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A Swerve On Leave/leadership- from "CAF Members File Suit"

Me spending the month of May in the field at guncamp is still nowhere made up timewise by having 4 Fridays off in June.

Though no allowance can give you time with family.

Oh yes......the equivelent of one 12 hour overtime shift. Screw family time, we need to pad my Commanding resume.....

Because one day of leave makes up for four weekend days away...

I get that those are the rules imposed on the CAF, but rules like that are exactly why people leave. A member can spend 14-30 days away from home, and get exactly one day off in compensation. Regardless of the missed school events, birthdays, anniversaries, etc...

I think I've said here a few times our leave policy is in dire need of a upgrade. Probably the biggest reason we lose people is we demand they spend 200 +/- days away and throw a pittance of compensation at them and then we get our noses out of joint when they give us the finger.

I'm curious to hear what would be adequate compensation for all this time away. I mean you all volunteered for your positions, surely you'd know time away from home was almost guaranteed in your trade. Complaining about being at sea when you joined the Navy is a little silly.....or are you complaining that you go to sea too much? It's like being a long haul trucker and not liking being on the road all the time.

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I'm curious to hear what would be adequate compensation for all this time away. I mean you all volunteered for your positions, surely you'd know time away from home was almost guaranteed in your trade. Complaining about being at sea when you joined the Navy is a little silly.....or are you complaining that you go to sea too much? It's like being a long haul trucker and not liking being on the road all the time.

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Can I read your MPRR ? I'd like to know what insight your experiences in the CAF provide. Always good to know ones audience.

I mean we can play the "you signed up for it game" that seems to be working out well so far.

Spending 180+ days away from home, getting 2-3 weeks off (Don't forget duty watches) and then going back out the door for more time than that without even the financial compensation at that point... I get it. Why would a young person keep doing this ? Lots of job opportunity out there.

Its a complicated issue with many avenues that need to be trodden down for this to be fixed. Careers, leadership, command cycles, ops and CBIs all have a role to play in fixing this.
 
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Complaining about being at sea when you joined the Navy is a little silly.....or are you complaining that you go to sea too much? It's like being a long haul trucker and not liking being on the road all the time.
You shouldn't run people ragged, regardless of trade. In an Air Force context, aircrew (generally) like to fly, but that doesn't mean they'd want to be deployed all the time either.

I'm not sure how the trucking industry pay works, but do they get overtime? Do they get randomly called away on jobs, or is their schedule set in advance?

Anyways, yeah...thread split.
 
I think I've said here a few times our leave policy is in dire need of a upgrade.



Probably the biggest reason we lose people is we demand they spend 200 +/- days away and throw a pittance of compensation at them and then we get our noses out of joint when they give us the finger.

Funny I would expect a union would help with this.

Coincidentally, I've done a fair bit of work with some Union leadership groups.

One guy told me "When organizations have good leadership, Unions aren't needed all that much. That's why we're always so busy." :)
 
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I'm curious to hear what would be adequate compensation for all this time away. I mean you all volunteered for your positions, surely you'd know time away from home was almost guaranteed in your trade. Complaining about being at sea when you joined the Navy is a little silly.....or are you complaining that you go to sea too much? It's like being a long haul trucker and not liking being on the road all the time.

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There are a number of different leave provisions. In some places short leave is abused; in other places it’s utterly neglected as an option. Judicious commanders at all levels should, where possible, consider exercising discretion within their authority to allow members what time they can before or, particularly, after a long stint away from home. I’m not suggesting anything that’s not already provided for.

LDA, sea pay, etc are fine for compensating for the physical suck. However you can always make more money; you can never make more time, and it’s often as not the time more than anything that damages families.

It’s a retention thing. Nobody here is suggesting a 1:1 result is likely in terms of making up for missed days off. It is, however, an easy thing for chains of command to be seen to be going to bat for their troops.
 
I'm curious to hear what would be adequate compensation for all this time away. I mean you all volunteered for your positions, surely you'd know time away from home was almost guaranteed in your trade. Complaining about being at sea when you joined the Navy is a little silly.....or are you complaining that you go to sea too much? It's like being a long haul trucker and not liking being on the road all the time.

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Understanding that sea time/field time is supposed to be tracked for PERSTEMPO management, is this still done? If so, is the PERSTEMPO policy even followed?
 
I don't believe you can teach it. I think is a characteristic that you are born with. It can be honed and tuned but not created from nothing.

Personally I think "leadership" training is silly.
We teach it to kids through our program, some get it, others not. Some people have the ability to lead but need to learn about the tools and various methods, otherwise they are floundering for the first while. Have good leaders spend some time teaching the next generation. I also learned by example both good and bad from the people in charge of me.
 
We teach it to kids through our program, some get it, others not. Some people have the ability to lead but need to learn about the tools and various methods, otherwise they are floundering for the first while. Have good leaders spend some time teaching the next generation. I also learned by example both good and bad from the people in charge of me.

