Sitting on a Northwest flight today from Seattle to Detroit, the pilot used a term that in hundreds of thousands of miles of flying around the world I have never heard before. Interestingly, it was during the little beginning-of-flight pilot speech I’ve heard hundreds of times before. It was just a quick phrase on where we were headed.
“Right now, I’ve got the nose pointed at Billings, Montana.”
May not seem like a big deal, but almost exclusively, pilots give the shpiel on flight paths with “Our flight path today takes us…” “We’ll be headed over Bismark, ND.” Much more passive approaches those. However, today’s captain called out an undeniable fact: Where the Captain points the nose…that’s where you are headed.
Also, to get from Seattle to Detroit, there are plenty of places to point the nose as a intermediate point. Same with your business, there are lots of different ways to get wherever you are going. Once you have picked a “route”, as a leader, its important that your team actually knows where you have the nose headed. This is true whether you are a CEO or a front-line Team Lead. It’s OK to be assertive with the way you address it as well.
One of the biggest frustrations I see from individual contributors is that they feel like a passenger on a plane who is looking out a airplane window at some nondescript landscape somewhere. They feel the momentum, and they know they’re headed somewhere, but people like to know where they are headed along the way. They want a leader who knows where the nose is pointed at all times and doesn’t keep it to themselves!
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