Category Archives: leadership

Maybe He Won’t

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I do try to avoid social media, colossal waste of precious time that it is, but every once in a while, something leaks into my asylum and I get sucked in.   I saw a post this morning that Glen Roberts was soon going to celebrate his 99th birthday.

Glen Roberts is one of my very few surviving bosses.   A tall, gentle man, with a boyish demeanor, he was not only the clinical director at a non-profit mental health center where I worked in the 1980’s, but was also a consummate standup bass player, and the leader of an eponymous big band.   He was one of those rare men who was loved by all, although occasionally his passivity irritated some who appreciated a more authoritarian, less laid-back, musician-like leader.

Glen was so beloved and respected that when the clinic finally raised enough capital to construct a new building, the board decided to name it after him, an honor rarely bestowed on a living and not-yet retired individual.   Years later, in a travesty of justice, the Glen Roberts Child Study Center was renamed after the agency crumbled under strokes of mismanagement that caused it to be absorbed by the mega non-profit named after social worker and philanthropist Didi Hirsch.

As my boss and supervisor, Glen and I talked often about my clients, one of whom I have likely written about before.   Patrick (not his real name) was a strapping, sweet, charming and kind-hearted man in his early twenties, another of those rare men who people tended to love almost instantly.   Patrick had likely killed many people in his young life, though the exact number was not clear, because, in Patrick’s words, “I never hung around long enough to see if they died.”

Patrick lived with a bullet lodged in his spine that was put there by his father when Patrick stepped in front of his mother to protect her from his father’s drunken rage.   The story made the news, especially because the dad got off scot-free on some technicalities.   He disappeared soon after, and Patrick was determined to find him and kill him, although he struggled mightily to resist the urge.   To let off some of that pent-up rage, he would go from bar to bar and challenge random men to a fight, take them out to the parking lot and beat them until they were unconscious in pools of blood.

Yet, Patrick’s typical waking demeanor was such that once, when he was arrested for beating the crap out of a fellow co-worker, the Burbank police showed up at my office in Burbank with Patrick in tow.   The police noticed how despondent Patrick was in the back seat and had the perspicacity to ask Patrick if he felt like killing himself.  When Patrick answered affirmatively, they asked him if had a therapist, and Patrick directed them to my office, where they let me talk to him while the two cops sat in the waiting room.

Afterwards, the police said that the guy who Patrick beat up at work was at the hospital, and the victim’s mother asked that they release Patrick because her son “deserved it.”  Patrick, who was mixed race, was being repeatedly taunted by this guy and had enough. 

I loved Patrick, as did nearly everyone else, but I was afraid of him.   I believed what they taught me in school, that the way psychotherapy worked was that the client “transfers” his or her unresolved conflicts onto the person of the therapist, and the therapist then provides the “corrective emotional experience” in which those past emotional wounds come to be healed.  

The implication of such a scenario was clear to me, and that I, especially as a male father figure, would likely become the target of Patrick’s rage.   When I told Glen that I was afraid that Patrick would come after me in one of his vengeful rages, Glen just sighed softly and said, “Maybe he won’t.”

Those three words have stuck with me ever since, and have comforted me in so many instances in which the odds felt stacked against me.   After the cancer diagnosis, the voices inside and around me kept telling me that there’s a good chance this cancer is going to kill me.   Somewhere in the recesses of consciousness, Glen’s reassuring voice responded, “maybe it won’t.”   So many other times, too personal to mention in this context, in which panicked voices crescendo in the face of one sort of loss or another, Glen’s words respond.  “Maybe he won’t… Maybe she won’t… Maybe it won’t.”  

When attempting to teach me to swim in the Atlantic Ocean as an 8-year-old, my grandmother Rhea told me to “Never turn your back on a wave.”   I don’t know if at the time she spoke it she understood it as the profound metaphorical injunction it came to be for me, although I expect she did.   But I took it to heart, and I do my best to remain vigilant in this truly dangerous world.   But it’s Glen’s voice that enters as ballast for the terror that manages to reside like Castaneda’s raven just over my shoulder.   That may just be the wave that does me in, but on the other hand, maybe it won’t.

Happy 99th birthday Glen, and thanks for being a guiding light for so many of us who were fortunate to be graced by your presence.  

Earning It

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I made a lot of mistakes during the checkride that was to finally determine whether or not I earned the privilege of carrying a blue pilot certificate around with me in my wallet.  I made so many of them that I was convinced I had failed.

I was shocked when after my last landing the examiner offered me an outstretched hand and said “congratulations.”  He told me to tie down the airplane and meet him inside while he did the necessary paperwork.  When I got inside, I told the examiner that I was certain I had failed.  He looked at me reassuringly and said, “You earned it.”

Given the number of things I had done wrong, and his criticism at several key junctures in the flight, I began to wonder exactly what I did right to earn the privilege.   Eventually I came to believe that I was rewarded with the certificate because I demonstrated something that I don’t think the examiner ordinarily saw.

There is an interesting rule that applies to the checkride.   Despite the fact that the pilot being scrutinized is still technically a student, the pilot is also legally considered the “pilot in command.”   What it means to be pilot in command is that the pilot, and only the pilot, is ultimately responsible for the outcome of the flight.   That responsibility, it seems, is not just about knowing the craft of flying so well that the airplane is truly subservient to its pilot; it is also about an attitude.

At the beginning of the checkride, the examiner suggested that we head out toward the coastline between Point Mugu and Santa Barbara to do the maneuvers that demonstrated that I was proficient in handling the aircraft.   I responded by saying, “No, let’s go to the Santa Paula aerobatic box.   The place you’re suggesting is a corridor for traffic up and down the coast.   It’s safer near Santa Paula.”

