By Shawn Doyle
Well, BA’s latest industrial soap opera is concluded. For now. But last week’s events aren’t the end of it. The drama the world watched played out between cabin crew and management was only one face of a many-headed Hydra that plagues the halls, hangars, and terminals of BA. And it will continue to do so unless something changes within the people and their attitudes towards one another. And that comes down to leadership.

BA is not, by and large, a happy place to work. Animosity exists on so many levels and in such complexity that, as a newly joined senior manager back in 2001, I was never sure why I was constantly being given dirty looks from people. Was it because I was a senior manager, or from Engineering, or based at Heathrow, or some other cultural association that didn’t sit well with those around me? Once I broke the ice, people opened up and I discovered a community of mostly proud, loyal but very disaffected professionals, and that’s true for management as well as staff. Until BA can address that issue, and get the company thinking and feeling like one group, events like last week are going to continue to disrupt BA’s own performance every year from now until eternity.

There are some things that BA can do, indeed, MUST do, if they’re going to change things for the better. And by BA I mean everybody, not the ubiquitous BA that cabin crew wanted to bloody. BA is not some faceless machine. It is real people; around 45,000 real people across the globe, and each one has a responsibility to make it work, to understand that when the whole prospers, everyone prospers, even if it merely guarantees jobs for another year. These are the things that BA has to address in the short term to help ensure they have a collective long-term:

1. Direct. BA needs a vision, a real challenge, something they can shoot for and achieve, something that tells them where the company is going. BA has several small ones, which are all numbers to do with punctuality, passenger satisfaction, staff happiness, etc, but little attention is really paid to them by staff. The headline goal, achieving a 10% operating margin, is a clear, measurable goal, but it isn’t real enough to most people. They can’t connect themselves to it and it hardly inspires them to get out of bed and race in to work every day. Which brings us to the next point.

2. Inspire. Management is an intellectual exercise of processes, time, budgets, etc. Leadership, however, is an emotional exercise of inspiring people to believe in themselves and their group, to raise their expectations of excellence and to feel valued in making a direct contribution to the company’s success. Make people feel important and encourage them to use their whole toolbox of talent. It takes hard work and an ability to be warm and open with people, to establish a level of trust, but it is imperative. Where you have inspired people, you have high performance.

3. Unite. BA doesn’t need the likes of Virgin, Lufthansa, and United. They are their own worst enemy and the competition benefits daily from the infighting, politicking, and discord that exists in the ranks and the management. It’s pervasive and is even recognized within BA. They refer to it as their “silo mentality”. They all complain about it, but no one has done anything to solve it. Cabin crew don’t like the flight deck, engineers don’t like the ground staff, support don’t like the directs, none of the staff likes management and, to be honest, management are largely untrusting of staff. With these attitudes, they each get the partner they deserve. Part of that problem, and you see it in peacetime military organizations, as well, is that there’s no common enemy. Lacking anything outside to direct their energy toward, they turn on each other. BA has to take the fight outside. Give them a common foe to throw rocks at to keep them from throwing rocks at each other. Challenge them to beat United’s load factors on the North Atlantic and beat Emirates in the service awards. That’s tangible and it’s outside. It’ll make a world of difference.

4. Corporate Values. Establish clear and simple values, expectations of one another. Make them real and not just something that lives in a frame somewhere at Waterside. Take time to let people mull them over and input to them. And be willing to be called to account on them, and hold others accountable as well. BA has made some moves in that direction but there is little sense of ownership of them in the population, and even less sense that those at upper levels live by them. At the very least, BA’s people need to learn to respect one another more.

5. Invest in Leadership. Many team leaders and managers are promoted from within because they were good at whatever job they did before and demonstrated an aptitude for management. But then few have been given any real leadership training or support, certainly not since 9/11. This means there is a population of well-intentioned new managers who have not learned the finer points of leadership, and a more experienced population that desperately need some new thinking and outside perspective. Create a more responsible yet inclusive environment where people are encouraged to take risks but are held accountable for genuine poor performance. Invest in the leadership population and you’ll improve the relationships between managers and staff. With that comes performance.

