The podcast by project managers for project managers. The unpredictable nature of a crisis means that leaders have little time to prepare. Our guest Matt Harper, a retired 20 year Naval Officer, talks about crisis leadership lessons he learned onboard the USS Cole during a terrorist attack.

Table of

Contents

00:37 … Meet Matt 01:38 … Matt’s Role on the USS Cole 03:55 … Background to the USS Cole Deployment 06:32 … Geographical Location of Yemen 07:58 … October 12th, 2000 10:02 … Reacting in Times of Crisis 12:24 … Events Following the Attack 14:36 … Responding Well or Responding Poorly in a Crisis 16:34 … Management vs. Leadership 20:15 … Crisis Leadership Lesson One: Understand Yourself 21:05 … Crisis Leadership Lesson Two: Be Comfortable with Uncertainty 22:40 … Crisis Leadership Lesson Three: Collaborate 24:01 … Crisis Leadership Lesson Four: Be Ready to do Anything 26:35 … Crisis Leadership Lesson Five: Lessons Learned 27:35 … Keeping Motivated in a Crisis 29:42 … Get up on the Balcony, Take a Different Perspective 33:11 … Go Beyond Your Comfort Zone 34:41 … Resolving the Problem 37:20 … Get in Touch with Matt 38:52 … Closing

MATT HARPER: ...this is the hallmark of the good leader, of

the good project manager that says, got it, that’s the way it’s supposed to be

done, but we’re in a crisis deadline or whatever the case may be.  And this is how we need to do it now.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I am Wendy Grounds, and with me is Bill

Yates.

BILL YATES:  Hi.  Hi, Wendy.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi,

Bill.    Today we’re talking about what

will we do in a time of crisis.  We have

Matt Harper with us.  He is on Skype from

Denver, Colorado.

Meet Matt

BILL YATES:  Yeah, Matt

has had a twenty year career with the US Navy and we’ll get more into that.

Specifically though, he had a unique experience and I’m looking forward to

discussing with him and sharing with our audience.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Matt

is going to tell us about his experience on the USS Cole after a

terrorist attack in Aden, Yemen, which happened in October 2000. He was

decorated for his leadership after this attack and he’s applied that to

coaching lessons in crisis leadership, and so I think he’s got a lot of good

stuff he’s going to bring to us today.

BILL YATES:  Yeah,

Matt, we so appreciate your time. 

Welcome to Manage This.

MATT HARPER:  Well,

thanks.  Thanks for having me.  Looking forward to it.

BILL YATES:  Any time

we can bring somebody into a conversation that has the knowledge, the training,

and the experience that you do, we know our project manager listeners are going

to appreciate it and learn from it. 

Wendy and I were talking, we feel like the best way to tackle this topic

is just start from the beginning.  Give

us a sense for what happened with the USS Cole and what your role was, or what

part you played in that.

Matt’s Role on the

USS Cole

MATT HARPER: 

Sure.  Well, thanks, thanks again

for having me.  I would like to kind of

start out, having a 20-year military background, I’m sure a lot of the people listening

to the podcast will have military backgrounds.

BILL YATES:  Right.

MATT HARPER:  But for

most people who do not, I would like to say that anybody who spends time in the

military, what we do on a daily basis is really project management.

BILL YATES: That’s true.

MATT HARPER:  It’s

something that we I think don’t do a very good job, we people in the military

or prior military personnel, we don’t do a very good job really making it clear

that that’s really what we do, probably 90 percent of our day, is really

different types of projects that all interrelate to each other.  They’re all underfunded; they’re all

under-resourced.

BILL YATES:  Yes.

MATT HARPER:  And that’s what we do on a daily basis.  So about my experience, I originally grew up in San Francisco.  I always knew I kind of wanted to be in the Navy, so I went to ROTC up in New England at Boston University.  So I commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Navy in 1996.  I commissioned as a ship guy, so it meant I spent most of my time on ships.  So again, kind of the military big organization that people may or may not be familiar about:  if you say you’re “in the Navy,” that’s kind of like saying you work at GE.

BILL YATES:  Right.

MATT HARPER:  You could be, you could be a line worker who’s doing the same job over and over again, or you could be the CEO, and so there’s a whole range in between.  So my time at the Navy I spent most of that time on ships.  And then when I wasn’t on a ship, I was at a staff or at a desk job in a cubicle kind of doing paperwork, for lack of a better word. 

