This is a crucial skill to have as a Captain. It took me many years to hone it as a Chief Mate and I find myself coaching younger mates quite a bit when to recognize someone is trying to get a rise out of them. Once you fly off the handle with someone looking for a case, they have essentially won. If you stay calm and let them dig their own grave while trying to make their case, you control the situation.
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Oof. I would put the blame on your management for wording these emails so clumsily. This generation is the same as any other. But these days we are more aware of all the things that make us human. This doesn’t mean you need to drastically change how you manage people. It just means you should treat people the way you would want to be treated. Keep in mind that’s not how you WERE treated- it’s how you would want yourself (or others including but not limited to: your shipmates, your sister, your best friend etc) to be treated. Respect and empathy and professionalism. It’s nothing new to humanity but it’s new to the working world.
ETA- The wording seems especially inappropriate considering the important of chain of command on ships. There really needs to be maritime-specific language for these common sense concepts.
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Damn! Straight truth.
About 2008-ish, 2009 I saw a change, I’m sure most of us here have done the company training with the meetings, in a way it cleaned the industry up, which I mean “tug and barge” but at the same time it took the soul out of it. I started in 01, worked with some guys who where down right assholes BUT you learned the job or went the fuck home. Had 1 captain on a Moran tug tell the 3 of us that Peter said he can only keep 2, but he was going to weed it down to 1 for sport, and he did. My very first hitch at Reinauer the guy I was working with wouldnt even talk to me, went to give him my ticket to put my name in the book, he looked at me, threw at back at me and said your not going to be here a week dont fucking unpack. Try that shit now and the office would be called in a heartbeat. God forbid the crew acts like men, but it’s cool for a guy to come to the company meeting wearing make up and capri pants, it’s a joke anymore.
50 years ago, the kind of deranged assholes BargeMonkey mentions were common and for a sensitive young soul entering the working world, it was brutal. You had to develop a thick skin and quickly or else go home. Some of the sensitivity training I had to take before retiring 7 years ago seemed over the top but I’ll sign off on it if it removes the old school toxic behavior and abuse of power out of the workplace. My view is that all around respect and everyone doing their job as expected is an ideal worth pursuing.
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I don’t agree freighterman1. The root of the problem is the lazy employee playing games with HR to his own agenda. The method the HR department is attempting to treat the problem is ineffective and counter-productive to the mission of the vessel. However, the problem remains the lazy deckhand and his general rejection of any authority.
I Love that analogy. Great tankerman. Good second Mate
The individuals who wax eloquent at the Galley Table about “how things would be different if I was Boss” don’t ever seem to actually ‘be the boss’. They never matriculate up the chain of command, but boy don’t they shoot their mouth off about how they ‘were gonna’ coulda, woulda, be Captain but… it’s better being Tankerman. Says it all
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I love how the generation that started giving out participation trophies is now bitching about the results.
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Agree. During my brief tenure in the US Gulf I saw more than one of these self important “captains”. To some of them it was a point of pride to run off a new guy or anyone that did not kiss their ass. Upon further examination these “captains” got their job because of who they knew, what town they grew up in or their ability to kiss the bosses ass, not some superior ability. They considered themselves bullet proof. They failed to understand that one can get their point across without being an asshole and believed themselves to be God. Now many have no job, there is no demand for GOM “captains” and I doubt they are getting any help finding gainful employment. Karma is a bitch.
At the end of the day we are all judged by how we treat our fellow human beings and our own personal integrity.
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I’m the guy in the office who gets the evaluations and reads them. I’m the guy ashore who the deckhand complains to. Let me tell you the way the system can work effectively.
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When a deckhand complains to me that he’s been treated poorly on an eval I tell him I never comment on the person making the evaluation, and that I take the evaluation at face value. If the complainer got a “2” out of “5” that’s ground truth.To say anything else undercuts the officer making the eval and destroys the system.
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I tell the complainer that a single eval doesn’t tell me anything. It’s the pattern of evals that tells me everything. Where I work “3” means a good eval. If the complainer gets a “2” (below average score) once and “3’s” on ten other voyages, I tell the complainer not to worry about it–and I say nothing else.
