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By Captain John L. Byron U.S. Navy
Poet John Keats doubtless knew nothing of military fitness reports when he wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn. Yet this quote from the poem seems appropriate here. When it comes to evaluating subordinates, Navy leaders apparently can’t tell the difference.
Fitness reporting is a cynical combat zone, a bad system we pander to just so we keep from harming our good people. Comic strip character Pogo said it best: We have met the enemy, and they is us.” The system will never correct itself. That’s our job, and now is the time to act.
Even on practical grounds, the system is lousy. If this is such a good yardstick, why are we using only the last eighth of an inch? The subtle distinctions we think we see often stem more from the writer’s ability and the reader’s background than from the ratee’s performance. We have fabricated a never-never land, where English words lose meaning, and evaluation grades fail to move off the peg of perfection.
The words of British politico John Randolph apply well here: the system “shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.” The astonishing point is not that we have a problem, but that we have not taken on its reform, especially now, in this time of retrenchment, when our ability to identify the fittest is most crucial. Creating a new Navy is the task at hand. Constant improvement is the theme. Yet we fail to tackle this pervasively flawed system called fitness reports.
Our faulty evaluation system affects more than just promotions and assignments. Fitness reports touch every individual in the officer corps. Unwillingness to reform the system tells each of us that all this stuff about honest data and process improvement, about vision and Total Quality Leadership, is insincere and transitory, a program du jour from which we should expect little. If fitness reports are off the block for improvement, Total Quality Leadership is dead.
So what can we do? First, we must face our fears, then set goals for a reformed system and prescribe a process for creating that reform. Then: change the system!
The Fears
Leaving aside fear of change and the folly of counseling in our fears, most of the fear in fitness report reform boils down to a single item: we ll promote the wrong people. To that, we can respond the following ways:
Who says the system is promoting the right ones now? We do, the ones the system has benefitted and promoted. Most would have made it under any system, of course. But the beneficiaries of a promotion system, whatever its problems, naturally think it to be wonderful, which is why starting the reform we need has been so hard. A reformed system of blunt honesty and genuine statistical relevance can only enhance our ability to find those most fit.
We have lesser concerns as well. Transition from old to new will be challenging. Never changing is the only way to avoid transition issues. We made change inevitable a few years ago when we began to “two-block” ensigns and to recommend all but ax murderers for accelerated promotion. We can deal with transition just fine.
Finally, stretching a system’s rules to gain advantage presents a problem. We are where we are because we’ve eased our way around the good intentions of a potentially honest reporting system, applying great ingenuity to give our candidate and our community a leg up. This demonstrated willingness to push the system is what wrecked it, and we could worry that a new system might become corrupted as fast as the old one did. The new system must have safeguards built into it to prevent its perversion. We need tough rules, system monitoring, and genuine discipline Navy-wide, a system with teeth to catch those who would practice creative accounting in fitness reports. Automation will help. We can make a new system work.
The Goals
Reform requires clear goals. The new system of fitness reporting must have four key attributes. The process must be focused, simple, disciplined, and honest.
Focused We now aspire to four separate ends:
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S. NAVY RECRUITING CENTER
Lieutenant Rodent is a model naval officer, at least according to this faux fitness report, which appears here in the current configuration and signed by Commander Rambo. But in keeping with Rambo’s new-found honesty and integrity the reformatted fitrep shows that the young lieutenant still needs some work.
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Lieutenant Rodent is a SUPERB OFFICER making a huge contribution to this ship's success. His knowledge of the shipboard weapon system HAS NO EQUAL. He is my BEST WATCHSTANDER in a wardroom of fine officers and possesses unlimited potential!!!
Specific accomplishments:
- Conducted 17 flawless torpedo firings, with no misses attributed to weapons system performance.
- planned, coordinated, and executed a highly demanding mine plant for training. Grade received: EXCELLED!.
- Organized training in small arms that made this ship the first one fully certified in the squadron. Four sailors earned marksmanship medals from j this effort.
- Displays the best technical knowledge of the weapons system in nr/ experience. He drives his department to excellence in maintenance and repair and he demands fuil support from the other departments and outsi agencies to keep the system operational. His hands-on expertise in a foimd a system software problem that had eluded all the 'experts the ship to make its underway commitment.
- STANDS THE BEST UNDERWAY WATCHES IN MY WARDROOM! He possesses spl judgment in shiphandling on the surface and a truly fine sense of control and tactical optimization submerged. In an operation of value to national defense he was my nurber cue ODD.
- Conducted a most successful Combined Federal Campaign., with 1001 participation and 127% of goal achieved.
- Displays strong leadership in the wardroom, setting high stand officer performance and dedication. He is a powerful force a MISSION ACCOMPLISHMENT as the nurber one priority.
Lieutenant Rodent is one of the finest department heads in j head and shoulders above his contemporaries. Promote him now! strongest terms his assignment to COMMAND AT SEA at the earliest*! has unlimited potential and flag rank is a distinct possibility.
