Episode 32: The Leader: Part 1 - Developing Coaching Leaders in the RCAF- Scott C
Alright. We're ready for departure here at the Pilot Project Podcast, the best source for stories and advice from the pilots of the RCAF. I'm your host, Brian Morrison. With me today is major general retired and author, Scott Clancy. Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott:Thanks for having me, Brian.
Bryan:Before we start, let's go over Scott's bio. Major general retired Scott Clancy served in multiple squadrons of the Royal Canadian Air Force as a tactical helicopter pilot. He flew the twin Huey and the Griffon and qualified as an aircraft commander, maintenance test pilot, and instructor pilot. During this time, he deployed many times in Canada to assist with natural disasters and to Haiti after the 2,010 earthquake. He held many command positions, including his dream job, commanding 1 wing and its 7 squadrons.
Bryan:As a director general on the RCAF staff, his responsibilities included all personnel, operations, logistics, infrastructure, and strategic planning for the entire RCAF. His last years of service saw him as a deputy commander of the Alaskan NORAD region and finally director of operations for all NORAD in Colorado Springs. Scott retired after 37 years of service and has since served as a senior mentor on courses delivered to senior officers of the RCAF. He is a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and has been featured on CNN Morning, AC 360, CBC News, and CTV News, providing commentary on NORAD, the war in Ukraine, Defense Matters, and the war in Gaza. Scott recently published a book called developing coaching leaders, the fundamentals and techniques that make leaders extraordinary.
Bryan:Today, we will be discussing the skills of leadership as a pilot as well as Scott's book. Scott, you've been in many leadership positions in your career. What inspired you to translate that from lived experience into a book?
Scott:Yeah. Hey. That's a great question, Brian. You know, I was, obviously had lots of leadership positions throughout the military, but at the same time, I coached basketball with my kids and, you know, starting when they were young and I'd played college basketball back at CMR in the day. So, you know, as they were progressing up, I started coaching more and more bigger teams, older teams, more elite teams.
Scott:And I ended up being an assistant coach at the Royal Military College. And when I matched that coaching experience with what I'd seen leading, something came up, you know, where I was going, the best leaders that I saw in the military were coaching their teams really well. And the best coaches I saw on the basketball court, even at the university and elite levels were ones that were leading their teams well. So that's kind of what inspired the whole idea that there's a, there's a crossover here between how you coach people and then how you lead them. And the last thing is, is that, you know, my military experience, I'd be interested to know what you think about this, right?
Scott:Is that a lot of the way in which we teach leadership seemed to me trial and error. I'm going to throw you into this position. I'm going to give you these leadership responsibilities, but I'm not really giving you all the skills and tools that you need to be able to develop that leadership. So I wanted to write down what it took to actually do those things and make it more of a deliberate a deliberate approach to leading and coaching.
Bryan:Yeah. And I think we'll touch on that a little more later, but I I do agree that we've mentioned this in the show before that a lot of comes down to what mentorship you've received, especially as a pilot. There isn't a lot of formal training on leadership. And so, basically, it comes down to I don't wanna call it luck, but it's almost luck. You know?
Bryan:Did you have great mentors? Right?
Scott:Right. And that's not when you think about a military organization, you don't think, oh, they're haphazard with the way at which they develop their leaders. But the reality is unless you had a great example and someone kind of explaining and giving you those tips along the way and saying, this, not that, that makes you reflective on it. And not everybody's lucky enough to have that. And the more that we get busy, the less our leaders have the time to be able to do those things.
Scott:That's not a deliberate approach to developing leaders.
Bryan:Right. Absolutely. So Scott, can you give us a brief overview of the book and tell us some of the key themes?
Scott:The whole thing about the book is I'd seen a lot of teams. Teams, maybe not necessarily my teams, but teams I was around, you know, that were discouraged, disillusioned either with the leadership or the organization themselves. And, you know, within the care forces, I know we see a lot of this, right? A lot lack of trust, especially with senior leaders, this kind of stuff. And I saw leaders disconnected from their teams.
Scott:That doesn't mean that they weren't providing them direction. And in some ways they were micromanaging them, but you can be micromanaging a team and be disconnected from the reality of where that team is and the things that they're, that they're going through. When I looked at this, both those disconnected teams and those disconnected leaders or disillusioned teams and disconnected leaders, they're all focused on one thing and it's this binary transactions around performance. How many flying hours did you fly last year? I need you to fly this minute.
Scott:Like, it's all just binary transactions of give and take the things I need from you. And, you know, we're paying you a good salary to go ahead and get this. And then teams going, that's not what I'm about. You're not hearing me in the 1st place. Based upon that, what I wanted to do is say, Hey, listen, there's a better way to lead out there.
Scott:There's a better way to focus on the development of the people inside of your teams. So what I did was I thought that leadership was a taught skill, not an innate skill. I don't like the great man theory of here's your personality traits and you either have them or you don't because every leader and everyone has the ability to be a leader and everybody has the ability to develop those skills. Some might be more, you know, better communicators or better orators or, you know, better managers if they're more skilled at, you know, organizing things, whatever it is. But it's maximizing those skills and each team is going to need different leaders or different traits in different situations.
