Former Royal Air Force fast jet pilot Mandy Hickson, joined us at NMP Live to tell us about her three tours of duty and 50 combat missions. She also shared how she uses her experiences to inspire her corporate speaking events.
Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Mandy Hickson
Can you give us a brief overview of your career?
I did three tours of duty, 50 combat missions in my time on the squadron flying tornadoes. One mission that always sits high up in my memory bank is an evening. It was a night mission; we were taking off about 10 o’clock at night until 2 o’clock in the morning. We had just swept up our last target and we were setting the nav kit towards base.
I was going home the next day and I was starting to relax. I’ll be honest, the area that we were flying in had always been really quiet, nothing particularly happening, and so complacency might have started to creep in as well.
Suddenly my navigator in the back seat shouted “Mandy! Break right” Instantly I reacted to his call because we had been engaged by a surface-to-air missile. It had locked on to the heat source of our engines. We performed the manoeuvre and we put out our flares, which act as a decoy to take that missile away from being locked on to the heat, and it picks up those flares.
It exploded about two miles away from our cockpit and then the whole mission changed for us. The way it worked out in that theatre of war at the time was that once an aggressive act is made towards any members of that coalition force, and there were about 80 aeroplanes airborne that night, operating out of four countries around the Persian Gulf, you are entitled to prosecute an attack on a target.
So, instantly you have got to go through a decision making process. I happen to be leading my first ever combat mission. I was the junior member of the team. I had been trusted to lead and suddenly, quite frankly, complexity’s gone through the roof. So actually, for me, it was all about raising the game, being accountable for my actions, choosing a pathway, utilising the team members to get the very best from my team as well, but asking for advice where it was needed.
My boss that night gave me the most outstanding example of leadership I have ever seen. He trusted this junior team member when the complexity was low and the second we got shot at it all changed. We had to go find a tanker, we had to refuel, and then we pressed back in to Iraq.
I was actually unsuccessful in my refuelling but I was still leading the mission, and I’ve got to make some decisions – do I carry on trying for personal gain or do I step back and allow the rest of my team to refuel? And that is what we chose to do. I say we because it is very much a crew. You have a pilot and a navigator and you are in that decision making process together.
The rest of my formation, my boss was my number 2 and a senior member of the team, the executive officer, they were number 3,and they went back into Iraq, located the target and destroyed it. Myself and number 4 landed on our fumes back at base.
I felt like I had failed but when I ran the debrief it dawned on me that we were successful in our task. We were the only formation that had a direct hit on our target that night. We were successful as a team, and sometimes it is about that overall success. It’s not about the individual glory and it’s about selflessness. It’s about looking at what the task is and utilizing everybody’s skill sets for that.
My boss had truly empowered me because he didn’t leap in and take control. He let that junior team member lead, and that in itself was incredibly powerful as a learning lesson for me.
How important is communication?
Communication is absolutely everything. When I left I retrained as a Human Factors Facilitator. The aviation industry as a whole realised that aeroplanes were crashing still. Especially 25 – 30 years ago, we were losing a lot of aircraft and they realised that human error was the main causal factor. In fact three out of four accidents happen because of human error.
Now, you can never stop a human from committing errors, however, what you can do is educate people in the human elements that can make a difference. Communication is one of our top priorities in that as well.
There are 16 areas that we cover within that Human Factors training. Everything from leadership to decision making, the way our brains work and we process information, our situational awareness; understanding the bigger picture and how everything comes together, but the communications skills are the thing that I say underpins absolutely everything.
In the air, if you were to say something as a message to someone else, and they misinterpret it, lives can be lost as a consequence. So, every single one of your communications is two way. You must always say something, get clarification, understanding and then get them to feed it back.
Businesses, when you look at how much money is lost on miscommunication, be it in the form of emails or someone misinterpreting what somebody has said, it’s amazing how powerful that is. So, how can we change that? I run quite a lot of sessions looking purely at communication skills, looking at the way that teams work together, and actually sometimes breaking down those barriers. An email is not always the best course of action. Picking up a phone, having a personal relationship. Knowing the person on the end of that line is so powerful to how business is done, and I think we have got away from doing that a little bit.
What is leadership?
Leadership is not a title; it’s an action. I read that and I loved it, because that is exactly it.
When you join the military you spend 6 months, or it could be 9 months now for an officer, really learning how to be a leader. They take you through a process. They almost wear you down to your lowest ebb to begin with. I think you have probably seen that on all the programs about the forces. What they are trying to do it work out where your own personal strengths and weaknesses actually are.
Until you understand how you tick how can you be part of a team and understand how the members of your team work? Once you understand your own personal strengths and weaknesses you can see those in the members of your team. Then you are built up in to leadership roles where you are going to be making decisions as well.
The big thing for me, and it was never spelt out, but what you are trying to create in leaders is that you are trying to take someone from being a transactional leader, i.e. I am paying you to do a job – go and lead! That is not a leader. That is a manager. If you want leadership, it is someone that takes an organisation, or a group, or a team to the next level. You are getting things out of that team that they didn’t believe they could as a set of individuals, and so you are becoming a transformational leader.
That is the big difference. Basically, leadership is that action that we can see.
How do leaders create the right culture of success?
I think it all goes down to empowering the team members. If you have a leader who is quite authoritarian, I think that is a very old-school style of leadership. We have certainly seen changes enormously in the workplace about how people are leading.
