Michelle 'Mace' Curran

And I think one of the things that fighter pilot culture does really good to foster trust, because we have to have it at such an extreme level, especially the Thunderbirds, right?

Like you're flying as close as 18 inches from another airplane going four or five hundred miles an hour.

And a lot of times when we're in formation, you might be looking to the right, staring at the jet next to you, trying to stay in position.

And there's another person to your left and another airplane doing the same thing.

And you cannot turn and check on them.

You just have to trust that they're not going to hit you and that they're going to move so that you can move where you need to go without being like, oh, are they out of the way?

It's insane.

And so the fighter pilot debrief.

Where after every flight, we have this opportunity for feedback, ownership and accountability.

When you are a young new fighter pilot, it's intimidating because you feel like you're getting in trouble.

And you also suck at your job because you're a beginner.

So that most of the debrief is just talking about the things you messed up because you're the weakest link because you're new.

But as you progress and as you get kind of brought into that team and that trust starts to develop, you realize that the purpose of that is not to shame you, to ridicule you, to make you feel bad.

The purpose is to openly look at everyone's mistakes, whether that's me as a brand new lieutenant, whether that's the wing commander who's a one-star general and happens to also be a fighter pilot and flies a handful of times a month and is honestly just not that tactically good at that point because he has a lot of other stuff going on.

And when he fesses up his mistakes the same as I do, that's what creates that trust.

And

Everyone understanding that the reason we're doing this feedback is because we want to be the best team we can possibly be.

It's not to call you out.

It's not to make you feel bad.

It's because we have this shared goal that creates that psychological safety that creates a team that gets better a lot faster because errors aren't hidden.