Leadership and Teamwork sits at the foundation of the Core Competency framework for a reason. It is not simply one competency among nine — it is the operating environment within which all the others function. And within Leadership and Teamwork, this behaviour sits at the heart of what effective leadership actually looks like in practice. Not authority. Not seniority. The willingness to act when action is needed, and the clarity to tell your crew what to do when you do.
The behaviour has two components that are worth separating, because they demand different things. Taking initiative is an internal act — a decision made before anyone else has necessarily recognised that a decision is needed. Giving direction is an external act — communicating that decision to the crew in a way that creates clarity and generates movement. Both are required. Initiative without direction stays inside one pilot's head. Direction without initiative is reactive — waiting for events to force the hand rather than getting ahead of them.
Initiative as Threat Identification
The most important expression of initiative on the flight deck is threat identification. Threats do not announce themselves. They accumulate — in the weather building ahead, in the fuel state that is trending quietly in the wrong direction, in the runway state report that arrived twenty minutes ago and has not yet been discussed. The pilot who takes initiative is the one who lifts their attention from the immediate task to scan the wider picture and asks the question that has not yet been asked.
This is why initiative and situational awareness are so closely linked. You cannot act on what you have not noticed. But noticing is only the first step. The pilot with high situational awareness who does nothing with it — who sees the threat and waits for someone else to identify it, who recognises the developing situation and assumes the captain has it in hand — has completed only half the cycle. Initiative closes it. It converts awareness into action.
The crew that waits for events to force their hand is always one step behind. Initiative puts you a step ahead.
Direction Is Not Only the Captain's Job
There is a persistent assumption that giving direction is the captain's prerogative. It is not. The framework is explicit: any crew member may be required to give direction as circumstances dictate. The first officer who identifies a developing situation, who sees that the captain's attention is elsewhere, who recognises that the crew needs to act — that first officer is not overstepping by stating clearly what needs to happen next. They are doing their job.
Effective direction has three qualities: it is clear, it is concise, and it creates no ambiguity about what action is required. "I think we should probably consider..." is not direction. It is an observation. "I need you to get the weather for the alternate now" is direction. The difference matters under pressure, when there is no time for the crew to interpret an intention and when any ambiguity about who is responsible for a task increases the probability that it does not get done.
A crew environment in which only the captain gives direction is a crew environment operating below its potential. The captain who creates genuine psychological safety — in which every crew member feels empowered to call what they see and state what they think needs to happen — has built a team that is more resilient, more observant, and more capable of managing the unexpected than one in which direction flows in only one direction.
This does not mean undermining authority. It means building the kind of team where authority is exercised collectively, where the first officer's input is genuinely valued, and where the captain's response to a crew member giving direction is to engage with the substance of what they have said rather than the fact that they said it.
Spare Capacity Is the Prerequisite
There is a dependency that the framework makes explicit and that experienced pilots know from practice: initiative and direction require cognitive headroom. The pilot who is fully consumed by the immediate task — managing a high-workload phase of flight, dealing with a technical issue, absorbing an unexpected clearance — does not have the spare capacity to scan for developing threats, let alone to act on what they find. Workload Management is not a parallel competency to this behaviour. It is the foundation on which this behaviour depends.
This has a practical implication for how you approach every sector. The captain who manages their workload carefully, who plans ahead, who uses automation deliberately, who delegates early — that captain is not just managing the current task. They are protecting the capacity that initiative and direction will require when the situation changes. Spare capacity is not a luxury. It is the resource from which everything else is drawn.
Structured decision-making frameworks are one of the most practical ways to develop initiative under pressure. TDODAR — Time, Diagnosis, Options, Decision, Assign, Review — provides a scaffold for exactly the kind of thinking this behaviour demands. It forces you to assess the time available, diagnose what is actually happening, generate options rather than defaulting to the first solution, make a decision, assign tasks with clarity, and review the outcome.
Using TDODAR — or whichever decision framework your operation favours — trains the habit of structured initiative. It turns "I should do something about this" into a disciplined sequence that produces a decision and a direction. The pilot who practises this structure in normal operations will reach for it instinctively when the situation demands it under pressure.
The Mentorship Dimension
This behaviour has a generational dimension that is easy to overlook in the moment. The captain who consistently takes initiative and gives direction is not only managing the flight. They are demonstrating to the first officer beside them what effective leadership looks like in practice. First officers build their mental models of captaincy from what they observe — from the captains they fly with, the decisions they watch being made, the directions they hear given and the situations they see being acted on rather than ignored.
The implication is significant. If you are an experienced operator, your behaviour on the flight deck is not only a performance standard — it is a teaching instrument. The habits you model, the initiative you take or fail to take, the direction you give or leave unspoken — these shape the pilots around you in ways that persist long after the sector is over. This is a responsibility that comes with experience, and it operates whether you have consciously accepted it or not.