*This article has been adapted from the executive summary of the detailed NPS technical report (NPS-18-001, March 2018) titled Understanding and Retaining Talent in the Surface Warfare Community.
The Navy Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) community provides a vital, sophisticated capability to address increasingly dynamic and unpredictable threats around the world. Effective performance in the SWO community requires a somewhat unique set of skills and capabilities, which center on life and work aboard ships at sea. Many SWOs find life at sea to be fun and exciting, filled with challenging jobs and camaraderie, and a balance that makes the hard work and long hours worthwhile and rewarding. Alternatively, for others the sacrifice seems unsustainable, and the SWO community has battled mid- and junior-level officer attrition for many years.
To help combat such attrition, community leaders have devised and implemented a number of progressive changes to enhance the SWO profession and to help retain talent. The community has recently increased its department head retention bonus; increased compensation to officers selected early for department head; and organized a number of alternate, parallel career tracks to expand flexibility and options regarding sea-shore rotation, education, specialization, and other decisions affecting retention.
The goal is to retain, develop, and promote the most talented SWOs. Interdisciplinary researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) recently completed a qualitative study to addresses the issue directly. This study is grounded in the direct experiences and perceptions of talented SWOs, mostly at the O-3 level, as they approach or pass the critical department head screening point—a point at which much SWO talent is lost historically—and it asks three research questions: 1) What constitutes talent in the SWO community? 2) Why do some talented people choose to leave the Navy while others choose to stay in? 3) How can we retain talent in the Navy?
Results suggest that the SWO community is working well overall; that its recently implemented changes are serving their intended purposes; and that many talented people are being identified, recognized, promoted, and retained as desired. Nonetheless, this community is no exception to having room for improvement, and through their grounded, independent study, the NPS researchers identified seven significant risks to retaining SWO talent: 1) talented people not being assigned to challenging jobs; 2) unfavorable interaction with chiefs; 3) unfavorable interaction with detailers; 4) unfavorable CO/XO interaction; 5) lack of command opportunities; 6) difficult family planning; and 7) dissatisfaction with sea life.
Each of these retention risks offers potential for mitigation, and the researchers offer a set of nine recommendations to help address these risks and to retain talent. Each recommendation is presented with brief comments from senior SWO leaders reacting to an advance copy of the study. Such comments represent confirmation in some cases, additional emphasis in others, and even occasional rebuttal as well.
- Work to assess talent in advance of JOs’ sea tours. We need to know whom our talented JOs are, and it could be helpful to gain additional insight into talent before their first shipboard assignments. We recommend developing some kind of shipboard exercise, simulation, or other assessment—producing validated indicators of SWO talent aboard ship—to be accomplished during BDOC (Basic Division Officer Course). This could help mitigate the issue of talented officers being assigned to unfulfilling jobs in the first place.
Additionally, we recommend implementing a more consistent policy of reassigning JOs to different jobs periodically during their sea tours. This could be accomplished informally or through formal rotation programs and via assignments to different ships or even aboard the same ship throughout an entire JO tour. This could benefit JOs through exposure to multiple shipboard jobs, thereby limiting the length of time, if any, that talented people remain stuck in unfulfilling jobs.
Senior SWO Response: This issue stems in part from attrition: a comparatively large number of ensigns are required in order to have a sufficient number of talented department heads available eight years later. One result is having more division officers (DivOs) aboard ship than necessary.
- Set and enforce expectations of mutual cooperation and respect between JOs and chiefs. Effective JO-chief interaction is important to successful operations in every division aboard ship. However, not all chiefs appear to be equally supportive of the DivOs for whom they work. Some inherent personality mismatches are likely to be inevitable, and some JOs and chiefs may be comparably more or less motivated to learn from and teach one another, respectively. Nonetheless, we recommend that JOs be taught and motivated to humble themselves, beginning with instruction through their commissioning sources, and to seek out learning from chiefs. We recommend further that chiefs be taught and held accountable by command to make themselves available and to support DivOs. This could help to mitigate the issue of talented officers’ unfavorable interaction with chiefs.
Senior SWO Response: This is being taught, and the expectations are in place. The issue is more likely to stem from the JOs—who could seek more collaborative interaction and teamwork—than the chiefs.
- Set and enforce expectations of responsive interaction between JOs and detailers. Many JOs express dissatisfaction with detailer support and mistrust of the detailing process. A key manifestation of inadequate support appears to stem from unresponsive communication. We recommend that detailers be instructed to follow simple, professional business rules (e.g., “every SWO email will be responded to within two business days”; “an email will be sent to a SWO within two business days of receiving a telephone call”).
Further, SWO mistrust of the detailing process appears to center on an absence of process transparency and possible goal misalignment. We recommend that the detailing process improve in terms of transparency, providing talented officers with visibility into all available jobs and permitting them to “bid” on and interview for them in a quasi-market. These measures could help to mitigate the issue of talented officers’ unfavorable interaction with detailers.
Senior SWO Response: The standards for detailers are in place and enforced. It’s hard to believe that detailers are unavailable to support SWOs.
- Set and enforce expectations of increased mentoring and coaching by COs and XOs. Many JOs perceive that their leaders only give orders and provide evaluations of recent performance, reflecting negligible motivation for sharing highly valued guidance and experience. This represents a challenging issue, however. COs and XOs are military commanders, with serious missions to accomplish in an inherently hazardous work environment. They require considerable latitude to do so in ways that make sense and that fit their leadership styles and experience bases. Nonetheless, a lack of guidance and mentoring, combined with toxic leadership and inhospitable command climate, is a strong dissatisfier for talented SWOs, and even one toxic CO/XO could potentially drive dozens of talented subordinates out of the Navy. We recommend that the Navy draw from world-class mentoring and coaching practices to provide leaders with mentoring and coaching support that can help them become better mentors and coaches to JOs. This could help to mitigate the issue of talented officers’ unfavorable interaction with CO/XOs.
