Look at the behaviours that define effective Leadership and Teamwork — anticipating crew needs, providing support, demonstrating empathy, resolving conflict, empowering participation, giving direction — and ask what conditions are required for any of them to actually function. The answer, every time, is the same: an atmosphere in which people feel genuinely able to speak and be heard.
Without that atmosphere, crew needs go unspoken because the crew member doesn't feel safe raising them. Empathy has nothing to work with because the other person isn't showing you what they actually feel. Conflict goes underground because voicing a disagreement feels riskier than swallowing it. Participation is performed rather than genuine. Direction is received but not truly heard.
Creates an atmosphere of open communication sits within the Communication competency, but its reach is wider than that. It is the enabling behaviour. The condition that must be present for the rest of the matrix to deliver what it promises. Which is why it needs to be established early, maintained consciously, and treated as the priority it is when anything threatens it.
The Window Is Narrow
The atmosphere of a crew is set faster than most people realise. It does not develop gradually over the course of a flight — it is established in the first exchanges. The tone of the pre-flight briefing, the way the first question is received, whether the body language of either crew member signals genuine interest or procedural compliance — all of this is being read before the first sector has begun.
By the time the crew are airborne, the pattern is already in place. The crew member who felt genuinely heard in the briefing will contribute actively throughout the flight. The one who felt their input was tolerated rather than valued will have already begun to calibrate how much they offer. Not dramatically, not consciously — but the adjustment happens, and it persists.
This means the window to establish the atmosphere correctly is narrow. And it means that any crew member who coasts through those first exchanges — efficient, professional, but not genuinely open — has already shaped the dynamic in ways that will be difficult to reverse once airborne.
The atmosphere is set in the briefing. By the time you are at the holding point, it has already been established — for better or worse.
The Illusion of One-Sided Openness
There is a version of this behaviour that looks like success and is actually a failure. It is the cockpit where one crew member communicates openly — raises concerns freely, shares their thinking, contributes without hesitation — while the other does not. The first person experiences the atmosphere as open. The second experiences it as anything but.
One-sided openness is not open communication. It is one person's comfort operating inside an atmosphere that the other person cannot access. And from the outside — from the perspective of the crew member who is communicating freely — it can be invisible. They are saying what they think. They are asking questions. They feel the exchange is working. What they cannot see is the adjustment the other person has already made — the concerns not raised, the hesitations swallowed, the contributions withheld because something in the dynamic has signalled that voicing them carries a cost.
Avoiding this requires something that is easy to say and genuinely difficult to do: seeing the atmosphere from the other person's position, not your own. That requires self-awareness — an honest assessment of the signals you are sending, not just the intentions behind them. It requires empathy — the genuine interest in whether the other person is experiencing the exchange the way you think they are. And it requires humility — the willingness to accept that the atmosphere you believe you are creating may not be the one you are actually creating.
Open communication is created as much by non-verbal signals as by words. The captain who checks their phone while the first officer is speaking. The brief pause before responding that signals consideration of rank rather than content. The slight shift in posture when a concern is raised that wasn't anticipated. None of these are dramatic. All of them are read.
The crew member who picks up those signals does not necessarily conclude consciously that they should speak less. But they adjust. The threshold for raising a concern moves slightly higher. The instinct to offer an unsolicited observation is suppressed just a little more readily. Over the course of a flight, those small adjustments accumulate into a crew that is operating significantly below its communicative potential.
Maintaining It Is Active Work
An atmosphere of open communication is not something you establish once and then leave running. It requires active maintenance — particularly across the transitions and pressure points of a flight where the conditions that support it are most likely to degrade.
High workload phases are the most obvious threat. When a captain is task-saturated, the bandwidth available for monitoring the quality of the crew's communication narrows. Responses become shorter. Questions get deferred. The implicit signal — not intended, but received — is that this is not the moment to raise concerns. Which is often precisely the moment when concerns most need to be raised.
Fatigue is a less visible but equally significant threat. A crew that communicated openly at the start of a long duty day may find the atmosphere has quietly contracted by the fourth sector. Not through any single failure, but through the accumulated effect of slightly shorter responses, slightly less eye contact, slightly less genuine engagement. The atmosphere deteriorates incrementally, and because each step is small, it can go unnoticed until the degradation is significant.
The maintenance required is not complicated. It is the same set of behaviours applied consistently — genuine attention when the other person speaks, real questions rather than procedural ones, the visible acknowledgement that their input has been heard and considered. Small acts, repeated reliably, across the length of the duty day.
The Fragility of What's Been Built
Open communication is built collectively but can be destroyed individually. A crew where both members have contributed to an atmosphere of genuine openness has created something genuinely valuable — and something genuinely fragile. Because all it takes is one moment where a concern is dismissed, one instance where a contribution is met with impatience, one exchange where the signal sent is that speaking up carries a cost, and the atmosphere begins to close.
This is the asymmetry that makes this behaviour so demanding. It is aligned in the sense that both crew members need to be part of it for it to function. But it is not symmetric in its vulnerability. One team member, through arrogance, indifference, or simply never having examined their own effect on the crew dynamic, can undermine what the other has been carefully building — often without knowing they have done so.
The signs of deterioration are worth knowing and worth watching for. A crew member who has become quieter than their baseline. Contributions that have become shorter and more qualified. An increase in closed, confirmatory responses — yes, understood, roger — where there used to be more substantive exchange. These are not dramatic signals. They are the early indicators that the atmosphere is contracting, and they are far easier to address at that stage than once the contraction has become the new normal.
The atmosphere of open communication is built by the whole crew and can be closed by one. Noticing the signs of deterioration — and acting on them early — is the behaviour in its most demanding form.
On the Line
High Performance Pilot structures your development of Creates an Atmosphere of Open Communication across three levels — Foundation, Proficient, and Mastery. Each session takes minutes. The development happens on every flight. Free to start.
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