The aviation industry involves high-stakes environments with little margin for error. Team effectiveness is therefore not a nice-to-have but a core driver of safety and performance.
Trust and communication form the foundation, as we previously discussed, but there are other critical elements that make up a high performing team; certain behaviours, team dynamics, and cultural influences.
This article explores these deeper dimensions of team building and how leaders can sustain performance in the long run.
What Makes Teams Effective? Insights from McKinsey’s 17 Health Drivers
McKinsey & Company identifies 17 ‘health drivers’ that determine how effectively a team performs. Together, these drivers account for around 69-76% of the performance gap between low and high-performing teams, especially when it comes to efficiency, results, and innovation.
Categories of Health Drivers
There are four categories, each containing several specific drivers or behaviours.
Configuration
This concerns how a team is structured and composed; whether each member’s role is clearly defined, and whether the team brings together the right balance of internal expertise and external insight. In aviation, this might mean aligning engineers, operations staff, and compliance specialists to ensure that safety and efficiency goals are met.
Alignment
Alignment pertains to how united a team is around its purpose and objectives. It measures the degree of shared commitment and clarity of direction. In airports, strong alignment ensures that planners, maintenance teams, and ground operations are all working towards the same turnaround targets.
Execution
Execution assesses how effectively a team performs its day-to-day work. It includes collaboration, accountability, and the ability to meet objectives under pressure. In aviation, this translates into consistent adherence to safety procedures, efficient shift coordination, and on-time task delivery.
Renewal
Renewal refers to how teams sustain long-term performance through learning, reflection, and continuous improvement. In aviation operations, renewal can involve post-event reviews, process audits, training, and knowledge-sharing.
Which Drivers Matter Most?
McKinsey’s research shows that high-performing teams excel in around 11 of the 17 drivers on average, so it’s not about being perfect in all areas. Some drivers have a consistently greater influence than others and their importance varies depending on the team’s context.
Teams that scored above average in trust, communication, decision making, and innovative thinking demonstrated superior outcomes across efficiency, results, and innovation:
- Trust: 3.3x more efficient and 5.1x more likely to deliver results.
- Communications: 2.8x more efficient, 2.7x more likely to deliver results, and 3.1x more innovative.
- Innovative thinking: 2.3x more efficient, 2.4x more likely to deliver results, and 2.7x more innovative.
- Decision making: 2.8x more innovative.
The most impactful drivers that influenced efficiency, trust, and innovation – ranked in order of impact – were as follows:
- Efficiency: Trust, communication, innovative thinking, feedback, and conflict management.
- Results: Trust, communication, innovative thinking, role definition, and decision making.
- Innovation: Innovative thinking, decision making, communication, trust, and feedback.
The previous article explored trust and communication, so let’s consider how to strengthen innovative thinking, decision making, feedback, and conflict management.
Decision Making
McKinsey notes that teams are often unclear about what each person’s role is in the decision-making process, and this applies for both simple, everyday decisions and those involving greater complexity or uncertainty.
McKinsey recommends the DARE model which defines several roles within decision-making processes:
- Deciders: These individuals have the authority to make the final call.
- Advisers: They provide input, context, or expertise to guide the decision.
- Recommenders: They consolidate information and propose a course of action.
- Executors: Their role is to implement the chosen decision effectively.
Innovation
One way that innovation applies in aviation is finding better ways to solve operational challenges, such as reducing turnaround delays, improving cross-department communication, or streamlining maintenance planning.
To encourage innovative thinking within teams:
- Set aside dedicated innovation time. This can include ‘what-if’ sessions where employees can question existing processes and suggest alternatives.
- Recognise even the smallest suggestions that help save time, reduce costs, or remove unnecessary steps.
Rotate exposure between functions (e.g., planners spending time in line maintenance and vice versa) to help staff understand interdependencies and identify process improvements. - Support risk-taking to pilot new ideas, as long as it stays within safety and regulatory requirements.
- Overworked teams don’t innovate, so do what’s possible to prevent burnout.
- Look to hire curious people that are intrinsically motivated to learn and improve things.
- Fear of failure is a common obstacle to innovation. Eliminate any cultural factors that could contribute to this fear.
- Eliminate a culture of naysaying; nobody wants their ideas to be mocked or immediately dismissed.
Feedback
Effective feedback drives improvement when it comes to performance and safety. To make it more effective, provide it in a continuous rather than an episodic manner. For example, review performance after key tasks have been completed instead of saving everything for annual reviews.
It’s also important to separate coaching from compliance. Naturally, regulatory oversight is crucial, but employees also need developmental feedback focused on growth.
Allow frontline workers or junior engineers to share insights upward, as their perspectives can highlight systemic issues earlier. And always communicate what was done as a result of feedback as this builds trust and incentivises further contributions.
Conflict Management
Structured communication frameworks play a critical role in conflict management. In moments of pressure, there isn’t time for emotional debate. Training teams in clear dialogue techniques, like such as stating facts first, then concerns (without accusations), then proposed actions, keeps conversations respectful and focused on resolution rather than personal differences.