6. Reward teamwork. Break down the silos. Start with the senior managers and many will follow. I remember hearing Willie express surprise and concern when he first became aware that many of the then-400 senior managers didn’t know each other. There was nothing in the corporate culture that brought the senior leaders together if their jobs didn’t directly interface, so the sense of a broader responsibility to each other and to the leadership of the company didn’t exist. Organizing regular networking and informal gatherings to let the SMs get to know each other as people will reap huge dividends. Take the military example again. Arguably more progress gets made in the Officers’ and NCO clubs on a Friday night than everywhere else all week.

7. Be Visible. This is partly related to Inspire, but also involves listening. When you’ve got a workforce of 45,000, and 18,000 of those are transient and don’t report to a traditional management system, communicating with them and inspiring them is a challenge. But it’s one that has to be taken on board. The PR machine at BA should be working a lot harder to make Willie and the rest of the LT real and personal to everyone in the company. And I’m not talking official state visits, but a casual stroll through the baggage halls or in the cabin crew standby area to spend a few minutes chatting to people. BA’s Leadership Team, at least the ones I know, are all personable and very approachable, but it’s the responsibility of a leader to be out and about, talking to people where and while they work, listening, not transmitting. I don’t pretend to know what Willie’s diary looks like, but I can think of few more important things than spending time with a few staff to hear what’s on their minds. It educates both parties and leaves people feeling a lot more connected to what’s going on.

8. Unions, unite your people and your company. The unions at BA are anachronisms that have no place in the 21st century and do little to demonstrate any unifying or leadership behavior. In my association with the union representatives in Engineering, not once did a union rep bring something to the table to make the company more effective and ensure its survival. In every case it was a matter of management asking for something and the union either refusing outright or wanting something in return. Unions can be powerful leaders of people, but they need to take a more proactive stance that links their membership with their company rather than divides them.

9. Staff need to see themselves as culpable and part of BA, not somehow separate. And clearly MOST do, but the ones that don’t give a bad name to the rest and need to be dealt with. Staff need to expect honesty and integrity from their management and their peers, they need to self-police and take a firmly adult view of their place in the company. They need to understand that their relationship with their managers is a two-way problem and requires a two-way solution. Both sides need to offer an olive branch and both sides need to get their own houses in order.

The leadership and relationship problems within BA are not unique, and deserve a much more thorough treatment than I have space for here. For example, I’m working with another UK-based aerospace company which has exactly the same issues; an anachronistic macho management culture that doesn’t understand how to get the most out of their people. Yes, they’re both successful companies, but they could be so much more if they gave themselves the tools with which to do it. This second company is doing something about it at several levels, and it’s making a difference to the people in the program and those that work with them. The most despairing thing I found in my 5 years as a senior manager at BA was the incomprehensible waste of talent and opportunity, all of it self-inflicted, some of it willfully.

There is evidence that some things are changing, and there have always been examples of leadership brilliance within BA’s ranks. BA can build on that. The style used by the Managing Director of the BA Interiors Engineering facility in Wales, an enthusiastic and engaging man named Bill Kelly, is the benchmark BA should be using. Already the newly appointed Director of Engineering, Garry Copeland, is taking a different view and leading his people with a much softer, more inclusive style, and encouraging Bill Kelly’s approach throughout his directorate. Early indications are encouraging, even as Garry works to overcome 30+ years of legacy culture.

BA is at a crossroads now and there’s a new man standing at the junction. This is a watershed opportunity to use this cataclysm as a catalyst for change. So which track is Willie going to take? Continue down the same road with the same results, or take a new direction that might lead to some new outcomes?

Shawn Doyle is a consultant specializing in leadership and senior team development. He started his professional career as an officer in the US Air Force where he led teams of civil engineers in the US, Republic of Korea, Turkey, and the UK, where he now lives and works. His perspective on the leadership atmosphere in British Airways is well-informed as he was a part of it for five years, from Jun 2001 to Feb 2006. While there he led various departments within Engineering and worked directly with most other sections of the airline, giving him an exceptional breadth of view of the company’s culture. The success he had with some of the teams he led within British Airways was partly what inspired him to establish his own consultancy and coaching practice to help improve the level of leadership in UK industry. He has put into practice the things he writes about, has seen them work, and inspires people with the courage of his convictions and his ability to make them believe in themselves. To comment on this piece or contact Shawn, please e-mail him at "leadershipuk@yahoo.com

By Shawn Doyle
Well, BA’s latest industrial soap opera is concluded. For now. But last week’s events aren’t the end of it. The drama the world watched played out between cabin crew and management was only one face of a many-headed Hydra that plagues the halls, hangars, and terminals of BA. And it will continue to do so unless something changes within the people and their attitudes towards one another. And that comes down to leadership.