So I joined the Navy in 1996; and then in 2000 I was on my second ship, USS Cole.  So I was a young lieutenant at the time.  So a “young lieutenant” being I had about five years in the Navy in October of 2000. And so at the time I was the Assistant Operations Officer. As a young lieutenant I had a more senior lieutenant who was my immediate superior, and then it was the captain, and then the XO of the ship.  So I was kind of senior middle management, how’s that, for my time on that ship.

Background to the USS

Cole Deployment

So we had been on deployment, so that meant we notionally

had left Norfolk, Virginia for a six-month deployment.  So we left at the end of the summer of

2000.  We spent the first half of our

deployment in the Mediterranean.  So back

in 2000, after the civil war or the breakup of Yugoslavia, the U.S. military

was helping NATO in resolving the separate conflicts in the former

Yugoslavia.  At that time the

semiautonomous independent country of Kosovo was having their conflict, and so

NATO was providing a no-fly zone.  So

just kind of background for what we were doing, what I was doing on the ship.

BILL YATES:  Right.

MATT HARPER:  And so the ship, the USS Cole, basically we were tracking every aircraft that flew over Kosovo and were enforcing a no-fly zone.  So as a young lieutenant I was sending out messages, and I was tracking all the airplanes that flew over Kosovo in the Mediterranean.

And so we left there in October, and we did a high-speed – for us, which was 28 knots, which is about 35 miles per hour.  So for a ship that is fast.  We did a high-speed run to go from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, to the Arabian Gulf.  And the reason I say we did a “high-speed run” is because the type of ship we were at had gas turbine engines, which is basically a jet engine that they put on a ship.  And when we go really fast, we use up fuel, we use up fuel quite a bit.

So what would happen normally is ships would go through the

Suez Canal.  So this is prior to

9/11.  So this was relatively

routine.  So we would pull into the port

of Yemen, and then we would refuel. 

Nobody would leave the ship.  We

would just get more fuel, and then we would shoot off back and head into the

Arabian Gulf.  So again, at the time, we

were probably the 12th ship to pull into Aden, Yemen.

Now, in 2020, no ship ever would pull into Aden, Yemen because Aden, Yemen is really a war zone, and it has been a war zone for quite a while.  Back in 2000 it was deemed peaceful enough for us to go into.  So we pulled into Aden, Yemen on the morning of October 12th.  In my job as the Assistant Operations Officer, I had actually sent out the messages requesting fuel, so when I put out one of those messages, that unclassified the port visit.  So what that means is that basically you could fairly easily find out we were pulling into Aden, Yemen, and again, that was a routine thing that we did.  Yes.

Geographical Position

of Yemen

BILL YATES:  For those

who are geographically challenged and maybe not have a map in front of them, so

you’re just a bit south of Saudi Arabia.

MATT HARPER:  Correct,

yeah.

BILL YATES:  So you’re below Saudi, you’re a bit to the west of Africa, the continent.

MATT HARPER:  Yes,

yes.

BILL YATES:  So give

everybody, kind of draw an audio picture.

MATT HARPER:  Sure.  So if you start in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, so the eastern end of the Mediterranean of course is Israel, and then south of Israel eventually is Egypt. Then there’s the Suez Canal.  So really on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and that will go into the Red Sea, which is going to be on the western side of Saudi Arabia.  So you are correct, you go down through the Suez Canal, you go through the Red Sea. 

At the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula is Yemen, and then across from the Red Sea is the Horn of Africa, which is Kenya, Djibouti, Somalia.  So that’s a significant kind of hotspot for the world and one of the choke points that the Navy likes to make sure that we understand what’s going on, that choke point going through the Red Sea and of course up to the Suez Canal.  So if you keep going around the Arabian Peninsula, you go up along the coast of Yemen, you’ll go up around the UAE and Oman into the Arabian Gulf.

October 12th

2000

BILL YATES:  So from a project standpoint, you’re in a remote location, way away from headquarters and base and supplies, you’re having to go to an area to get restocked.  In this case you need fuel, and so that sets the stage for the events you’re going to describe.

MATT HARPER: 

Yeah.  That’s exactly it.  We are, at that time, again in 2000, we are

in a pretty austere and remote location; correct.  And that will lead us to be, after attack – I’ll

jump ahead very slightly.  After attack

we will remain in Yemen for about two, two and a half weeks because it takes so

long to come and basically get us.

BILL YATES:  Right.

MATT HARPER:  Yeah.  So it’s the morning of October 12th, and again, very routine stop, we’ve done this before.  Every Navy ship does this in some capacity.  So we pulled up to a refueling pier.