Tailhook. Sexual harassment. A cheating scandal. Press reports of violent crimes committed by Navy personnel overseas. A good order and discipline stand down. Difficulties with junior officer retention. Is there a pattern? Is there a solution?
The key factor, lacking in many Navy commands, is a caring, trusting, family-like environment that deliberately develops and instills proper core values in its people.
Family Synergy
A strong family is bound together by love and caring, by a commitment to one another, by trust, by shared values, and by shared time together. Parents and older siblings set the example, acting as role models for younger children. Parents guide and discipline children with a firm but loving hand and instill in them proper values. A strong family unit provides a sense of belonging and self-esteem. It can withstand outside pressures and adverse conditions and still succeed. It produces a synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
The Navy command structure is similar to the framework of the family. The superiors should set the example, provide good role models, use a firm but caring hand to guide subordinates in the right direction, and teach the right values. There should be an atmosphere of caring for each other, trust, and commitment.
At my first command, the wardroom and crew were tight. I felt that my chain of command cared about me personally. I felt appreciated, respected, and trusted, and I would have done anything for the crew and my ship to help make them a success. In a sense, we were a strong, tightly-knit family. I stayed to make the Navy a career.
In a recent Proceedings article, “Keeping the Generation X Junior Officer,” Lieutenant Hal Goetsch states, “Retention, like quality, is free if top leadership fosters the right environment and cultivates its next generation.”' In a truly caring, family-like command environment, few of the lieutenant’s complaints should exist.
Lieutenant Goetsch also is skeptical of a remark that officer retention would improve if submarines did more six-month deployments. In this case, he misses the point. This remark is not about spending more time at sea, but about shared commitment, experiences, camaraderie, and fun. When a ship goes to sea for a long deployment, the wardroom and crew have the opportunity to bond together as a family unit. When that happens—even though one may miss family and friends back home—one feels satisfied. Few things are more fulfilling than knowing that your ship, squadron, or battle group accomplished every task assigned to it in an outstanding manner, with camaraderie, caring, and command synergy. More deployments may not be the answer, but it is easier to develop close relationships during long at-sea periods than it is at a shore command, where everyone disperses at the end of the day. The key is that bonding together as a unit must occur to achieve synergy. Once that happens, everyone moves in the same direction with the same vision.
Lieutenant (junior grade) Sharpe adds another viewpoint in the Proceedings article “Generation X: One Wardroom’s Perspective.”2 He believes that senior officers sometimes bypass junior officers, leaving them out of the picture. Navy-wide, there is less emphasis on authority, discipline, and respect than on management. The result is that junior officers do not consider themselves to be part of ship’s society. Pride and a sense of belonging are missing.
Both of these authors recognize different parts of the problem and, therefore, part of the solution. The element that appears to be missing is a caring, nurturing environment that allows its members to pursue self-fulfillment, along with proper family or command values. This concept has been given other names in naval tradition—camaraderie, esprit de corps, fraternity, teamwork—however, a family unit is neither a democracy nor a brotherhood of equals. There is a strict chain of authority. The leaders must clearly be in charge.
Because many of the personnel entering the Navy may not have been taught proper values while growing up, today’s leader often must act as a parental figure. Accordingly, it is even more important that a leader be a strong role model who guides subordinates along the correct path.
Tough love and discipline are required in any family, but discipline must be executed in a caring and purposeful manner. Punishment should never become routine or nonchalant. Along a similar vein, every good teacher knows that one must push students, make them mentally stretch and put in hard work to learn through application of principles, to retain what they have learned, and to progress. The trick to guiding, disciplining, and stretching individuals to achieve their greatest potential is to do it in a caring and trusting manner, so the person appreciates it and respects you even more afterward.
Double Standards
By far the hardest task a leader faces is leading by example, following the same rules subordinates must follow. Of course, leaders should set and live up to an even higher ideal, because subordinates’ standards usually will lag somewhat behind those of the leader. The gap between where the standards are set and the actual standards that are achieved is determined by the leader’s example and that of the other leaders in the command.
One pitfall a leader faces is that of double standards. Two sets of standards do not work. You cannot have a lower standard on deployments, nor can you have a higher standard only while the inspection team is on board. You cannot have a different set of standards for liberty in a foreign port than for your home port. Besides being too confusing to the sailor who has to follow these standards, there is something else fundamentally wrong. Standards are not situational. The values you set must be absolute. It is your job to instill these values in the troops and then to lead by the highest example. Tailhook, sexual harassment cases, and other horrible examples that have appeared in the media are little more than symptoms of false values and double standards.
A second kind of double standard involves trust. We hold our subordinates accountable, but we behave as though we do not trust them. Accountability and trust must exist side-by-side. If we hold people accountable for the performance of their subordinates, but at the same time we do not trust them and expect them to fail, then they probably will. People will mirror your expectations; you get what you expect, not what you direct. You must trust your subordinates to make the right decisions from the principles you taught them, to allow them to learn from those decisions, and to stretch themselves to attain their highest potential.
A prerequisite for setting standards, for leading by example, for disciplinary actions, and for mentoring is that you truly must care about others—your command, your superiors, and the well-being of the Navy and your country. You must care enough to put others’ interests ahead of your own and to try to do what is right for them. In return, you will be respected, and people will go out of their way to help you and the command. A family synergy will develop and the command will become extremely successful.
Mending the Chain
The Navy must not be a reflection of society; it will be a reflection of its leaders. The Navy becomes a sailor’s new family, for better or worse. It is not good enough that leaders merely establish a nurturing environment; they also must be positive role models and instill proper values and high standards of achievement in their subordinates. Not everyone entering the Navy will have a complete set of proper values; standards must be taught deliberately and reinforced until they are ingrained.
If sailors are allowed to proceed along their career paths without absorbing proper values, they will be unable to instill those values in their subordinates later on. The chain of traditional values will be broken, and this failure then will fan out through the Navy like a cancer. It is each leader’s responsibility, therefore, to establish and strengthen this chain by bringing to subordinates solid values that they in turn can pass on.
Sailors spend a great deal of their time in the workplace, especially at sea on long deployments. A command’s influence can be substantial. Navy leaders, therefore, have a unique opportunity to provide a family-like environment that will help instill needed values.
There are no simple answers that will solve all leadership problems. Each situation is different, every individual has different needs, and each leader brings different talents and skills to the job. Nevertheless, even though leadership is situational, proper values are absolute. Caring for others provides an absolute yardstick to help set standards, teach proper values, and do the right thing. We must continue to mend and ultimately strengthen our chain of values.
1 Lt. Hal Goetsch, USN, “Keeping the Generation X Junior Officer,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 1995, pp. 66-69.
2 Lt. (j.g.) John Sharpe, LCdr. Chris Ratliff, and Cdr. Kevin Peppe, “Generation X: One Wardroom’s Perspective,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1996, pp. 28-32.
Commander Pierson, a submariner, currently is assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations staff in the Submarine Warfare Directorate (N87).