Pic unrelated; it’s back from my YP days.

Reading this week:

• The Last Whalers by Doug Bock Clark

I came across an article about the CO of the USS Decatur getting fired for lying, so I wanted to share some thoughts on lying. I’m on a “thoughts on leadership” kinda kick with my posts on decision making, and this dovetails with my post on regrets. The other regrettable and regretted decision I considered writing about was the time I lied to cover up a tagout violation.

I now believe that the most important trait in a leader is honesty, which is a much larger concept than just not lying. Not lying is an important part of that though. Back at the Academy, and throughout my time in the fleet, we had regular training on integrity. I was going to say these training sessions were annoying, but that’s not quite the right expression. They were fine to go to, and I didn’t particularly mind going, it’s just that if you don’t lie you’ve already kind of achieved max integrity. You could achieve no higher level of integrity by like, not telling lies moreso than you already were (or uh weren’t) if you weren’t a liar. I believed myself to be a person of integrity who, when faced with a difficult choice, would make the right decision. Until I went ahead and found myself in that position and lied anyway, and learned an important leadership lesson about lying.

The story involves some nuclear reactor stuff and some work controls stuff I’ll try to avoid going into detail over in order not to bore you. This was of course back when I was on the submarine, and the ship was going to do some testing which had not been performed in Guam ever, or at least in anything resembling recent memory. This involved discharging some nuclear material from the submarine to the submarine tender which, for various reasons involving piping connections and the possibility of spewing boiling radioactive water all over the harbor if it went poorly, made people nervous.

To cope with the work and the schedule, the engineering department was split into two watch teams that would stand back-to-back 12 hour watches. I was selected to be the Engineering Duty Officer (EDO) for the day shift, and was therefore the lead guy for this whole project. I wasn’t in charge of planning it, but I was in charge of actually doing it, leading my team and all that. This evolution took what was supposed to be days and turned into weeks of preparatory work. It went from days to weeks because so many things went poorly. They mostly went poorly on the submarine tender side of things, but people’s hackles were raised. Naval Reactors was keeping a close eye on all this and so was everyone else and there were these big wigs and in and among this whole massed operation somehow check valves could still get installed backwards. My counterpart EDO on the night shift had already been replaced like twice, for relatively minor stuff that blew up only because everyone was so nervous.

So it was in this environment that I went to go clear diver’s tags one day. Diver’s tags are part of the maintenance system, and function to prohibit the operation of any equipment that could harm the SCUBA divers that would do work on the ship underwater. When you want to have divers work on the ship, you “hang” these tags, and when the work is done you “clear” them. To ensure these tags are hung properly and cleared safely, there is a system of checks where a representative for the divers will come onto the ship and authorize the tags to be cleared. They have to (back then anyways) sign out of the tags on the computer, and then physically sign on a sheet for every tag that is authorized to be cleared. So the divers came down, signed out of the tags on the computer, and I went ahead and authorized for the tags to be cleared. The mechanic went around and cleared the tags, and I checked them all, and went to go file the paperwork, at which point I realized I had fucked up big time.

The divers, you see, hadn’t signed for the individual tags. I had, at that point, committed a tagout violation by clearing tags that weren’t properly authorized to be cleared. Tagout violations are treated as a huge deal, because they are a huge deal, because the tagout system is what keeps people from being killed when they work on equipment. It has to be respected and little mistakes could easily get someone hurt. The proper answer was to go report to the Engineer and the Captain what I had done.

Then again, this wasn’t really a big deal. The diver’s tags exist to keep divers safe. If there are no divers in the water, they don’t really have a point. And the divers were not in the water, they had no intention of going in the water, and were in fact not authorized to go into the water. So really I had just made a paperwork error. And in my scenario, I knew what would happen if I reported my tagout violation. I would be relieved as EDO. I would let down the whole team, and someone else would have to take my spot. Besides having shucked my duty onto someone else, me getting fired from the EDO job would probably cause more delays, which would hurt the guys, and someone else would have to learn all the things that I had learned to do the job. And on a personal level, it would be a failure on my part and I would be reprimanded. So I lied.

This turned into like 1800 words so I split it into two parts. Come back next week for the thrilling conclusion.