Letdown

How leaders on the ground failed their teams in the sky

In 1966, I broke up with a boyfriend who had proudly informed me he wouldn’t fly if he saw a female pilot board the plane. Fifty-eight years later, this is, apparently, still a thing. 

Warnings that female (and Black) pilots are putting travelers at risk is the latest in a barrage of alarms being raised by anti-DEI activists. They’re blaming a range of unrelated problems on corporate efforts to engage a broad spectrum of talent, seeking to stir fear and provoke a backlash that will serve the political factions they support. 

I was going to take a break from the politics of DEI this week, but events– a flurry of aircraft safety issues-  roped me back in. A passenger plane’s door blown off mid-flight, a cargo plane catching fire, a plane’s wheels spinning off on the tarmac– these unfortunate events have struck activists as a golden opportunity to attribute pretty much every problem in aircraft manufacturing to industry “wokeism.” The rantings about female and Black pilots are simply an opportunistic pile-on.

The basic argument goes like this: companies are spending so much on DEI that they are underfunding engineering and manufacturing, while undertrained or incompetent hires, allegedly mandated by internal quotas, further contribute to the mess. 

By the way, I’m intentionally not linking to examples of these assertions because I don’t want to give their propagators more oxygen. 

The problem with these screechy assertions is that, like most intentionally divisive efforts, they get pretty much everything precisely wrong.

To take a glaringly obvious example: Boeing’s safety travails. 

The company’s decades-in-the-making problems first burst into the headlines in 2018, when two successive 737 MAX 8s crashed a few months apart, killing all passengers and grounding the MAX8 worldwide. Boeing’s successor plane, the MAX 9, has also faced groundings since its introduction, as successive safety problems have surfaced.

A range of investigations and some excellent journalism have explored the problems in Boeing’s corporate culture- which has had zero to do with DEI. Instead, it has everything to do with a succession of leaders, all of whom happened to be white and male, privileging the maximization of shareholder value over engineering and manufacturing excellence. 

In other words, it’s the usual story of arrogant CEOs and complacent boards who assume that white male confidence in a given approach is proof of competence and “vision.” 

For decades, Boeing leaders have been given the benefit of the doubt, even as their decisions should clearly have raised alarms. Case in point: CEO Phil Condit and President Harry Stonecipher’s bizarre 2001 decision to move the company’s headquarters from its historic Seattle campus to an abandoned Morton Salt building in Chicago.

Boeing had cultivated and built up eight decades worth of engineering and managerial expertise in Seattle. But in order to escape the influence of the company’s 40,000 engineers, who were fighting to save it from the chainsaw of cost-cutting they believed would undermine safety and design, senior executives opted to build themselves a nice little bubble in the Midwest.

Then in 2003, a cascade of ethical scandals forced Condit out. He was succeeded by Stonecipher, who was fired two years later because of a sex scandal. Both Stonecipher and his eventual successor had been General Electric guys. They had been influenced and mentored by Jack Welch, who in the nineties was also busy trying to transform GE by focusing on finance rather than engineering and product. Welch, lionized as the second coming in business at the time, hollowed out GE, setting it up for a series of reverses that would result in its being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. 

Needless to say, none of these people were fans of diversity, and their leadership style was the polar opposite of inclusive. Instead, they prided themselves on being the toughest guys on the block, dominating employees and enforcing a culture in which people with skills kept their mouths shut and kowtowed to those with positional power. These CEOs then retired with massively outsized pay packages after making decisions that set their great companies up for decades of setbacks.   

So it’s important to remember the true history of how we got here– here being a continuing wave of aircraft safety problems. The problems these companies are experiencing began decades ago. They were reverse-engineered by a handful of macho, greedy CEOs whose influence on business culture is finally being contested. Yet as author and Professor of Business Psychology at Columbia University, Tomas Premuzic-Chomorro has demonstrated in his research, companies routinely conflate overconfidence with competence in white males, especially those in leadership positions.

As a result, people like my former boyfriend can still be conned into believing that only white men are competent to fly, or build, aircraft.

Like what you’re reading? Click here to order my most recent book Rising Together from Amazon. Also available from your favorite bookseller. Thank you for your support!