What’s Wrong With the System
The existing system of reporting officer fitness is dysfunctional in tour ways:
- Asking the writer for overblown word descriptions and hyperinflated grades that grossly exaggerate performance and potential.
- Asking the officer rated to use a report devoid of useful counsel as the basis for improved performance.
- Asking the end-users on selection boards and at assignment desks to base serious decisions on trite distinctions, searching to differentiate among officers marked identically or nearly so.
- Asking a system for reporting fitness of individuals to referee promotions between communities.
y Describe the individual’s fitness for promotion
- Provide information needed to make duty assignments >■ Give performance feedback to the individual
- Allocate promotions between designators
A reformed system should concentrate on the first purpose. Done correctly, new fitness reports will serve the second end as well, but the third and fourth just cannot be accommodated without destroying the primary aim.
We should sharpen the focus of fitness reports by moving the counseling aspect to a new system. Other services separate reporting from feedback, using an internal form to engage the individual officer in a dialogue of goal setting, self-appraisal, and senior response, in an annual round of counseling and performance feedback that stays clear of the central reporting system. We should adopt this practice, both as a better way to counsel junior officers and
as a mechanism to keep pure the purpose of the fitness reports themselves.
Should the final report be shown to the individual? This is a perennial question. The implementation of a separate counseling form, plus an overriding interest in unfettered presentation of objective fact, however, argue against it. But what of adverse information; are we not required to show this to the individual for comment? Yes, but we could greatly simplify this minor element by clearly defining what constitutes adverse information and by having the personnel system initiate action to the constituent, when review says that information in a report is adverse. We do not routinely have to show individuals their fitness reports, and we should not do so.
Sharpening the focus also means that we cease using fitness reports as the promotion battleground among the warfare communities. In our current system, each reporting senior in the unrestricted line has strong community incentive to write fitness reports that show his or her people to be superior and therefore more promotable than those of other designators. We have built in the need to hype, at least for the unrestricted line.
We rely on a succession of selection boards to determine the balance of promotions among warfare specialties. This makes no more sense than asking these boards
to write the Navy budget. Promotions are a resource, the same as funding. And they should be allocated the same way—through leadership and decision-making at the senior level. They also should share the same goal—to meet the overall needs of the Navy. Using selection boards to decide how many of each type we promote abdicates responsibility, crippling the existing system.
The cure is straightforward: we must fence promotions by designator. This will invoke community discipline to prevent abuses—no community wants to make the task of identifying its best more difficult, and none could gain advantage by inflating its grades in a fenced system. Critical to reforming the fitness report system is a change in promotion rules that makes each designator a separate competitive category, competing internally for a fixed number of promotions established by other administrative action.
Simple—By separating counseling from reporting and eliminating the need to inflate reports to serve community interests, we can make it much easier to concentrate on reporting fitness. Our next task is to simplify the form itself, cutting back on the blizzard of marks and words now required. Presently we have approximately 28 separate reporting parameters to grade and about a full page of blank paper to fill in. The present report is too complicated and burdensome to write and—as generations of board members turned bleary-eyed peering at green screens will attest—far too hard to read. We should concentrate on basics:
- Is this person average, below average, or superior?
- How is he or she doing in the areas that really count: leadership, management, seamanship/airmanship, sub-specialty performance?
- Should this person be promoted?
- Evaluate his or her performance and potential (briefly— 10 lines maximum).
The form should be sufficiently short and simple that a reporting senior can write a fitness report with relative ease. If we simplify the form, the meaning will shine through unequivocally. If we make the task of writing it more palatable, reporting seniors will do the work themselves rather than passing it down the line (often to the reported-upon individual, an invidious, much-too-common practice).
Disciplined—One could argue for doing away with evaluations entirely. But the size of the Navy, its tradition of promoting strictly on merit, and the need to grow leaders internally rather than hire from the outside all make evaluation unavoidable. Thus, we should evaluate the most representative data possible. Both the selection and the assignment processes require an ability to see distinctions in an officer’s paper record. Fitness reports provide the raw data. They should show genuine differences. Currently, we grade everyone so high that often the only real distinctions are in the block showing the officer’s competitive ranking against the others graded. This is much too heavy a burden for just one box.
The new system should clearly display the same spread
in performance and potential that actually exists in the people themselves. Real officers are not all plastered against the left-hand edge of life. Rather, we cluster around a central average, fit a bell-shaped curve. “Typical fine officer” describes most, not “superstar.” The system should let us say so . . . without penalty.
But instead, we two-block everyone, “firewalling” our grades, as the Air Force calls it. This defeats the whole purpose of reporting. We must stop. Sure, our motives are usually virtuous, but sponsorship and kindness get in the way of hard-nosed evaluation. For fairness and the good of the Navy, detailers and promotion boards need a clear picture of individuals, not fantasy artwork. Fitness reports should be vehicles for accuracy, not advocacy.
We need a system with genuine distinctions. Now we must read between the lines. In a proper system, we would simply read the lines. Assignments will have a better foundation, and promotion will be less of a crap shoot if we can spread out the marks and use truly accurate word descriptions. We have got to stop putting garbage into the system if we expect it to produce quality results.