Scott:So I broke down the book into fundamentals and TTPs, tactics, techniques, and procedures. The fundamentals, those baseline things that you need to do to be able to lead and coach a team well. Trust, communication, you know, self awareness, these kinds of things. And then the TTPs, real practical and pragmatic tips, even checklists to walk through some things that you can do as a leader to make it easier for, okay, Hey, I can, I can apply this? Then I organize them into quick little 4 or 5 page, chapters.
Scott:Some a little bit longer, some a little bit shorter. And also that you could read something and, hey, take that tip away. And you didn't have to sit there reading a tomb of a book to be able to get through it. That's kinda what the book looks like.
Bryan:Yeah. And that's something that I appreciated when I was reading through it that it is, often in bite sized pieces. So for someone like me with ADHD, it was still doable. You know? I'm a type of person where my focus tends to wander, especially when I'm reading a practical book.
Bryan:And I found that I was able to say, okay. Like, this is doable. I can read this next chunk, and then I can sit and think about it.
Scott:Oh, my son has ADHD, and he didn't wanna read the book. So I recorded the audio book, and he listened to it. Now I thought for my son to listen to 9 hours of my voice, that would be, you know, like, even a bigger stretch. But he actually enjoyed the fact that he could sit back and listen to it and picked up a lot more of the the things from it as well.
Bryan:So you touched on this a little bit earlier, but what is the difference between coaching and leading? Obviously, there's gonna be some overlap, but what does it mean to be a coaching leader?
Scott:So that, you know, another great question because it's it was central to when I was looking at what leadership was, what coaching was, and the difference between the two. And a lot of the book was trying to find where there are overlaps. And to me, a little bit of this was providing more skills, more arrows in the quiver, if you will, to leaders and coaches to be able to react to situations and, you know, hone their skills as leaders. So leaders in my mind, I like a real simple definition. Anyone who's moving a team towards a goal.
Scott:The size of the team, hey, we could make the case to say a singular coach working with 1 individual is that moving? Is that a team? Okay. Yes or no. Interesting conversation.
Scott:But I like that simple definition because you're moving someone towards a goal, whatever that objective is. I think coaching is about developing individuals and the team towards aspirational goals, but that are focused and centered on the development of the individuals. So while the leader is maybe lighting that fire under an individual and saying, this is the, you know, momentous number of yearly flying rate hours that you have to achieve and here's where the squadron's going. Here's where it's the coach that's saying, look, what we need from you, Brian, is I need you to develop to an aircraft commander in this amount of time. I need these kind of skill sets.
Scott:These are the kind of and here's the exposures that I need to get to you so that you can develop because ultimately, I need you to replace me as that senior aircraft commander that's doing the scheduling piece that has those understandings of these things. And now you're going, so how do I get to that ace? Well, you're going to fly this many hours. You're going to do this many things. You're achieving that leader goal, but you're developing the individual to get there and that connects the individual.
Scott:And so when you ask that great question, you know, what's a coaching leader? I think a coaching leader connects an individual and the team 2 ways. 1, they connect to the individual at an emotional level. You know, for me to inspire you as a leader, I'm going to have to connect to you individually. I'm going to have to be able to know and be able to connect with you.
Scott:That's why, you know, people don't necessarily respond to leaders that are way up the food chain. It's their immediate supervisors that are making all the difference in the world. It isn't no generals. There's no CEOs that are making those big differences. It's the individual that they're working for right then that's making the difference in the lives of every single person that's out there.
Scott:So a coaching leader is going to connect with those individuals personally. The second way that they're going to connect is they're going to connect that individual to that aspirational goal, but by taking their individual development to it. So when you see that goal of either a yearly flying rate or how defending the nation flying, you know, know, when I was talking with crews that were, you know, flying up on the North Slope of Alaska in the, raptors that that I was sending out there. The answer was how we were gonna develop them to enable that mission. They wanted to be flight leads.
Scott:They wanna get out there and assume those things, but it was those developmental things that got those aspirational goals of deterring the adversary and all the rest of the stuff done. And that's what I mean by a coaching leader.
Bryan:So it sounds like it has a lot to do with the personal development of the people that are being led.
Scott:Absolutely. And I don't think that you can connect an individual if they don't see that higher purpose. Now there's a lot of times when we go and we do things with higher purpose that that lights us up with domestic operations, saving Canadian lives. You know, I was deployed in Haiti or go to Afghanistan, prepare forces to go to Bosnia or Kosovo. I've done a lot of these different things or over to Mali.
Scott:The idea though, is that those higher purposes, they can become very, very ethereal and they're going to lose their importance over time. It's only going to be a certain amount of time that you're going to say, Hey, listen, I'm going away. I've been away every single weekend leading up to this 9 month deployment. Why? Because, the defense of the nation is important.
