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Get Real, Get Better

13 October 2022
“History shows the navy which adapts, learns, and improves the fastest gains an enduring warfighting advantage. The essential element is fostering an ecosystem—a culture—that assesses, corrects, and innovates better than the opposition.”--Admiral Michael Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, Remarks at 2022 Surface Navy Association Symposium          
“History shows the navy which adapts, learns, and improves the fastest gains an enduring warfighting advantage. The essential element is fostering an ecosystem—a culture—that assesses, corrects, and innovates better than the opposition.”
--Admiral Michael Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, 
Remarks at 2022 Surface Navy Association Symposium

 
                                                                                                                       
 
Get Real, Get Better
is a call to action for every Navy leader to apply a set of Navy-proven leadership and problem solving best practices that empower our people to achieve exceptional performance.
► The Navy has teams with great culture and great performance, but we also see examples of teams with poor culture and weak performance. The gap between our best and our worst performers is too large.
► To remain the world’s strongest Navy, we must have consistently strong performance. Get Real Get Better is the mindset consistently used by our best performers.
► This approach empowers our people to find and fix problems – and innovate – at their level, from the deckplate to senior leaders.  We reward ownership and ingenuity, and we help each other remove barriers. 
► We are committed to accelerating our warfighting advantage by unleashing our people, not by burdening them with extra requirements, policies, or bureaucracy.
► Principles here and in the Charge of Command make our Navy more ready for competition and combat.
 
                                                                                                                       

Get Real, Get Better is a proven mindset that every Navy leader must embrace to unlock the full potential of our people.

It starts with our core values of honor, courage and commitment as the bedrock of a winning navy.

Building from these values,  

Get Real is about having the courage to self-assess, to build teams that embrace honest, hard, transparent looks at our performance to understand our actual strengths and shortcomings. We must be our own toughest critics.

Get Better is about a commitment to improve, to be self-correcting. It’s about taking pride in high standards and fixing problems together when they’re small, before they grow large and complex. It’s about applying proven methods to get after the things that matter most, in a focused and disciplined way, and not by just adding activity.

                                                                                                                       

Gilday Relieves Richardson as Chief of Naval Operations
The official portrait of Adm. Mike Gilday, 32nd Chief of Naval Operations.
Gilday Relieves Richardson as Chief of Naval Operations
Gilday Relieves Richardson as Chief of Naval Operations
The official portrait of Adm. Mike Gilday, 32nd Chief of Naval Operations.
Photo By: Ms. JoAnne Sorrentino
VIRIN: 190812-D-IF881-2002
CNO's remarks at
Surface Navy Association
January 11, 2022

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                       
Navy Reserve Vignette
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ALBANY, Ga. (May 25, 2021) - Happy 123rd birthday, Navy Hospital Corps! Hospitalman Trey Reza, a pharmacy technician at Naval Branch Health Clinic Albany, retrieves a medication. Reza, a native of Midway Park, North Carolina, says, “It is important that patients receive the correct medication, strength, dose, and frequency for their safety and to heal.” On June 17, the Navy’s most decorated rating celebrates 123 years of service. The Navy Hospital Corps is the military’s only all-enlisted corps, and the Hospital Corpsman rating is the largest and most diverse in the Navy. (U.S. Navy photo by Deidre Smith, Naval Hospital Jacksonville/Released). #FacesofNHJax #NavyHospitalCorps
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210525-N-QA097-010
ALBANY, Ga. (May 25, 2021) - Happy 123rd birthday, Navy Hospital Corps! Hospitalman Trey Reza, a pharmacy technician at Naval Branch Health Clinic Albany, retrieves a medication. Reza, a native of Midway Park, North Carolina, says, “It is important that patients receive the correct medication, strength, dose, and frequency for their safety and to heal.” On June 17, the Navy’s most decorated rating celebrates 123 years of service. The Navy Hospital Corps is the military’s only all-enlisted corps, and the Hospital Corpsman rating is the largest and most diverse in the Navy. (U.S. Navy photo by Deidre Smith, Naval Hospital Jacksonville/Released). #FacesofNHJax #NavyHospitalCorps
Photo By: Deidre Smith
VIRIN: 220811-N-NO999-0001
Get Real:
Reserve Sailors on Active Duty orders for greater than 30 days were experiencing an unacceptable lapse in TRICARE coverage. When recently activated Sailors attempted to access care, they found they had not been enrolled in the TRICARE system and were denied access to coverage. As a workaround, Sailors would go to a nearby ID card lab and manually update the Defense Enrollment Eligibility System (DEERS) to receive TRICARE. For years, this burdensome, manual process was the accepted way to get TRICARE coverage immediately, wasting thousands of hours each year with Reservists waiting in line at ID lab. The process was even part of some activation checklists at local commands. In 2021, after multiple Reserve commands elevated the issue, Navy Reserve Forces Command and Navy Personnel Command analyzed this issue and identified that manual review, occurring only once per month, was the root-cause of lapses in providing access to coverage.
 