But simple admonition will not cure the current gross inflation. The heart of reform lies in discipline, which is almost entirely absent from the system now. We are on a treadmill that none of us can get off without some new, tough rules that force everyone to play the game straight.
Each reporting senior now has no choice but to inflate grades and words because of the practices of all the other reporting seniors. Each member of a warfare community must write glowing reports in order to keep up promotions. The incentives lie with perpetuating every bad aspect of the existing system.
Nothing stops us from promulgating this pap. And nothing prevents us reporting seniors from saying that all our people are straight-A performers, in the top 1 %, and outstanding in all ways. We concoct an illusion of gods and goddesses walking the earth. We have been writing reports so long this way that we have been struck blind to just how untrue these screeds are. The highest praise an officer can get is that he’s as good as his fitness reports. Damned few are.
Two disciplines will cure this: honest words and honest marks. We fix the word problem by setting a rigid mandate against salesmanship, against “all narrative gimmicks,” as the Army calls the various verbal and typographic tricks we think are so cute. We forbid use of meaningless phrases such as “head and shoulders above his contemporaries,” “finest lieutenant in my experience,” “catches bullets in his teeth,” etc. And we make this stick by bringing back the army of little old bureaucrats in tennis shoes to screen reports and bounce every one with even the faintest whiff of bullshit. When the Bureau of Personnel starts rejecting undisciplined fitness reports (through the chain of command?), we evaluators will stop Writing them.
We also must rachet the grades back down to common- sense levels. Many years ago the grades and promotion recommendations from most reporting seniors showed a healthy spread (our sister services and the Royal Navy largely still do). But we have experienced years of perni
cious grade-creep and now harm our best people by making “straight-A, RAP (recommend for accelerated promotion)” the standard mark for all but the totally inept. Three factors have brought us to this sorry state:
>- Community pressures to increase “their” promotions
- Individual pressures stemming from more sophisticated understanding of promotion competition
- And from both these factors, development of a body of “fitrep tips’” and other keen hints on how to subvert the system, all amounting to: “perfect grades are unassailable”
The trend has been gradual, but we have steadily followed along the path described by the great Civil War historian Bruce Catton, . . one of those insane chains of military logic in which men step from one undeniable truth to another and so come at last to a land of crippling nonsense,” a land in which even ensigns know that whatever their performance and potential might truthfully be, their grades must show perfection. It is this march upward of grades that has dragged along the superheated word descriptions. We mark everyone at a level of perfection and then must do a writeup to match the marks. If we can drive the grades back to a normal distribution, can create marks spread in a sta- tistically-relevant way, then the words will follow back down to earthly levels.
Thus, we need a second discipline—in grading—to parallel stricter rules on the writeup.
Vital to reform is putting the top marks and the silver-bullet promotion recommendations on a strict quota basis. We will need a three-tier set of promotion recommendations: “definitely promote,” “promote,” and “don't promote." Then we impose computer-monitored quotas rigidly to limit the number ot top recommendations and grades to perhaps one-third o all those assigned by the reporting senior during his tour.
The number of “A” grades and the number of “definitely promote” recommendations allowed a reporting senior must be quota-limited and tightly policed.
Why place this burden on reporting seniors? Because
We concoct an illusion of gods and godesses walking the earth ... We have been writing reports so long this way that we have been struck blind to just how untrue these screeds are. The highest praise an officer can get is that he’s as good as his fitness reports. Damned few are.
this is where the burden lies best; of all in the system, reporting seniors have the best vantage to evaluate and grade performance and potential. By reducing the space available for words, reporting seniors will be forced to write genuine evaluations and not just list accomplishments for others to evaluate later, as is common now. By limiting to a fixed percentage cap the number of “must-pro- mote” recommendations and top grades they can assign, reporting seniors will be forced to be continent in their evaluation marks. Only in this way can we ensure that selection boards and assignment officers will see real distinctions in those before them. Those of us who sign reports will have to quit being nice guys and earn our keep by making the tough decisions in honest evaluation.
In the officer ranks, a rare few will collect “A” grades and "defmitely-promote” marks at every duty station. Some will be stabbed in the heart with “don't promote.” The majority will have mixed records, As and Bs, “promotes” and “definitely-promotes” mixed together, mirroring on paper the real-world spread in individuals of performance and potential. That is what we are after.
Honest—Our new system will have all its rules aimed at straightforwardness and accuracy. But truth is too important to be left merely as an outcome of system incentives. Genuine, unconflicted integrity is vital to fitness reports and to our ethical sense as naval officers as we write them. We must replace the tons of guidance on writing these reports we have put together over the years with a simple charge: play it straight. We need cultural change in fitness reporting that constantly and consistently presents only one precept: tell the truth.
The Process
Leadership creates cultural change. The ethical inconsistencies and troubled execution of the current system will persist until the front office says fix it. Until then, reform is impossible. Once directed, reform is easy. Creating reform for fitness reports is a relatively simple business. We need will, not wit.
Captain Byron commands the Naval Ordnance Test Unit at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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