So you’ve got strategic and near-term operating plans for your business aviation organization, and your team is diligently working on them.
Things are somewhat better, but the organizational results aren’t quite there. You get the feeling that you should screw a turbocharger on the team somewhere, but you can’t figure out how.
If this sounds like your flight department, fear not. The use of self-assessment tools can take a marginally performing organization and place it into overdrive.
What is a Self-Assessment Tool?
Self-assessment tools help increase the performance of your aviation organization. They do so in many ways, but perhaps the most powerful is to align the passions and interests of your team with the goals and objectives of the organization.
Not taking the time to explore these alignments is like expecting a surgeon to be a great poet or a pilot to be a master violinist. Some may achieve this, but typically one size does not fit all.
We’re all different. To create a high-performing business aviation organization, you need to understand the rich differences among the team members that make up the mosaic of your flight department.
Then, you must leverage the power of those differences and focus them on the goals and objectives you have established. Once you do this, step back, get out of the way and watch the performance of your organization soar.
Self-Assessments: The Next Frontier in Organizational Performance
There are three primary things that self-assessment tools do to increase the performance of your business aviation organization:
- Clarify Passions and Interests—Did you ever wonder why you like doing some things more than others? Have you noticed that when you’re doing things you like to do, you seem to have boundless energy? And when you’re doing things you don’t like to do, it’s a complete struggle?
This is due to the alignment of the activity at hand (or not) with your passions and interests. Self-assessment tools help you and your team members identify or reaffirm these interest areas.
The objective is to involve your team members in the department’s goals and objectives in areas where they’re interested, ideally as part of their Individual Development Plan. When you do so, they’re totally ‘turned on.’ You’ll often have to chase them out of the office on Friday afternoons.
- Illuminate Differences in Style—Each of us ‘shows up’ in a certain way every day we walk through the doors of the flight operation.
Have you ever noticed that some of your aviation team members get along famously while others are like oil and water? It could very well be that a person’s interpersonal style is the culprit.
This is a drain on productivity and organizational performance. Helping team members understand how they ‘show up’ can help them improve their interpersonal relationships—and invest the energy spent on interpersonal difficulties instead of the business objectives at hand.
- Understand Needs—Just like you have a certain style in which you show up every day, you also have a certain set of needs in the way you want the people around you to interact with you.
If these needs are not met, they cause you to go into stress. But without a clear understanding of those needs, you have no clue where the stress is coming from and how to deal with it.
Self-assessment tools help you and your team members understand the causes of interpersonal stress, build range and mitigate them.
People -The ‘Nucleus’ of the Organizational Atom
When working with aviation organizations, we’re often told that the team has ‘had this training,’ or ‘gone through that team building exercise.’ When we investigate, we often find that the experience has only dealt with the systems or structure that surrounds the organization (the outer shells of the atom) and has not, in any effective way, touched the people within the organization (the nucleus of the atom).
The result rarely has any lasting impact.
To get to the nucleus of the organization, you have to work at the level of the individual, not simply the systems that surround them. You have to help your people understand how their interests, styles and their needs impact the performance of the organization and their interpersonal relationships.
The objective is not to change anyone, but to provide insight at the individual and organizational levels to understand how these vitally important components of behavior can impact the overall performance of the team.
The objective is to build individual and organizational success strategies. It’s territory rarely explored today and truly the next frontier in organizational performance.
In the next series of blog posts, we’ll explore how successful aviation organizations have taken these concepts and put them in action—with unbelievable results.