San Diego Navy Recruiting Case Study

Navy Recruiting District San Diego Values and Daily Negotiations
Introduction
The United States Navy Recruiting Command (NRC) consists of 26 Navy Recruiting Districts (NRDs) spread out throughout the Continental United States. One of the largest Recruiting Districts is NRD San Diego, which consists of 55 recruiting stations spread out throughout San Diego, Riverside, Orange County, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Yuma Arizona. The obvious mission is to recruit men and women to join the United States Navy. According to NRC webpage (2015), their mission is to “recruit the best men and women for America's Navy to accomplish today's missions and meet tomorrow's challenges” (pr. 1), Obviously, NRD San Diego shares the same mission, but there are different set of unique challenges, which trickle up from each recruiting station. Having completed a three year recruiting tour assigned to one of the local San Diego area

recruiting stations has led to some interesting revelations. NRD San Diego has a constant struggle with aligning its values to the daily negotiations due to the constant change.
The Need to Adjust Quickly
NRD San Diego is a fluid organization by its nature of having to adjust to both internal and external pressures. Internal pressures come from within the organization’s constantly readjusting its future needs for specific types of people. Yes, there are monthly quotas for each NRD, but there are also other quotas for specific types of people. For example, there are quotas for highly intelligent people to operate nuclear reactors and super athletic people to join the Special Forces. At times, there are also quotas for specific gender and racial types, depending on the Navy’s need to maintain diversity. External pressures come from such factors as the nation’s economy, war status, and the demographics of the recruiting areas. Needless to say, the individual recruiter’s mission is ever changing and unpredictable. According to Kolb and Williams (2010), this is where the “shadow negotiations” would typically occur because the recruiters have to negotiate how they are going to negotiate. People generally have different values that are influenced by their unique situations, which require a different set of negation tactics. Ultimately, recruiters at NRD San Diego are required to quickly adjust or change their negotiation tactics if they want to be successful.
Conflicting Goals
NRD recruiters were often given conflicting goals, which did not align with the mission of recruiting highly qualified men and women. Recruiters were at times put in tough situations of having to choose to either help an applicant or help the NRD with its goals. There were instances when applicants really wanted to join and had completed all the pre-accession process, but were not allowed to join because the NRD wanted a particular type of applicant. To make things worse, sometimes recruiters in this situation were tasked with having to negotiate with applicants who did not meet all requirements or were simply not interested in joining, but they fit the education, age, racial, or gender. This led to recruiters vulnerable and in bad bargaining positions. Kolb and Williams (2010), suggest that getting into a good position requires either using incentives or exerting pressure. None of this matters if one party senses or assumes they have more value than the other. The challenging thing about NRD San Diego was not finding people – it was finding “the right” applicant at the right time.
Maintaining Integrity
Maintaining integrity was a daily struggle due not only to the conflicting goals, but also due to the competitive culture in NRD San Diego.

The rewards and punishment system were clearly known, but yet some people simply took risks to win. Unfortunately, there are people who wanted to “win” at all costs and the NRD’s “win/lose” system enabled some bad behavior. As per LED 430 negotiation group exercise, the win/lose scenarios do not leave much room compromise. Individual accomplishments were prioritized over the team concept, which typically resulted in a “me versus you” instead of a “real team” or even a “work group” atmosphere. It is hard to do the right thing when there is no room for compromise and it is only about winning or losing. Kolb and Williams (201) suggest that sometimes it is better to leave things as they are than to get a worse deal. Although that might be true for most cases, but in recruiting this is strictly as loss. Being put in this type of environment was an eye opening experience due to the fact that it tested my

integrity.
Conclusion
Although NRD San Diego’s mission sounds good in writing – it was not always followed; on the contrary, sometimes it was expected to deviate from it. From a personal perspective this was due to poor planning. According to Kolb and Williams (2003), complicated negotiations require strategic planning and should be executed through a process, which begins with establishing credibility. The biggest lesson learned is that organizations and individuals should fully embrace their values or they will lose credibility when negotiating.