Fatal crashes prompted the Navy to transform the way it trains recruits. There are lessons here for every business.
By Lauren Weber Updated March 29, 2020 9:11 am ET Great Lakes, Ill.—Four nights a week, young people arrive by the busload at the Navy’s Recruit Training Command in this town north of Chicago. As they file off the bus at dusk, they are greeted by shouted commands: “Run, female! Run, male! Move your ass! You will not move this slow again for the next eight weeks!”
Still, the military has long been a source of inspiration and fascination for business leaders, and at its best the service manifests qualities executives try to foster in their organizations: dedication to a mission and rigorous discipline. What’s more, the armed forces—with more than 1.
In the case of the Navy, congressional investigators and military officers had warned repeatedly of overworked sailors, inadequate training and budget cuts in the years leading up to the two collisions, due largely to an overcommitment of Navy ships to overseas missions. “If you can’t fight a fire, you’re not going to be a sailor,” says Rear Adm. Jamie Sands, the Navy SEAL who was tapped in spring 2019 to command several training programs, including boot camp. “We’ll remediate you, we’ll try to get you there, but if you can’t get there, you can’t be a sailor.” Adm. Sands keeps a copy of the Navy’s report on his desk at all times to remind him that when the service sends poorly trained sailors out to sea, lives are lost.
Commanders, who lead boot-camp divisions of around 88 recruits and are responsible for their performance, now assess their divisions’ weaknesses and use blocks of time once devoted to online learning to have their recruits drill skills like patching pipes or tying knots to anchor and moor a ship. During practice on the replica, instructors ring a bell every time recruits make a mistake. Each bell signals an error that could result in a sailor tumbling overboard in a real-life situation, says William Haines, a gunner’s mate who attended boot camp last summer.
Pause and refocus The Navy has also begun to see the limits of its longtime “tough it out” approach. Boot camp is still a crucible, and it is designed accordingly. Recruits are yelled at, insulted, broken down. Between 10% and 12% drop out before graduation; the attrition rate has increased 3 percentage points since the boot-camp changes were implemented.
“We’ve all been told in the past to suck it up and push through,” says Senior Chief Petty Officer Warren Caverly, who previously ran the gym where recruits do daily fitness drills and tests. Recruits are taught to mentally and physically recalibrate—pause and refocus—if they are struggling, and encouraged to talk about problems they are having.
Does it work? As in the past, some recruits panic when they hit the water, come up gasping for air and are pulled to the side by instructors wielding long poles. Many can’t complete the full length and are sent to a smaller pool for remedial classes—and, as before, they are allowed to take the test multiple times.
“We want to affect the dynamic of the Navy from the bottom up,” Capt. Thors says. “With 40,000 sailors leaving here every year, we’ll change the fabric of one-third of the Navy within three years.” “We used to take a sailor from boot camp, and plug them into a training system focused on everything they would need in a 10- to 20-year career,” he says. “But not every sailor will stay in for 20 years, so some training was never realized. We also zeroed in on the fact that training has a shelf life.”
Operations specialists operate radar, navigation and communication equipment on ships, detecting and tracking nearby ships, aircraft and other objects. “It would be like, ‘Look at this, hold it in your memory until we test you on it on Friday.’ They data dumped as soon as they left here,” he says. Now, 80% of the curriculum is hands-on work with simulations and interactive courseware and 20% is lectures, with more engaging lessons built around scenarios experienced in the fleet.
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