Scott:So it's only going to take everybody so far. That's right. When we had forces that were deploying into Afghanistan, we had first officers that are arriving inside of one wing. And what we were saying was an operational training unit, a road to high readiness and a deployment equals aircraft commander. And the reason for that was is the instant that person came off of leave after their deployment, they were going to start another road to high readiness.
Scott:And I needed them to be an aircraft commander because we were hand to mouth with the crews that we're feeding through Afghanistan. So when you had that young first officer come in, they could see their development through this. It was, you were essential to, it might be, you might be 1 of 12 crews, but without you, that crew doesn't work. And on the next deployment, you're gonna be leading a section. I need this expertise from you.
Scott:So that's why it's about personal development in my mind. And I think when you think about coaching a basketball team, it's the same thing. If the kids aren't pivoting well, if they're not passing the ball well, it's their individual development that gets them to be greater than the sum total of the 5 players you just threw on the floor.
Bryan:Right. And it sounds like not only is that personal development key to the individual, but it becomes extremely important to the organization as well. Because like you said, that's what gives you those leaders in the future.
Scott:Absolutely. I used to say all the time, and Brian, you you pick up on this. If you as a leader are not spending about 20 to 25 percent of your time developing people to replace you, then you're not doing it enough. Putting them in the positions, giving them the responsibilities, empowering them to make decisions. In your stead, this is why you want to build those leaders for the next generation because your time in these organizations is fleeting.
Scott:Right? So the idea is you want to build them with the same kind of exposures that you got. The same kind of mentorship and things that you had the opportunity to advance under, you wanna give to everyone else.
Bryan:Right. That makes sense. Now we touched on this a little bit as well. But in your book, you state that leading and coaching are emotional trust relationships. What does that mean?
Scott:That's a a quote from my friend, Steve Nash.
Bryan:Okay.
Scott:Not the basketball player, but Lieutenant Colonel Steve Nash, a Royal with the RCR, he's a good buddy of mine. Steve made this quote to me and and I think it's brilliant. First thing, it's a relationship. Too often leaders think about their position, the authority that they have. And we talk about ARAs, the accountability, responsibility, and authority that you're given as a leader and how they have to be aligned.
Scott:Well, that that ends up all being about the leader as opposed to it's a relationship. By thinking about leading and coaching as relationships with all of the complexities that personal relationships have. Right? If you think about the personal or intimate relationships that you have with your significant other, same thing. So that was the first thing.
Scott:If you have a relationship with an individual, then singular events. You might have had a bad day. You might have had a little bit of an argument. They become less important than the relationship itself. So to me, you know, it's one of my phrases I like to use with a lot of leaders.
Scott:If you place the relationship that you're having with the people that are on your team above whatever that transactional stuff is, whatever the day to day stuff is, it'll change the way in which you approach things. Because you'll be more concerned about the individual in that relationship than you will about their actual performance. Because the performance is actually going to be an output of having a good relationship and understanding. The second thing is that both are centered on the concept of trust. There can't be any trust or there can't be any real relationship without trust.
Scott:And so centering that core piece of the relationship in trust, now you know that I have to be, I have to give something to this individual in order to gain that relationship. I have to trust that they're not going to break my confidence in them. And at the same time, they have to trust that if I say something, I mean it. So that bonds you together and that's what's centered to the relationship. And then it's all done at an emotional level.
Scott:We can talk about, and I like to divide out Managers or Supervisors from Leaders, right? Like it can put you in a position of authority. And we've all seen this, whether it's officers or senior NCOs or business executives and politicians that get put into positions. And they're saying the things that either govern or lead, you know, manage properly. They've they've given you the direction that you need to do the job and everything else, but they're not really leading you.
Scott:They're not coaching you along to where you're supposed to be. They're not, you know, just feels like you're going through the paces. This is where this disconnection and disillusionment comes from. At an emotional level, if you're establishing emotional trust, establishing a relationship with an individual where at that emotional level, hey, I believe this individual has a real care for me and my development, but at the same time has a care for this mission. When I think about my job in the military, there's nothing more honorable than the defense of the nation and the protection of the people in it.
Scott:So at an emotional level, if I can make them understand that that resonates with me, but I really care about the individual, then that, you know, that triad of that emotional relationship is going to come through in everything that we do. That's why I say that leadership and coaching are emotional trust relationships.
Bryan:Yeah. And it's funny. As you're explaining that, I'm thinking back to some of the best leaders I've worked for. And I would say that every one of the best leaders I worked for, I actually had a relationship with them. Like, it wasn't just, hey.
Bryan:You know, go do this. It was, hey. I really don't wanna let this person down because I care about them, and I care about the goals that they're trying to get us to work towards.
Scott:Yeah. And they took the time to develop that relationship. Right. They mentored you or they explained the whys that are behind things. They gave you the space to ask the questions that you had to ask to be able to get on with the job.
