On the West Coast, a skipper is ordered to terminate his highly successful management incentive program because some of his men have completed their assigned tasks in less than the standard eight hour day and have been allowed to go on liberty. At an East Coast port, all command duty officers are required to be on the quarterdeck between 1600 and 2000 daily to ensure that the liberty party is in acceptable attire. In Washington, a Navy civilian employee is reprimanded for a security violation because she failed to "sign off' her safe at close of business, even though her safe was properly locked. What do these seemingly unrelated events have in common? Very simply, they illustrate the most pervasive and insidious management problem in the Navy today: the means/ends inversion, a focus on activity in lieu of goals. Procedures are stressed to the exclusion of substance.
There are many ways to describe The Problem, any one of which provides the flavor, but none of which seems to fully explain its extent. In traditional Navy jargon, excessive rudder orders are being issued, seniors telling juniors not only what they are expected to achieve, but how to reach that goal. Some management consultants would tell us that we have lost sight of our objectives; others call it micromanagement or "Big Brotherism."
It requires no special management background to recognize that we have a problem in the Navy. The very size of type commander regulations indicates that something is wrong. Exasperated skippers have suggested that John Paul Jones could not have defeated the Serapis if he had been burdened by so much paper. If one takes the time to go beyond the bulk of regulations and examine the substance, the full impact of The Problem becomes obvious. In every publication of regulations the author has examined, there are numerous examples of extremely detailed guidance. It is either so obvious as to be demeaning, or it establishes procedures that are unnecessary for accomplishing worthwhile goals.
These examples indicate that our people in command are not just being given goals to reach; rather, they are being told "how to" in great detail. One logically needs then to ask, "Is this really a problem?" Aren't military people supposed to do what they're told? Isn't this the way it has always been? Is the organization really being damaged by detailed guidance from above? If you want the answers that count most, go to the people on the cutting edge, fleet commanding and executive officers. They may express themselves in different words, but their consensus is clear: they feel overwhelmed and stifled by excessive direction. They are frustrated, angry, and depressed by the realization that what should be the most rewarding years of their lives - the professional peak of their careers - are not all that satisfying. Some have described themselves as puppets, being moved by strings from above. Having thought that they would be able to exercise their creative capacities, they find that they are being forced into doing things the way someone else thinks best. Instead of concentrating on combat readiness, skippers and execs are forced into meeting administrative check-off lists and fitting themselves and their commands into a mold of standardized operation that is uncomfortable at best.
There have been many cases in recent years of top-performing officers refusing commands. Worse, some of those who took command admit in private that they would resign if they could do so gracefully. The Navy, shocked and dismayed by this, seems ready to believe that we have somehow bred a line of timid officers who want to shrink from responsibility. It is always more comforting to blame the individual than to accept the unhappy conclusion that something may be wrong with the organization. What is lacking is not acceptance of responsibility (in most officers), but rather the lack of an opportunity to be creative and independent.
More than just commanding officers are affected. Junior officers seem deeply troubled and turned off by The Problem. Many express their deep frustration and discouragement by exchanging the blue and gold for mufti at the first legal opportunity. It was not without good cause that one of the important initiatives of the early Seventies was to put "fun and zest" back into the system. In the author's judgment, that effort largely fell flat. It is a rare skipper who has not been told by a young division officer or a department head that he doesn't consider the prestige and power of command to be worth the "hassle." More often than not, the officers who express this thought are among the most talented and ambitious on board. We have created a gap between the image with which we recruit officers and the reality of their existence. The romantic image is of a man who goes to sea, leads other men, exercises discretion and power-an independent thinker and doer, an individual in an era of massive organizations. In reality, he is closer to a colorless cipher, conforming to countless paper requirements in order to survive.
We are developing a corps of officers who look for answers in publications but can't fight their own ships. They know how to conform but not create, interpret but not innovate. And we delude ourselves that this is sufficient. Because we have the peacetime capacity to control fleet units in the remote areas of the globe, we assume that these communications will be present during wartime. Thus, the qualities of independence, initiative, and judgment are no longer quite so important. We continue to pay lip service to these characteristics, but our actions belie our words. Our inspection and promotion systems reward those who precisely follow the methodology ordered from above. We seldom, if ever, measure results instead of procedures.
