“Are you good at your job?” “What makes you good at what you do?”
Presenting a briefing with the title “Are we good at what we do?,” I recently asked these questions to a group of around twenty-five professional aircrew.
Of course almost all of us think we are good at what we do. But how often do we pause to question our beliefs and ask ourselves why?
I followed up these questions with a simple task directed at each individual: Using one word if possible, describe what single factor, above anything else, you think most determines why you’re good at your job?
When we collected and reviewed the answers of the group the results were resounding: almost everybody had come up with traits which described what they considered to be important elements of their character or mentality.
A sample of the answers are as follows. Look carefully at the kinds of behaviours they describe.
- Willingness to learn
- Openess
- Committed
- Level-headed
- Patient
- Critical of myself
- Dynamic thinker
- Team player
- Motivated
- Attention to detail
They hadn’t listed their high level of skill. They hadn’t mentioned an in depth knowledge of systems, manuals, protocols or procedures. They referred to attitudes.
In aviation we talk a lot about competency and competencies. A competency is described by ICAO simply as the ability to apply a set of behaviours, including knowledge, skills, and attitudes, to carry out a task or activity.
Education in general, and aviation training more specifically, spends an awful lot of time, expense and effort developing the first two of this trio of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Even in advanced and recurrent training the balance of time and resource is heavily loaded in favour of retaining and developing knowledge and skills. Pilots, for example, unfailingly practice specific flying manoeuvres and profiles, and drill malfunction handling. And this is undoubtedly important stuff.
However, when asked, people almost universally highlight attitudes to be what really defines their competency in almost any role. Look back and consider your professional education and training. What fraction of time, effort, or resource have you spent on consciously and deliberately developing attitudes? What fraction has your employer spent on developing this in you? Strangely, given the value we attribute it, most of us accept this element of our professional development to be a product of experience; a side dish, that is picked up along the way.
ICAO defines the non-technical behavioural competencies for aircrew as the ‘big five’ of:
- Problem-solving and decision-making
- Communication
- Teamwork and leadership
- Workload management
- Situation awareness
In aviation we might be familiar working with those categories from flight training, briefing- debriefing, and CRM training. But even those who work with them more frequently are unlikely to apply them much to their work environment beyond the flight line or formal training scenarios. CRM training is one forum in which we train and develop attitudes, but it is often under-valued, devalued, and lacking credibility. Consequently it is of poor quality in this respect.
Consider the person you most admire professionally and why. It is unusual that your admiration for them as a role model is based first and foremost on technical skill or depth of knowledge. Conversely, it is possible to acknowledge a colleague’s deep technical know-how or remarkable skill at a task without them earning your professional respect at all. This simple observation demonstrates to us the deeply human element of how we work in any environment, or at any task.
When was the last time you really stopped to think about how you personally employ attitudes in the pursuit of your professional competency? When you’re judged by those around you – more than what you know, or the skills you show – overwhelming evidence suggests that the focus of those doing the judging will be on the personal characteristics you display in carrying out that role rather than depth of your knowledge or the quality of your skills.
KSA= Knowledge-Skills-Attitudes.
ASK = Attitudes-Skills-Knowledge.
Maybe it’s time to ASK: Is it time to put attitudes first?
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