The painting behind President Jacob Zuma is Leonardo DaVinci’s last supper. Ironic perhaps, but what intrigues me is that leaders are always surrounded by people. This is the same in private sector as it is in public. This is the same in religion. Who makes a great leader? The people around the leader? Or does the leader make the people around him great?
Leadership is like having a pilot on an airplane. The pilot is paid not to crash the plane, the flying the plane part is a given. One of the reasons that the airline industry has such few crashes is that leadership is understood to be intrinsically about understanding failure. It is about understanding that hierarchy is littered with opportunities for failure. Human nature is such that when you are on top of the leadership pyramid you suffer from a “god” complex. You stop listening for advice and more importantly the people around you start giving you the advice you want.
The airline industry whilst very hierarchical, they learnt very early on that everyone in the cockpit should have a voice despite their rank. Many crashes in the early days of aviation happened because people were afraid to speak up to their captains when they saw problems.
The term “cockpit resource management” (later generalized to “crew resource management”) CRM was coined in 1979 by NASA psychologist John Lauber who had studied communication processes in cockpits for several years. While retaining a command hierarchy, the concept was intended to foster a less authoritarian cockpit culture, where co-pilots were encouraged to question captains if they observed them making mistakes.
According to Wikipedia; CRM is concerned with the cognitive and interpersonal skills needed to manage resources within an organized system. In this context, cognitive skills are defined as the mental processes used for gaining and maintaining situational awareness, for solving problems and for making decisions. Interpersonal skills are regarded as communications and a range of behavioral activities associated with teamwork.
The aviation industry remains one of the safest industries. In fact you have 1 in 29.4 million chances of dying from an airplane crash! That is flipping amazing when you consider how many moving parts are in a plane! So why is it so safe? One of the reason is that the industry studies its failure consistently!
In the unlikely event of a crash the industry as whole has mechanisms of not only studying the failures but also making sure that the learnings are built into future procedure. The blackbox, which is actually orange, records all the flight data including the cockpits communication. So should there be a crash they review all data and see what went wrong, and then implement changes to make sure it never happens again.
How often have you heard people in corporate say they are in leadership. Your rank does not make you a leader. Your actions do. Being a leader is about wearing your big girl panties. Big girl panties don’t have much fabric and that means you need to be able to make grown up decisions with very little information.
South Africa needs both a black box and a CRM. With any of the recent events, have we learnt anything? if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past my money is that we will just keep repeating them. The last supper is never the last, it seems.