In addition to hurting retention, adversely affecting officer development, and causing dissatisfaction, The Problem detracts from the achievement of the Navy's raison dêtre: combat readiness. Behavioral scientists for years have reported that motivation is best achieved (after the basic needs have been met) by permitting people a good deal of latitude in their vocational environment. By participating in goal development and determining the course to reach those goals, "ownership" develops, and people have a personal stake in ensuring successful accomplishment. Indeed, one of the conceptual foundations of the Navy's own Human Resource Availability is increased commitment through development by the crew of unit goals and the steps to reach them. What the institution has blessed within units during one week of an 18-month cycle, however, is inconsistent with standard practices toward units during the entire cycle. An examination of fleet and type commander goals reveals a number of items which are oriented toward compliance with procedures rather than outcomes. Full use of training devices is an example.
Determining the cause for this devitalizing problem which permeates the entire organization is difficult at best. Undoubtedly, there is no single reason, but rather a cluster of norms, values, pressures, and constraints have contributed. There is no easy target to point to as scapegoat; it is all of us and none of us. While venting one's spleen against staff personnel may provide some measure of satisfaction and ameliorate temporarily the ill effects of a complaining ulcer; it does little to identify the real culprit(s). Some possible factors may be suggested.
Perhaps the largest factor contributing to The Problem is a downward spiraling phenomenon whose elements are failure, distrust, direction, and overload. The cycle typically begins with an acknowledged failure at some level. When a senior is put under excessive pressure by his senior, overreaction can occur, with the result that subordinates are no longer trusted to accomplish their jobs. Assuming that some will fail without guidance, the senior issues directives to prevent another disaster in the area in question. These are followed by inspections to ensure that the senior's program has been implemented and by command attention to preclude embarrassment. The more these programs are directed from above, the more an officer's time at the unit level is dominated by compliance with "how to's" and the less time is spent on achieving the goals themselves. Eventually, one's capacity for supervision becomes overloaded, an important item receives less attention than it warrants, another failure occurs, and the cycle is reinforced and repeated. The number of inspections and "assist" visits being imposed on our units suggests that we have reached criticality. Apparently, however, efforts are being made to reduce the number of such visits.
"Excessive staff echelons in the chain of command" is often identified as a major structural deficiency, and it may be one cause of The Problem. As directives depart each level, there is a tendency to interpret and provide policy guidance. Very often, this guidance includes added "how to's." What begins as a relatively simple objective at the four-star level may end at the unit level as a detailed plan of attack, completely foreclosing any opportunity for individual initiative. It is unreasonable to assume that it will be otherwise, without conscious effort. C. Northcore Parkinson, originator of the famous Parkinson's Laws, told us years ago that work expands to meet the time available. Thus, when staff positions are filled with energetic, bright officers, those officers are going to find something to do with their time. Directives follow directives, and commanders at each level feel it is necessary to issue implementing instructions. But paper alone proves neither loyalty nor effectiveness.
The necessity for a major change can result in The Problem. One example that comes to mind is the equal opportunity issue. While many thoughtful and dedicated people at all levels recognized that the Navy had major racial problems, insufficient progress was being made to satisfy ethical and legal demands. In the face of undesirable racial incidents, dramatic action was deemed necessary. The decision was made in Washington to require certain organizational changes in each unit, such as creation of the Minority Affairs Representative and the Human Relations Council. One can quibble endlessly whether these were necessary when a chain of command was functioning, but the point is that commanding officers were being told how to achieve a very admirable and essential goal. One result was that many officers still resent the program, despite being personally committed to equal opportunity and treatment.
In the author's opinion, a primary cause of The Problem is that-short of combat-we have trouble judging performance, despite 200 years of experience. For a variety of reasons, the surface community seems to have the most difficulty in this area. Our ships are seldom really evaluated against each other or by an objective minimum standard. And even our Battle Efficiency E competition involves a large measure of subjectivity. Because it is often easier to establish and monitor evaluative criteria around procedures than objectives, we rely on these factors to judge units. How are combat readiness, reliability, and casualty control measured? Who does the judging?
We know from past failure what doesn't work. For years there was competition between units which used certain exercises gleaned from Ship Exercises (FXP-3). But ships from the same squadron usually evaluated each other. Not unexpectedly, results were often compromised through mutual interests. A squadron commander could not be expected to be objective either. The more ships in his squadron that achieved departmental Es and other awards, the better he looked. When the author was a shipboard department head, he was the senior inspector for an amphibious battle problem on board a ship in the same squadron. The performance of the inspected ship was judged marginal (including a number of clear safety violations), but she received the annual amphibious assault award after the grades were elevated by the squadron commander. Self-evaluated exercises meet the needs of a training program, but they can hardly be used to determine the achievement of acceptable levels of performance. We have few measurable goals, and those that do exist, we often discount.
