The Navy’s administrative and statutory board processes are not the primary obstacle to fairness and equality in selecting the best and fully qualified for career milestones and promotions to lieutenant commander, commander, and captain. Succeeding in the “great power competition” for talent within the Navy will require more than compliance with submission requirements of fitness reports (FitReps). It requires a culture of excellence developed through the commanding officers’ (COs’) deliberate execution of coaching, mentoring, and evaluating. To succeed, COs must leverage their broad knowledge and experience to provide deliberate counseling and mentorship to their wardrooms at key times throughout the year and offer precise advocacy for junior officers to community managers and senior leaders for all officers in their wardrooms.
According to the Bureau of Naval Personnel instruction, COs will guide the counseling program . . . to provide feedback to the member and to motivate and assist improvement. Performance counseling starts with a fair assessment of the member’s performance and capabilities, to which the member contributes. It identifies the members’ strengths and motivates their further improvement. It also addresses important weaknesses but should not dwell on unimportant ones. It should avoid personality and concentrate on performance.
Conducting mid-term counseling and submitting FitReps and associated summary cover pages on time is the bare minimum to maintain compliance. COs should strive for excellence by bringing their character, competence, and connections to bear as the reporting senior. For example, by using available resources on MyNavyHR like SECNAV-approved community briefs, community manager roadmaps, checklists, mentoring guides, and pathways to success to explain the significance of professional achievements up to captain. Prior to assuming command, COs should have a meticulous thought process on managing their reporting senior cumulative average (RSCA) across all reporting summaries. Topics such as graduate-level education, additional qualification designators (AQD), timing and requirements for joint officer qualification (JOQ), and the significance of subspecialty codes (SSC) must be championed by the CO, not just the detailer. COs should seek opportunities—ideally prior to command—to learn more about detailing processes and attend selection boards. Time is a CO’s most valuable commodity. Investing time shows junior officers that the CO, and by extension the Navy, is serious about their professional development and humanizes the needs of Navy’s talent management objectives.
Senior officers may say the Navy already expects this. If so, the Navy is not “inspecting what it expects.” According to Navy Regulations, The Commanding Officer and his or her subordinates shall exercise leadership through personal example, moral responsibility and judicious attention to the welfare of persons under their control or supervision. Such leadership shall be exercised to achieve a positive, dominant influence on the performance of persons in the Department of the Navy.
The FitRep is the CO’s primarily metric-driven tool to directly influence statutory and administrative board members. Each FitRep submitted adds data points to the Performance Summary Record (PSR) and Officer Summary Record (OSR). PSRs, OSRs, and well-written block 41 comments represent a naval officer’s fitness for the next community milestone or promotion, influencing each board member’s vote of confidence toward “best and fully qualified.” Two data points are a trend. This places every commander, at every echelon, in a powerful position. Furthermore, board members know how competitive records look and select the best and fully qualified based on the collection of FitReps submitted. A FitRep from three years ago—especially from billets a community highly values—matters for a board today. Therefore, each FitRep must be respected for its potential impact on every officer’s career path potential, embracing a requisite level of counseling and mentorship reflecting the spirit and corporate implications of the Navy’s talent management enterprise.
eNavFit is not the final answer. Iterative change to “minimize the need for the hard copy routing process, reduce unit-level administrative obstacles, and automate submissions . . . into a sailor’s Official Military Personnel File (OMPF)” is just more compliance. Excellence is when reporting seniors see themselves as part of the talent management enterprise, exponentially leveraging an asymmetric advantage over the competition, which is “our Sailors . . . the true source our naval power.”
