The Little Red Hen and Teamwork

May 16, 2016
When we miss our chance to participate fully in the customer experience, we are "robbed" of the opportunity of gaining satisfaction in a job well done.

Traditional cultural lessons ring true today. What could the story of "The Little Red Hen" possibly have to do with aviation? We all know hens don't fly! Read on and it will become clear..... 

At the farm, the Little Red Hen is busy with growing, harvesting, and milling the wheat to bake some bread. Along the way, she runs across many farm "friends" that she relies on for help. But according to the story, they are all too busy and are not able to help her achieve the goal. However, once the beautiful bread is done baking and ready to eat, she finds many friends back at her door waiting to reap the benefits of her work!

ServiceElements has worked with thousands of B&GA professionals in many organizations throughout the industry - FBOs, charter management organizations, OEMs, MROs, flight departments, etc. No matter what type of organization we work with, the biggest challenge across the board (at least 90 percent of the time) is the internal customer culture (a fancy term for teamwork).

Whether the challenges come from "silos" (lack of communication/teamwork between departments or job functions) or "tunnel vision" (lack of empathy/vision for what others have to do), ServiceElements' facilitators find that most organizations struggle with the challenges of recognizing and being vigilant with their internal customer service (teamwork).

In our ORM (organizational resource management) programs, we discuss how none of us can do everything required from our jobs on our own every single day. All of us rely on our teammates at work to help us deliver the best service we possibly can deliver. We typically spend more time with coworkers than family members. So, conflicts and disagreements are expected. But the key is identifying out how to turn these conflicts and disagreements into opportunities to build strong teams (and hopefully infrequent) incidents rather than relationship issues. In addition, finding out how to be focused on our internal customers just as we are with our external customers.

Sometimes, internal customers can be like the Hen looking to coworkers for assistance. Other times, aviation professionals can be so focused on their own responsibilities and goals that they miss the opportunity to provide service to team members to help achieve the ultimate goal for the organization ... service, safe service. There have probably been times in each of our aviation careers where we attempted to participate in the success of another's work. But there have also inevitably been times when we were not an engaged part of our team and only focused on our own workload and not participating in the overall effort it takes to deliver on a business aircraft service goal.

Quite often, we don't even realize the effects of this unintended culture. Our lack of engaging in our "link in the chain" will eventually surface further down the road. That could mean disastrous results from our lack of awareness of internal customer needs because successful internal service has a direct correlation with successful external service. Today, more and more reports are focusing on drama as the key reason for loss of productivity. And drama is usually the result of an organizational culture which does not promote a service-minded, team-oriented entity. We are all familiar with this; we see and hear it every day. The occasions when coworkers point at others not doing enough. Or how so and so gets away with things and others don’t and so on and so forth. We live in an era that people issues are the most predominant in our work.

That is why organizations like Maintenance Managers Conference (NBAA MMC, May 2 through May 5) are focusing on the people-oriented aspects of our industry. As an industry, we do have the obligation to be as technically proficient as we can be. This is a reality for our industry. However, more and more we are seeing the challenges in people interactions. It could be a simple situation like line maintenance becoming confused by simple inspection interpretation of how to document a job. Or a pilot simply not finding time to explain a squawk or even an eager to please DOM doesn’t hear his team about a maintenance issue in favor of looking good in front of the aircraft owner/user/customer. Or the shifts not passing on the important information to the next shift. These are all causes for drama which ultimately result in lack of confidence and job loss.  

When we miss our chance to participate fully in the customer experience, we are "robbed" of the opportunity of gaining satisfaction in a job well done.  This may affect coworkers' self-esteem, create drama, and possibly generate negative feelings within the workforce. It can also minimize the overall customer experience. Ultimately, the sooner we recognize that teamwork is a participatory sport, the sooner we control our own careers and destiny.

For more information about organizational cultures, or if you would like to schedule a service culture assessment, please contact us at ServiceElements, www.serviceelements.com.