Written by Source: AIN Online
People want feedback on their CRM and benefit from receiving it, but it is rarely given. Or sometimes it comes too late. A new tool allows pilots to get feedback on their own CRM skills from colleagues. RateMyCRM
As a young new captain for a small five-airplane wet lease airline, Nicholas Dmoch thought his leadership style was “soft and laissez-faire,” he recalled. But shortly after leaving to join a large business aviation fleet operator, a lead flight attendant at the airline did Dmoch a big favor: she gave him a far more accurate assessment of his leadership style, and that sparked the idea for what became his new service, RateMyCRM.
“She said I came across as authoritarian,” he said. “Even in that small company, no one told me [that]. No one did.” So he decided to create a feedback mechanism for flight crew to rate each other—by invitation only—and he called it RateMyCRM.
A problem with CRM or crew resource management is that the training is usually lumped in with simulator training. “The situation is artificial,” he said, “and people show their best behavior. When flying on the line with someone, there are so many opportunities for observations because people behave in a more normal way.”
What Dmoch has found during his career is that people want feedback and benefit from receiving it, but that it also is rarely given. Or sometimes it comes too late. Or never.
An example was when two pilots who flew together for 20 years reached a point where they could not be scheduled in the same cockpit. “Little by little frictions built up until there was a clash of characters and they couldn’t fly together,” he said.
The only way to fix this problem was to send the pilots to mandatory training so they could rebuild their relationship. This could have been avoided, he explained, if one of the pilots had been given some constructive feedback about one small thing he did that resulted in the broken relationship. “If he was told, ‘we all like you, there’s just this one little thing,’ then it would be so much better.”
RateMyCRM is designed not to allow feedback from anyone except those who are invited to provide it. The requester is the one who pays for the service; there is no fee for the person providing the feedback.