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If on the other hand the complainer has gotten grades of below “3” on their last three voyages I tell them their pattern sucks and that they are in trouble. “2” means below average performance and they need to bring it up or face getting fired. That’s the system.
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Most often a complainer getting low evals will say a particular mate has it out for them. I never comment on this, Except to tell the complainer that all officers are evaluated by me on how well they evaluate. If more than one mate has given the complainer a “2” I tell the complainer it obviously isn’t just one guy.
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I may tell the complainer that all officers are constantly reviewed by myself as to their skill in evaluating. I’ve read 10,000 evals over the years. I can read patterns. If Johnny Deckhand is getting a “3” from all the mates except Mate Bill, who gives him a “5” , I look at Mate Bills’s evals for other people. If he’s giving abnormally high scores,I tell him to dial it back a notch. He’s not doing his job well.
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As part of an annual meeting, all officers are required to rate every unlicensed person in the fleet. A consensus rating number is reached in open discussion that lasts about a minute per AB, deckhand, cook, etc. Occasionally that minute is filled with argument and discussion. Usually not. Notes are taken. Now every officer knows how every unlicensed person is rated by other officers. When I look at the voyage-evals on a person I refer back to these annual ratings. Are they remarkably different? I ask around to find the reason why.
Shoreside personnel and officers have to be on the same page as to the eval system. They have to treat it with importance and “truth-test” it regularly, and there has to be actual ramifications for bad evals–and positive ramifications for good evals, as well. Absent this, an eval system is of limited value.
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The type of people coming through a company door changes through the years.One of the reasons is that the company itself changes. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better.
25 years ago when I hired seamen you had a lot of people apply for the job, with a high fraction of ex-cons, thugs, headcases, grifters and alkis. Some of which you had to hire.The result was a rough class of sailor. They had to do a much harder job back then, for fewer bucks. Many were good at it. Many did it because it was better than moving on to the next job they would fail at. But they brought a lot of dysfunction aboard, which the company put up with because the job had to get done. I got to know a lot of doctors, lawyers, and insurance adjusters back then on a first name basis.
Nowadays the labor market is very tight. Has been for the last six years. Not much volume of workers. On the other hand I only need to hire a fraction of those I did 25 years ago. I can afford to be very picky. I forget the name of the lawyer we used to use. Haven’t been sued since the days cellphones had antennas.
Are the young people coming through the door more sensitive now? Maybe. I am seeing a lot less dysfunction. On sailing day I see a lot of guys showing up on time, no black eyes, no booze fumes. But like I say, the company changed so the people coming through the door changed, too. Can happen both ways.
Some old ABs still here from the bad only days say the new guys are more sensitive. But a lot of these survivors from the bad old days went to sea to escape imprisonment/debt collectors/society-in-general. Going to sea wasn’t a career for them. It was a place to hide from society and themselves. So who’s ruler do we measure the new guys with?
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The generation that survived WW2 handed the baby boomer generation everything on a silver platter and they spawned the hippy movement. Fast forward to the millennials lol.
We had a couple of guys like that. . . “Man, the Captain and the Chief have it easy. . .all they do is play cribbage and drink coffee. . . .” Yeah, that is all we did. . . .
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Awwww…boomers complain about muh millenials LOL
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That platter you speak of was sometimes only silver plated to look good covering poor base metal. In other words not everything was so rosy back in the day.
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A lot of this so-called snowflakes melting seems to be more a case of crew pushing back again unnecessary bullshit.
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If that goes for pushing back against the office then I guess you could call me king of the snowflakes. I’d settle for elder millennial I suppose.
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But as soon as anyone suggests cutting thier Social Security benefits it’s all, “I earned that! Me me me and mine!”
I don’t expect to ever get a dime back from social security, and neither do any of my fellow millennials. But I know a bunch of boomer ‘old school’ captains that expect to live off SS. Maybe they should have focused on financial planning instead of stroking thier big captain egos.
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How about the old guys who are career 3rds, career QMEDS, etc. For all their “experience” and “knowledge” they sure are lazy shitheads.
20, 30 years of sea time under their belts and they are often clueless. Certainly nor interested in working hard or moving up like some younger 3rds/Q’s.
If I can I try and fire them. If the guy hasn’t learned how to do his job in 20 years of sailing why the fuck should I be responsible for his training?
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