Senior SWO Response: A large push to improve mentoring and coaching is in place now.
- Reevaluate the performance evaluation process. Many junior officers seek to distinguish themselves through early command, in large part because they do not feel well represented by their evaluations, yet they seek to “practice” command in smaller, less stressful settings (e.g., something less demanding than as CO of a DDG) also. However, there are only a fixed number of command billets, and the issue appears to center on the performance evaluation process. We recommend that the Navy continue its performance evaluation transformation (PET) process. This could help to mitigate the issue of talented officers’ perceived lack of command opportunities.
Senior SWO Response: The PET process has active participation and support.
- Continue to offer the recently expanded number of career tracks. This appears to help address some risk stemming from rigid career timelines and family planning difficulties, and the SWO community should be congratulated for devising and implementing it. Nonetheless, life at sea—and away from family—is hard, yet it is central to the SWO profession and will likely persist as a driver of talent loss. This could help to mitigate the issue of talented officers’ family planning difficulties.
Senior SWO Response: The overall career path is the same. The alternate tracks that are selected only rarely may be going away.
- Work to support pregnant officers. The risk of losing talented people to pregnancy is specific to women, who may become unable to finish their sea tours, and who may fear becoming uncompetitive relative to their peers. Some women are able to plan children around the pockets of shore duty that are sprinkled into their career timelines, but such pockets may or may not coincide with the women’s family plans or their metaphoric biological clocks, and some talented female officers may fear jeopardizing their careers or simply leave the Navy out of frustration.
Although the Career Intermission Program represents one approach to addressing pregnancy as a retention risk, it has limitations and consequences (e.g., transfer out of active duty). We recommend an alternate approach involving a “year group rollback system” for female officers looking to have children earlier than the pockets of shore duty noted above. If a female JO were to get pregnant before or during a sea tour, for instance, then through such rollback system she could be sent to shore duty and rolled back a year group to stay competitive. Expanded Tricare coverage to include fertility treatments for those who delay having children for family planning merits mention here as well. Together, these steps could help to further mitigate the issue of talented officers’ family planning difficulties.
Senior SWO Response: The Navy continues to work this issue actively. Changing officers’ lineal numbers presents a challenge, however.
- We recommend thinking creatively of ways to reduce the loss of time with friends and families while at sea. In our fathers’ and grandfathers’ Navy, people may have been content with reading books, writing letters, and exchanging sea stories with shipmates. In this age of ever increasing network bandwidth and computer connectivity, however, many JOs seek current, online, and synchronous social interaction. Toward this end, even the smaller ships could be equipped with higher capacity networking capability, which would enable people aboard ship to have richer and more frequent communications with friends and families back home. As examples, rich video conference, chat and social network capabilities are relatively common and inexpensive today, and life aboard ship could become less onerous and burdensome if people could stay up to date and interact with friends and loved ones using such capabilities. Streaming current music, games, movies and television shows could enhance people’s experience at sea also.
We recommend also expanding our vision in terms of ways to increase the number and quality of activities that are available aboard ship. Small efforts to make life at sea more enjoyable and accommodating aboard warships could go a long way. Consider, for instance, the availability of more diverse, healthier meal options (dare we use the word “cuisine”?) or drinking a glass or two of wine or beer at the end of the day (such practice is permitted in some navies.) Either could represent a welcome ritual, and a commitment to adequate downtime and sleep aboard ship could pay dividends—in terms of talent retention and safety alike. This could help to mitigate the issue of talented officers’ dissatisfaction with sea life.
Senior SWO Response: The Navy continues to make progress. People aboard ship can call home more easily and frequently, and the meals are getting better.
- Finally, train JOs more thoroughly in advance of their sea tours. The relative lack of training represents an important dissatisfier. Many JOs perceive that the formal (ashore) training received before their sea tours is inadequate, and several participants in this study mention the 2017 accidents involving the cruiser Antietam and destroyers Fitzgerald and McCain for at least anecdotal support for this perception. After only a brief BDOC experience, new JOs go directly to their ships for their first operational tours at sea. Other Navy communities (esp. Aviation, Nuclear) have considerable training pipelines that officers must complete before their first operational assignments and before being entrusted with expensive Navy assets (e.g., aircraft, reactors).
In its effort to get JOs out to sea quickly, the SWO community may be sacrificing an opportunity to increase SWO competency levels aboard ship and contribute toward talent retention. We recommend (re)instituting a lengthy formal training program prior to the first sea tour, or at least a substantial extension of BDOC. We could even consider affording JOs a measure of independent self-study time (e.g., without formal job responsibilities) to begin preparing for shipboard qualifications before the beginning of their sea tours. This could help to further mitigate the issue of talented officers’ dissatisfaction with sea life, and it could contribute to increased safety at sea.
Senior SWO Response: This recommendation has gained some metaphoric traction, and several different approaches to increased ship handling are being considered and implemented. Indeed, a successful ship handling assessment may be required before joining a ship.
Of course, much work would be required to implement the recommendations outlined above, and it is unclear what impact they would have upon the detailing process, morale, perceived fairness, recruiting, chain of command, retention, and other areas. Moreover, some of these recommendations are clearly controversial, and others would increase pressure on already strained budgets. Nonetheless, they offer potential to help to keep talented SWOs from leaving the Navy. We leave the answers to Navy leaders and policy makers, in addition to topics for future research.