THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 11, 1995 TAG: 9511110532
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
A plan to essentially shut down the Navy for a day so that sailors, airmen and their leaders can focus on sexual harassment and other disciplinary problems will have little impact unless the service makes such reviews a part of its culture, management experts said Friday.
And even then, warned Alexander Horniman, a professor of business management at the University of Virginia, an organization the size of the Navy may need up to 10 years to stop the sexual misconduct that has bedeviled it in the 1990s.
The Navy is ``a huge organization, with a culture that's antithetical to change,'' Horniman observed; he said that makes rooting out a problem as deeply ingrained as sexual harassment doubly challenging.
Adm. Mike Boorda, the Navy's chief of naval operations, announced the stand down on Thursday, just hours after The Washington Post published a story detailing allegations that a Navy chief petty officer groped a female sailor during a flight from Norfolk to the West Coast last month. Some 20 other Navy personnel on the plane were said to have failed to intercede to stop the incident.
The stand down, which Boorda said he wants completed within a month, is expected to include lectures and seminars on: sexual harassment; other discipline problems; alcohol and drug abuse; and the Navy's expectation that its people will look out for one another.
Since the Tailhook scandal of 1991, in which drunken naval aviators assaulted Navy and civilian women, the service has instituted classes and enforced tough new rules to stop harassment. Horniman said it must maintain and even increase those efforts to really solve the problem.
Horniman, who has done some consulting for the Navy on other subjects, said that when organizations pause for the kind of reflective day Boorda has ordered, they tend to think they've done all they need to do about a particular problem.
``People say `We've done it once, we've done it,' '' he observed.
Frederick Steier, an associate professor of engineering management at Old Dominion University, said that unless the messages imparted during the stand down are reinforced regularly, people in far-flung units will see them as merely part of a strategy to rebuild the service's public image.
Chip Stilwell, a former Navy fighter pilot who now works as a business consultant in Virginia Beach, agreed: ``We're kind of in one of those transitional periods where the message is going to have to be sent, the message is going to have to be sent, the message is going to have to be sent .
Stilwell praised Boorda and the commitment he demonstrated in announcing the stand down. ``He's trying to send a signal, and the stand down is very effective for that,'' Stilwell said.
But Stilwell added that having attacked harassment on several fronts in the four years since Tailhook, Boorda and other Navy leaders need to be asking themselves and outside experts whether there are different approaches to the problem, as yet untested in the Navy.
Stilwell likened the commitment the Navy must make to solving harassment problems to the one it has made to instituting the ``total quality leadership'' program of the late W. Edwards Deming.
He recalled that Adm. Frank Kelso, Boorda's predecessor, sought Deming's counsel near the outset of that effort and asked how long the Navy might need to ingrain the ``total quality'' philosophy into its culture. Deming suggested that 50 years would be about right.
KEYWORDS: NAVY
by CNB