Editor's note: Captain Chesley Sullenberger is collaborating with DuPont on the development of safety programs. DuPont is a sponsor of Sustainable Business Forum.

I testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee with Flight 1549 First Officer Jeffrey Skiles in February of 2009. We stressed that making safety the top priority in the airline industry was paramount – and doing so required strong leadership. We did not stand alone in calling for increased leadership: the Committee Chairman, Congressman James Oberstar of Minnesota, a widely recognized expert on aviation and aviation safety, summarized this thought succinctly when he said that safety begins in the boardroom.

Management at every level is responsible for safety. Safety should be a core business function because it is too important to be managed by exception. When effective and authentic safety leadership and action are not present or when adequate resources are not made available to implement safety measures, it’s nearly impossible for frontline employees to make up for those failures. We can no longer define safety solely as the absence of recent incidents and accidents. Seldom are bad outcomes the result of a single failure but rather the end result of a causal chain of events.

In many organizations, our leaders are typically trained in finance and are no longer subject matter experts. We need to do a better job of teaching our senior management the science of safety, and that it is essential that they solicit and act on brutally honest counsel and feedback, especially on safety issues. With airline companies under extreme cost pressures, a focus primarily on the bottom line puts the safety of our passengers at risk. While commercial aviation is very safe, it is terribly unforgiving of yielding to expedience, and over the decades we have learned costly lessons, some literally at the cost of many lives.

Effective leadership in any company, regardless of the industry requires authentic action to establish the organization’s core values. It has been said by many that leaders drive values, values drive behavior, behavior drives performance, performance drives outcomes, and all of these together define an organization’s culture. When leadership treats others with respect, they in turn build a culture of trust. I’ve had the privilege of talking with Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen in recent months, and he also speaks passionately of the responsibility of leadership as well, saying “you cannot outsource core values.”

This isn’t easy. Building trust requires great interpersonal skills. While some may define these types of skills as soft skills as opposed to hard skills, they should be considered human skills. The power of good communication and genuine cooperation is just as (and sometimes more) important than other types of expertise. For instance, in the world of medicine, sometimes these types of human skills have the potential to save more lives than clinical knowledge. We should never discount the power of strong interpersonal talents and how that affects leadership and safety within an organization.

I believe that an organizational commitment to safety – REAL safety, not a lip-service approach meant to be given to regulators and then filed and ignored – requires an absolute and genuine commitment. It must be pursued vigorously and simultaneously, with management’s genuine commitment to leadership, and the front line’s authentic engagement of those stated values. Shared values knit together leaders and employees, and increase an organization’s likelihood of success.

On January 15, 2009, the successful outcome of Flight 1549 was made possible because of effective leadership, clear core values, and operating within a robust safety system that allowed us to – in 208 seconds – solve a life-threatening problem we had never trained for and had never seen before.

No matter where you work or what you do, it is the key decision makers who have the power to make changes to your organization and make it the most efficient and innovative, and the safest it can be. Will you take the action to make these changes in your organization and demand that others do the same? What are the core values your organization lives and works by? This choice is yours, and each of ours. It is likely the more difficult path, but it is the better, safer path. I challenge each of you to commit to the highest level of safety.

 

Captain Sullenberger's previous article is one of our most popular: Aviation Safety is a Team Sport