Failure is no Option

Unwanted events such as incidents or accidents give managers the opportunity to further develop the safety culture in the company. How they deal with them is crucial to building and maintaining trust. Depending on the image of 'leadership' they carry within themselves, they will succeed or fail in this.

Trust is the basic building block of any safety culture. Building and maintaining it in the organization is a matter of leadership. What sounds so casual turns out to be a special challenge for the management team. It requires consistent self-leadership especially when it comes to overcoming the irrationality given to us by nature. The hindsight-…

For a safety culture worthy of its name, managers must overcome the error paradigm. They are challenged to ensure psychological safety within their sphere of influence, and the only way to do that is to build trust. To achieve this, they must confront irrationality, which is buried in the very nature of human beings.

Our well-balanced and perfected approaches to preventing misconduct and damage are increasingly proving to be fragile and ineffective. We meticulously create sets of rules and compliance structures, only to find that they do not prevent trouble. A critical examination of our approach is called for.

Congratulations to Simon Billeter, Jürg Niemeyer and Raphael Jenni! The three experienced First Officers of the Swiss Air Force and Rega / Swiss Air-Rescue have successfully completed a three-day joint-leadership course with me. I wish you all the best, much success and satisfaction in your new, demanding role in the cockpit of the Bombardier…