That ship has sailed. I just sit behind a big desk and look important now...all while occasionally whoring myself out for flight time. It's a living.
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Creating a better Officer Corps
- Thread starter ssnspoon
- Start date
That ship has sailed. I just sit behind a big desk and look important now...all while occasionally whoring myself out for flight time. It's a living.
Maybe I don't get it... why don't/can't CO's give a second-job, 16 months in the squadron superstar LT a higher ranking than a last job 40 months LT who just fills a flight suit? Personally I would be "looking for" less gamesmanship and a more honest evaluation of the value of that employee.
Smoke,
There is no technical reason why a CO can't rank anyone where he pleases, when he pleases. The challenge comes in deciding whose career you're going to advance at the expense of someone else, whose career you're probably going to terminate. For example, suppose your hypothetical oxygen thief LT was performing his job better than your nugget O-3 on the CO's first FITREP cycle at the squadron. No fault of the newbie, he's just learning how to function at that squadron and at that level. At the second FITREP cycle under your command, you decide to move the nugget ahead of the no-load in the rankings. That more senior O-3 will now show declining fitness reports under the same reporting senior...kiss of death on a selection board. Now you have a "walking dead" LT at the squadron who has no real motive to show up to work, as he's just waiting for the formality of another selection until he FOSx2 and is asked to leave. Everyone on the boards understands pretty much understands the constraints of the trait averages. They simply aren't granular or relevant enough to break out the real performers. Where CO's earn their money is writing the narrative to accurately reflect current performance relative to peers, and to identify those who are worthy of attention by the board.
R/
There is no technical reason why a CO can't rank anyone where he pleases, when he pleases. The challenge comes in deciding whose career you're going to advance at the expense of someone else, whose career you're probably going to terminate. For example, suppose your hypothetical oxygen thief LT was performing his job better than your nugget O-3 on the CO's first FITREP cycle at the squadron. No fault of the newbie, he's just learning how to function at that squadron and at that level. At the second FITREP cycle under your command, you decide to move the nugget ahead of the no-load in the rankings. That more senior O-3 will now show declining fitness reports under the same reporting senior...kiss of death on a selection board. Now you have a "walking dead" LT at the squadron who has no real motive to show up to work, as he's just waiting for the formality of another selection until he FOSx2 and is asked to leave. Everyone on the boards understands pretty much understands the constraints of the trait averages. They simply aren't granular or relevant enough to break out the real performers. Where CO's earn their money is writing the narrative to accurately reflect current performance relative to peers, and to identify those who are worthy of attention by the board.
R/
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
I'll concede that this is a minor change that would be easy to make, and would save members the effort from having to use books written on fitreps/eval reporting guidelines to decode the language, but I just don't see how it would be functionally different in regard to selecting the best and the brightest for promotion. Isn't that the main gripe here, that the system is not selecting the proper people or that good performers sometimes get shafted out of an EP or a #1 of X simply due to luck and timing?
What if you flip it the other way? What if you show up to the squadron and someone who is only a few weeks senior to you (in the command, I mean), or worse, slightly junior to you (for the sake of FITREPS) and they get the nod much earlier than is considered the norm? You'd live in a world of a glass ceiling. No matter how hard you worked and how good a job you did, you'd never be able to get the paper to prove it.
This exact situation happened to me at the beginning of my DH tour. Obviously the question of whether the other person was as good as their paper indicated is a matter of discussion but none of that mattered since the paper had already been generated, blocking the rest of us, regardless of how motivated we may have been.
I've never been one to show up to work in order to make sure I ended up with a good FITREP, but when you see that you can't get one of the important jobs and even if you do, you have little hope of being professionally recognized for it, it makes life in the squadron frustrating.
The question to me is the cost/benefit of keeping many of the most ambitious and talented people driven or risking a few months of an already C performer suddenly "working" a half hour less a day and giving you a C-. The middling work ethic/talent seemingly get well taken care of at the expense of what could be truly exceptional careers. I have never seen it from the command-level side so I don't *really* know. But my pieces of exposure to the system were almost completely about these kind of games... whose turn it was, etc, and much, much less so about the underlying actual professional contribution. I am surprised that the leadership doesn't give a commissioned officers/aviators more credit than to assume they will actually quit.
