Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit
When ego and optimism are not your friends
Published Guide updated 3 min 16 sec
In the cockpit, a go-around is the disciplined choice when the approach is no longer safe. Sharon says ego and optimism are what make a pilot, or a leader, force the landing anyway. Changing course is not the failure. Forcing a bad approach is.
Key takeaways
- A go-around is a performance decision, not proof that you failed.
- Ego wants the original plan. Optimism insists it will still work.
- The costly mistake is continuing after the conditions have changed.
- Find another way in, then commit to that path.
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Edited transcript
For anyone outside aviation, a go-around is what you do on approach when something is wrong: full power, and another circuit, rather than forcing the landing. Sharon says she is still working the leadership lesson out for herself, because ego gets in the way. You want to land. A positive outlook says you can still make it.
A gust, a crosswind, an approach that is too steep or too fast — any of those is a reason to go around. In life she used to treat a missed landing as a personal failure. The actual failure would be trying to land in a crosswind she cannot handle, or so steep and fast that the aeroplane hits nose-first, or so high that it balloons and flips.
Treating the change of plan as a mistake misses the point. Going around, and asking how else to do it, is the higher-performance choice. Sometimes the honest move is to drop the ego and the optimism that says the original plan must work. Go around, go under, go over, or come at it another way, and put full power into that. Persistence is not the same thing as banging your head against the wall.
