Page 19 - Navy Journal 219

Hierarchy of Needs ...

It cannot be an officer’s individual responsibility nor is it possible for
her/him to work all by her/himself to attain the attributes for fulfilling the needs.
Rather, the Navy is to provide opportunities for her/him as the requirements arise.
The Navy is to arrange for courses in a timely manner when an individual is in
need of, or becomes eligible for, that. Likewise, the Navy will have to present an
individual with sufficient opportunities for gaining work experiences at sea and
ashore. Subsequently, an individual may not be penalised unnecessarily for being
without a qualification or job experience when she/he was not allowed any scope
for that. However, such opportunities offered by the Navy must also be availed
by the individual every time without sufficient reasons to not do so.
Officers, therefore, have a responsibility to reciprocate the Navy’s
arrangements by suitably fitting themselves in to the system. Personal problems
and preferences will always remain and at times might even be in direct
confrontation to Navy’s requirements. Therefore, extra efforts might be
necessary to offset such contradictions. It is natural to find that an officer’s
problems become increasingly more in number and larger in dimension to limit
her/his freedom of action as she/he becomes more senior. Additionally, while it
is true that ‘all work and no play make Jack a dull boy’, the opposite ‘all play and
no work make Jack a mere toy’ is also true. Any fine officer is expected to
achieve a balanced mix of:

a. Theoretical knowledge (evidenced by performance in examinations and
courses);
b. Practical fieldwork (use of theoretical knowledge in to practical
applications as demonstrated by performance at sea and ashore); and
c. Personal life (mostly out of office private life of self and members of
immediate family).
The Navy is to allow for motivation and scopes for positive competition
to allow sufficient opportunity and space for professional growth of its officers.
They are to be constantly encouraged to excel in an environment where the bar
to scale is to be raised gradually higher until that tends to reach the ‘Level of
Incompetence’ . Therefore, a viable option for the Navy is to nurture meritocracy
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instead of allowing mediocrity to prevail. Such sifting may start from an early
age, somewhere between 4-8 years of service by an officer. Because by the time

7. ‘Level of Incompetence’ (also known as ‘Peter Principle’) coined by Canadian psychologist Laurence J Peter in 1969, says
that a competent employee will continue to be promoted till she/he reaches a position for which she/he is no more competent,
and will then remain in that position because she/he is considered no more fit for further promotions – thus every position in a
given hierarchy will eventually be filled by employees who are incompetent to fulfil the job duties of their respective position
(hence the need to avoid such a stagnation).

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