It appears that the Navy may be reluctant to accept the results of legitimate, objective competition. Humans in all walks of life believe that they can subjectively judge who is the best performer, yet that judgment often mirrors those who are the most liked. When a subordinate who is out of favor demonstrates success, the senior is often made very uncomfortable and surprised. He must then either reevaluate his assessment of the individual or downplay and ignore the performance. If the Navy as an institution is going to adopt objective criteria for evaluating officer performance, it must be willing to accept the results and reward the winner.
A seductive attraction of standardization can also be a contributing factor to The Problem. There appears to be a strong drive toward standardization in every large bureaucratic organization, irrespective of its function or composition. It does have its benefits and is sometimes necessary, but it is important to understand that standardization should not be a goal in itself. It protects the mediocre and incompetent to some degree and usually prevents gross errors. But it stifles the creative impulse of the most talented managers and precludes discovery of improved methods. Standardization is most beneficial when applied to technical problems but is often counterproductive in managing people.
What is the solution for The Problem? Just as there is no single cause, there is no one easy answer. An institution as large as our Navy cannot be changed overnight. When he was Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke reportedly bewailed the amount of energy required to alter the course of the organization by a single degree. There is an incredible amount of momentum accumulated in the habitual ways of conducting routine business, and the Navy has been deeply involved in the "how to" mode for many years. Old ways die particularly hard, and there will be powerful (and sincere) voices of dissent from many quarters if the Navy elects to change its modus operandi. It will be claimed that without detailed guidance, standards of "professional" excellence will not be met, and the readiness of the Navy will suffer, perhaps irreparably, while the "experiment'' of concentrating on goals is conducted.
The above notwithstanding, improvement can be realized, and happily, without the necessity for change at the fleet level and above. Leaders at every level can make a conscious decision to get out of the "how to" business. Each can excise from his collection of directives those which contain rudder orders and refrain from getting back into the business with messages and suggestions. Individual people and commands within the Navy can adopt management by objectives, a technique where goals are mutually determined by superior and subordinate, and the subordinate is left to his own devices as tO how to reach those goals. His fitness report would reflect how well the objectives were met. Management by objectives is not new to the Navy, and it has some strong advocates, but it often has been abandoned when difficulties have been encountered in implementation. While management by objectives is not the panacea for all Navy management problems, it certainly can contribute to eliminating the feelings of frustration experienced by so many commanding officers.
Of course, for objective-oriented management to be effective, there must be measurable goals. The Navy has developed meaningful objective criteria in some areas. It should continue to establish operational evaluations to determine who is meeting goals and who is falling short. Creating objective criteria and testing procedures is easy in some areas and difficult in others. There are already sufficient exercises and criteria for gunnery and aerial bombardment evaluation, but operations and communications testing is more formidable.
In order to achieve objectivity, special evaluation groups (not in the chain of command) should be established to judge performance. The Board of Inspection and Survey is an excellent example of an existing, no-nonsense, results-oriented evaluation group. Similar teams could be created to judge every facet of naval warfare. But this evaluation should be limited to outcomes, not whether records have been maintained, schools attended, or training programs conducted. Staffs in the chain of command should minimize their current roles of monitoring and evaluation... and emphasize support and assistance to the operating forces. The fleet training groups should once and for all be restricted to training. The suggested evaluation groups should judge the final battle problem of a refresher training period. As it is, there is a conflict of interest between training and evaluation, for the judges are personnel from the organization which is charged with training. Complete objectivity does not always result.
One change that could be made overnight to provide commanding officers more latitude and authority would be to modify the restriction on days per quarter that ships can operate. The goal is clearly not to keep ships in port, but to conserve fuel and money. As it is, a ship could theoretically "cowboy" around the ocean for each of its allotted days, squandering fuel and exercising inefficient engineering practices without significant penalty. Why not allot to each ship an equitable amount of fuel and let the ship determine how it is to be expended? A ship with competent engineers, a motivated crew, and an innovative captain can probably figure ways of spending more training time at sea, thus meeting other combat readiness-related objectives.
Closely allied with the limit on days at sea per quarter is the wider problem of the entire quarterly employment schedule. There are usually four levels in the chain of command involved in establishing and changing schedules. The least influential is the ship herself. The number of personnel associated with this process is enormous, and the time and resources required, impressive. It is the author's belief that a simplified system, involving commanding officers to a greater degree, would result in conservation of effort at many levels. Rather than schedule in-port time, upkeep, individual exercises, and other very detailed forms of employment, a ship could be scheduled for COD-commanding officer's discretion. During that time, he could be under way, conducting maintenance, undergoing in-port training, or whatever he deemed appropriate. Imagine the energy that could be saved in not having to process every minor change in schedule. There are undoubtedly many other places in scheduling where a commanding officer can be given more latitude without disrupting the obvious necessity of coordinating and preplanning outside support activities associated with complex multi-unit exercises at sea and major maintenance ashore.
