By Jason Korman, CEO, Gapingvoid Culture Design Group
The announcement that Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun will step down quickly reverberated across the markets and the business world on Monday. As Reuters noted, the move is part of “a broad management shakeup brought on by the planemaker's sprawling safety crisis stemming from a January mid-air panel blowout on a 737 MAX plane.”
It’s also the latest sign of a fundamental challenge that has vexed Boeing for years: creating a culture in which fixing problems is a much larger priority than assigning blame. For any organization to ensure safety and reward shareholders, it needs a culture in which employees are free to speak out without fear, and thinking is driven by curiosity rather than blame.
Introducing new leadership to Boeing offers an opportunity to build real cultural change. If the company doesn’t, it will set itself up for more disasters.
The culture work Boeing needs
I know well the difficulties of building cultural change in aviation. The stakes are just about as high as it gets. Lives are on the line. Of course the fear of making a mistake -- or being caught making a mistake -- will hang over daily operations like a constant, dark cloud.
My work with the U.S. Air Force has shown me that a commitment to achieving “no-fail” missions can be a good thing, but can also create its own dangers. If any kind of failures aren’t allowed, then people may be wary of ever admitting a mistake.
Boeing has wrestled with this. As I wrote in Forbes in 2020 after two 737 MAX plane crashes killed 346 people, one of the factors critics cited was the company’s “culture of secrecy” having prevented employees from speaking up when they saw problems. An attorney representing victims’ families also said the company had a culture in which profits outranked safety. For me, most striking in the investigations was Boeing’s refusal to consider other opinions when developing the aircraft and addressing safety issues.
No doubt, changes have taken place since then. But in January, a two-month old Alaska Airlines 737 made an emergency landing after a door plug tore off mid-flight. In the investigation, “pilots reported pressurization warning lights on three earlier flights” of the same jet, Reuters reported.
According to the New York Times, the incident “renewed questions about the safety of Max planes and Boeing’s commitment to quality. Airline chief executives publicly expressed frustration with the manufacturer.” The Federal Aviation Administration grounded similar planes and imposed production limits on Boeing. “In recent weeks, Boeing has come under mounting scrutiny. An F.A.A. audit of Boeing’s Max production found dozens of lapses,” the report added.
Investors, beware the ‘doom loop’
For shareholders, this is an important time to learn about the dreaded “doom loop” that can do severe damage to companies and their bottom lines. As Investopedia puts it, the term “describes a situation in which one negative action or factor triggers another, which in turn triggers another negative action or causes the first negative factor to worsen, continuing the cycle.” (The term was popularized by Jim Collins in the management book Good to Great.)
I’ve seen this loop play out inside organizations. Being responsible for something going wrong leads people to pretend it didn’t happen or just avoid talking about it. Instead, they bury a mistake and move on. That leads to further errors.
The key is for an organization to transform its culture so that curiosity takes precedence. Leaders should demonstrate an interest in the what, where, why, who, and how of all operations. When something goes wrong, they should show that getting to the core of the problem, rather than finding someone to blame, is the most important goal. Determining the “what,” not the “who,” is the most important goal.
It’s also practical. At a company like Boeing, mistakes are never the fault of just one person or small group. Even if someone messes up in a production line, there are checks and controls in place that are supposed to spot these things. Any error shows a fault in the system that needs to be addressed. That can only happen when everyone feels free to share what they know, with psychological safety firmly in place.
A culture of curiosity breeds intrinsic motivations and incentives for success. It vastly speeds up the process toward solutions that last. And it rewards stakeholders, including investors, who know that tackling these issues is essential for long-term growth.
Boeing has a chance for a new beginning. With pressure from investors, it can finally take on culture change as central to its core mission -- and deliver a stronger, safer future.
-Jason Korman is CEO of Gapingvoid Culture Design Group, a team of experts in cross-disciplinary fields who work with corporations, government agencies and other organizations to build ideal work cultures.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.