Can Leadership Be Taught? To the folks at MITAGS and PMI, the answer is YES.

By Kathy A. Smith

There is a strong undercurrent in the maritime industry today that calls for more effective and robust leadership at sea and ashore. The crux of the problem is that there is a prevailing misunderstanding of the difference between leadership and management.  Bridging this gap is what the U.S. based Maritime Institute of Technology and Graduate Studies (MITAGS) and the Pacific Maritime Institute (PMI) are working hard to do.

Management Is Not Leadership
"What we think is leadership is actually management," says Walter Megonigal, MITAGS-PMI's Senior Management Consultant and former Director of Training. "When leaders try to lead with a management focus, they tend to prescribe a set of steps instead of an overall mission, and things start getting confused from there." He adds that when this confusion becomes well implanted in an organization's culture, people end up carrying out practices and processes under the wrong assumption – an impediment that runs from the senior executive level all the way down to the deck plates.

"Leadership is universal," says MITAGS’ Director of Training, Eric Friend, a U.S. Merchant Marine Academy graduate who is currently working on a degree in management with a concentration in organizational leadership. "The principles and the practices are different in that management’s purpose is to do things right while leaders should focus on doing the right thing. The simplest interpretation is that management attempts to correctly carry out the organization’s procedures and practices while leaders make sure that those procedures and practices are in line with the organization’s vision, mission, principles and culture.”

According to both Friend and Megonigal, the analysis of good leadership is reflected through an organization's long-term success, not its quarterly financial statements, and the application of effective leadership and its attendant skills has not changed over the years. What has changed is the maritime industry's understanding of the need to apply good leadership both onboard ships and in supporting corporate activities.

"Our industry is in the infancy of implementing leadership as an approach to correcting its various problems," Megonigal explains. "For many years, we have found it easier or more convenient to identify the symptoms of leadership failure and apply technology as a fix," he says, referring to a definitive statement made by one of MITAGS' clients back in 2001 that helped birth the 28-hour Management, Communications & Leadership (MCL) course it’s been running since 2004. "We have put every piece of technology available on the bridges of our ships and we are still having incidents and accidents." Relying on technology alone is clearly not the answer to leadership success, argue Friend and Megonigal. How leaders effectively lead every day is.

Staying Focused
Leadership is really hard work, especially at sea, where it's a 24-hour-a-day responsibility, Megonigal told MarEx. "Whether you are the Master or Chief Engineer, and you are on or off, you are still that ship's and that organization's leader and you have to be visible and accessible," he says. "There is virtually no instance in which you can say, 'It is not my job,' if you are the leader. You may be able to sidestep some of that onshore, just because we tend to go home, but not onboard ship." A team that works with a forward-looking approach is critical to a leader's overall effectiveness.

As Megonigal emphasizes, on the bridge the Master or other officer in charge has to keep the bridge team focused on staying ahead of the ship. That is his or her central role. They start losing focus when they start getting behind the ship. Their situational awareness, their decision-making process puts them in another situation where they have a discussion and wind up working in the past and not the present or the future. "It's the leader's job to get that refocused," he says.

"It goes back to having a vision," adds Friend, "not just a mission statement but a day-to-day operational outlook of a ship underway. It's asking, 'What do I need to do to keep the team moving forward?' Leadership is having the vision to get people to look forward rather than living in the past."

Verbal vs. Nonverbal Communication
Effectively communicating with teams is also paramount to leading with success and a challenge for leaders working not only with language, cultural, religious and gender issues but generational ones as well. For example, cruise ships can have as many as five generations of workers, ranging in age from 17 to 85. Megonigal explains that effective communication is developing a level of understanding from the sender to the receiver – not agreement, not persuasion, just understanding. This approach works with almost all cultures through all languages. What's important is surmounting the barriers. Language barriers are tough, and they are prevalent in the maritime industry. It's a leader's responsibility to figure out how to work around them.

Using body language is a necessary part of seafaring communications and is generally a universally-adopted technique. Nonverbal communication includes tonality, voice inflection, facial expression, body language, signals and signs. According to Megonigal, only about 10 percent of communication is relayed in words. The other 90 percent lies in how those words are delivered.

Written communications are also essential for leaders. "If you can't write clearly, you can't say it clearly," Megonigal says, referring to his “who, what, when, where and how” approach to teaching writing skills. There is also the challenge of using 21st century electronic communication methods, an area he says should be completely devoid of emotion. "Email is not human communication and should be held to factual or objective information at best."

Turning Managers Into Leaders
Leaders also need to cultivate intellectual maturity when dealing with people. In the leadership role there are times when anger is required in order to make a point, a specific technique Megonigal calls “controlled logical reasoning anger.” However, it doesn't work for every individual case. The hard part of good leadership is correctly assessing the situation and circumstances and applying the correct techniques. That's why leadership is tough and why the right kind of education and training is important.

The MCL course, which has its origins in the Bridge Resource Management course, is appropriate for management-level officers, senior industry executives and managers. The course has been presented to a wide range of industry sectors including cruise lines, containerships, tankers, and Military Sealift Command senior officers.

The course is comprehensive and follows a prescribed format. It can be customized to include modules on understanding the ISM Code, Risk Management, and Media Response. There is plenty of room for interactive discussions, a critical element necessary for building skills, knowledge and confidence. It also moves with the times and continues to evolve as new leadership paradigms emerge. Friend explains: "Leaders need to grow. If they are not growing, they are stagnating." The MCL course is also being submitted to the U.S. Coast Guard for approval to cover the new STCW 95-mandated management and leadership competencies.

Megonigal states: "Success in today’s marine environment takes more than just technical competence. The interrelationship between ever-increasing technologies and the humans that employ those technologies dictates that training and education become a career-long process in the maritime profession. How effective and efficient that interrelationship is depends on good leadership." – MarEx

Kathy Smith is a frequent contributor to The Maritime Executive.