $700,000 in delayed reimbursements and continued for approximately nine months, until we finally closed the last outstanding ticket.
The experience reinforced a management principle I have relied upon ever since: when a problem crosses organizational boundaries, assigning blame within those boundaries will not solve it. Someone has to define the problem from the customer’s perspective, bring together everyone who owns a piece of the solution, establish a disciplined management rhythm, and stay with the work until the system—not merely the latest symptom—is fixed. In this case, our ultimate measure of success was not whether two Navy information systems communicated properly; it was whether the Sailor who had done what the Navy asked could once again trust the Navy to do what it had promised in return.
COVID-19: Adapting a Peacetime System to an Immediate Crisis
When COVID-19 began spreading rapidly across the United States in March 2020, Navy Reserve Forces Command established a Crisis Action Team to manage an extraordinary flow of information between senior Navy leadership and a nationwide Reserve organization. I served on that team as the subject matter lead for travel and orders-related issues, but my most consequential work occurred alongside it. As civilian authorities sought Department of Defense support in early hotspots including New York and Southern California, hundreds of Navy Reserve physicians, nurses and Hospital Corpsmen volunteered to mobilize, including personnel needed to support rapidly activated Navy hospital ships. The challenge was getting them there quickly enough to matter.
The Navy’s formal mobilization system was designed for a much more deliberate process. It was not sufficiently agile for the immediate demand we faced and, critically, had no direct connection to the Defense Travel System, leaving urgent mobilization travel dependent upon a legacy manual travel process. My office administered a different orders system used for shorter periods of active duty that was already integrated with the Defense Travel System. Navy Reserve leadership therefore developed an interim approach: qualified medical Reservists could initially be placed on these Active Duty for Training (ADT) orders, allowing them to arrange travel electronically and report where they were urgently needed, while the slower formal mobilization process continued in parallel and converted their status after arrival. My team and I worked nights and weekends for roughly two weeks to process the extraordinary volume of orders and travel requirements necessary to make that approach work. It was exhausting, but also inspiring to see Reservists volunteering to serve communities confronting an unprecedented public health emergency and our staff doing everything possible to get them there.
The crisis also demonstrated that urgency does not automatically travel down an organizational chart. At headquarters, the scale of the emergency was unmistakable, but translating that urgency through six regional commands and ultimately more than 100 Reserve centers across multiple time zones required persistent communication and increasingly direct leadership. Organizations accustomed to predictable peacetime routines suddenly had to understand that evenings and weekends could no longer be treated as inviolable and that normal processing timelines were inadequate to the moment. Senior Reserve leadership ultimately had to make explicit what the circumstances required: this was not operations as normal.
We succeeded in meeting the immediate need, but the experience exposed a larger weakness I did not want the organization to forget once the crisis passed. We had moved people quickly because we found a lawful workaround using a more agile orders-and-travel system—not because the formal mobilization process itself was designed to move large numbers of people rapidly. To me, that was an important distinction. Crisis leadership is not only about improvising successfully when the established system fails; it is about remembering why the improvisation was necessary and using that lesson to make the permanent system better. That realization became the foundation for a much longer effort I subsequently led to modernize how Navy Reservists would travel during future large scale mobilizations.
The Travel Juggernaut: Challenging a Barrier to Mass Mobilization
The COVID-19 response exposed a weakness in Navy Reserve mobilization that I believed would become a much larger problem during a national contingency: we had tens of thousands of trained Reservists available to mobilize, but our legacy process for physically moving them to their destinations could not operate at anything approaching that scale or speed. We came to call it the “travel juggernaut.” During COVID, we’d worked around the problem by initially placing urgently needed medical personnel on a different type of active duty order that could take advantage of the Defense Travel System. Afterward, I began asking a more fundamental question: why couldn't we use that same modern travel system for mobilization itself?
