'Service before self' part of enlisted review process

  • Published
  • By Chief Master Sgt. Brian Eastman
  • 60th Operations Group superintendent
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  On June 27,1923, the first successful aerial refueling took place.

A DH-4B flown by Lieutenants Virgil Hine and Frank Seifert passed gasoline through a hose to another DH-4B flying beneath it, flown by Lieutenants Lowell Smith and John Richte.

Our Air Force is continuously changing through necessity and innovation. After years of research and development, combined with trial and error, most modern aircraft in our fleet are capable of in-flight refueling. Those advancements all started with a brilliant idea and a simple question: "What if we could?"

Anyone who was involved in the stratification process for the Enlisted Retention Recommendation Forms, in preparation for the Enlisted Retention Boards, will tell you how difficult that process has been. As leaders in today's Air Force, we must reap what has been sown over the last 20 years.

The perception that we are all firewall fives unless we screw up has made it impossible to determine who our best and brightest are, who among us is average and who is slightly below average. We have justified our ratings by instilling the mentality "I don't want to hurt my Airman's career with a markdown."

Consequently, we're not necessarily hurting our Airman, but our Airmen as a whole. On paper, superstar Airmen who are truly among the best appear the same as the clock-watching Airmen who simply come to work, do the absolute minimum and then go home. The ERBs will do their best to determine the top Airmen to retain. However, the process could have been made simpler and more transparent if we, as supervisors, were honest with our ratings in the past.

So who will ultimately pay the price? It's tragic, but true: In the end, some Airmen who are truly among the finest may be told that their services are no longer needed. Those are decisions that should have been made at the lowest level, where an Airman's performance is first-hand information, not at a level where an Airman's worth is the sum of a stack of paperwork.

One of our core values, "service before self," means we have to be willing to make tough decisions, even when they're difficult or unpopular. We must have courage, we must display integrity, we must be honest with our subordinates and we must rate them accordingly. I truly believe that we all have at least one area of our performance where there is some room for improvement and those areas need to be addressed at the base level for all of our Airmen to truly do their greatest work.

What if we could honestly rate Airmen without severing their promotion opportunities in the future?

Now is the time for innovation and change. So how do we start? The first step is by providing honest, thorough and constructive feedback.

On July 1, the Air Force will implement a new tool to assist us, the Airman Comprehensive Assessment Worksheets. These are designed to help assess performance, mission capabilities and deployment readiness, as well as to mentor subordinates for increased leadership.

Will these singlehandedly solve the problem of overinflated performance ratings? No, but they are only the first step in a series of changes in the right direction. It will take strong leadership and integrity at all levels to set the tone for the future. Hopefully, supervisors will be willing to walk the walk and stand by our core values in order to truly put "service before self" to both achieve and reward the best work we possibly can.