Life and Leadership Skills in Support of the Navy’s Culture of Excellence: Summary Findings

The Navy has been developing and implementing a Culture of Excellence (COE) to improve the readiness and capability of individual Sailors and, by extension, the Navy as a whole. The goal is to move from a culture of compliance to a culture that ensures a safer and more combat-effective force that prioritizes personnel safety, readiness, and training [1-3]. This project supports N17’s COE by identifying the following:

• Key leadership and life skills in Sailors’ careers
• Important touchpoints in the behavior learning continuum (BLC) from recruitment to transition when these skills should be acquired and reinforced
• The appropriate sequence, frequency, and content for the identified skills at each touchpoint This summary document shares key findings and tables. For more detail on any of these concepts, please refer to the full study report [4].

Life and leadership skills

To identify the key life and leadership skills, we reviewed literature on the essential nontechnical skills people need to be productive, resilient, healthy contributing members of society and the organizations they serve. The literature uses various terms for these skills, including soft skills, character skills, social and emotional skills, and 21st Century skills. In terms of the Navy’s Primary Prevention Logic Model [5], these skills (DBs).