Scott:And that relationship meant that whatever happened on that day was going to be less important than the relationship that you maintained with that individual. Funny enough, afterwards, you don't nobody's going to go, hey, remember that year that we did blah, blah hours of flight? No, you're going to remember, Hey. That was a great time. We had a great team.
Scott:We worked together. Well, that's what you're gonna remember for years after.
Bryan:We've mentioned that trust is one of the main concepts of the book. You also said that you started to give people 100% of your trust so that they could only lose it by having to earn it. And that's pretty interesting because there's kinda the 2 big schools of thought on that. Right? Some people say you need to earn my trust, and some people say you've got my trust, and you can only lose it from here.
Bryan:So what did starting people out at a level of 100% trust gain you?
Scott:I think it began that relationship part that we're talking about. If you're gonna connect with an individual at a personal and emotional level, And remember that, you know, I spent the vast majority of my time, if not, you know, from the age of 18 to 55 in the military. Being a leader in an emotional way, the first thing that's going to tap someone's emotions is I trust you right now. I know you're qualified to do the job. I know you've got the skills.
Scott:I trust you. Nothing qualifying that on the back end. There's people I've heard say things like, you only have to go down from here. Like, no, no, don't qualify any of that. I I trust you.
Bryan:Okay. So I sort of misspoke there because I did mention, and you've got a 100%, and you can only lose it from here. So I like that. Don't put that caveat in.
Scott:And why would you? Why would I love you, honey. Just don't break that love.
Bryan:Like, I mean,
Scott:that's not gonna be the wedding proposal that, you know, is is a, you know, never break this bone.
Bryan:It's not gonna make a strong relationship.
Scott:But why? Why? Like, I've had people where I've said I've trusted them right at the very beginning and said, listen, you know what? I trust you at a 100%. No, you're good with this.
Scott:And they've come back and go, boss, I think I screwed this up. Okay. You know, I really don't wanna break your trust. You haven't. You didn't maliciously try to do something wrong.
Bryan:Mhmm.
Scott:You're not out there trying to undermine, backhand. No. You're trying your best. I I still trust you. K?
Scott:We're all in there, and we're just gonna up our confidence to be able to get over this. We're gonna work together on this. Man, I trust you even more because you had the guts even after all that to come and tell me. You know, that's good. And when I think about the time at which, you know, I didn't think about trust for the vast majority of my career.
Scott:Didn't mean that I didn't trust people or didn't. It's just the concept of trust wasn't something that was, you know, forefront in my mind. But I think we, we all did this anyways. Like when you're a young pilot, you don't walk into servicing and go, Hey, Sarge, walk me through your, certifications and how current you are on the engine change that you did on the aircraft on board. No, you don't.
Scott:You trust the panel set. You trust that the people there are certified to do this. And we do this across the KLM forces too. We have lots of crews that fly with like, you could be thrown into a situation where you're on a specific aircraft, but you've never flown with the people that you're about to embark upon this mission before that actual crew briefing. You don't know anything about them.
Scott:You're meeting them for the first time, but we have all these standards that are set up to do that exact same thing. Those standards are based upon trust. You have to trust the standards officers that are there. You have to trust the people that are like there's there's all these tiers of trust that you're going to build up from a leading and coaching point of view. That's why I went, hey, there's no real big leap here to trust it a 100%.
Scott:Why wouldn't I trust the people in here to do this? And what that gains you is it gains you in engagement because the first thing that comes with trust is empowerment. Once you start empowering the people on your teams, you know, and this was my idea from the very beginning, the more that you're empowering those teams, the better that they're going to want to aspire to achieve whatever goals you're setting for them.
Bryan:I like that. I wanna bring this back to practical skills for pilots who are listening. So on that theme of trust, how important is technical flying ability in growing trust amongst a crew?
Scott:That's a great point and a great question because, you know, I've thought about this a lot when I was building the chapter on trust inside the book. Charles Feldman wrote a book called The Thin Book of Trust. I like it. It's a real thin book. I'm a pilot.
Scott:You know, my lips still move when I read. I like pictures. So small books help me and his concept, he divides trust into what he calls 4 distinctions competence, care, sincerity, and reliability. Competence being an element of trust. Now there's a thing about competence here, especially in the military when the consequences of bad things happening are catastrophic, right?
Scott:Life and death. And that's military, but even military flying, it can be every day. So even though, you know, the yes, riding around in the back of an Iltis or, you know, a G Wagon for the army, it's an important thing. Aircraft operations are very specific and they can get catastrophic even in training very, very quickly. Right?
Scott:Yeah. Aviation is a life and death sport. Right. So you're always operational, even when you're training. Like, so it's a little bit of a misnomer when we compare it to the way that the army gears up for months months months and is only actually operational when they hit the ground and bullets are flying.
Scott:Our real operations are being conducted all the time. And I think that differentiates, you know, the way that the Air Force thinks about every single minute of every single day from a safety point of view a little bit differently. But what is that technical flying capability that you want to have competence in? Is that, I mean, I'll break it down for a second. Is that just the hands and feet of manipulating the aircraft?