Another graphic example of an area where procedures have become more important than substance - and have eroded the commanding officer's discretion-is individual training. The Navy has implemented the Personnel Qualification Standard (PQS) system in every unit and for most ranks and rates. It is not merely recommended, but required, and many inspections now include the checking of PQS. PQS does, of course, have merit. The materials associated with the program have been developed at great cost and effort and often are of excellent quality. But the system requires considerable officer supervision and paperwork, and it does not necessarily achieve a goal. In today's cliche, what counts is the bottom line, and the bottom line in individual training is whether or not a man knows his job and can do it. If he doesn't, all the systems in use have failed. During inspections, what should be checked is not marks on a schedule but demonstrated knowledge. One unobtrusive measure which could be used would be to review average scores during the previous advancement exams. Another method would be random questioning of both officer and enlisted personnel. During ship visits, one Inspector General of the Navy asked men to demonstrate the use of an oxygen breathing apparatus, reasoning that if the men couldn't take the pressure of an admiral watching, they wouldn't be able to don the equipment in an emergency. As painful as such tests can be for a unit's supervisory personnel, they unequivocally measure results and cannot be "gundecked" by the saltiest operator. We need to eliminate most aspects of command and administrative inspections that deal with procedures and instead concentrate our limited examination time on the real elements of combat readiness.
A far more complicated and radical departure from current practices would be to restore more discretionary financial authority to the unit level. This is clearly a long-term venture which will require substantial in-house planning and congressional approval. Yet it would free the commanding officer from the artificial constraints that now limit his ability to achieve readiness . Instead of funding food, fuel, spare parts, and salaries out of different pockets, a command could determine what element needed budgetary priority. There should be no reason why a skipper could not compensate a man who is doing the work of three petty officers (because of a Navy wide shortage in a certain rating), nor utilize fuel money for spare parts, if that met a higher need. Commanding officers should be given the opportunity to retain funds in a "savings account" status past the fiscal year end. This would replace the current custom of a mad rush to expend funds during the last few weeks of the year. The present feast-or-famine atmosphere not only dictates against prudent fiscal practices at the unit level, it also regularly draws substantial unfavorable publicity to all the services.
What would be required to implement these changes would be nothing short of a major change in fiscal procedures, but this appears technically feasible. Indeed, Dr. Robert Anthony, Assistant Secretary of Defense (Financial Management) proposed a very similar concept a decade ago. The Navy did considerable research on the plan, nicknamed Project Prime, and attempted a shipboard pilot program. However, the effort proved unsuccessful , largely because of a lack of congressional support. Laws limiting discretion in the expenditure of public monies were neither repealed nor modified, and therefore new budgeting and obligating procedures could not be used , and the project was abandoned . Despite past problems, increased pressures on the armed services for improved management may now permit another attempt. Neither DoD nor Congress should object to modified budgeting if it can be demonstrated that the change would result in improved readiness. (Retention, quite clearly, is a major factor in the readiness equation.)
The above suggestions for reducing rudder orders in all their various forms by no means constitute an all-inclusive list. Valuable ideas for the establishment of a goal-oriented Navy will likely be triggered, however, in the minds of every officer with a modicum of fleet experience. Major change will come to the institution only when the cause for widespread dissatisfaction is recognized and accepted and the commitment is made to find a solution. The objective should be an environment of reasonable decentralization with clearly understood goals and priorities at every level. Diversity of styles and methods should be tolerated if not encouraged. Perhaps most importantly, occasional failures should be accepted as the price of developing initiative, innovation, and bold leadership. It should be a system where restraint is exercised in imposing procedures, where sophisticated communications are properly used as a tool instead of a means to tighten control. If this occurs, the Navy will once again be noted for its independent, resourceful seafaring captains, invigorated by modern leadership skills and strengthened by advanced technology. In short, to eliminate The Problem, we must learn again that men are unique, capable, and responsible creatures and that commanding officers can thus be trusted. With that trust, our skippers will no longer be muttering under their breath, "Get off my back, sir. I can hack it." And they will hack it.
Trying to Recoup
Wishing to share some interesting information with the United States Naval Institute membership, I wrote a short comment for submission to the Proceedings. I asked a secretary at work if she could type it in her spare time, promising that if it was accepted we'd go to dinner on the proceeds. The item was published, and a check arrived soon after. So, the secretary, her fiance, my wife, our two sons, and I went out to celebrate. After a very pleasant dinner, I applied my $25 check to the $50 tab.
Dennis M. Greene
(The Naval Institute still will pay only $25.00 for each anecdote published in the Proceedings.)