The Competency That
Makes the Others Work

There is a version of the Core Competency framework that treats each of the nine competencies as a separate domain — a skill to be developed in isolation, assessed independently, scored and filed. By that reading, Leadership and Teamwork is simply one box among nine. You are either good at it or working on it, and either way it sits alongside Communication, Situational Awareness and the rest as a discrete item on a checklist.

That reading misses something important. Leadership and Teamwork is not just another competency. It is the condition under which the other competencies operate. A crew without effective leadership and genuine teamwork does not simply score lower on one of nine dimensions — it becomes a crew where every other dimension is harder, less reliable, and more likely to fail precisely when it matters most.

Thirty years of line flying, including time as a line training captain and a period teaching MCC and APS courses, has made this clear to me in a way that no framework description fully captures. The technical competencies — Application of Knowledge, Flight Path Management, Problem Solving — are necessary. But whether they actually deploy on the flight deck, under pressure, depends almost entirely on what the Leadership and Teamwork environment allows.

What the Competency Actually Requires

The nine behaviours within Leadership and Teamwork span a wide range — from following directions reliably and admitting mistakes, to empowering participation and taking initiative when required. Reading the list, it is easy to assume the competency is primarily about the Captain: how they lead, how they set the tone, how they direct the crew.

That is only half of it. Leadership and Teamwork is a bilateral competency. It describes how a crew operates as a unit — which means it makes demands of the First Officer as much as the Captain. The First Officer who follows directions without genuine engagement is not demonstrating the competency. The Captain who leads without creating the conditions for the First Officer to contribute is not demonstrating it either.

What the framework is actually describing is a shared environment: one where goals are understood and owned by both crew members, where mistakes can be named without threat, where humility and integrity are consistent rather than situational, and where each person is genuinely empowered to contribute. That environment does not appear automatically because two qualified pilots sit down together. It is built — deliberately, and largely in the first few minutes of the flight.

Enabled by Communication

Leadership and Teamwork cannot exist without Communication — not as a dependency in the abstract, but in the most concrete operational sense. Every leadership behaviour in the framework is exercised through communication. Goals are shared through communication. Direction is given through communication. Feedback is provided through communication. Conflict is resolved through communication. The leader who cannot communicate precisely — who cannot convey intent clearly, time their interventions well, or read whether their message has landed — is a leader whose influence over the crew is unreliable.

The relationship runs in both directions. The crew member who listens actively, confirms understanding, and resolves ambiguity before acting is not just demonstrating Communication competency — they are making the leadership structure work. When a Captain gives a direction and the First Officer reads it back accurately and confirms intent, the team is functioning. When that loop breaks — when assumptions replace confirmations, or when ambiguity is left unresolved to avoid an awkward moment — the leadership structure has degraded even if nobody has raised their voice.

Grounded by Application of Knowledge

There is a quality of leadership that is only available to the crew member who genuinely knows their procedures. It is the confidence to make decisions without hesitation, to brief with authority rather than approximation, and to delegate with precision rather than vagueness. That quality is not a personality trait. It is the product of Application of Knowledge and Procedures — and without it, the leadership behaviours become hollow.

Consider the briefing. A Captain who briefs the approach well — who knows the procedure, applies it to the conditions, anticipates the decision points and frames them clearly for the First Officer — is exercising Leadership and Teamwork. But the brief is only as good as the knowledge behind it. The crew member who says "we'll deal with it if it happens" at a decision point that should be pre-briefed is not leading the crew through uncertainty. They are leaving the crew to manage it alone.

Application of Knowledge is what gives leadership its substance. The behaviours — setting goals, briefing contingencies, assigning roles clearly — require a foundation of procedural knowledge to be meaningful. Role clarity is only possible when you know what the role requires. Anticipating crew needs before they arise is only possible when you understand the flight well enough to see what is coming.

This matters particularly during MCC training, where pilots are transitioning from single-crew operation for the first time. The leadership behaviours are genuinely new — but so is the procedural context of crew operation. The two develop together, and a deficit in either one limits the other.

Essential to Problem Solving and Decision Making

Under normal conditions, the relationship between Leadership and Teamwork and Problem Solving is largely invisible. Decisions get made, the crew complies, things proceed as planned. It is when something goes wrong — or when something unexpected demands a genuine decision — that the quality of the Leadership and Teamwork environment determines whether the crew's Problem Solving capability is actually available.

The framework is explicit that leaders must involve others in decisions. This is not a courtesy. It is a cognitive resource strategy. The Captain who makes decisions unilaterally, without drawing on the First Officer's situational awareness, knowledge, or perspective, is operating with a fraction of the crew's problem-solving capacity. The First Officer who has relevant information and does not offer it — because the crew dynamic does not feel safe for challenge — is making the same error from the other side.

Constructive challenge — the willingness to say "I'm not comfortable with that" or "have we considered this?" — is simultaneously a Leadership and Teamwork behaviour and the mechanism by which errors in Problem Solving get caught before they become consequences. Crews that have built a genuine leadership environment, where contribution is expected and challenge is welcomed, have a natural error-correction system running alongside every decision. Crews that haven't are dependent on the Captain being right the first time.

That is an uncomfortable dependency in an environment designed specifically to require two people.

The Briefing as Leadership in Action

If there is a single moment in the flight where Leadership and Teamwork is most visibly expressed, it is the briefing. Not because the briefing is a test of leadership — but because everything the competency describes comes to bear in those few minutes before the flight begins.

The effective briefing establishes shared goals: both crew members understand the plan, the priorities, and the constraints. It assigns roles with clarity: who is doing what, when, and under what conditions that changes. It anticipates crew needs: the contingencies are discussed before they arise, which means the crew is not making their first decision about a runway change or a deteriorating alternate under pressure. And it creates the conditions for mutual contribution: a brief where only the Captain speaks, and the First Officer nods along without genuine engagement, is not a brief at all. It is a monologue that leaves the crew structurally unprepared.

The briefing is also where Application of Knowledge, Communication, and Leadership and Teamwork converge most clearly. The knowledge base determines what gets briefed. The communication skills determine whether it lands. The leadership environment determines whether the First Officer contributes to it honestly or simply waits for it to end.

When all three are functioning well, the brief is genuinely brief — focused, specific, mutually owned. When any one of them is absent, the brief is either incomplete, unclear, or one-sided. And in each case, the crew carries that deficit into the flight.

Why It Defines the Crew

Of the nine Core Competencies, Leadership and Teamwork is the one that most directly determines whether the crew operates as two individuals sharing a cockpit or as a single, effective unit. Every other competency is present in both people. But whether those competencies can be pooled — whether the combined situational awareness of the crew is greater than either individual's, whether the combined problem-solving capacity is available when it is needed, whether the knowledge in both heads is accessible rather than siloed — depends on the leadership and teamwork environment.

That environment is not a given. It is built, maintained, and occasionally rebuilt after something disrupts it. It requires ongoing attention across the whole duty period, not just the briefing. It requires the humility to admit when you are wrong, the integrity to say something when you should, and the skill to deliver both in a way that the other person can actually receive.

Leadership and Teamwork is the competency that makes all the others available. Developing it is not about personality or seniority. It is about building the habits, one sector at a time, that allow a crew of two qualified pilots to become something genuinely more capable than either one alone.