Answering that question required challenging some deeply embedded assumptions. I first had to demonstrate from governing travel policy that a mobilization was, for travel purposes, fundamentally a long period of temporary duty rather than a permanent change of station. Once that interpretation was accepted, a more difficult financial problem remained. Reserve travel normally used dedicated Reserve funding and specially configured Defense Travel System profiles, while mobilizations were funded through active duty Operations and Maintenance accounts. Making my proposal work therefore required giving approximately 50,000 Selected Reservists access to active travel system profiles and a funded line of accounting that would be available when mobilization orders were issued. That would dramatically increase agility, but it also required senior financial officials to accept a calculated risk: the Navy would have to keep sufficient funding available in the system and trust Reservists not to obligate travel funds without valid orders.
For approximately 21 months, I briefed the problem and proposed solution through increasingly senior levels of the Navy, encountering understandable resistance along the way. The existing process was familiar; my alternative required changes in policy, financial controls and institutional assumptions, and obtaining money to test an unproven concept was itself a challenge. Eventually, I persuaded flag officers and senior civilian executives to provide approximately $200,000 for a proof-of-concept involving 100 volunteers. The pilot demonstrated that mobilization travel could be processed much more efficiently through the Defense Travel System. I transferred to my next assignment before I could complete the final project report or advocate for broader implementation, but we had done something important: identified a potentially serious barrier to mass mobilization, demonstrated that the barrier was not inherent to mobilization itself, and proved one practical alternative worthy of further development.
That experience taught me that institutional innovation often requires changing the question from “Why can't we do this?” to “Which specific rule says we can't?” Sometimes the answer reveals a genuine legal, financial or policy constraint. Other times it reveals that an organization has confused a longstanding practice with an actual requirement. My responsibility was not to dismiss the controls protecting public funds, but to understand them well enough to propose a different system that balanced accountability with the operational agility the Navy might someday urgently need.
Planning for the Mobilization Nobody Wanted to Need
When I assumed command of Navy Reserve Center Newport, I brought with me several years of headquarters experience working on one of the Navy Reserve’s most difficult strategic questions: how would an organization accustomed to mobilizing Sailors individually or in relatively small numbers activate tens of thousands of Reservists rapidly during a major national contingency? The Navy Reserve was developing an Adaptive Mobilization model designed around six regional processing sites that could receive arriving Sailors, complete administrative and medical screening, provide necessary preparatory training, and move them onward to their assigned missions. But there was an inherent problem in the model: the Navy Reserve’s six geographic regions were not equally populated, and neither were the demands that would be placed upon their mobilization sites.
That imbalance was particularly significant along the East Coast. A regional organization headquartered in Norfolk was responsible for an enormous geographic area extending northward through New England, with a correspondingly large Reserve population. During routine operations, the Navy could rely heavily upon a centralized mobilization processing organization in Norfolk, but nobody expected a single location to process anything approaching the roughly 50,000 Selected Reservists the Navy might need to activate within 30 days during a major contingency. Once I arrived in Newport, I began asking whether we could use existing Navy infrastructure more intelligently. Naval Station Newport already possessed substantial training, medical and support capabilities, while its location made it far more accessible than Norfolk for Reservists living from Connecticut through Maine. Establishing Newport as a subregional processing site could simultaneously reduce the burden on Norfolk and shorten the first leg of mobilization for thousands of Sailors in the Northeast.
I began researching the concept and the resources that would be required to make it viable. The idea was not to create an entirely new mobilization establishment, but to recognize capacity that already existed and consider how it could be incorporated into the larger system when demand exceeded the assumptions underlying the normal process. I retired from the Navy before the concept could be developed through approval and implementation, but I documented the work and handed it to my successor for further consideration.
The project reflected a habit of thought I carried from headquarters work into command and later into municipal management: organizational boundaries drawn for administrative convenience do not necessarily correspond to where people, resources or demand actually exist. Good planning requires looking beyond the boxes on an organizational chart and asking how a system would perform under real-world load. Sometimes the most practical solution is not to build something new, but to recognize an existing asset, connect it to a larger need, and use the capacity already available more intelligently.