Capt. Mike Abrashoff graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1982 and quickly rose through the ranks. At the age of 36, Abrashoff became commander of the USS Benfold and the most-junior commanding officer in the Pacific fleet. When he took over the ship, Abrashoff faced staggering challenges: low morale, high turnover and loss of motivation. His solution was a process of commitment and cohesion, which the he calls grassroots leadership.

After retiring from the Navy just over four years ago, Abrashoff started his own leadership development company based on his work on the USS Benfold. His book, It's Your Ship, focuses on leadership that encompasses, not demands.

FC: What prompted you to write It's Your Ship?

Abrashoff: We appeared in Fast Company magazine; they wrote an article about us. They asked me to speak to about 1,000 business leaders. People came up to me afterwards and told me I ought to write a book. I couldn't believe people would tell me to write a book, but after enough people told me to write one, I started shopping it around and Warner Books decided to publish it.

FC: How much contact do you have with the fire service?

Abrashoff: I actually haven't had much contact with the fire associations, but their work force is just like my work force — honest young men and women. Nobody's ever handed them anything in life, yet they're doing phenomenal work. How we motivated our crew on Benfold will work with people in fire organizations.

FC: As keynote speaker at the IAFC's opening session at Fire-Rescue International, what will be your message for the chiefs and chief officers?

Abrashoff: They face tough obstacles with budget cuts and everything else, but at the end of the day, none of us are perfect leaders, and we all need to take some time out of our busy lives and think about the leadership component; think about how we're leading our departments.

I'm going to share with them my leadership story, and hopefully it will cause them to sit back and think up ways they can do even better in creating that sense of ownership in their people. And get them to be more creative in how to solve problems and think outside the box.

FC: There certainly are a lot of parallels in your book between the fire service and the Navy. From the beginning of your career, you seemed to have been stuck with some old-school officers. How did you keep from getting turned off by these diehard traditionalists?

Abrashoff: It's tough. One tour I had, every day I went to work I wanted to quit. I hated it so bad. To be honest, I don't know why I stayed. I guess I didn't have anything better to do, but I didn't have any role models to show me the right way to do it. We think that we can order people to do a job, but we can't order people to turn in great performance, and that's what the fire and military have in common.

We can tell people to go do something, but that's not going to gain us the dedication and devotion. The way we do that is where our leadership traits are so critical, and that's how you get to that next level of performance. I never had anybody show me until I went to work for the secretary of defense, William Perry, and he showed me how to do it.

FC: Although you've said that time was difficult, you write that it eventually all came together, prompting you to be a different kind of leader.

Abrashoff: I wasn't proud of myself because I didn't do enough to protect my officers from a difficult commanding officer, and we lost a great number of good officers as a result. I wasn't very proud of what I did or what I failed to do.

FC: You put a strong emphasis on retention; that seems to have been important to you.

Abrashoff: People don't care much about retention these days with the economy the way that it is.

FC: Right, but don't you think the type of employees we have to work with today is different from 20 years ago?

Abrashoff: You know what? They're different, but they're just as good. If you treat them poorly, they'll behave poorly. If you treat them with respect, that's all they want.

One of my officers left the Benfold and went to the Navy's recruiting command and recruited people into the Navy. I had dinner with him a year later, and he said, “It hit me three months into the job that what we did on Benfold was that we tried to recruit our people each and every day, even though we already had them.”

When I look back, the guy was right on the head, we recruited our people every day.

FC: You put strong emphasis on being a team player. How do you differentiate between a team player and somebody who is an opportunist or there under false pretenses?

Abrashoff: The person at the top can stop that if it's going on, and I think the people at the top know it when they see it. I decided that brown-nosers would be outed on my ship, and it wasn't in your long-term best interest to be a brown-noser. I wanted somebody who would tell me the way it was, not sugarcoat it and be honest with me, and that's what got rewarded on the ship. If we reward brown-nosers, that sends a signal to the rest of the organization, and I wasn't going to reward brown-nosers.

FC: When you first arrived on the Benfold, you were very direct in telling the crew that “it wasn't their father's Navy.” How would you get the message across to new fire officers that it's not their father's fire service?