I hope you are getting solid results. Just FYI we pump a metric crap ton of shitty leaders through "leadership training" and grade them as successful. IMHO our failure rate for these courses should be high.

I love your highlighted part. Something we do badly is talent identification. We have come to rely on "checks in the box gained by being in position XXX". We don't adequately review the outcome of ones time in position XXX we just given them a pass for being there and then push them forward. Speaking for the Sgt -> MWO world, couple that with 2nd language, trade exposure (read empires), "education" and a broken PER system and you have an excellent petri dish for toxic leadership to rise to the top.

When is that thread split coming ? ;)
 
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I don't believe you can teach it. I think is a characteristic that you are born with. It can be honed and tuned but not created from nothing.

Personally I think "leadership" training is silly.
I dunno. Maybe ‘training’ isn’t the best term. ‘Study’ might work better.

You’re more likely to succeed as a leader depending on certain personal traits, but I also think that desirable leadership behaviours can be identified, cultivated, and developed. It still has to come from within the leader, but if we’re more aware of what we’re doing and why, and the impact it has, I think a lot of growth can be achieved.

I will say that at least CAF meaningfully tries, and does achieve some successes, at least at the more junior levels I had access to.
 
Understanding that sea time/field time is supposed to be tracked for PERSTEMPO management, is this still done? If so, is the PERSTEMPO policy even followed?

Good question. I would say it gets trumped with operational necessity and a lack of healthy people.
 
Understanding that sea time/field time is supposed to be tracked for PERSTEMPO management, is this still done? If so, is the PERSTEMPO policy even followed?
Sea time is in Monitor Mass but they don't do anything with it.

With pier head jumping, you can rack up a lot of sea time in 4-6 week increments, and some people are gone 9-10 months in 12 with nothing more than a few days of short. Not sure if it's changed recently, but MFRC in Halifax was pretty notorious for having lopsided support for families of deployed members, but you were mostly SOL if it was just regular sailing.

Weirdly enough we have a retention problem.
 
Sea time is in Monitor Mass but they don't do anything with it.

With pier head jumping, you can rack up a lot of sea time in 4-6 week increments, and some people are gone 9-10 months in 12 with nothing more than a few days of short. Not sure if it's changed recently, but MFRC in Halifax was pretty notorious for having lopsided support for families of deployed members, but you were mostly SOL if it was just regular sailing.

Weirdly enough we have a retention problem.

what she said yes GIF by TipsyElves.com
 
So it's not a leave issue, it's a personnel management issue.

Granting more leave would not address the shortages driving the jump from ship to ship to ship but would rather be one more "use it or lose it, you lost it" dissatisfier.

Reduce tempo, up attraction, recruiting and training would seem to be the way out
 
So it's not a leave issue, it's a personnel management issue.

Granting more leave would not address the shortages driving the jump from ship to ship to ship but would rather be one more "use it or lose it, you lost it" dissatisfier.

Reduce tempo, up attraction, recruiting and training would seem to be the way out

Leave is part of it by way of robust and accurate compensation package, which will up your recruitment and retention.
 
Spending 180+ days away from home, getting 2-3 weeks off (Don't forget duty watches) and then going back out the door for more time than that without even the financial compensation at that point... I get it. Why would a young person keep doing this ? Lots of job opportunity out there.

They most definitely wouldn't want to keep doing it, it's why manning is at such horrid levels. The obvious fix is more people to solve rotational issues, but that's not something you or I can control. I've seen my fair share of releases when I was in Cold Lake, the only influence I had as a supervisor was to make work life better for those I directly worked with. Fixing PLD, housing, isolation was out of my control. Having people working for you that were completely miserable and negative all the time didn't help anyone. In the end they are in charge of their careers and I always supported their choice to leave to other things, they don't owe anything to anyone, everyone is free to better their lives and make their own choices. I'm not advocating "don't like it leave", but at my level there was only so much I can do. Staying in for the institution is not helping anyone.
 
So it's not a leave issue, it's a personnel management issue.

Granting more leave would not address the shortages driving the jump from ship to ship to ship but would rather be one more "use it or lose it, you lost it" dissatisfier.

Reduce tempo, up attraction, recruiting and training would seem to be the way out
I think it's all driven by an overly ambitious operational schedule; we really are past the point where we have enough people to safely sail all our ships, and we don't allow enough time to fix things between time at sea. We really need to tie up a few ships, and still mind blowing we didn't have any kind of OP pause with COVID (especially with all the additional impacts that had on getting things fixed and having people available).

We really need to start planning on doing less with less (especially during peace time) so we can actually respond to emergencies without breaking people more. Leave policies are there that could be used, but the reality is that we can't actually take advantage of it and meet the operational demand, and that's even with cutting duty watches down to unsafe levels (for the actual state of the ship).

If we changed from a 'prove it's unsafe' to 'prove it's safe' mentality that would help, as a number of ships wouldn't leave the wall for a while.
 
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