Get Better:
Instead of forcing Sailors to work through a time-consuming and onerous process of updating DEERs, they successfully addressed the issue by implementing a simple, daily update script via the Navy Standard Integrated Personnel System (NSIPS). Now, when members begin a set of long-term orders and are mustered with their new command, NSIPS sends an update to DEERS, automatically triggering the start of TRICARE coverage. In the majority of cases, this automated process has eliminated any lapse in TRICARE coverage for our Reserve Sailors.  Outlier cases where an issue persists are rare and are now reviewed on a daily basis for immediate correction. Addressing the issue provided Sailors the medical benefits they need and also saved numerous man-hours.
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Navy Medicine Vignette
Get Real:
As the Navy Medical Department approached the one-year mark of the pandemic, we began to return our focus back to routine business. It became rapidly apparent that routine business had been neglected. One striking example was the Physical Health Assessments (PHA) backlog. We had over 100,000 Sailors delinquent for their PHA, representing over 25% of the force. The COVID pandemic created the perfect storm of curtailed healthcare access and the pausing of routine Navy events that required medical care. Specifically, the elimination of normal forcing functions like the Physical Readiness Test (PRT) caused us to be in a very deep readiness hole.
PHAs quickly became a critical priority for the highest level of Navy leadership. Traditional Navy behavior would be to grind through our existing processes to improve our medical readiness. That would mean keeping clinics open late, overworking medical staffs, and forcing Sailors to wait in long lines for in-person PHAs to make up the backlog.
 
Get Better:
Instead, Navy Medicine formed a special team to find the friction points and root causes of the PHA backlog and take action on what matters most to resolve it. This team determined three specific ways to bring the backlog down as quickly as possible – maximize the use of the Defense Health Agency’s virtual readiness clinic, formalize the priority of PHA completion and give assistance to targeted Navy commands with a high number of overdue PHAs.  
The impact of these changes were immediate and significant. In nine months, the backlog of overdue PHAs was reduced by more than 60,000. By using the virtual, readiness clinic with patients who would normally go-person, Navy Medicine continues to better schedule and complete PHA appointments in support of medical readiness.
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Naval Aviation Vignette
Fifteen ships from the Royal Australian Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, German navy, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) and U.S. Navy sail in formation during Annual Exercise (ANNUALEX).
PHILIPPINE SEA (Nov. 21, 2021) Fifteen ships from the Royal Australian Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, German navy, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) and U.S. Navy sail in formation during Annual Exercise (ANNUALEX). ANNUALEX 2021 is a multilateral exercise conducted by elements of the Royal Australian, Royal Canadian, German, JMSDF and U.S. navies to demonstrate naval inoperability and a joint commitment to a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific.(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Haydn N. Smith)
Fifteen ships from the Royal Australian Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, German navy, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) and U.S. Navy sail in formation during Annual Exercise (ANNUALEX).
211121-N-HS181-1869
PHILIPPINE SEA (Nov. 21, 2021) Fifteen ships from the Royal Australian Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, German navy, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) and U.S. Navy sail in formation during Annual Exercise (ANNUALEX). ANNUALEX 2021 is a multilateral exercise conducted by elements of the Royal Australian, Royal Canadian, German, JMSDF and U.S. navies to demonstrate naval inoperability and a joint commitment to a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific.(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Haydn N. Smith)
Photo By: MC2 Haydn Smith
VIRIN: 211121-N-HS181-1869
Embrace the Red