Abrashoff: There are new threats today that we didn't have 10 years ago that the fire service has to respond to. They're first on the line for the chemical, radiological and biological threats, and they have to continue to improve their skills, but oftentimes they don't have the budget that they need to do the job that needs to be done. So how do you get that done within tight budgetary constraints?

There's a whole host of problems and no one magic solution. I'm not going to stand there and say leadership will get you there, because it won't if you're not adequately funded, but it will get you a start and it will cause people to start thinking differently. Those people who have money, they need to start thinking how they spend that money — should I spend the money on this or would it be better to spend it focusing on the threat of the future?

That's what we did on that ship. We spent money like it was coming out of our own pocket, and they knew that they would have whatever they needed whenever they needed it, but they also knew that the only way I could guarantee that was if they spent the money wisely. That was the culture we created.

In the government, there's a mad rush at the end of the quarter to spend your money if you haven't spent all your money, or you're going to lose it. That leads us to spend money that doesn't give us the biggest bang for the buck. I'm sure that goes on at every level of the government.

FC: With the new Department of Homeland Security, there's a feeling there will be a stronger presence than ever of the military involved with response.

Abrashoff: Is there going to be an issue of how the fire service gets along with guard units? At the end of the day, we're all in this together and people have to check those egos at the door and come up with the best solutions that help everybody. The best way to do that is put yourself in the shoes of others and figure out how you can work together because it's the results that matter, not who brings what to the table. And it takes leadership to do that.

FC: In your book you discuss the classic front-page test: “If what I'm about to do appeared on the front page of the Washington Post tomorrow, would I be proud or embarrassed?” Does the media focus too much on wrongdoing?

Abrashoff: I think too often we view the media as the enemy, and we don't have to view the media as the enemy, we can make them work for us.

When I was working for the secretary of defense, we had a problem because most of the planes that carry government officials around were broken-down and old. As a result, many times the secretary of defense didn't have a plane to fly on because of the way he ranks in the pecking order of … officials.

But we had four 747s that were part of the Strategic Command that used to be airborne. Since the end of the Cold War they've been sitting out there, but they have to fly 450 hours a quarter to maintain their efficiency. Since they have to fly anyway, poking holes in the sky to maintain their proficiency, … and here we have a member of the government who needs to go on foreign trips, genuinely needs to take a plane, but the problem is budgetary because it costs taxpayers $26,000 an hour to fly.

So that's a godsend to the media — a government official flying around in a huge expensive jet. Well, we were upfront with the media to begin with. We said this is a plane, this is why we're taking it and it's good government in action, and there was never a peep from the media about wasting this aircraft. It made sense.

If you can make a good case to the media, they'll support you. Too often we tend to view them as the enemy, but we tried to bring them into our circle and be open and honest with them, so we had favorable coverage from them.

FC: What else did you learn as assistant to the secretary of defense?

Abrashoff: God, there were a million lessons. I think the most important thing is that it doesn't matter who has the greatest idea, the key is to … let those ideas be heard and implement them because it's the bottom line that counts. What we were about in that office is nobody every stepped up to take the credit. It was always doing it because it was the right thing to do. I think that's what I learned from him. And at the end of the day, it'll come back to you anyway.

On the Benfold, I was happy to give it away. I was happy to give it away to the chief officers and the crew, they're the ones that were doing it. Where I'm going to get my ego massaged is by having the best ship in the Navy, not by saying, “I got this idea and we're going to implement it.” Results are where you should get your ego from, not how you got there. Those who are more humble and spread it out to others, that's more buy-in from your people.

FC: How did you deal with the stress during these changes?

Abrashoff: There can be some very stressful times. I had a great second-in-command whom I could confide in, and I had a senior enlisted advisor — the senior enlisted guy on the ship. I would bring the two of them in and we'd shoot the breeze. It's important to have a sounding board to get people to give you the honest truth and also to have it kept private. I knew what I said to those two, it would never be relayed to others.

FC: On the Benfold, you spent time talking to individual crew members and then matching the right people to the right job.

Abrashoff: I wanted them to be happy, and if they had an interest in what they were doing, they'd probably get results. If by talking to somebody I knew they were interested in something, then if I had a mission to get accomplished, I could match the right people to the right job. It's not really rocket science, it's talking to them and getting them to open up and find out what turns them on.

