Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Assessing Performance: leadership standards, accountability, responsibility


Leadership at every level depends on integrity to assess the performance of our people honestly and openly. We can only deal with internal threats if we can rely on the quality of the information in our official records. There are serious effects of failure to reflect fully, accurately, and completely on all aspects of professional, ethical, and personal career development in performance appraisals.

We must instill and preserve the core traits that sustain our profession and keep our forces strong, effective and safe. Entrusting our leaders with the responsibility, authority and resources necessary to carry our their missions is essential, but with responsibility comes accountability. My expectation is that our leaders will set the standards for leadership, management, and mentoring, and will be accountable for the health and performance of the force.
Extracted from SECDEF MEMO of March 2, 2010
SUBJECT: Fort Hood Investigation

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Accountability - It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.A special film project produced by Louis Lautman related to this topic ''The YES Movie''www.TheYESmovie.com

General Quarters said...

Who could forget viewing the film "I Relieve You, Sir" the reenactment of the 1969 Melbourne-Evans incident in SWOS basic? I recall that it was almost an assault on my sensibilities and all my previous assumptions about suffering the consequences of one's actions. In an hour, it instilled a recognition of the dead serious nature of my new profession, and a lifelong lesson about the nature of authority, responsibility, and accountability.

I'm a little sad that we seem to have lost a some of that sharp edge in our current Navy, but I am also proud of this seafaring tradition when I compare it to the corporate sphere and what often seems to be a complete vacuum of even the notion of personal accountability.

An unintended consequence of our glorification of corporate management technique in its many iterations is that we seem to have unwittingly introduced the corporate practice of weaseling which has made some inroads in displacing the hard reality based tradition of our naval predecessors.

Unknown said...

Too little, too late. People died because someone was afraid to say BOO.

I agree with GQ. Last I saw, WALMART does not project combat power, kill people, or brek things.