In my previous blog on lessons Leaders can learn from airline crashes I ended with the role God/Captain plays in crashes. From an early age we learn overtly or covertly that Leaders (whoever is in charge) are final arbiter’s especially in high stress situations that require quick decision making. The natural inclination is to shut up and defer to the top.
Lesson five. Research found that too many crashes occurred due to the communication and decision-making process in the plane. If God and Captain were interchangeable, why wouldn’t everyone defer to the Captain to solve the problem when it occurred? Crews wouldn’t even think of questioning their judgement or providing a different opinion about the situation. Flight crews throughout the company ‘learned’ quickly which Captains were receptive to open communication.
How were cultural norms a contributor to crashes? When someone disagrees with you or puts forward alternative suggestions, they are breaking a cultural norm they learned over their entire life from parents, teachers, other bosses, etc. ‘speaking up to a person in positional power is dangerous.’ Good decision making requires multiple inputs and broad perspectives. As a Leader how do you know you are receiving real thinking and input from others? How often does your ‘crew’ look to you for solving the big problems? What are the cultural norms in your organization that reinforces bad communication and decision making?
As the Leader of your organization how frequently have you asked yourself if your organization looks at you and ‘managers’ the same way. If there is a critical problem who leads in solving the problem, how are they ‘sanctioned’, how comfortable are people in giving their opinion or questioning yours? When you personally give decision making authority to someone else what are they thinking? Do you support decisions made by others that you don’t agree with?
This was the biggest hurdle airline crews had to get over, Captain as God. Retirement of ‘older’ Captains helped along with CRM training. Interesting, as the ‘changes in the cockpit’ started to become standard procedure most Captains felt ‘relived’ of the burden to ‘do everything.’
There is another lesson on decision making that I have observed Leaders getting themselves and their team into trouble when the Leader is trying to build teamwork. I frequently see Leaders and their team discuss a situation that needs a decision. The Leader is usually very overt about how they want ‘everyone’s’ input because a decision has to be made on the issue under discussion.
What they forget to clarify with their team is how the decision will be made. Will it be one individual (and who is that individual), majority, or consensus of the team (and few people still don’t understand what consensus decision making is). The team or certain individuals may think they have decision-making authority and then are upset when the Leader makes the final decision.
Lesson six. Don’t forget the important stuff. In a high stress environment sometimes the most important stuff is not just the immediate problem. Early on trainers realized when a Captain retained control over everything or clarified everyone’s role a fundamental error occurred, no one took responsibility to fly the plane. Everyone was so focused on the problem they forgot the most important thing. The outcome of this learning became training rule number one; “someone has to fly the airplane”. Captains were taught that the first thing to do when a problem occurred was to assign flying the plane to someone and if the Captain retained control of the plane that meant everyone else had the power and authority to solve the problem. Captains had to train themselves to stay out of the conversation, tough assignment.
The quickest and most effective way to change undesired behaviors in the cockpit was through the Captain’s language and behavior. The ‘older captains’ had to relearn how to manage the cockpit and people in general. Through feedback they found that even when the crew was not in the cockpit the Captain’s behavior either reinforced old norms or the new desired behaviors. With women becoming part of the crew and Captains the cultural norms regarding females had to be addressed.
Lesson seven, the unintended consequences of technology. As technology in airplanes became more sophisticated planes could literally takeoff and land without the crew interceding, which is similar to what is moving into our ‘self-driving’ personal vehicles. The problem that surfaced in the air was a degrading of ‘flying skills’. An emergency situation requires the crew to fly the plane. The more the crew allowed the plane to fly itself the quicker their flying skills diminished. Solution, crews were required to complete so many ‘hands on’ takeoffs and landings over a period of time to keep their edge.
In your organization how has technology diminished certain skills? The reliance on texting and email has diminished peoples in-personal skills amongst other negative outcomes. As another example in a conversation, I had with the President of a process manufacturing plant, he told me, “machines technology goes only so far, the fine turning is the operator”.
Lesson seven. Training by and large is not an immediate solution for most things. Training is an intellectual exercise with little to no follow-up by students (employees) who are there for many different reasons. Only correct application of new skills over time is a solution. Don’t fall into the training as a solution trap. In the CRM training room crews listened too and discussed critical situations and then proceeded to make similar or the same mistakes they had heard in the simulator. How much money does your organization spend on training? Wonder why it doesn’t get the desired results? Do you know what the desired results are? Who’s evaluating your training programs? Are you holding people accountable for measurable training outcomes?
In the simulator I was always amazed at how the emotional intensity and focus of the cockpit increased the minute they stepped into the cockpit. When the crew was challenged with a problem you could ‘feel’ and see it increase. However, I never heard anyone ever say, “we just went through this situation in the meeting”. Think about it, learning never takes the first time and under stress people revert very quickly to old habits. In CRM they always ‘debriefed’ crews afterwards and had regularly scheduled check rides. If ‘problems’ surfaced on the flight line smart people dealt with them immediately.