FC: That approach meshes with your chapter “Build up your People,” but you also include a section about building up your boss. In the real world, in the course of a your career, you're likely to be stuck with an unqualified or self-serving boss. How can someone deal with that situation?

Abrashoff: You know, there's no easy solution to that problem. I wish I had words of wisdom, but the best thing to do is to deal with it, be the firewall between your boss and your people so it doesn't infect and spill over into your people.

For my last two months on the ship, I got a new admiral who was like that and I knew I was leaving, so I could deal with it, but it would have been tough if I'd had to deal with him long-term. I thought about it and this guy was so immune to change that I just had to sit there and deal with, but what I could do was prevent him from ruining my people.

FC: Women and minorities are always a topic of debate in the fire service. Interestingly, in your book you said you canceled the ship's diversity training.

Abrashoff: It was ineffective. We focused on our common purpose instead of what divided us.

In the fire service, people have a common purpose, and they need to realize that they need to work together as a team, they need to support each other. Remember the coal-mining accident last summer in Pennsylvania? Those nine miners were asked what caused them to survive and they said that they'd tied themselves together. If they had been separated one by one, they would have started dying.

When I look back on the Benfold, I see that we tied ourselves together because we had a common interest. The fire service has a common interest, too.

FC: Would those actions be an example of, “If a rule doesn't make sense, break it”?

Abrashoff: I probably shouldn't have said that. If a rule doesn't make sense — this is what we did on the ship — we'd figure out what caused that rule to be made in the first place. A lot of times rules are established 30-40 years ago because of some need that existed back then, but the conditions have changed, the technology has changed, but yet it takes us forever to change the way we do business.

For example, the Tomahawk cruise missiles came online just in time for the first Gulf War in '90-'91, and they came up with the step-by-step procedures on how to launch the missiles. Well, by the late '90s, we had new and updated equipment, new and updated missiles, yet we never updated our procedures. We were in the Persian Gulf in late '97 when Saddam was acting up and the order came down to prepare to launch the cruise missile if we had them. Nobody could meet the time requirements.

One sailor, 24 years old, never went to college, I never told him to do it, but he felt ownership for his Tomahawk … and he researched every step of the procedure as to why it was implemented that way 10 years ago and if there was a better way to do it. He came up with a new set of procedures. We tried it, it worked. We passed it to the three-star, he tried it, it worked and on to the whole battle group and shazam! We were suddenly able to meet our time requirements and [that procedure was] used by the entire Navy.

I didn't order that guy, I didn't think to do it, but it was the culture we had created on the ship — that you investigate why we originated those ideas in the first place and ask if the conditions still exist today or if there's a better way we can do our business.

On the Benfold we found that by looking at the rule, maybe it's still effective, but if it's not, then let's figure out how we can challenge it. So I don't think “break it” is right, but challenge it. If I had to rewrite that chapter today, it would be “Challenge the Rules.”

FC: It seems that you spent more time developing your people rather than your career.

Abrashoff: My first 16 years in the Navy I focused solely on my career, but then I got to a point in my career from which I could retire from that pay grade and still be considered a success.

I started thinking what's most important to me, and that was that I never wanted to write to the parents of one of my sailors to tell them that their son or daughter wasn't coming home because of something I did or failed to tell them to do. That became an overriding concern for me over my career. If people die because of you make a mistake made, that's something you don't get over, at least I wouldn't. And I wanted to make sure I didn't have any regrets.

If you think about us as leaders in those terms, the promotions are petty. I also knew if I produced results, I'd get promoted anyway. At the end of the day, producing results gets you promoted.

FC: Can you reduce successful leadership to one word?

Abrashoff: It fluctuates, but today I would say trust. You can't do anything without trust. Look at the economy when people don't trust Wall Street and corporate CEOS — big vote of no confidence, and the country goes into a recession when people violate that trust.

Same thing in firehouses and in our ships. If you don't trust that person going into the fire with you, you might do things differently. You have to trust them.

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It's Your Ship can be ordered at a 30% discount from Abrashoff's Web site, www.grassrootsleadership.com.