Robert Roncska carried the nuclear codes as the commanding officer of a $2 billion nuclear submarine. He has written two books about what he learned down there, and the one he talks about most with Sam Sapp is titled Beyond the Sea: Leading with Love from the Nuclear Navy to the White House and Health Care. The conversation moves from the fear-based commanding officer who once made a young Robert wet his pants, to the mentor who showed him a different way, to a five-second hallway conversation four years later that helped bring a child into the world.
What You'll Hear
- Why Robert wrote Beyond the Sea and why he calls love a practical leadership tool, not a soft one
- The John Hopkins 2018 figure he cites: 240,000 hospital deaths per year from medical errors, and what the nuclear Navy's 75-year reactor safety record can teach healthcare
- His first commanding officer, MFB, and the moment a yelling session made him pee his pants
- The three components of trust Robert leans on: good intentions, words followed by actions, and competency
- Five seconds with a petty officer in a hallway, and the phone call four years later that changed a family
- What leading with love looked like inside the George W. Bush White House, including the nicknames for everyone on staff
- Why he thinks imposter syndrome, held in small doses, actually makes leaders more trustworthy
- The Leader-Member Exchange research, DISC, and the playbook for relationship building he is turning into a seminar and curriculum
Two books, one thesis: lead with love
Robert Roncska introduces himself through his two books. The first, Beyond the Sea: Leading with Love from the Nuclear Navy to the White House and Health Care, lays out a leadership philosophy he did not find in any Navy leadership school or in the academic courses he now teaches. The second, High Reliability Health Care, applies the nuclear Navy's operating discipline to hospitals.
He cites a John Hopkins study from 2018 that put hospital deaths from medical errors at 240,000 per year in the United States. He calls it the third leading cause of death behind cardiovascular disease and cancer. He compares it to filling Arlington Cemetery every year, or a plane going down every day. The nuclear Navy, by contrast, has gone more than 75 years without a reactor accident, with 20-year-old sailors running the reactors.
Robert's thesis is that high reliability and high performance both rest on the same thing. Effective, caring leadership. He frames it plainly. You cannot have reliability without leadership that looks out for people. And you cannot have leadership worth following without results. The two books, he says, go hand in hand. One is the culture and the mindset. The other is the operating system. Both start from putting people first.
He is building a consulting practice, a seminar, and a curriculum around the same idea. The goal is to take what worked on a submarine and what he saw at the highest levels of government and translate it into a playbook any leader in any industry can use.
MFB, the fear pyramid, and what fear-based leadership costs a team
Robert's first commanding officer on his first ship is the figure he calls MFB in the book. The chapter opens with a scene where MFB yelled at him so loudly for an inconvenient, not egregious, mistake that Robert wet his pants. He reached out to MFB before publishing. He felt sorry for the man. On a prior ship, of more than 30 junior officers, only one stayed in the Navy. The rest left because of how MFB led.
The damage fear-based leadership does is not just the moment of the yelling. Robert describes what happens to a crew afterward. People turn into robots. Critical thinking drops. Psychological safety goes to zero. Nobody speaks up. In the book he tells the story of a main engine casualty that cost $9 million in damage. A sailor shifted lube oil coolers full of air. Supervisors knew what was happening and said nothing. The root cause was not the coolers. It was the culture.
Robert also describes an upstream chain of events. A sailor had appendicitis and needed to reach the nearest port. A routing message came in as the ship was about to go deep. MFB drove west when the orders were east. Hours later the crew discovered the mistake and argued over who would wake him up. That paralysis, Robert says, is what fear-based leadership creates.
Sam raises a question he half expects a fear-based leader to ask back at them. Are the kids today just soft? Robert's answer is layered. Some leaders lash out because they were never taught anything else. Some are burned out and reaching for the only tool they have left. And some lean on fear because it is easy. Holding someone accountable by yelling is cheap. Holding yourself accountable first, looking in the mirror, fixing the system, that is harder. That is what leading with love requires.
Grooms, the three ingredients of trust, and a hallway conversation that changed a family
Robert's second commanding officer was Bruce Grooms. Grooms is the person who showed him what a different kind of leadership looked like. Robert describes a bathroom conversation with two other officers where one said he would do anything to go serve under Grooms. Not because Grooms was the most tactically brilliant. Because he cared for people. That single overheard line is how Robert ended up on the USS Asheville, learning the leadership style that shaped the rest of his career.