In the beginning of 2019, our F/A-18 super Hornet Fleet was at 55% mission capable… only about half of our inventory was ready to be used by the Navy for deployment and training. And Super Hornet readiness had been low for 10 years despite lots of money and resources being focused on extra repair parts and depot repair. We decided to embrace the red, to challenge our thinking and learn. We took a hard look at our performance, harnessed the data that was available, and realized that it was not a lack of inputs that was holding us back, but the capability of our processes to turn those inputs into outcomes. We learned from elevating our gaze up and out to look at the best performers that the real opportunity to improve Super Hornet readiness wasn’t in more inputs, but in process changes that made our maintenance teams more effective. Taking some best practices from the airline industry, we developed a new way to collaborate across the Navy in resolving down jet issues, and we developed a new approach in how squadrons do maintenance, building a playbook of how to do large maintenance checks more thoroughly and efficiently. With these and a few other changes, we drove our Mission Capable rate through the roof—it was incredible….in less than a year, we surpassed the DoD-required 80% Mission Capable rate, and have sustained that readiness ever since.
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Shipboard Fire Safety Vignette
Steelworker Constructionman Alexander Rose grinds out a metal strip in preparation for welding on Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, Feb. 2, 2021.
NAVAL AMPHIBIOUS BASE CORONADO, Calif. (Feb. 2, 2021) Steelworker Constructionman Alexander Rose, attached to Amphibious Construction Battalion 1 (ACB 1), grinds out a metal strip in preparation for welding on Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, Feb. 2, 2021. ACB 1 conducts ship-to-shore transportation in support of amphibious operations around the world. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Storm Henry)
Steelworker Constructionman Alexander Rose grinds out a metal strip in preparation for welding on Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, Feb. 2, 2021.
210202-N-DK042-1006
NAVAL AMPHIBIOUS BASE CORONADO, Calif. (Feb. 2, 2021) Steelworker Constructionman Alexander Rose, attached to Amphibious Construction Battalion 1 (ACB 1), grinds out a metal strip in preparation for welding on Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, Feb. 2, 2021. ACB 1 conducts ship-to-shore transportation in support of amphibious operations around the world. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Storm Henry)
Photo By: MC2 Storm Henry
VIRIN: 210202-N-DK042-1006
Self-Aware, Self-Correcting

Managing hot work (welding and grinding projects which cause heat and sparks) during a big maintenance availability is tough. The whole ship and shipyard is under pressure to get the availability done on time, but during one shift, we disapproved multiple requests because we were not meeting safety standards. We brought it up to our chain of command--the Captain completely had our backs, ordered a stop to all hot-work until everyone was able to get re-trained and on the same page of what was needed to do the work safely. It’s good to know that, despite the time-pressure to get things done, out team acted to find and fix this problem early, and fixed it before it grew into a bigger problem. We were self-aware enough to see the issue, and then had the discipline to self-correct it quickly.
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Naval Shipyard Vignette
171023-N-LC642-018.jpg
171023-N-LC642-018 ARABIAN SEA (Oct. 23, 2017) Aviation Electronics Technician Airman Desiree Vanassche, from Detroit, calibrates a sweep generator aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68), Oct. 23, 2017, in the Arabian Sea. Nimitz is deployed in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. While in this region, the ship and strike group are conducting maritime security operations to reassure allies and partners, preserve freedom of navigation, and maintain the free flow of commerce. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Emily Johnston/Released)
171023-N-LC642-018.jpg
171023-N-LC642-018
171023-N-LC642-018 ARABIAN SEA (Oct. 23, 2017) Aviation Electronics Technician Airman Desiree Vanassche, from Detroit, calibrates a sweep generator aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68), Oct. 23, 2017, in the Arabian Sea. Nimitz is deployed in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. While in this region, the ship and strike group are conducting maritime security operations to reassure allies and partners, preserve freedom of navigation, and maintain the free flow of commerce. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Emily Johnston/Released)
Photo By: MCSN Emily Johnston
VIRIN: 171023-N-LC642-018
Fix or Elevate

We were sick and tired of not having enough calibration equipment to do all the Fiber-optic repairs. Too much time was being wasted scouring the yard for in-calibration equipment. This was leading to a huge backlog in getting our projects done—and even more delays in getting our ships out on time.  In the past, we would have just dealt with it, working back-breaking hours to make up for the lost time. Instead we decided to fix or elevate, bringing a clear barrier impeding performance to our bosses in the shipyard and NAVSEA. They quickly talked to the METCAL office, who gave us another way to temporarily get our equipment calibrated. Even better, the METCAL office is now working on a way to give us an in-shipyard way of calibrating test equipment.   
 
                                                                                                                       
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