SUMMER 2022 / REAL-LEADERS.COM 23 LEADERSHIP Ruchira Chaudhary coaches MBA students and senior business executives at several business schools: SMU, NUS, and IMD in Singapore; The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Asia; and the London Business School. This is an excerpt from Coaching: The Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership. Copyright 2021 Ruchira Chaudhary, with permission of Penguin Random House. brings everyone on the same page. Clarity and specificity of language are a manager’s best tools. This means using clear language and avoiding phrases that could obscure your meaning. For instance, using a phrase like “a real possibility” can be interpreted as conveying a likelihood of anywhere from 20–80%, according to professors Michael Schaerer and Roderick Swaab. Similarly, while giving feedback, managers tend to sugarcoat the feedback they give to their direct reports, which only ends up increasing the gap between the perception of managers and employees on how they were performing. Consider the same mitigated language taking place in high-pressured situations such as a cockpit. Ambiguous language could potentially be fatal and needs to be avoided at all costs. They collaborated by involving their team members. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell theorizes that flights are often safer when the co-pilot is given command of the plane. This would seem contradictory given that co-pilots have far less experience than the captain, but Gladwell’s Cockpit Culture Theory seems to state otherwise. He says that if a critical situation arises, the captain will not hesitate to share their views despite the co-pilot being in charge. Whereas when the captain assumes control, the co-pilot is less comfortable expressing their opinions to a senior officer. He cites the example of Korean Air, which had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, “Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots.” No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, with the fact that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S. Gladwell says that the culturally based power distance between pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit can be a main determinant of success or failure in a flight. “Our cultural legacies determine to a large extent how we relate to one another. If we are from a culture where authority is respected above all else, we will find it harder — even when lives are at stake — to challenge what we perceive to be a higher authority.” Without the mantle of authority, the co-pilot may often resort to skirting around an emergency situation rather than directly addressing it. For example, rather than subtly hinting at the crisis with the question “Do you think we have enough fuel?”, it would be better to state it authoritatively as, “We are going to run out of fuel in 45 minutes, so we have to prepare for landing now.” Using the appropriate level of assertiveness in a crisis situation is imperative for a successful outcome. More often than not, it’s not bad piloting that causes plane crashes; it is the pilots’ inability to do all of the other things that flying a plane involves: communicating, improvising, multitasking, asking, listening. To further validate these findings, a team of academics and a practitioner — the pilot — spent six years studying flight-crew communication. Their goal was to reveal the importance of team-driven decision-making during emergencies, highlighting that teams (not leaders alone) make the difference between success and failure. The study would also identify the aviation training practices that can be best adapted for and used in the business world. They used two simulation scenarios: one involving airspeed sensor failure, the other involving an unexpected loss in cabin pressure. In both cases, the simulator crews first had to deal with the immediate emergency and then safely complete the flight with a damaged aircraft. In the first scenario, the crew members did relatively well. The authors inferred this was because the crew could simply follow checklists for standard operating procedures and were not forced to think on their feet. The second scenario was more challenging for the flight crew since there was no script or checklist to follow. The outcome depended largely on the captain’s leadership style. How the captain communicated with the crew had a major impact on crew performance. Similar to the outcome in Outliers, crews performed consistently better when the copilot was included in the decision-making process rather than when the captain took unilateral decisions and simply gave orders. Captains who asked open-ended questions like, “How do you assess the situation?”, “What options do you see?”, “What do you suggest?” came up with better solutions than captains who asked simple yes-or-no questions. The key takeaway was involving colleagues as equal decision-making partners by asking them their opinion. The authors concluded that those in positions of power need to recognize that they do not lose authority when they ask questions or admit that they do not know everything. Similarly, leaders who ask questions create teams capable of handling the complexities of any business task, whether critical or non-critical. Leaders who don the mantle of coaches, who ask powerful open-ended questions, who include others in the decision-making process, who collaborate and communicate, can navigate turbulent times much more effectively than others. n
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