BA is not, by and large, a happy place to work. Animosity exists on so many levels and in such complexity that, as a newly joined senior manager back in 2001, I was never sure why I was constantly being given dirty looks from people. Was it because I was a senior manager, or from Engineering, or based at Heathrow, or some other cultural association that didn’t sit well with those around me? Once I broke the ice, people opened up and I discovered a community of mostly proud, loyal but very disaffected professionals, and that’s true for management as well as staff. Until BA can address that issue, and get the company thinking and feeling like one group, events like last week are going to continue to disrupt BA’s own performance every year from now until eternity.

There are some things that BA can do, indeed, MUST do, if they’re going to change things for the better. And by BA I mean everybody, not the ubiquitous BA that cabin crew wanted to bloody. BA is not some faceless machine. It is real people; around 45,000 real people across the globe, and each one has a responsibility to make it work, to understand that when the whole prospers, everyone prospers, even if it merely guarantees jobs for another year. These are the things that BA has to address in the short term to help ensure they have a collective long-term:

1. Direct. BA needs a vision, a real challenge, something they can shoot for and achieve, something that tells them where the company is going. BA has several small ones, which are all numbers to do with punctuality, passenger satisfaction, staff happiness, etc, but little attention is really paid to them by staff. The headline goal, achieving a 10% operating margin, is a clear, measurable goal, but it isn’t real enough to most people. They can’t connect themselves to it and it hardly inspires them to get out of bed and race in to work every day. Which brings us to the next point.

2. Inspire. Management is an intellectual exercise of processes, time, budgets, etc. Leadership, however, is an emotional exercise of inspiring people to believe in themselves and their group, to raise their expectations of excellence and to feel valued in making a direct contribution to the company’s success. Make people feel important and encourage them to use their whole toolbox of talent. It takes hard work and an ability to be warm and open with people, to establish a level of trust, but it is imperative. Where you have inspired people, you have high performance.

3. Unite. BA doesn’t need the likes of Virgin, Lufthansa, and United. They are their own worst enemy and the competition benefits daily from the infighting, politicking, and discord that exists in the ranks and the management. It’s pervasive and is even recognized within BA. They refer to it as their “silo mentality”. They all complain about it, but no one has done anything to solve it. Cabin crew don’t like the flight deck, engineers don’t like the ground staff, support don’t like the directs, none of the staff likes management and, to be honest, management are largely untrusting of staff. With these attitudes, they each get the partner they deserve. Part of that problem, and you see it in peacetime military organizations, as well, is that there’s no common enemy. Lacking anything outside to direct their energy toward, they turn on each other. BA has to take the fight outside. Give them a common foe to throw rocks at to keep them from throwing rocks at each other. Challenge them to beat United’s load factors on the North Atlantic and beat Emirates in the service awards. That’s tangible and it’s outside. It’ll make a world of difference.

4. Corporate Values. Establish clear and simple values, expectations of one another. Make them real and not just something that lives in a frame somewhere at Waterside. Take time to let people mull them over and input to them. And be willing to be called to account on them, and hold others accountable as well. BA has made some moves in that direction but there is little sense of ownership of them in the population, and even less sense that those at upper levels live by them. At the very least, BA’s people need to learn to respect one another more.

5. Invest in Leadership. Many team leaders and managers are promoted from within because they were good at whatever job they did before and demonstrated an aptitude for management. But then few have been given any real leadership training or support, certainly not since 9/11. This means there is a population of well-intentioned new managers who have not learned the finer points of leadership, and a more experienced population that desperately need some new thinking and outside perspective. Create a more responsible yet inclusive environment where people are encouraged to take risks but are held accountable for genuine poor performance. Invest in the leadership population and you’ll improve the relationships between managers and staff. With that comes performance.

