There is an easier way to run a cockpit. You take control, you direct, you decide. You tell people what to do and when to do it. The flight gets completed. The boxes get ticked. And you feel, if you are that type of operator, entirely satisfied with yourself.
The problem is that you are probably the only one who does.
The behaviour empowers and encourages team participation sits within Leadership and Teamwork for good reason. Leadership and Teamwork is the foundation competency — the one that influences every other. Without it, the matrix begins to fracture. And within that competency, the ability to genuinely empower the people around you is not a soft skill or a management concept imported from a business school. It is a practical, observable behaviour that separates effective operators from ones who only think they are effective.
The Two Routes
Every captain, every senior first officer, every crew member in a position of influence faces the same choice — consciously or not. You can control, or you can empower.
The controlling route is faster in the short term. Less explanation required. Less investment in the other person. Less tolerance of a different approach. You get compliance, and compliance gets the job done. But compliance is a floor, not a ceiling. It delivers the minimum, reliably, and nothing more. The person on the other side of the cockpit is present in body, executing their tasks — and entirely absent in every other sense that matters.
The empowering route asks more of you. It requires you to understand the other person's abilities, to allocate tasks that challenge without overwhelming, to ask for input and genuinely use it. It requires self-awareness — you have to know your own strengths and limitations before you can make good decisions about how to distribute work. And it requires a certain confidence. Operators who default to control often do so because empowering others feels like a threat to their own authority. It is not. It is the fullest expression of it.
Empowerment is not a management technique. It is an expression of a confident, self-aware operator who understands that the team's ceiling is higher than their own.
What It Actually Looks Like
In practice, empowering and encouraging team participation means involving your crew in the planning process — not as a formality, but as a genuine resource. It means asking the question before you've already decided the answer. It means creating an environment where input is expected, not tolerated.
It means allocating tasks fairly and appropriately to ability. That is a more nuanced skill than it sounds. Appropriate allocation is not simply giving people what they can already do comfortably — it also means giving people tasks that stretch them, that develop their capability, that build their confidence. A team member who is consistently under-utilised stops contributing. A team member who is consistently over-stretched stops functioning. The empowering operator reads both risks and manages them.
The briefing is where empowerment is either demonstrated or denied. An operator who briefs at the crew — delivering information in one direction, confirming nothing, inviting no input — has already set the tone. An operator who briefs with the crew — asking what they've noticed, what concerns them, what contingencies they'd plan for — has created something different. Not a longer briefing. A better one.
Situational awareness in flight is built partly on this foundation. Team members who have been involved in planning are more invested. They are projecting forward. They are less likely to be passive when things begin to change.
The Double Return
What makes this behaviour worth the extra effort is that the return is compounded. When you empower effectively, the team performs better — more options surface, more threats get identified, more errors get caught. That is the team-level return. But simultaneously, each individual within that team develops. They are being stretched, being trusted, being given the chance to contribute above the minimum. That is the individual-level return. Both happen at the same time, from the same behaviour.
The operator who controls gets neither. Their team delivers compliance. Their colleagues stop growing. And critically — though this operator rarely sees it — the trust that makes a crew function under pressure is quietly eroding with every flight.
When the Chips Are Down
The argument for empowerment is most visible when things go wrong. In a non-normal situation — a failure, a developing threat, a decision that genuinely requires the best available thinking — the controlling operator suddenly needs what they have spent months suppressing. They need the crew to contribute fully. To think independently. To push back if the plan is wrong. To own their part of the response.
An empowered crew does this naturally, because it is what they have always been asked to do. They are already in the habit of contributing. They already know their input is expected and valued. The trust is already there.
A crew that has been directed and controlled throughout has none of that. At the moment it matters most, the captain is alone — the only person in the cockpit actually flying the problem. Everyone else is waiting to be told what to do next.
When the chips are down, an empowered team is the only route out — with everyone contributing at their maximum for the team.
Building the Habit
Like every behaviour in the competency framework, this one develops through deliberate practice. You do not become an empowering operator by deciding to be one. You become one by repeatedly making the choice, at the small moments as well as the large ones, to involve rather than direct.
Ask for feedback — not as a formality, but because you actually want to know. Do your crew feel involved? Are they being used effectively? Do they want more responsibility? And give feedback in return. If a colleague has more to offer, say so. If you have more to give, make it known. The dialogue has to flow in both directions for any of this to work.
Active communication is the mechanism. Empathy is the fuel. Self-awareness is the prerequisite. You cannot allocate appropriately to others' abilities without first being honest about your own.
On the Line
High Performance Pilot structures your development of Empowers and Encourages Team Participation across three levels — Foundation, Proficient, and Mastery. Each session takes minutes. The development happens on every flight. Free to start.
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