Scott:Is it knowing the systems and all of the system outcomes and how that works? Is it the mission application or tactical application of that platform and knowing how to do that and all the tactics that go along with that? So when we say competence, what is it that we're talking about? Because at different times, you're going to need different competencies. To be clear, there's a baseline of competence that underpins trust in all military organizations.
Scott:You know, if you're not going to be rickety tick as a pilot with that aircraft, and you know, I was a helicopter pilot and tacked the aviation. Right? I knew tactics. I wanted to know tactics. I read everything about tactics.
Scott:We had everything about the aircraft. I wanted to know how best to be able to do this. But that's what I found about almost all the crews that I flew with. They were having that same kind of, and the people that didn't, the people that were, you know, kind of lackadaisical about that. You know, when we got into actual combat operations, these are not the people that you're actually trusting to do those things.
Scott:That'll only take you so far. Right? But it is still underpinned with, with competence. But what I'm going to do is kind of insert a little bit of a doubt in there. Care.
Scott:You can have an aircraft commander and he's a great aircraft commander. But I don't think he really cares about the rest of the crew. Great hands and feet, knows the machine, knows all the rest of the stuff. But he flips me off. He does how much you actually going to trust this individual?
Scott:Because when the crap hits the fan, at one point in time, he's going to care more about himself than you. And if something goes wrong, he's going to throw you under the bus. Right? Okay. What about someone who's not really sincere?
Scott:They say stuff, but they don't really mean it. Hey, listen. When we get there, we'll have ample time to have, downtime before we have to turn the aircraft around and head back because, you know, we've been on the road for almost 2 days straight, you know, nonstop flying. But then he doesn't do it. Okay.
Scott:Well, at one point in time, are you going to trust that individual and reliability that they're going to follow through on what they say? So there's a whole bunch of things that are involved in trust that have more to do than the actual competence of hands and feet. So when you break down those elements of trust, yes, you've got to be competent in a flying, especially a military flying, you know, situation. But at the same time, I think there's more to trust than just that. Now there's an accountability here.
Scott:And I think that this is important, especially for us, you know, me retired, you guys still serving, military officers and pilots, especially. You have to be accountable for the actions that you are, and that's what's going to get you that competence tick in somebody else's box. But we don't think about this very often about being accountable for the things we say and the actions that we have. The more and more that you fly in military operations, the more and more that you're responsible for more than just yourself and your aircraft and crew. The more that that competence and is going to be about being accountable for someone more than yourself, More than just, you know, your small little world.
Scott:And that's going to, it's going to change the way in which you're making decisions. So to me, good Cockpit Resource Management, you know, a clear competence skill of, you know, all aviation and military aviation specifically. Ultimately, if you're not communicating well, you have to be held accountable to the fact that you've provided barriers to communication inside of that cockpit. You gonna have to be accountable that you don't have the skills or you haven't read up on the things to make sure that you know that. You can cover for a lot of those things.
Scott:If you've got enough care to go, hey, listen, I don't know that. Tell me about this and pull that information in from somewhere else. So when I think about how important technical flying ability is, it's going to depend on where you are, 1, you know, in the chain of command. As you get further up, your technical competence is going to be become less and less important. But it's going to become less and less important.
Scott:Like when I was director of operations for NORAD, nobody really cared if I knew how to start a Gryphon. That's right. And nobody knew if I knew how to start a Raptor and I couldn't fly in them or an F18. But you really did care whether I was organizing and characterizing the defense of the continent so that when those 18s did get in the right position to make the shot, to do the right things, they weren't out of pocket doing the wrong things. Didn't have the materials.
Scott:Weren't, you know, all of the things that set someone up. And that's my technical competence was that. So I think competence is important. It's important to all layers and all levels, but it's gonna change over time.
Bryan:It's really interesting. There's a lot to think about there. And it sounds like trust involves yes. It involves that technical competence, that practical competence, especially at the, let's say, captain level for an aircraft commander. That technical competence is very important.
Bryan:But there is a lot more to it. And you'll see this with people who get into leadership positions for the first time, and they start to have those opportunities of who are they taking care of. Are they taking care of themselves first? Are they taking care of the people who they're in charge of first? And it sort of starts to separate people who are gonna be a strong leader from people who really need to work at it.
Scott:You know, I had a flight commander when I was a young captain. And he's a great guy, knew the machine, knew the tactics, knew all the rest of the stuff. And we were going to go fly together one day. He was my flight commander. And we were flying after lunch and I walked by his office and he's there eating the sandwich that his wife had made for him, doing a map study of the route in an area within the Petawawa ranges that he could have navigated with the back of his hand off of memory, didn't need to review the route.
Scott:He knew everything anyway. But he was doing it anyways because that's what the example and professionalism was and this kind of stuff. And that example, he'd take that into the cockpit and then I'd trust him. And then when he didn't know something, he'd go, I don't know about that. Scott, tell me about that.
