It’s no great comfort for the flying public that air traffic controllers have been nodding off on the job and pilots have been forced to land unassisted. As scary as that may be, personally, I don’t blame the controllers. They were set up for failure.

Many of these controllers work schedules that read something like this: work an 8-hour shift, rest for 8 hours; work an 8-hour shift and rest for 8 hours. Many work repeated back-to-back midnight shifts, during which most of them are flying solo.

To quote Charlie Sheen, “DUH!” They’re all falling asleep at the switch because they’re all sleep-deprived!

The system is obviously flawed and therefore, it has failed the controllers – and us. Where are the leaders here? I know convenience store managers who do a much better job of scheduling their clerks than this, and these clerks (typically) are not responsible for the lives of hundreds or thousands of people in one shift.

Are you scrutinizing your procedures and systems to make sure that you are setting people up for success rather than failure? 

A while back, I had a client call me requesting a “teambuilding training program”. In an effort to conduct a little informal needs analysis I asked him what was going on – what prompted his request. (Since I’ve worked with this company in the past, I have a pretty good idea of their leadership structure.) He explained that they wanted to provide the teamwork training to their sales people. He further elaborated that these sales people are set up into two divisions and are essentially competing against each other for customers. 

Wait a minute. Back up! You want to provide teamwork training, presumably to help them to work together better as a team, while they are expected to compete against each other? Sounds almost like an oxymoron to me.

No amount of teambuilding, training  or rah-rah-rah inspirational/motivational pep talks will get these people to function as a team when they are required to compete against each other for their livelihood. That system is inherently flawed.

Policies, procedures, systems, processes all have to be established to set your people up for success. Do you periodically re-evaluate and re-assess yours to make sure that they still make sense?

Duh!

Action Time! What will you:

• start doing,
• stop doing, or
• continue doing or do differently

to make sure that you’re setting your people up for success rather than failure?.

Use the comment box below to share your action plan and experiences with us!