If people are just being told what to do then they are not feeling engaged, and therefore they switch off and you have got a completely un-empowered team. You hear people saying “well, what is the point? There is no point in pushing that upwards because I won’t be listened to, nothing ever changes around here”. If people have a voice, and they feel that their leader is listening to them, suddenly you have now got engagement. People feel they can make a difference to the team, and actually people all come on board.
So, for me, what people can do in a leadership role is about actually listening to the people, right from the bottom levels.
When we are looking at safety, for example, in the aviation sector or across all industries, you want people to feel the ability to challenge authority. They want to come and have a voice, how powerful is that? You come, and you might have only been on the job for one day, but you see a better way of doing it and you feel empowered to say, “I’ve seen a better way of doing it!” and people go wow! People come on board. If people are just doing what they are told to do then actually it is never going to work.
What is the importance of planning and strategy?
When we are looking at planning a mission we say prior planning prevents perfectly poor performance. I might have changed the odd word in there, but actually planning is everything.
Missions can take 5 or 6 hours to plan, and it’s only going to last 2 hours when you are up there. It’s that covering every single scenario so nothing surprises you.
For business, if you look at any business strategy, when they have got a perfect plan in place, how much smoother does the actual operation go? When they are launching something and they’re not feeling ready, it’s not good to go. I have gone in to so many businesses when they say “it’s amazing, you almost know from the start of a project how it is going to go, literally from the planning stage”
On the flip side of that though, and this is an interesting one with the world as it is at the moment, I work with a lot of companies who are trying to get a more agile approach. Now things are changing so quickly, especially if you look at things like IT or Software, if you spend too long on the planning stage you have now missed the boat, because somebody else has done it.
So sometimes it is about planning and trying to think about every what-if scenario, but at the same time not spending so long so that it’s perfect. You almost make that call on 70% and say “right, that is good to go now, lets start implementing it and actually test it in action” and I can see that that works as well. I think there is a balance, definitely.
How important is debriefing?
The debrief, for us, is the critical learning point. There is no point in flying a training mission, or indeed an operational mission, unless you can learn from it.
I look with businesses all the time who if I ask them “do you debrief post-project or post-event?” they say, “we always want to, but we never seem to have time”. Well, when are you ever learning? It is almost like they skirt over all of the quick points and ask when does that get implemented.
We run through a debrief funnel. We ask basic questions. We start at the top – what happened? What were the facts? Let’s just lay that out. Why did it happen? What is the cause? But underneath it all you are getting to the how. How can we be better? What is the cure? If you can get to that bottom point each time and want to learn.
In our debriefs one of the big things that we have done, and you see it on the Red Arrows for example; in the Red Arrows they have very open debriefs. Members of the public can often win prizes and things, and they will stand at the back of the debriefs and say number 1 you did this, number 3 you did that.
There is no rank in the room so it is an interesting one. I can sit in a debrief as a junior member, as a flying officer, there could be someone 4 or 5 ranks higher than me, and I would say number 2, and suddenly you are flattening a hierarchal gradient, and it gives people more of a voice to feel they can challenge authority, because you are referring to someone in a formation position.
Actually, getting down to the nitty-gritty of what went well, because we often focus on the negative, but to me it is also about focusing also on the positive – “this went brilliantly, right, that is the best practice that we need to replicate!” Get it out there. Share it to everybody within that company.
If you’re not sharing the learning you are keeping it close to the chest, and actually we’re not developing. We aren’t utilizing that learning for what it is worth.
What are the key take-away messages from your talks?
When I first went in to speaking, I started to speak in a motivational way, thinking that is where I should go., But actually at the same time when I left the Air Force I also retrained, not just as an airline pilot but also as a Human Factors Facilitator.
I realized that I would always have my conference calls with my clients and I would ask what are the key messages, what do you want brought up, what is going on in the business at the moment? They would say they want to empower the team, it is a little bit about wanting people to be more accountable for their actions, they would like a little bit more of the team work side, a bit on communication, a bit on decision making, and I was thinking these are all my Human Factor elements that I’m basically training the airline world in. I realized that they are the key take-aways.
Every business, it doesn’t matter if you are flying, oil and gas, or high-risk financial sector, people are at the heart of every single business. The key take-aways therefore are going to be the same. It doesn’t matter if I am a fast jet pilot and I am making decisions in very quick time, they will affect lives. People may ask how that is relevant to the financial sector but ultimately you are making decisions that are going to be affecting millions and millions of pounds.
So, how do we run through a decision making process? I share things like our decision-making models, a lot about empowerment, and for me it is selflessness within teams. How do you truly build a team that go the extra mile for their colleagues? For me it is about trusting those team members.
When you start to see people acting selflessly you know you have got an excellent team and you watch the trust build and you watch performance go through the roof. There are so many take-aways, not just on the safety side of things, of course not, but more in the human element; in how we work.
I do it purely through a story telling aspect. I get people quoting back to me 7 or 8 years later; “Mandy, the stories you told of cycling around that hanger with your team mates, I have told it to everybody since”. That is really powerful, that people remember stories. They don’t remember facts and figures; they always remember stories.
When we talk about leadership, you look at the good leaders; how do they lead? Well, they lead through storytelling, and it’s a very powerful skill to have.
If you're interested in booking Mandy Hickson you can enquire online, email us or pick up the phone and speak to one of our friendly booking agents. For further information on Mandy, testimonials and video clips view her profile.