Scott:That's really interesting. He always was curious about everything around. All I wanted to be was around this guy because I knew hanging around him. And he was creating that atmosphere inside the cockpit where we could query him, draw from his expertise. And at the same time, if we knew something new, you know, as we evolved to the Griffon and the more technical elements of electronic warfare and things like that, we were right there as a team.
Scott:And that team feeling amongst the crew, man, that's the level of competence that I want. That's, you know, that's the personification of what I think we think of as as young captains, as competence inside of a crew.
Bryan:Yeah, absolutely. And it's a classic example of leading by example. Right?
Scott:Absolutely.
Bryan:So one of the challenges of flying in the RCAF is that crews very often coming together for a flight and then separating according to their own schedules. How can an aircraft commander create a sense of trust in these circumstances?
Scott:This is really cool. I think back on my time as an aircraft commander being in situations like this, being thrown together with multiple crews around, whether it's 10 tactical air group or or or one wing, and thinking through what I might have done differently. First of all, you know, I've said from the beginning, I think that leadership and coaching is an emotional trust relationship. To have that emotional trust, to establish that relationship, you need to establish a connection. But when you're thrown together, you know, maybe immediately prior to a mission said, hey, you're crewed up with these individuals.
Scott:That can be tough. You don't have the time to develop those kinds of things. So in that situation, just remember, you still have to connect with people. Even in the smallest moment and in the smallest things, you can do very simple things that connect people to you. There, you've got that bond.
Scott:You've got that. First thing is, don't start with a crew brief. Gentlemen, crew brief. And then start walking through the weather and the mission and all the rest of the stuff. That sets a tone.
Scott:Right now, if you're going to do that, that's fine. But just realize that you're starting with, hey, the mission is the important thing here. As opposed to, hey guys, let's guys, girls, whatever it is, let's get together. I'm Scott. I want us to use my first name in the cockpit.
Scott:This is how I operate. This is what I'm about. This is my experience. This is it. Hey, okay.
Scott:Just just walk. Okay. Look, we we have to gel together as a crew. We have to rely on our standardization and this kind of stuff. I like things like this.
Scott:I like things like that. This is how I am. Okay. Good. Okay.
Scott:Any questions for me? Anything before we get started? Okay. Boom. And then then we walk in.
Scott:You've established that connection with the individuals. Establishing eye contact. Looking them in the eyes. As an aircraft commander, I would be taking time beforehand, making sure the aircraft during the pre flight, I'm out there on the line making a connection. Not because I need to see the pre flight and check up on them, but because I want to put my eyes on the individuals and make sure that they know I've got their back.
Scott:I'm going to be the AC for this mission. And there's all sorts of little things like that that I would be doing. Now standards help here. Obviously, we go through the same crew briefings. But making sure that people know, hey, listen, you got any issues, even in the most timely fashion, bring it up.
Scott:Whatever it is, there's nothing, no little piece of information that's too small. Saying those things, looking people in the eyes and making sure that you establish that connection. And if there's something that people body language or something like this that that turns you off a little, just don't be afraid to say, hey, listen, I noticed maybe even afterwards, pull someone aside. I noticed when I said that portion of my brief, you seemed a little bit antsy. What's the issue there?
Scott:And if there's something that you have to correct, hey, thank you for bringing that up. That's a great point. True gets back on or, you know, you're on the headsets. Hey, guys. Mike brought up this thing.
Scott:It's about that. That's a great point. This is what we're going to do about this. This is how we're going to approach this. Okay.
Scott:Any questions on it? By being open and positive like that, by making sure that you establish that connection, remembering that it's an emotional connection that you're going to have to establish to be able to lead people in that environment. That's gonna assist you with that trust, and it's gonna backstop that baseline competence that we have because of the standardization across the fleets.
Bryan:I really like that point about, as a leader, being willing to take in different opinions, different perspectives, or, like you said, something that needs correcting and just being open about it and kind of showing a little bit of vulnerability. I think that's really important.
Scott:So, you know, vulnerability. Brene Brown writes a lot on, vulnerability. And I think that a lot of people should be reading a lot of her stuff because I think it's important. A lot of military leaders, and I I must say a lot of pilots, believe that they can never be wrong. The whole idea of you always have to know, you always have to have an answer.
Scott:And so I think this comes from 2 places, especially within of our military piloting expertise. First thing is all through training, we're taught any decision is better than no decision. Good or bad, make a decision. Right? So that's the first thing.
Scott:Second thing is, as pilots, we keep on getting reinforced that we're great. The more that you advance, the more that you're great. Listen, to be clear, right? How many pilots does it take to change a light bulb? 1, because he holds a light bulb and the world revolves around him.
Scott:That this is a common joke. Right? That we used to and you can insert pilot, fighter pilot, you know, whatever it is, to to be able to cast the disparaging comments on whoever you want to. But the reality is that this reinforces a sense that you're omnipotent with respect to that knowledge on this and that the vulnerability that you show is only a sign of weakness. Military decisiveness ends up being seen as competing with that.
