Life of an ocean brave

Spend an hour with Commander Paul Taylor and you'll seriously flirt with the idea of joining the New Zealand Navy.

Clean-cut, tertiary-educated, media savvy and an accomplished public speaker, Taylor is in many ways a walking recruitment poster for a modernised Navy.

In command of initial and advanced naval officer training, Taylor paints a rather compelling picture of a new Navy that accepts women and homosexuals and refuses to discriminate against recruits based on age.

In 2003, the only criteria for entry to the Navy are to pass its physical, mental, legal and aptitude standards. Anyone who gets that far will find that in addition to trade-related qualifications, all naval personnel, from commanding officers to pay clerks, navigators to cooks, have access to the same leadership training.

Top performers are rewarded with promotion, challenge and career advancement, and in theory, the better an individual's performance, the further that person can go in their naval career.

It's a training and development formula that would do any commercial boardroom proud, yet it bears little resemblance to the stuffy, hierarchal, bureaucratic naval training model of just 10 years ago.

Taylor says in the late 80s Navy leadership training focused too much on command and authoritarianism.

"It was ineffective and created a lack of accountability. We were certainly not getting the best from our people."

Nor was the Navy keeping them. Its attrition rate at that time was 40 per cent, compared with just 12 per cent last year.

Poor external assessments, budget and personnel cuts led the Navy to address its training and leadership needs by the mid-1990s. However, Brian Bedggood, director of international leadership development consultancy Blanchard, which has worked with the Navy since 1993, says middle naval management introduced Blanchard's leadership management methodologies without buy-in from the top.

"It was initially the vision of just one or two forward-thinking officers. Then after a few years, the Admiral decided everyone in the Navy should be trained in the same way with the same skills."

Today, the Navy continues with those modernised leadership and analysis programmes, and to date, 95 per cent of personnel have been trained in self-performance, team leadership and situational leadership.

The Navy has also improved its measurement practices through redeveloped internal surveys, refresher courses, and a balanced measurement and benchmarking system.

The latter has helped to produce a half decade of results which, when compared with historical figures, suggest the training is working, albeit slowly (see box).

That the rate of improvement has been gradual is probably because of the personal reactions of some naval staff to change. Taylor illustrates how far the new Navy is prepared to go to accommodate such attitudes.

"Some people saw the new system as an additional burden they didn't want. Fortunately nearly all of those people have now found employment elsewhere."

However, he concedes the Navy still has work to do.

"Our internal satisfaction surveys show little change since 1998. There's still a need for improvement."

But hasn't 10 years been long enough?

Bedggood, who recently signed the Navy to another three years, says cultural change takes as long as it takes.

"The cynicism that surrounds leadership training and cultural change tends to come from companies that adopt it as flavour of the month and don't follow through."

Taylor says there are many correlations between the business world and the modern military.

"Where we differ is that we don't make a profit. But our leadership training, visions and goals have a correlation with the business world. If an organisation steeped in tradition and age-old management and hierarchy practices can change, any commercial business can."

Critics say a military organisation with businesslike qualities may be a weakened one. One of the main areas of contention is that new training models encourage military personnel to question their superiors and to learn from mistakes.

"We've migrated from a culture that conducted witch-hunts to one that understands mistakes can be learned from," says Taylor.

While few would argue that civilian employees can learn from mistakes, if for example a naval mistake led to the loss of a ship or lives, would military accountability take precedence over the promise mistakes will be viewed as learning curves? And if accountability does take precedence, what good does it do to train naval personnel that it's okay to make a mistake?

While Taylor has heard these criticisms before, he's not entirely comfortable with them. Part of the reason for that is because the New Zealand Navy is rarely involved in combat and its personnel have voluntarily joined the service. This places the Navy, like Army and Air Force, in the position of having to attract and keep quality personnel; a naval officer with 15 years' experience cannot be replaced in a week by contacting a civilian recruitment agency.

So while Taylor concedes the need for unquestioning compliance in crises, he says the best way for the Navy to move forward is to understand that today's recruits are well educated and looking for an organisation that will develop their career potential.

"The Navy is always going to be a place where people can lose their lives or be required to take the lives of others. But our personnel are trained to understand where the line is between compliance and healthy questioning."

Taylor is ideally positioned to understand what motivates the people he's responsible for training. Married with two young children, the 38-year-old has clocked up 21 years of naval service, nearly double the average 11-year tenure of an officer. Despite this, you get the feeling Taylor might have been at the helm of a civilian corporation by now had the Navy not initiated change.

Taylor says the new approach has helped to build and direct his naval career, culminating in a personal highlight, a two-year stint as commanding officer on the frigate Te Kaha. And while Taylor is now in a new position, it's no reflection on his ship-commanding ability. The Navy has just three, soon to be two, frigates, so command assignments are rotated.

This raises an important question. With only two frigates on the horizon, how can the Navy promise this year's 270 recruits, 40 of whom are officers, ongoing challenge, career advancement and added responsibility?

Taylor points out there are many other jobs in the Navy besides ship-bound positions. However, for those with their hearts set on commanding naval vessels, there's hope. Over the next five years the Navy is likely to begin lending support to coastal security organisations such as the Police, MAF, Customs, and the Department Of Fisheries. The Navy of 2008 may resemble a smaller version of its benchmark organisation, the United States Coastguard.

Taylor says in five years the Navy will probably have up to 14 vessels, including patrol boats, a tanker, the frigates and hydrographic and diving ships.

"We're interested in a diverse range of people and we're ahead of other navies, local councils and New Zealand government departments in our training and development methodologies."

He pauses, no doubt contemplating how else he can present the Navy as the exciting and modern career environment he clearly believes it to be. But there's no really no need.

Eavesdroppers at the next table and catering staff carrying coffee are already wondering if they could pass the fitness test.