Common Goal Leadership

In the FBI, there is a lot of pressure to succeed and sacrifice because of the stakes. Not only do you feel the need to prevent catastrophe in violent crime or terrorism, but also your colleagues are working very hard and you want to output at the same level they are. 

I run an aviation program and I took over as the supervisor after the past two did not have any experience with flying. As I worked on reversing some of the culture and establishing my own policy initiatives, I also addressed an up tempo in our requested work. I had an extremely competent and successful team and that led to lots of projects and missions. 

This meant we had an increase in external pressure while we were going through internal team changes.

My team is full of professionals and I trusted them to be able to manage their stress and risk. In fact, there are mechanisms in place to assess their ability to achieve the mission. But if you’ve ever done any training on Fatigue, you’ll know that when you’re tired, you don’t know you’re tired. 

So the requests for missions continued to pour in and day-after-day my crews woke up early and answered the calls. Our line of work is not able to be achieved with inclement weather (labeled wx for shorthand) but the forecast showed blue skies. My team needed a wx day but there wasn’t one on the horizon. I recognized that the pace needed to stop and so I scheduled a stand-down day.

Military Aviation regularly practices stand-downs in which all flights are cancelled. It is usually to address a safety issue. In my case, I needed to get my crews the mental rest they needed, even if they had gotten 8 hours of sleep the night before.

I understand that turning a team off or stopping production may seem counter-intuitive for an increase in productivity. And finding a “good” time to do that is next to impossible. There are clients and deadlines and margins and stakeholders. But in order to retain the level of product and safety that we were known for, that was bringing in the work, we needed to stop delivering a product for a day.

Is your team balls to the wall for the past couple weeks trying to hit a deadline? Have you noticed a shift in productivity, deliverables, or safety? Perhaps it’s time for a wx day.