Scott:I think that's a wrong way to approach business. I made tons of mistakes. When I was a young leader, I made tons of mistakes. When I was a young pilot, I made mistakes. And, but I learned from them.
Scott:And the thing that I like about the flight safety system and our cultural approach to being open on that is the same way that I like, you know, to approach whether it's Cockpit Resource Management or even my leading. Look, I'm going to tell you what I think the best way to go is. I'm going to try and give us a vision, but we're the team that's going to move this towards and I want your inputs upfront. And if I screw something up, tell me about it. And then as a leader, owning up to that publicly.
Scott:Alright. We're back to that accountability thing. If you're gonna be accountable publicly for your errors, saying, listen, I screwed that up. That's not the thing. I you know, Mike reminded me back in that in after the crew brief that it's not this, that, there's an AIF that changed, you know, this thing and this
Bryan:For the listeners, an AIF is an aircrew information file, and it often contains new procedures that have not yet been incorporated into the manuals.
Scott:So there we are. This is the thing. Mike, thanks for that. That's really good. I screwed that up.
Scott:Okay. Team, are we back on track here? This is the way we're going. I think people will actually listen to you more and will be more willing to bring up problems because you are accountable for the things that you mess up. The hard ones become when you mess up big time.
Scott:But if you show the kind of trust and systemic trust in people where they can make mistakes, they can have errors, then then they're going to be willing to give you and bring to you their problems and issues so that you can resolve them upfront. And to me, I think you're right on right on point. And it's a sign of probably some of the best leaders that you saw as well were the ones that were willing to say, yeah. Hey. Listen.
Scott:I I probably didn't know that too well. I I messed that part up. Because they're people. They're human.
Bryan:I think that willingness also to say, I don't know or, hey. I was wrong about that. You know, we're talking a lot about trust. How can you trust somebody who never admits they're wrong or who you know made a mistake and they won't own that?
Scott:You know, I like the idea of saying I'm not gonna know everything. But there's a military culture out there that I know. When we were preparing forces for Afghanistan, I was the chief of staff of 1 Wing. I was already a Lieutenant Colonel. And I remember a number of chiefs coming to me saying, sir, you have to stop saying, hey, I don't know.
Scott:We're making this up as we go. I went, but we are. Yeah, but you can't say that, sir. I said, yeah, but everybody knows we are. Like, there's no standard maneuver manual for the Delta Model Chinook.
Scott:Why? Because we don't have any Chinooks in Canada, you guys. Like, come on. We're we're borrowing this. We're taking it.
Scott:And whatever the good ideas are out there, I want those good you have to have that. But there was such a military culture against this to say, no, you have to know. You have to make like, you know. No. No.
Scott:So I railed against this a lot. And, you know, when I, when I was in and I think it's important for leaders at all levels to show that level of accountability to themselves personally, as an example to the people that are coming behind them.
Bryan:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people will just see through it otherwise. You'll just be seen as another person living in their own reality distortion field. You know, they think that everyone's buying this. I know everything act.
Bryan:And the truth is we all know that nobody knows everything.
Scott:Absolutely. And and funny enough, the team might though. That's where you can get to the point saying, hey, you know, I might not know everything, but the team can get close. And that becomes the power. Like when I was leading these large multi dimensional organizations in Alaska and up in the RCF staff or in NORAD headquarters, I had very little of the technical competence to figure out the best way to defend a continent.
Scott:But man, oh, man, did I have a team that could get us really close. My job was literally to make sure the team was heading in the right direction and was, you know, best supported to get there.
Bryan:Now this is another thing that we've touched on, and it's a core concept of flying in the Canadian Armed Forces. A key skill that we develop for communication and coordination in the cockpit is something called crew resource management, or we commonly refer to it as CRM. How has your experience with CRM influenced some of the fundamentals of leadership and coaching from your book?
Scott:So many places. Right? And, you know, you've read the book. I mentioned it in the book a couple of places. At its basis, CRM's about being able to see the interactions within the crew environment.
Scott:Like having, you know, multiple sensors because the aircraft commander is ultimately going to decide what's going to happen with that aircraft. So you're feeding a single decision making authority, the aircraft commander. But you're going to have to be okay with getting inputs from everyone else. You know, going back to what we just talked about because the AC can't see everything and key tidbits of information can save the lives of everybody on board. Right.
Scott:And making sure that you are open to that. When I say you have to be able to see the interactions and the barriers to those interactions. Now, I knew the instant I got promoted to Major and then, you know, exponentially getting worse as you climb up the chain, when you crawl into the cockpit, Captain Bloggins, Master Corporal Bloggins in the back, Colonel Bloggins and Colonel Clancy upfront, there's already a rank barrier to communication in that cockpit. You have to know and understand that and you have to work even harder to overcome that kind of stuff to make sure that you get the interactions. So CRM's about doing that.
Scott:Bleeding's all about that too. So many times I've been in meetings where I've said something and, you know, across the room, I see the roll of the eyes. I'm going to that person right after going, why were you rolling your eyes? And they're like, I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean to.
