Do you ever feel like your job could use a chiropractic adjustment? We all face various obstacles at different points in our life, and things can get out of whack in your personal life, career, goals, or habits at any given time. That’s why it’s important for us to check in and figure out how to get back on a smooth flight path.
If you’ve been in the aviation industry in a technical role, you’re probably familiar with the four forces of flight: lift, thrust, gravity and drag. These forces also correlate with forces that keep a company’s culture right-side up. We call them the four forces that balance workplace culture: respect, resources, reasons and realignment. Do you and your company have all four of these forces?
You can learn about other forces of workplace culture here: https://theaviationcollective.com/fourforces].
In this newsletter, we will focus on the last force: drag.
Equally important to all the other forces—lift or respect, thrust or resources, and weight or reasons, is the pilot’s or leader’s control of the airship’s direction. This is accomplished through inputs to drag—or in company terms, realignment.
Whether you have a strategic plan or a flight plan, unless your operation is completely autonomous, you’ll need to make adjustments. Winds or changes may blow you off course. You may need to divert due to changing conditions at your planned destination. You know, like fog or a pandemic. Something unexpected may happen, like an electrical fire, an engine failure or a passenger with a medical emergency. A regulatory shift, a disruptive competitor, the loss of a key employee or client.
Regular checkpoints, awareness, accountability and adjustments can avert disasters in our organizations, the same way they do in the air.
I don’t want to get on any sort of political soapbox here, but what if, like pilots, government leaders had to prove they could handle all sorts of different emergencies as a qualification to take the job. Before I point too many fingers…what if as leaders, or even just humans on a planet with other humans, we made regular adjustments, we realigned, to continue on the course to the destination we wanted?
Trust me, smooth landings don’t just happen. They require respect, the proper combination of resources, reasons or weight, and the proper alignment or realignment in the landing pattern. Sometimes they aren’t smooth, even when you have all those forces working together. But some people say any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.
Which one of those forces is the area where you see the most growth potential at your organization? Leave a comment or send me a message. Trust me, I hear all four answers regularly. They are all important!
You can visit https://theaviationcollective.com/fourforces to watch the full Free Aviation Workplace Culture Training.
