Culture is a huge piece of the puzzle here. One of the reasons I stay in SELRES land is to keep being around aviators. And I don’t want to lose being able to give people funny callsigns, bust on them, and have fun as a ready room. Naval Aviation at its best rocks to be a part of. But I don’t think that, as a community, we always do as good as we could at screening out folks who weaponize the culture, whether on purpose or accidentally. There's people that use "we're aviators; we say it how it is" as an excuse to just be shit leaders or assholes in general.The big thing I'll say on this is that it takes more than just the CO's buy in. If we let it get to the CO level it's too far. You need DH buy in, you need Sr JOPA buy in. You need guys who won't tell their low time -2 when they get a terrible call as they're walking to flight, "Suck it up and compartmentalize, you'll have to do it while deployed."
I think we have a bias as a Navy for assuming that great players will make good coaches. But I’m not sure we systematically do enough to make sure that our rockstars understand that succeeding in a stack-ranked system like ours can introduce certain biases in one’s thinking. Not for all or even most, but some. Off the top of my head:
- Coupling someone’s motivation to their results. I have a suspicion that some folks have a hard time with this. It’s like the thought process goes “I busted my ass and succeeded, so if you don’t, it means you didn't bust your ass, thus you don’t care. Thus, you’re a no-load, and I can crap all over you.”
- For the really, really talented, misconstruing what "average" performance really is, because they're so far above it. Said people aren't always the best at teaching stuff either, because when it doesn't come naturally, "don't suck" isn't really a strategy.
- Losing patience because I WANT THAT CHECKLIST ITEM DONE NOW! When realistically it could get done between now and like three minutes from now, so calm down. No one's necessarily behind the jet.