I received a call at 6:53am yesterday morning, from my NS unit informing me of some rather unfortunate news.
For the uninitiated, National Service (NS) is a obligation for all Singaporean males. We serve 2 years of conscripted military service and after which we are bound with reservist duties as "NS-men" till the age of 45-50. I may be wrong so if any readers know the exact age at which we are released from the armed forces (SAF), please correct me. As for me, I've given up trying to keep track. I just want to serve my tour and be done with it.
You might as well have said that I had just awoken from a 20 year coma, because after barely 3 hours of sleep from the previous night, one of the young lieutenants (or 2nd lefs, as we Singaporeans call them, following the British pronunciation of the word as 'left-ten-nant') had decided to brutally interrupt my beauty sleep. Shifting my eyeshades up (don't judge me, I have a reason why I believe in them) towards my forehead, I answered that phone call from camp with all the fortitude I could summon to hide the fact that I was still as groggy as a person under the Imperius charm.
Sparing you the details of the entire situation that had broken out in camp, what ultimately transpired was a story of lies, deceit, and dishonesty. Sounds like the plot of a Taiwanese drama serial but I kid you not when I say that this happens just about every now and then in a SAF camp. So the moral of this whole story: If you want drama, sign on with the SAF and forget your Taiwanese dramas on Channel U. 'Live' storytelling trumps TV anytime. NOT.
As with all plots, it started with a single unfortunate incident. With the addition of another incident and topping them off with a good measure of lies and a few unpleasant exchange of words, I have now got a soldier who is about to be court-marshalled. After counseling him, it has all come down to the fact that all this could have been avoided had he taken up responsibility of the offence he had committed, and not shoveled his own grave by piling layers of lies upon one another.
This incident brings be back to a conversation I had with a Leading Steward (LS) about more than a year ago. I had asked him if there was one thing that if he could change about the company's culture, what would it have been. His answer was simple. Ownership.
SQ's cabin crew family counts itself in the figure of roughly 7000 people, with four ranks split among them. From bottom to top, they are the
- Flight Stewards/Stewardesses (FS/FSS) who wear the blue tie/kebaya
- Leading Stewards/Stewardesses (LS/LSS); green tie/kebaya
- Chief Stewards/Stewardesses (CS); red tie/kebaya, and finally the
- In-Flight Supervisors (IFS) who the wear purple tie/kebaya.
If we were to talk about an airline like Emirates (EK) or Qantas (QF), it would be a given that such equivalent ranks exist within their respective cabin crew departments as well. But perhaps the one thing that sets SQ's, or rather, most cabin crew operating as part of an asian airline such as Korean Air (KE) and Malaysia Airlines (MH or MAS), is the hierarchy at play amongst ranks. Asians do tend to pay a lot more attention to seniority and rank as compared to most western cultures.
So naturally, you'd expect the FS and FSS-es up in the air, to be doing most of the work on the ground. The bosses from each flight - the Chiefs and IFS-es are the equivalent of senior management who come down hard on the people caught in the middle (or junior level management)- the LS and LSS-es.
Now what has all this got to do with aviation, you may wonder. Stick with me, I promise I'm getting to the point soon. (Yeah, sorry if I can get a little long winded like that)
I think my friend, the LS, had a very good point to make when he said that the one thing he would have liked to see changed is the attitude of people taking ownership of their faults and responsibilities. I have to concur because I see far too many people who adopt a "fight or flight" mentality when it comes to handling issues, be it at work or at home. What's so wrong with being wrong? What right about being right all the time?
My soldier was a typical example. He tried to "
tai-chi" his way out of the situation, implicating his very own platoon-mates in the process. He was being dishonest while trying to make himself look faultless. I'm not sure if he realised it at that point of time, but his guilt as apparent as a kid trying to convince everyone that the cookie crumbs on his shirt did not come from him stealing from the cookie jar.
The same thing applies in the cockpit - or in flight school, for that matter. One of my most invaluable lessons while in the Singapore Youth Flying Club (SYFC) came from a certain instructor who forced me to identify my errors and provide a rectifiable solution to them. That's how we learn, and learn fast. (Read
The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle for more on this)
In a similar way, our mistakes should be seen as something we take ownership of. It's part of a pilot's mindset.
In taking ownership of our mistakes, we own them and we convert them into our learning points that will stick with us for the rest of our careers. So what if our faults have consequences? That doesn't mean that we should
fight against them or take
flight from them. Fighting consequences by lying to cover up mistakes lead to even bigger lies, or consequences even. Look at history for a good example of how many crashes were attributed to pilot error, or under the sub-heading of not reporting events that went amiss during the flight.
In my humble opinion, the leadership responsibilities that Leading Stewards and Stewardesses play up in the air are very similar to the ones that us Cadets or newly minted SOs and FOs hold. Just as the LS/LSS-es are in charge of their FS/FSS-es, galleys, and meal services of their respective aisles, we cadets are in charge of the mistakes and learning points that we make in our entire learning process. In the same way that LS/LSS-es have to be accountable to their bosses, we cadets have not our bosses, but our careers to be accountable to. There is no point in keeping mum about a mistake and allowing bad practices to form habits.
So if you're hoping to get through the interviews, I hope this post sticks the mindset of
mistake ownership firmly in place. Nothing disgusts an interviewer more than coming to face with a cadet that cannot place himself in a position to learn or be humble enough to admit that he has made a mistake.
Now anyway, it's time for me to go back to my comfortable JCL-turquoise eyeshades, and wish me luck so that I don't get awoken by soldiers trying to score offs and night-outs with me for the next one hour.