Scott:No, no, no, no, no. Forget all that. Bob, tell me. Well, I was having that reaction because of this. Oh, goodness.
Scott:Yeah. Let's get let's get after that. Whatever happens after me acknowledging that, me, I'm not worried of whether whether it looked funny in the moment. I don't care about any of that stuff. I wanna get past all our embarrassment on this.
Scott:I wanna get to what's right, and I wanna explain it because I want you to feel empowered as part of that team. So CRM is all about that. Now there was 2 real specific tools and techniques that I used in the book and I used them in multiple places and they're communications techniques. Sometimes barriers to communication, People aren't going to want to give you the information that they have or they don't feel comfortable with it or they're just not, you know, comfortable with some of your engagements. And so I like the 2 CRM techniques of inquisition and suggestion.
Scott:And it's easy. Inquisitions is just a question. So could we have done that differently? And it's open ended questions. It's not, are you are you saying I'm wrong?
Scott:So because those are yes or no. Yes or no things and stuff like this. That's not real communication. What you want is open ended questions. Could we, you know, and then suggestion is, what if we had it done this?
Scott:What if we had it done? And I like both of those because whether it's doing visioning, whether I'm trying to engage, teams as a but as a communication skill writ large, those two elements of CRM have helped me significantly bring elements out in teams. I can remember being in Alaska in a very, very heated debrief after a very complex mission up on the North Slope. AWACS crews from the E3, the sector's there, the region staff are there, my commander's there, the fighters and the guys who flew the missions are all in there. And there's a real problem with who was directing who to do what and how and where those authorities lie and everything else.
Scott:And my, I watch my boss definitely say, okay, hold on. So are you saying that this is the wit? And asked a specific question of a specific group, which made them come a little bit out of her shell closer to where, you know, the fighter guys thought it was. But and then over here, suggesting to the fighter guys, yeah, but isn't this a way that we could 1, 2, 1, 2. And I'm going, boss, were you leading a CRM to he goes, Scotty, that's all I do all the time.
Scott:It's just throw those two things out there and pull those elements of the team together because they see just how close they actually are. And then they come to the realization so that when I'm finally making a decision or decreeing how we're going to do things in the future, all I've done is pulled this stuff out by using those 2 tools, suggestion and inquisition. So, yeah, I use a lot of the CRM techniques.
Bryan:I find that really interesting that you can use those techniques from the aircraft in leadership positions outside of the aircraft. Because one thing I think we do really well in the RCAF is that breakdown of barriers aboard an aircraft. I think, generally speaking, at least in my experience on the Aurora, you've got a large crew with a large disparity in ranks sometimes. And I would say 99% of the time, people seem very comfortable with saying, hey. This is, you know, pilot radar.
Bryan:This is what I see. This is my advice to you. You know? And that's coming from maybe a brand new private to maybe a light kernel even. So it's interesting that we can make that work there pretty easily, and then you could take those same techniques and make that work outside of the cockpit.
Bryan:It's, not something that I had thought of before, but it it seems sort of obvious in retrospect.
Scott:You know, it does. Good leaders will create that same feeling inside their inner core team that they work with all the time. People will feel like they can come to their leader with, you know, with good teams, well mentored, great example. I like to think that the cockpits where I learned to lead first. Right?
Scott:Where I saw what great leadership, agnostic of rank, agnostic of anything else, the smartest person in the cockpit could be, you know, the master Kropel at that moment in the back who's got a key piece of information that you need to be able to keep that aircraft safe. When I was on my 2nd unit, we were just taking the Griffon into the inventory. The squadron commanding officer, you know, long time Lieutenant Colonel had been a Loach pilot, right? A light observation helicopter pilot, Kiowa driver. Had no crew experience.
Scott:Had never flown a crewed aircraft. He never became an aircraft commander for the time that he was there or maybe at the very end of his command tour. But he was, nobody ever questioned his ability to lead the squadron because the way in which he led was always empowering and learning and being curious and, and getting everybody else's man, oh man, I'd follow him through fire. Right. And that's, that's that same personification.
Scott:Yeah. I love that, Abraham.
Bryan:Mhmm. Absolutely. Alright. That's gonna wrap things up for part 1 of our discussion on leadership in the RCAF with major general retired Scott Clancy. Tune in to part 2 of this discussion to hear about some of the challenges Scott faced as a leader, some of the challenges the organization faces as a whole with leadership, as well as practical advice to make pilots better leaders both in the cockpit and on the ground.
Bryan:Do you have any questions or comments about something you've heard on the show? Would you or someone you know make a great guest on the show, or do you have a great idea for an episode? You can reach out to us at the pilot project podcast atgmail.com or on all social media at atpodpilotproject. As always, we'd like to thank you for joining us this week and ask for your help with the big three That's like and follow us on social media, share with your friends, and follow and rate us 5 stars wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for now.
Bryan:Thanks for listening. Keep the blue side up. See you.