6. Reward teamwork. Break down the silos. Start with the senior managers and many will follow. I remember hearing Willie express surprise and concern when he first became aware that many of the then-400 senior managers didn’t know each other. There was nothing in the corporate culture that brought the senior leaders together if their jobs didn’t directly interface, so the sense of a broader responsibility to each other and to the leadership of the company didn’t exist. Organizing regular networking and informal gatherings to let the SMs get to know each other as people will reap huge dividends. Take the military example again. Arguably more progress gets made in the Officers’ and NCO clubs on a Friday night than everywhere else all week.

7. Be Visible. This is partly related to Inspire, but also involves listening. When you’ve got a workforce of 45,000, and 18,000 of those are transient and don’t report to a traditional management system, communicating with them and inspiring them is a challenge. But it’s one that has to be taken on board. The PR machine at BA should be working a lot harder to make Willie and the rest of the LT real and personal to everyone in the company. And I’m not talking official state visits, but a casual stroll through the baggage halls or in the cabin crew standby area to spend a few minutes chatting to people. BA’s Leadership Team, at least the ones I know, are all personable and very approachable, but it’s the responsibility of a leader to be out and about, talking to people where and while they work, listening, not transmitting. I don’t pretend to know what Willie’s diary looks like, but I can think of few more important things than spending time with a few staff to hear what’s on their minds. It educates both parties and leaves people feeling a lot more connected to what’s going on.

8. Unions, unite your people and your company. The unions at BA are anachronisms that have no place in the 21st century and do little to demonstrate any unifying or leadership behavior. In my association with the union representatives in Engineering, not once did a union rep bring something to the table to make the company more effective and ensure its survival. In every case it was a matter of management asking for something and the union either refusing outright or wanting something in return. Unions can be powerful leaders of people, but they need to take a more proactive stance that links their membership with their company rather than divides them.

9. Staff need to see themselves as culpable and part of BA, not somehow separate. And clearly MOST do, but the ones that don’t give a bad name to the rest and need to be dealt with. Staff need to expect honesty and integrity from their management and their peers, they need to self-police and take a firmly adult view of their place in the company. They need to understand that their relationship with their managers is a two-way problem and requires a two-way solution. Both sides need to offer an olive branch and both sides need to get their own houses in order.

The leadership and relationship problems within BA are not unique, and deserve a much more thorough treatment than I have space for here. For example, I’m working with another UK-based aerospace company which has exactly the same issues; an anachronistic macho management culture that doesn’t understand how to get the most out of their people. Yes, they’re both successful companies, but they could be so much more if they gave themselves the tools with which to do it. This second company is doing something about it at several levels, and it’s making a difference to the people in the program and those that work with them. The most despairing thing I found in my 5 years as a senior manager at BA was the incomprehensible waste of talent and opportunity, all of it self-inflicted, some of it willfully.

There is evidence that some things are changing, and there have always been examples of leadership brilliance within BA’s ranks. BA can build on that. The style used by the Managing Director of the BA Interiors Engineering facility in Wales, an enthusiastic and engaging man named Bill Kelly, is the benchmark BA should be using. Already the newly appointed Director of Engineering, Garry Copeland, is taking a different view and leading his people with a much softer, more inclusive style, and encouraging Bill Kelly’s approach throughout his directorate. Early indications are encouraging, even as Garry works to overcome 30+ years of legacy culture.

BA is at a crossroads now and there’s a new man standing at the junction. This is a watershed opportunity to use this cataclysm as a catalyst for change. So which track is Willie going to take? Continue down the same road with the same results, or take a new direction that might lead to some new outcomes?

Shawn Doyle is a consultant specializing in leadership and senior team development. He started his professional career as an officer in the US Air Force where he led teams of civil engineers in the US, Republic of Korea, Turkey, and the UK, where he now lives and works. His perspective on the leadership atmosphere in British Airways is well-informed as he was a part of it for five years, from Jun 2001 to Feb 2006. While there he led various departments within Engineering and worked directly with most other sections of the airline, giving him an exceptional breadth of view of the company’s culture. The success he had with some of the teams he led within British Airways was partly what inspired him to establish his own consultancy and coaching practice to help improve the level of leadership in UK industry. He has put into practice the things he writes about, has seen them work, and inspires people with the courage of his convictions and his ability to make them believe in themselves. To comment on this piece or contact Shawn, please e-mail him at "leadershipuk@yahoo.com