On Leadership

Get Real Get Better: Building Warfighting Advantage

By ADM Bill Lescher, USN

For 42 years, I’ve had the immense privilege of serving as a Navy leader, a naval aviator, and a proud member of the rotary-wing community. The opportunity to work with many of you, from the flight line to the halls of the Pentagon, has been deeply rewarding, and I continue to be impressed with the caliber of our team and the work we do together in support of our country.

We remain the most powerful Navy in the world. In 2021, the Navy-Marine Corps team flew over 1 million hours and steamed 22,000 days. We operated all over the world, from the Arctic to the South Pacific, protecting the nation’s interests and promoting American prosperity. No other Navy comes close to this level of global impact. The contributions that rotary-wing aviators make on a daily basis to this naval power, from hunting submarines, to providing maritime ISR, to supporting heavy-lift logistics, have been exceptional in making our Navy stronger and more lethal.

The core of our strength has always been our people and a Navy culture that values learning. Throughout the major conflicts in our history, our Sailors have learned and adapted to meet every challenge. As CNO stated back in January, “History shows the navy which adapts, learns and improves the fastest gains an enduring warfighting advantage.”

The evolution of the rotary-wing community offers a great example of the impact of those who embrace a learning mindset. From the early days of limited Search and Rescue birds, to the multi-mission, multi-domain war machines we have today, our best Sailors learned and incorporated new technology and tactics to deliver a strong warfighting advantage.

But we should be clear-eyed to the reality that our maritime superiority is in jeopardy. As we transition from two decades of primarily supporting land forces ashore in the Violent Extremist Organization (VEO) fight, we now face near-peer adversaries intent on overtaking our military dominance and challenging the international rules-based order. China is our pacing challenge, driving a shift to a sea control fight and threatening our advantage with sizeable investments in military capability, industrial capacity, technological development, and civil-military fusion. Russia’s specialization in Undersea Warfare and their destabilizing actions in Europe clearly endanger our NATO allies.

Once again, we find ourselves at the forefront of Strategic Competition, facing real and dangerous threats to our homeland and way-of-life. We must work together powerfully to accelerate our maritime advantage in this critical decade. Across every organization in the Navy, we must ask ourselves: Are we doing enough to prepare for combat?

In our very best teams, the answer is ‘yes.’ We see highperforming leaders who embrace the learning culture needed to deliver the advantage we need. These leaders are obsessed with finding poor performance in their units. They fix problems when they’re small by systematically identifying and addressing the underlying root causes, and build inclusive teams that learn.

But over years of studying Navy performance in depth, I have seen unacceptably large variability in how we lead. In contrast to our strongest leaders and units, I see areas in our Navy where our ability to learn and improve has dulled, driven by behaviors that oppose learning. We see leaders who struggle to perform and fail to promote the learning mindset that drives our best-performing commands. Our least effective leaders have grown up in the Navy to believe that, to get ahead, they must grind through the friction of status quo processes, keep problems within the lifelines, work barriers to improvement without asking their boss for help, and solve the problems most constraining their improvement by pouring resources and activity on it rather than seeking to understand and correct root causes.

Too often across our Navy, this kind of leadership has resulted in problem-solving by addition of more instructions, more process, and more complexity. Over time, this approach, combined with an unwillingness to accept any level of failure, has overwhelmed our people with activity and bureaucracy. While we were able to muscle through the damage from this kind of behavior in the counter-VEO fight, it is insufficient for Strategic Competition with China and Russia today. The inconsistent practice of Navy-best leadership and problem solving behaviors is the greatest constraint we have to accelerating warfighting advantage.

As we deeply studied our tragic mishaps, areas of sustained weak performance, and the winning behaviors of our strongest commands, we’ve seen recurring similarities in the best leadership practices leading to our best outcomes and the root causes leading to our worst outcomes.

This learning is core to our intent to build on strong core values and Navy-proven best practices to bring consistency across the Navy to how we lead and learn.

This is what the Get Real Get Better leadership standard provides.

Get Real Get Better has focused our learning to the essential, most impactful, leadership behaviors that are both significantly different from common Navy behavior and consistently practiced by our very best Navy leaders. These behaviors come with measurable standards to hold ourselves accountable.

Building on our core values, Get Real means having the courage to transparently self-assess—to build teams that embrace frank, hard, looks at our performance and understand our actual strengths and shortcomings. Get Better is the commitment to improve—to be self-correcting: taking pride in high standards and fixing problems together when they’re small, before they grow large and complex, focusing on what matters most in a disciplined way.

These principles are how our best commands throughout the Navy learn and build winning teams today.

Throughout the next few months, you’ll be hearing more about the Get Real Get Better leadership standard as we work to bring consistency to how Sailors lead. In the long-term, this initiative includes reforms to our talent management and personnel systems (such as changes to FITREPs, Evals, and promotion board precepts) so that we reward and promote Sailors who embrace this proven way of leading. Additionally, we’ll teach and reinforce these leadership and problem solving best-practices throughout a Sailor’s career, from accession pipelines to milestone schools, so that they are better prepared to lead and solve problems in the future.

As we work to bring more consistency to learning and leadership in the Navy, here are three Get Real Get Better leadership behaviors you can start doing today.

Act transparently, up and down the chain of command. Fixing problems at speed requires strong self-assessment and bold “Get Real” conversations with each other. Transparency allows us to align on standards and goals, and understand whether we are meeting them. We see the power of transparency in how we mission plan and debrief flights, with no-holds-barred feedback—regardless of rank—and a focus on what didn’t go well rather than just the good. This strong behavior of “embracing the red” performance in order to learn must come alive in every part of Navy work, from readiness generation, to weapons development, to personnel issues. Unless we Get Real through hard conversations with each other, we cannot Get Better.

Focus on what matters most. Our Get Better commitment to continuously self-correct requires each of us to prioritize risks and understand root cause. Taking the few extra steps to define the problem, “ask why five times,” or identify friction points will lead to better results because we are solving the real problem and learning along the way. Instead of rushing in with temporary solutions or added requirements and complexity, we must use proven methods to focus effort to the most impactful actions, and put solutions in place that last. When working to solve problems, our strongest leaders are the ones who take pride in removing barriers for their people. This can be done inside a department, at the squadron-level or across the wing. Measure yourselves on the opportunities to do so.

Build learning teams. Every leader must foster a culture of trust and respect in their commands, where Sailors can feel empowered to learn, innovate and contribute. Our teams cannot effectively learn absent the trust established by strong care and respect for our people. Our teams cannot embrace the red absent the trust that engenders frank and honest conversations. Caring for and respecting our people manifests in how we train and mentor them as individuals, equipping them with the tools and skills they need to excel in any environment they might encounter. We’ve seen as well that learning teams require leaders who clearly specify ownership of problems and opportunities so the team understands exactly how to collaborate to support making their team better.

There’s much more to Get Real Get Better, but if we lead more strongly in just these three ways, we’ve learned that we can powerfully improve our ability to adapt, learn and improve, the keys to winning in combat.

It starts with each of us. With key roles across our Navy, you are the generation that will meet the challenges ahead and, should conflict come in this critical decade, lead in combat. How you lead and learn today drives the Navy culture that we’ll have when the fight starts. For us to win, this must be a learning culture, building on how our best teams lead and solve problems today. I am confident that Get Real Get Better is the right approach, and that you are the right ones to make it come alive.

https://www.dvidshub.net/video/820228/vcno-speaks-nhasymposium