Responsibilities

Protecting our Passengers

When you roll into work tomorrow, I invite you to just take ten minutes to look around you and consider what you are responsible for.

Let me paint a picture to try and visualise where I am going with this. Lets say you’ve been in work for maybe 15 years now. You are mid thirties, perhaps with responsibilities at home to others. At the very least, you are responsible for putting a roof over your own head! Then take a look at work itself. You’ll perhaps have done OK so far, with a couple of promotions in the bag.

Your team is a key part of the company. Hey, it might even be your company if you are the entrepreneurial type. But you’ll have a space that you are responsible for, equipment, maybe a budget. You will be playing a key part in the bottom line of that organisation. It’s a big deal. But the biggest part of the jigsaw are those ten people that rely on you.

They are your passengers.

OK – where is this leading? Well, it’s about the responsibility that goes with that, and to underline the level of it, I’m going to use an aviation analogy, and compare you with the folks that get to sit up the front. A pilot has very similar responsibilities to you. They’ve got their own personal travails just like you – roof over the head, family responsibilities. They are in a position of responsibility, and have worked hard to get there – just like you.

They manage budgets. For each flight they have to optimise routeing, load factors, and other stuff to maximise efficiency and minimise fuel consumption. They will have someone yell at them if they are consistently busting the bottom line. Sound familiar? And equipment? Well you aren’t going to get much change out of $40m for even a reasonably modest regional jet. Maybe your kit is worth significantly less than that, but it is still down to you.

But the most important bit is the people. If you are a pilot, you are responsible for getting maybe several hundred people in a tin tube from A to B. Their lives literally depend on it. Your passengers are a bit more proactive in fairness than sat watching movies and drinking over-priced prosecco. You need to pull their levers so they perform. Pilots have to do that with their aircraft, so there’s the clear comparison.

But perhaps that is where it ends.

If you are the guy driving the tin tube, then your company continually invests in you. Every few months, you’ll be back in the simulator, being checked on your currency and proficiency. Another time, the standards pilot might come and sit in your jump seat and look at how you are performing in the real world. In both cases, they’ll work with you to help you understand your performance. If there is an update, an upgrade or some other sort of change, you’ll be back at ground school learning about it and becoming proficient. This keeps you good at your job. It massively reduces the incidences of pilots screwing up, breaking the aircraft and upsetting passengers.

How does that compare with you?

If we are achieving through people, how expert are we at ‘operating’ them? All too often, people are thrust into leadership roles with little or no prior development. And even if the organisation does put that investment in place, what happens afterwards? Are they back in the sim for a check ride on a regular basis, or just left to fly around, develop bad habits, and eventually leave their passengers with no option other than to strap on a parachute and bail out?

I’m going to stick my neck out here, and take the position that leading a department of a dozen people is infinitely more complex than flying an aeroplane, albeit both roles carry an equitable amount of responsibility! A machine has a manual. It will react in a predictable way to most inputs. The instructions will also tell you what you mustn’t ever do with it too – like fly into a really windy airport. And for the stuff that might go wrong, a really crazy individual called a ‘test pilot’ has worked out a standard procedure to apply to that situation. 999 times out of 1000, you can sort the problem. Everyone gets to Magaluf. Excellent! But people aren’t like that. Push the wrong button and you can end up with that individual in the repair shop for an indeterminate amount of time. That’s if they haven’t complained about you, and you’ve ended up suspended too!  

So my question is this? How much training time are you investing in yourself to make sure your passengers get to their destination? The airlines spend such massive money on it for good reason. Some of it is of course statutory, but the main thing is that if the passengers don’t have a good experience, they will vote with their feet, and soon there won’t be an airline. Within business, the expertise with which we lead and manage our people is no less important. But are you getting the training you need? Whether it is a coach to help you develop the way you lead, or exposure to new thinking and developments in your field, its an essential part of your ability to meet your obligations to be a better boss.

So give some thought to your training and development needs. If you can, lobby your boss to make the investment. Or maybe, like some of my clients, you take your own path and seek development privately. Either way, it will pay dividends on the investment

Derek Flint Cert.Ed., MCIPR