Robert breaks trust down into three ingredients. A leader has to show good intentions, which he ties back to empathy and vulnerability. A leader has to follow words with actions, consistently. And a leader has to build competency over time, which is why trust early in a career has to be earned slowly. Miss any one of those and the trust meter stops climbing.
He illustrates the payoff with a story about a petty officer in his command. While Robert was captain of the USS Texas, he made a habit of stopping briefly on his rounds and asking sailors about their families by name. Five seconds. How is your wife. How was the birthday party last week. Four years later, in Pearl Harbor, Robert ran into the same sailor by chance, who asked if he could stop by his office.
Inside, the sailor explained that he and his wife had been waiting years for a medical appointment that would help them start a family. His new orders had just been moved up by several months, which would have cost them the appointment. He had gone to his chain of command for two weeks and nobody would help. Robert made one phone call, gave the detailer a deadline to change the orders back, and was prepared to escalate if it did not happen. The orders were changed. Some time later, Robert got word that their family grew. The sailor would not have asked for help, Robert says, if the relationship had not been built five seconds at a time, years earlier.
Leadership inside the Bush White House and the power of a nickname
Robert served in the George W. Bush administration and is intentional about not using the interview to relitigate the administration's decisions. What he wants to talk about is how the President treated the people around him, because that is where he saw leading with love modeled at the highest level of office.
Nicknames were the hook. President Bush gave nicknames to everyone on staff, from Navy Bob to the Stork to the Mailman. Robert describes the effect. It made people feel seen. The leader of the free world was spending energy on a small, human signal that said you exist to me as a person. That signal built a culture that has outlasted the administration. Robert is joining a panel at Rollins College, where Mr. Rogers studied, alongside other Bush-era colleagues to talk about that culture.
The other image Robert shares is personal. Every morning at five, he would deliver the situation report to the President under the Texas sky. On mornings when no American service members had been lost, the President reacted, in Robert's words, like a kid in a candy store. On mornings when the news was bad, he took the paperwork in silence and walked inside. There was no performance in it. The weight was real. Robert says he would have lost all respect for the man if it had been otherwise. Instead, he learned that empathy from a leader is not a garnish. It is the thing that holds a team together across the worst decisions a leader ever has to make.
The point Robert drives home is that if a submarine captain can lead this way, and a sitting President can lead this way, and the best physicians he has met in hospitals can lead this way, then leadership style is not a personality trait. It is a choice that gets made over and over, in small moments. The choice compounds.
Imposter syndrome, the playbook, and a principle called WWNBD
Sam asks about imposter syndrome. Robert admits it. He grew up on a farm, made it into the nuclear Navy, screened early for executive officer and again for captain. Every step of the way he wondered if he belonged. He frames the feeling as a gift more than a wound. Imposter syndrome keeps a leader humble, keeps gratitude alive, and keeps arrogance out of the room. He thinks a limited dose of it makes a leader more trustworthy, not less, because humility is one of the traits people actually follow.
He and Sam spend time on something that makes Robert's approach different from most leadership books. He is not just arguing for caring leadership. He is trying to build the playbook for it. He points to Dr. George Graham's Leader-Member Exchange research, more than 50 years of academic work showing that stronger authentic relationships between leaders and team members produce better outcomes. He is pulling in the LMX-7 measurement, the DISC personality framework, and neuroscience for leaders who struggle with empathy. The product he is working on with what he describes as top-notch collaborators is meant to give leaders a Monday to Friday routine for relationship building. Who to talk to. What to ask. How to run a one-on-one. How to round on a team the way Colin Powell did.
He closes with his personal decision rule. People on the USS Texas used to keep a yellow sticky note by their desks that read WWNBD. What Would Navy Bob Do. Robert's own version of the question is simpler. Is this decision for me, or is it for the people and the mission. If it was the former, he would not make it. If it was the latter, he never went wrong. He ties the whole conversation back to the mental health crisis in the United States, citing that the largest mental health providers in Orange County and Miami-Dade County today are the prisons. The workplace, he says, is where this starts. Lower the stress there, lead with love there, and everything downstream gets better.
He invites listeners to reach him at NavyBob.com.
About Robert Roncska
Robert Roncska, known as Navy Bob, is a retired nuclear submarine commanding officer, former carrier of the nuclear codes, and former White House staffer under President George W. Bush. He is the author of Beyond the Sea: Leading with Love from the Nuclear Navy to the White House and Health Care, and High Reliability Health Care: Sharing the Secrets of the Nuclear Navy to Save Patient Lives. He teaches at a university and is building a leadership consulting practice, seminar, and curriculum based on the book. NavyBob.com