As the headlines progress each new day - we will hear less and less about the incredible achievements of the USAirways flight crewand Captain "Sully." While we may hear less about it from a media standpoint, there will be many aviation experts and National Transportation Safety Board professionals pouring over the happenings of the aircraft and its gorgeous life saving landing. All signs point that flight 1549 will be an ongoing example of study and training for many years to come.
The best thing about the subsequent study and training is that it will be focused on duplicity. Everyone is analyzing and looking for all things that were done right so they can be duplicated should something like this ever happen again. There is a great leadership growth parallel here:
The point is that we need to learn from greatness and attempt to duplicate it. Flight 1549 was saved by a group of highly trained people who operated with greatness and lead over 100 people to a future they thought they would not have.
The tendency for too many leaders is to look at what went wrong and work very hard to never repeat it. While they are working to not repeat what went wrong - other things go wrong somewhere else - so they chase that situation down and the cycle repeats itself. Don't let me discount the importance of learning from our mistakes. However, the focus needs to be on finding what is happening right, study it very closely and duplicate it.
If you want to develop great managers, learn what great managers are doing and duplicate it. If you want to have a great marriage, find someone you know who has a great marriage and ask them questions so you can learn what to duplicate. If you want to lead a great football team - don't study the 2008 Detroit Lions, study the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Arizona Cardinals and see what you can duplicate. If you have pockets of high turnover in your company and pockets of low turnover in your company - go and dig up the ingredients of the low turnover pocket and blend those ingredients in your high turnover pockets.
This approach will bring you to better results and future problem reduction much faster than always trying to learn from a broken model. The dough is in the duplicity of current progress!
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