Clear escalation paths ensure accountability. If a disagreement can’t be resolved, there should be an established route to involve supervisors and other decision makers. Knowing how and when to escalate removes ambiguity and helps prevents conflict from causing operational issues.
A data-driven approach further depersonalises disagreement. When discussions involve metrics, decisions are made based on facts rather than assumptions or hierarchy.
Supervisors and managers can undergo conflict management training that will help them recognise the signs of escalating conflicts and equip them with the skills for de-escalation. They may work on listening, showing empathy, calming emotions, and other mediation skills.
Causes of Conflict
It’s important to consider what triggers conflict in order to prevent it. Leadership style is one factor; micromanagement or overly directive behaviour can create stress and resentment, for example. Conflict also arises when individuals feel someone isn’t pulling their weight or when there’s a lack of mutual respect.
Personality differences (introverts versus extroverts, for example), can lead to misunderstandings if not acknowledged. A blame-driven culture magnifies these problems; when people are more focused on avoiding being at-fault than solving the problem, collaboration falters.
The Role of Culture in Team Performance
Organisational culture sets the tone for how teams function. Let’s consider a few cultural elements that are important in aviation.
Psychological Safety and Just Culture
It’s critical that individuals can speak up about ideas or concerns without fear of being reprimanded. This is vital in any safety-focused workplace but unfortunately, history has shown that there’s a price to pay when psychological safety is lacking; many aviation accidents have been traced to failures to speak up.
In one analysis of cockpit incidents, it was revealed that many experienced co-pilots stayed silent about mistakes due to perceived hierarchies and the power and status that captains held. Fear of the consequences of admitting mistakes or challenging authority can cost lives.
To counteract this, the aviation industry introduced training and leadership practices that promote psychological safety, like Crew Resource Management (CRM). This was designed to support open communication across cockpit and cabin crews.
CRM training encourages personnel to speak up directly, facilitate others to do so, and reduce power gradients. In fact, after CRM became standard, the rate of accidents related to pilot errors dropped by around 70% (between 1983 and 2002), according to one analysis.
Aviation companies today promote a ‘just culture’, where staff can report mistakes or hazards without fear of unfair punishment. The focus is on learning rather than blame.
Resilience and Adaptability in the Face of Disruption
Aviation is characterised by unpredictability and occasional crisis. Phenomena like sudden weather events, technical faults, and global disruptions (i.e., cyberattacks or airspace closures) make resilience and adaptability defining traits of successful teams.
Teams must be able to regroup quickly after setbacks, improvise in the face of the unexpected, and sustain operations under stress. In fact, 44% of airport leaders believe there’s a need for a ‘crisis-as-usual’ mindset.
How can aviation teams build resilience? In practical terms, immersive training or simulations that mimic real situations (like difficult passengers and security or cybersecurity threats) help staff develop the muscle memory to respond when crisis hits. It helps them perform more automatically when under pressure. Developing stress management skills can also help.
Psychological research indicates that team resilience emerges from the interplay of shared belief in collective efficacy, strong cohesion, effective knowledge management, and transformational leadership (a leadership style characterised by inspiring, motivating, and encouraging personal growth).
To strengthen collective efficacy and cohesion, build and reinforce a shared belief in the team’s ability to overcome challenges. This can be done by setting clear, attainable goals and celebrating successes.
To improve knowledge sharing, facilitate collaborative problem-solving, regular debriefings, feedback channels, reflection sessions, and mentorship.
Measuring and Sustaining Team Performance Over Time
Establishing high-performing teams is the first step, but it’s important to monitor the performance of a team and sustain it in the long run. Here are some considerations for measurement.
Quantitative and Qualitative Measurement
In an MRO context, metrics like turnaround time and Scheduled Task Completion Rate (STCR) directly reflect how efficiently the maintenance team is performing. This can be combined with qualitative data – for example, some organisations conduct periodic team health surveys to measure less tangible aspects like communication quality, trust levels, or cohesion.
Measuring these factors alongside hard output metrics provides a comprehensive view of performance sustainability. For example, a team might be meeting its KPIs but burning out its people. A survey could reveal growing morale problems so leadership can act before performance suffers.
Training, Development and Knowledge Retention
Sustaining performance also means preventing skill degradation and preparing for the future. Aviation teams deal with new aircraft types, updated regulations, and emerging technologies over time, and continuous training and professional development keep the team’s competencies sharp. Recurrent training sessions that exceed minimum regulatory requirements ensures everyone remains proficient.
Conclusion
Team building in aviation directly impacts safety, efficiency, and customer satisfaction, so there’s no room for mediocrity. High-performing teams exhibit high levels of trust, effective communication, and innovative thinking. They demonstrate strong decision-making skills, and effective feedback mechanisms and conflict management.
These attributes are known to increase efficiency, the delivery of results, and innovation. Establishing a just culture and developing resilience and adaptability are also key.
Monitoring team effectiveness on an ongoing basis ensures that any interventions continue to deliver measurable results. To learn more about our aviation maintenance software, contact us today.