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About Get Real Get Better

Admiral Lisa Franchetti “In our ongoing effort to strengthen warfighters, improve warfighting, and ready the platforms that support them, our way ahead is clear and our course is true. We will continue our Navy-wide culture renovation, where Get Real Get Better is the standard of leadership and problem-solving that leaders at all levels embrace and live. We are building teams that are self-assessing, self-correcting, and always learning toward one goal - delivering warfighting advantage. Similarly, we have commenced a once-in-a-generation transformation of our Navy in order to develop, design, and deploy the weapons and tools we need to compete and win, both now and in the future. In this decisive decade, we will maintain this course and increase our speed.”

-- Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations
What is Get Real Get Better? 

Get Real Get Better, or GRGB, 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 starts a mindset that is inquisitive, always learning, and seeking to improve.  Key leadership behaviors are the skillsets that put the intent and attitude of the mindset into action.  Analytic techniques and frameworks are the toolset to bring to bear for problem solving.
 

What is a mindset?

A mindset is a set of beliefs and attitudes that shape how we react to the world around us and situations and conditions that we encounter. Importantly, mindsets can be changed.  By adopting new ways of thinking, new beliefs, and new behaviors to cement those beliefs, we can adapt into new mindsets. That’s the call to action of GRGB when the CNO directs us to “think and act differently”

How is GRGB a mindset?

GRGB is a set of beliefs that orient the way we handle situations—a belief that values inquisitiveness, an inquisitiveness that honestly identifies performance shortfalls (self-assess) and seeks the root cause of problems and obstacles (self-correct); a belief in the value of learning (always learning). The GRGB mindset includes the belief that a leader’s job is to create an atmosphere of trust to enable a team’s inquisitiveness and discovery.  These beliefs shape the handling of situations:  leaders help solve problems elevated to them, not punish subordinates for identifying barriers; when faced with a mission or a challenge, the GRGB mindset orients against status quo, orients attention towards the outcomes desired and the performance necessary to achieve those outcomes.

GRGB is about adopting an inquisitive orientation to our jobs and our team performance. It’s about looking for opportunities to learn and improve.  It’s about thinking first about the outcomes we want to achieve, and being accountable (to our superior, to ourselves, to our teams) for measuring our pursuit of those outcomes, not merely executing activities.  GRGB is a belief that performance and activity are not ends themselves, but rather means to achieve outcomes.  GRGB is about valuing specificity and analytical rigor, about asking “why?” and “how do we know?”

GRGB is about developing the ability to adapt, to learn, to problem solve rapidly and effectively, because that ability makes us better warfighters.  In the future fight, we won’t have a size/mass advantage; we won’t have a technology advantage.  We need a dynamic adaptability advantage.  We need to know our standards and our systems and our operations exceptionally well, and then be able to adapt to disruptions of them.  We’ll practice in peacetime on readiness, routine operations, so that our skills are sharp for combat. 


Get Real Get Better embraces the following underlying principles: 
 
  1. Get Real Get Better begins with our Navy Core Values: honor, courage, and commitment. This is the foundation for who we are.

  2. The GRGB mindset is one that is self-assessing, self-correcting, and always learning. What makes Get Real Get Better different is that we have developed measurable behaviors and standards.

  3. Get Real Get Better is about achieving warfighting advantage. We must continue to act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence against our most consequential strategic competitor and pacing challenge.

  4. We are choosing deliberately to think, act, and operate differently.

  5. There is no finish line in pursuing continuous improvement.

  6. Get Real Get Better is for the entire Navy workforce, both uniformed and civilian.

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