He looked surprised that so early in the flight I opposed him, but he also seemed pleased at the decision, and quickly relented.   He broke one of the few smiles I saw during the flight, and simply said, “Okay. “

Another moment of surprise came after the maneuvers, some of which did not go so well.   We were flying out of the box, just east of the small Santa Paula airport where I had taken most of my lessons, and he said, “Where do you want to do your landings?”  Just as we were approaching Santa Paula, he said “How about Santa Paula?”

I responded contrarily again, and said that I would rather do my landings in Oxnard, a relatively large, towered airport only a few miles away.  I thought, but didn’t say,  that I would rather have the comfort of a 6,000 foot long and 100 foot wide runway which would more likely hide my mistakes than the needle in a haystack runway in Santa Paula.   The examiner undoubtedly expected that I would choose the more familiar Santa Paula airport that we were just flying over, so he was surprised again.   But I was the pilot in command and that’s where I wanted to go.

The last surprise came as I entered the pattern at Oxnard.   The controller, who didn’t know I was a student, gave me an instruction I had never heard before and one I have rarely if ever heard since.   He told me to “make short approach” and abort the remainder of the downwind leg of the pattern and land immediately to make way for fast traffic coming into the airport behind me.  I quickly glanced over to the examiner, who began to nod his head to cue me to say what was indeed the first thing that came to my mind.   It was the single magic word that gets you out of jail free: “unable.”

Exhausted and convinced I had already failed, I keyed the mic and instead of the magic word I said another one: “wilco.”   “Wilco,” for those not familiar with the shorthand, is a portmanteau for “will comply.”   Out of the corner of my eye I could see the shocked, and even a bit frightened, expression on the examiner’s face.   I simultaneously kicked in left rudder, pushed the nose down, cut the power, and turned the yoke toward the big fat runway.   The gentle Cessna 150 floated swiftly and gracefully toward the center of the runway, where I made one of the best landings in my life.

I couldn’t help but once again see the surprised expression on the examiner’s face.   Although he had nothing but criticisms to say up to that point, he couldn’t help himself and he uttered, “That was a great landing.”

“Thanks,” I said diffidently, still convinced I had failed.

I did two more good landings after that, and it is possible that it was my landings that convinced the examiner to pass me.   But in retrospect, I don’t think so.   After several years of pondering what went right (what went wrong was obvious), I think that the key to my passing was my polite but clear refusals to do what he came to expect.

It takes both skill and judgment to fly safely, but in the contest between the two, judgment wins out.   In the case of my checkride, I didn’t merely accept what I thought was expected of me, but instead opted to make my own decisions.   I clearly did not demonstrate that I was the most skilled pilot, but I did show the examiner that I knew how to be pilot in command.   Hopefully, that’s why he thought I had earned it.

 

The Mensch Checklist

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Business consultants and fitness gurus Adam and Jordan Bornstein interviewed various corporate leaders for Entrepreneur magazine, asking each of them to mention their most valued characteristic in a leader.   They came up with a list 22 items long, including:

focus, confidence, transparency, inspiration, integrity, passion, innovation, patience, stoicism, wonkiness, authenticity, open-mindedness, decisiveness, personableness, empowerment, positivity, generosity, persistence, insightfulness, communication, accountability, and restlessness.

While Elliott Ness might have been proud of how many of his progeny made it into the list, I, personably, would be thrilled to at least eliminate “personableness,” if for no other reason than that there is no such word.   (I don’t think “insightfulness” is a word either, but if it is, it shouldn’t be.)

It is not at all surprising that most of the words on the list describe the elements of what I think make a great pilot in command, although I might eliminate wonkiness.   Then again, without a bit of wonkiness I am not sure anyone would become a pilot to begin with.

Nor am I am surprised that the authors of the article failed to mention that, along the lines of Harvard Business School researcher Robert Kelly, these same characteristics also describe the ingredients of a good follower.   Great leaders want followers who are passionate, patient, innovative, inspirational, positive, accountable, and dare I say it, even personable and wonky.

So if great leaders have the same characteristics as great followers, what really does all this mean?   I would venture the obvious: these are simply the characteristics of people who are good at whatever they do—be they great leaders, great followers, great pilots, great anythingers.   I might be inclined to add “humility” to the list, although accountability and authenticity get pretty close.

If what goes into making a pilot a great leader are the same elements required for anyone to be good at what they do, then it might be more accurate to call this a mensch checklist.   While technically the word mensch translates to “man,” it figuratively translates into “the kind of person you would want to be married to your daughter.”  No gender bending is needed here because, according to Google, mensch in German is similar to man in English, i.e., it can be used for both man (as in mankind) and woman.   In other words, German is just as sexist a language as English in that there is no word for “woman” that can apply equally to men.   But I digress.

Mensch checklists are not only useful for assessing the qualities of potential in-laws, but they can also be useful as a self-assessment tool.   Note the characteristic of “accountability” on the list.

As the leader of a company for nearly three decades, I can easily point to a few things I did poorly.   I often lacked both focus and patience, and the older I got, the more I lacked decisiveness.   Overall, though, I think I did pretty good, if I must say so myself.   Unless I was having a bad hair day, I don’t think I lacked personableness, whatever that is, although I probably was way too wonky for my own good.

What I lacked as the leader of a company, however, I found I could make up for in the cockpit. There, it seems, I have little choice but to exhibit most of those characteristics, because in the cockpit a lack of generosity might not kill you, but a lack of focus, confidence, decisiveness, and accountability just might.

Most pilots will tell you that checklists are good things, although many pilots I know are reluctant to apply them to their attitude and personality.   Aviation safety experts often cite this failing as problematic, and I agree.  As a psychologist who took up flying relatively late in life, I am certainly in the ranks of those who think that an unexamined life is indeed a dangerous one.   Or, possibly, I am just letting my wonkiness get out of hand.