Well this is kind of my point... why not? Sounds like the CO bucked norms already with the early nod, but then is beholden to norms regarding trends?
Because the CO wasn't an idiot and knew how the game was played. The person was a community darling and with institutional inertia...
Not quite. Admittedly the situation was a little different since it was a RC squadron, but the end result was as I described it. The person was already in the squadron, but in a completely different reporting group. When the person joined our reporting group, the clock should have been reset, since the person "came in" to the reporting group after several of us had already been there. But because the person had a rep, the person skipped to the head of the line, and would have had to stay there for 2 1/2 years (!).
I know what you may be thinking... "But Gatordev, maybe you just have sour grapes and the person deserved to go to the head of the line."
If you knew the rest of the story, you'd know that wasn't really the case and the person was eventually "removed from the problem."
This is exactly what I was talking about, and why I believe numerical averages and rankings need to go away. They artificially constrain COs in their honest evaluations of officers under their command, and since everyone knows it, they have no real value. And the narrative is equally worthless; the Tank has so little time to review fit reps for each person on a board, everything but the first and last lines get glossed over.
Consider that an officer may have much more opportunity to shine in an earlier part of a tour. Say, LTJG Joebags is a branch officer with a no-load LPO, a divvo who's having medical issues and is gone frequently, and an overworked DH who can't give Joe the care and feeding he should be getting. And say Joebags picks up the slack and performs well beyond his years. The BEST he can hope for come fitrep time is a 5.0 mark or two and a nice line in the narrative. Fast forward to the end of his tour when there's been a changeover of DHs and front office. He's AOPS under an OPSO who has his shit together and doesn't delegate much. Joebags does a good job, but doesn't have opportunity to stand out, and could very easily get tagged with a #3 MP depending on his contemporaries, who skipper likes, etc.
So in this example, which is not an unusual set of circumstances, his earlier shit-hot performance will get plowed under by that last fit rep, and that's where the bullshit of "luck and timing" comes in. He has to count on the really busy guy who preps his record for the board carefully reading between the lines of all his fitreps. And that's, frankly, horseshit. Promotion and screening should not depend on everyone knowing the code words and "knowing how to read them".
there's a broad chasm between "can't" and "won't".
You've described multiple levels of failure here.
A few observations (none of which will ever get me an invite to the cool kid spin-off website)
:- one person's "shit hot" is another person's fleet average.
- when you swim in big ponds there are more fish to compete with (tacair -vs- MPRA).
- the navy gets it wrong sometimes.
- the navy gets it right enough to execute the mission.
- the grass isn't necessarily greener on the outside. seriously, ask some of your buds.
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Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
The way that the system is designed, it seems like flags would put the failure on your CO for not placing the JO in the right billet rather than the system being broken. If someone is doing a shit-hot job and can accept more responsibility, why put him in a job where he won't be challenged? I also still don't see the connection with this and the fitrep writeup having code words.
I think the real problem is when a guy who shows up very shortly before another guy gets a better ranking early on which can never be 'undone' without ending his career, and the slightly-more-junior-at-that-command guy will never get that #1 EP because they'll both transfer within about 6 months of each other.
No amount of hard work or ass kissing will make up for timing.
Or, it's better to be lucky than good.
Great way to run our officer corps. We don't even promote our enlisted with such a stupid fucking system.
If only there were a group of highly educated tactical professionals who could figure out the best way to train and promote their successors.
Performance evals/FitReps are by there very nature biased. More is expected of some employees than others by supervisors. It's a flawed system both in the military world as well as the civilian. It's worse on the civilian side. The folks who work for you who are good will strive to get better and take criticism in a constructive way. The others will get vindictive and feel that you are taking money out of their pocket.............then lawyers get involved, and as a supervisor you learn to rubber stamp the evals.
And again...if you want to fix the system, you need to understand that the people running the asylum are the real problem and the solution. If a CoC can't figure out how to keep a hot runner moving along and work them without fucking them on something they can control like timing, how can you trust them to not screw up a "new and improved system?"