As a division officer in the reactor department of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, I was responsible for the chemistry and radiological controls for two nuclear power plants, as well as the administration and leadership of around thirty engineering laboratory technicians.
As part of our departmental training plans, all Sailors in the department — officer and enlisted alike — were required to take a monthly continuous training exam. It tested technicians on a variety of topics, from those general bits of theoretical and system-based knowledge that all trained nuclear operators must consistently possess to watchstation-specific items particularly curated for each division. The recourse for failing one of these exams was temporary removal from watchstanding and a remedial that included mandatory checkouts on knowledge gaps and counseling sessions with the departmental chain of command.
My division was terrible at these exams. On one occasion, over thirty-percent of my division failed it. Some of these failures were not yet qualified, but some were. I believed the increased workload on those who passed would trickle down in the form of peer-shaming and get those who failed to try harder. But it never did.
My Sailors didn’t care about the exam. There was no reward for passing; it was expected as the standard. And the technicians in my division who failed typically did so by missing questions outside their field. In some ways I understood this (as much as theory is important for all watchstanders, I also do not fear the safety of operations if a chemist has trouble explaining the sound-velocity profile of an air ejector). On top of this, they almost universally waited until the day (or hours) before an exam to study the training slides. They hoped that the practically photographic memory of nuclear Sailors would save them, and so failed due to their own apathy.
Nevertheless, I spent the next month doubling down on instruction points. I took a few minutes at divisional quarters every morning to discuss challenging topics we had trained on that month. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t try to teach my division about topics outside their field of expertise, hound them on the importance of actually studying for the exam, or run informal chalk talks from the divisional office.
The next exam came and went. A couple days later the grading was done. I couldn’t wait to see our hard work pay off. I printed out the exam summary and…almost half of my division failed the exam.
My first thought was, The training division who grades these things must have their heads in their asses.
So I went down to the reactor training office and requested to review the failed exams. I reviewed them, getting madder with each page. Over and over again, my Sailors were phoning it in. If they didn’t immediately know the answer to a challenging question on reactor dynamics, for instance, they would simply leave it blank. But even for the questions designed specifically for their fields, they were giving half-assed answers. They knew more, but they weren’t putting the graphite on the paper.
On the front of each exam was the start and stop times marked by the exam proctors. Sailors are allotted two hours to complete the exam, but my people had finished the exams in about forty-five minutes.
The next morning at quarters, I was disappointed and I was mad. I told them so. “Forty-five minutes to complete these exams is wonderful if you’re a savant and you actually pass,” I said. “But if you fail, forty-five minutes makes you stupid. You are all awarded the opportunity to have a proctor review your exam before you submit it. They’ll tell you if you didn’t fully answer the question. Sometimes they can clarify the meaning of a question, if they’re in a good mood. And guess what? I asked, and not a single one of the exam failures accepted the offer for a review. You know what that tells me? It tells me you just didn’t care.”
During the remedials that followed, they each blamed the failure on something else. Either the questions were poorly written, or graded too harshly, or regarding inane and unimportant topics. One Sailor said that the schedule for taking exams is too strict and he only had an hour to take the exam if he wanted to start watch on time.
“But we specifically schedule the exams times to account for the watchbill,” I said. “If you only had an hour, that means to came to the exam an hour late.”
Without missing a beat he said, “Well you wanted us to study first, right?” Yes, he had waited until the morning of the exam to start reviewing the monthly training slides. The only reason others passed, he claimed, was because they took the exam later in the day and had more last-minute time to prepare.
Inevitably, the reactor officer, a captain-select who had just reported from two years of commanding a destroyer at sea, wanted to know why my division had dropped the ball for the second month in a row. I told him everything I had done, all the work I had put into the division over the past four weeks. The instructions at quarters, the chalk talks in the office. Hell, I even brought training slides with me to a general quarters drill so the back-up responders could study while they waited around in fire-resistant flash gear.
“We may have failed,” I said, “but it wasn’t from a lack of effort on my part.”
The commander looked at me for a while as though I was sprouting flowers from my ears. Then he said, “So you can’t do it.”
“Say again, sir?” I didn’t like what I thought I’d heard.
“What you’re telling me is you can’t do it. You tried everything, and you can’t get your division to pass an exam where we spend a month training them for it. Your answer is that you gave it your all, and you can’t do it.”
“Well no, sir. Not exactly…”
Ah, but the train had already left the station. I think the commander saw me about to soil myself, because he leaned back into his office chair in a way that magically lightened the atmosphere a little.
He said, “I know that’s not what you’re saying. But it is what you’re telling me. Lieutenant Walker, we are not an effort-based organization. We are a results-based organization. If a ship is required to be at a geographical rendezvous point at X time on X date to launch a strike mission into Syria and we fail to get there, the President of the United States doesn’t give two shits about how hard we tried. All that matters is that we didn’t do it. We failed. The answer is not I know I failed but, sir, I tried really, really hard not to. The answer is exactly which metric caused the failure via some kind of intelligent incident critique followed immediately by your course of action to ensure it never happens again. And it all starts with your full understanding, as a leader, that you failed the assigned mission. Furthermore, when you sit there and explain how hard you tried, in the face of failure, you end up simply describing your own incompetence to your leadership. If what you’re saying is true, then you’re really explaining how the division has no need for you since you are incapable of improving them. Never accidentally describe to your boss that you’re professionally useless.”
At some point in your career, you will miss the mark. Despite days, weeks, or even months of planning and training, your division will fail to meet some milestone. A collateral program you own will fall short of some procedural standard, and your ship will lose points on a command assessment because of it.
It happens, although it shouldn’t. But that kind of inevitability does not absolve you of responsibility. Instead, it should remind you that you have a hard job, and that job should only include failure when there was no way to succeed. And in those cases, your boss should know early that you believe that mission is doomed. Most likely it is not, and with the help of your command leadership you can find a path forward where we all accomplish the mission.
Failure, it turns out, is almost never an option.
The next month on the morning of the continuous training exam, I woke up at 0430 and volunteered to take the exam early and become a proctor. And instead of proctoring for a single exam session, I stayed in the reactor classroom all day and proctored every single group. And not a single engineering laboratory technician was allowed to submit their exam without my personal review and verification that they had answered every portion of every question. If they didn’t know the answer to something, they put graphite down on what they did know.
They scrounged for points like they mattered.
I also offered early liberty to anyone who could beat my score. Although no one got it, they must have tried for it. No one failed that exam except a single unqualified technician who did not require a remedial; he had been onboard for three weeks.
Not the best solution. Maybe not even the right one — I couldn’t proctor every exam, and perhaps I had just put a band-aid on a hull rupture — but it got the job done. I’ll never know because no one ever told me, but I’d like to believe that seeing me burn personal calories on their behalf was the first time I’d really shown them how much I cared instead of just lecturing them at quarters and in the office.
Because we never saw those big failure rates again, and our divisional average moved from the bottom of the department to the top.
Not the best, but it was something.
Einstein, Wainwright, and Salinger 