From the Sea to the C-Suite: Lessons Learned from the Bridge to the Corner Office

By Cutler Dawson, Taylor B Kiland and John A. Lockard

With Cutler Dawson at the helm for the last fourteen years, Navy Federal Credit Union, the world's largest credit union, has quadrupled the size of the organization and made it an industry leader in customer service. It is now one of the most fiercely trusted and smoothly run financial institutions in the world ranked by Fortune magazine as a Best Place to Work for eight years. This book reveals an honest and straightforward look at Dawson's leadership philosophy and guiding principles, offering tangible and practical insights for readers who want to learn how to chart a similar course of success--one of exponential growth without compromising a company's bedrock principles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781682476413

Book preview

Introduction

UNLESS OTHERWISE DIRECTED

★

Take command often. The more you do it, the better you will get at it.

—Capt. Pete Hedley, USN (Ret.)

Camp Lemonnier, located near the Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport in Africa, is a dusty and hot place, even in October. It is the only permanent U.S. military base on that continent. Navy sailors and Marines who are deployed there spend months at a time performing highly dangerous missions all over the Horn of Africa. In 2004, I was a Navy vice admiral, the deputy Chief of Naval Operations for resources, requirements, and assessments—what I like to call the last stop for the money in the Navy’s $100 billion budget. I worked out of the Pentagon, but I wanted to talk to the service members who were stationed and see for myself whether they had what they needed to get their jobs done. I toured the facilities and walked around, meeting with lots of sailors and Marines of all ranks who were stationed there for six months or more. I wanted to learn what these service members had—and what they wished they had—in order to perform their mission more efficiently.

While I was there I was surprised to receive a call from John Lockard, chairman of Navy Federal Credit Union’s board of directors. He congratulated me and told me that I had been selected to become the new president of Navy Federal, the company’s fourth in the past forty years. I beamed at hearing the news, and thanked him for the call. As I hung up the phone, I looked out over the harsh desert terrain. Reflecting on my career in the Navy, I thought about all the times that I had been forward-deployed, just like all the sailors and Marines whom I was meeting in Djibouti. In all, I had made fourteen overseas deployments. And now, after thirty-four years of serving in the Navy, I would soon be taking off the uniform and trading it in for a suit. My visit to Djibouti most likely would be my last trip overseas as a naval officer.

I grew a bit nostalgic. I started to reminisce about the beginning of my naval career, when, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, I was given command of USS Molala, an oceangoing tug named for the indigenous people of Oregon. Molala was a small and tested old ship, built during World War II and combat-seasoned with multiple tours in the Pacific, including the Battle of Saipan, the Battle of Luzon, and the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. She also had been deployed to Korea and Vietnam, providing towing and salvage support. She earned five battle stars in World War II and four campaign stars in the Vietnam War.

When I took command of this thirty-two-year-old ship and her eighty-five-man crew in 1975, I was the youngest seagoing commanding officer in a Navy of more than 550 ships. I was fortunate that my previous commanding officer, Pete Hedley, also had enjoyed a command tour early in his career. I wanted to follow a piece of advice that he had given me early on: Take command often. The more you do it, the better you will get at it. I thought I was ready to try my hand at the helm, and he agreed. His support of my request for this assignment was a critical moment in my career. I also expected that I would learn a lot on the job from my crew. What I learned most about was UNODIR,pronounced you-no-deer.

A ship and her crew often are isolated out in the middle of the ocean. It might be days or weeks before you reach another port or see another ship. It could take a long time before you could get more supplies, or a tool you might need, or advanced medical treatment, or a helping hand from another ship’s crew. Many times, you have to improvise and innovate to get the job done. Out there you are your own boss with little supervision. The Internet has changed this dynamic somewhat, of course. But the culture of being a commanding officer at sea has remained a solitary and independent one, where the CO’s actions and the crew’s performance make or break the ship’s success. Unless otherwise directed—or UNODIR—is a grant of power that is almost unique to the U.S. Navy. It means that in some cases you—and only you—may have to call the shots. You are responsible for and accountable for those decisions. You are given a broad objective, but very few specifics. You are not told how to do your job. UNODIR means that you don’t need to ask your boss back at the base, hundreds (or thousands) of miles away, for permission for each move you make—although you might need to ask for forgiveness later if something goes wrong. This experience breeds a certain kind of bravery mixed with some humility. You have to be unafraid, bold, and competitive, but you also need to be grounded in what is realistic.

During the Cold War era, we frequently found ourselves playing a cat-and-mouse game with Soviet submarines, fighters, surveillance aircraft, and ships—sometimes at close range. In 1976, Molala was assigned the task of shadowing a Soviet AGI, a Russian intelligence-gathering ship that was spying on us in international waters off the West Coast between Los Angeles and San Diego. The Soviet ship was larger than Molala, but she had a much smaller and civilian crew, with a complement of thirty to thirty-five mariners. The Soviet crew members knew that Molala was trailing her, and that we knew that they were collecting any kind of intelligence they could. Most likely they were intercepting voice or electronics transmissions or tracking the movements of U.S. Navy ships in and out of port.

We followed her, always maintaining a safe distance. We didn’t want a collision, but we got close enough to see each other from our bridges. It was a delicate dance. We both were very careful to follow the rules of the road at sea, and there was no hostile action by either one of us. We, too, were tasked with collecting any type of intelligence we could, but we were not told how to do this. After several days, I decided to shake things up a bit.

Using the ship’s flashing signal lamp, I sent the civilian master of the ship a message: "Would you like to come over to Molala for lunch?" Why would I do this? What was my rationale? Molala was a World War II–era ship. There was no technology on board my ship that would yield any valuable intelligence for the Soviet captain. However, a conversation with him, in person, might yield some interesting data for me that could never be collected at arm’s length. Keep in mind that I was twenty-seven years old, with only about five years of Navy experience under my belt. Some of my peers might have called me somewhat foolish. But, I knew I could learn more from the Soviet master than he could learn from me. That is the nature of spying—right?

My invitation initially was met with silence. The master most likely was taken aback and, as it turns out, he also probably had to make a call back to Moscow. After what seemed like a long interval, I received a polite regret from the master, indicating that he was not given permission to come aboard. That told me a lot. He didn’t have the same latitude and trust that I had been given by my boss back in San Diego. In hindsight, I often have wondered what the Pentagon’s reaction would have been if the lunch had taken place, and how my report on the meeting would have been received. It could have been one for the history books. We’ll never know. But what I did know was that the culture of Unodir had given me the confidence to take this bold initiative to achieve my mission.

I took that ingrained Unodir attitude to my next five tours as a commanding officer. Having leadership positions early and often in my Navy career gave me a degree of fearlessness. The more I practiced being a leader, the better I got at it. Now that I was at the end of my Navy career, I planned to bring that fearlessness with me to Navy Federal. I believed in the mission of the organization, but what I didn’t fully understand was how passionate Navy Federal members are about Navy Federal. After my visit to Camp Lemonnier, I traveled on to Fallujah, Iraq, to do the same thing: check on the sailors and Marines deployed there and see what they needed. I had dinner in the officers’ mess the first night I arrived. I shared the news that I had just received about my new job. And that’s all they wanted to talk about—Navy Federal. They wanted to share their personal experiences and proudly tell me how long they had been members of the credit union. It was an eye-opener that day in Fallujah how much Navy and Marine Corps men and women in combat depended upon Navy Federal for their financial well-being. It hit me hard that I had an important new