In my experience of several African operators, the following were just some of the pertinent points regarding the ultimate succes of the operation:
- Interpersonal/vertical communication: Management and employees tended to have an 'us and them' relationship, with neither party willing to communicate, or in general tending to have no respect for the other parties point of view. Employees did not trust management to act in their, or the companies best interest
in the long term. Management tended to go for short term solutions that were sometimes obviously doomed to fail; that is, if anybody tasked with implementing the solution was asked for an opinion, which seldom happened in any case.
- Training: Companies viewed training as an absolute drain of resources, merely relying on individual skill when any problems arose, which is always a hit or miss affair, especially given the often random hiring process. Training was thus done to the barest minimum standard, often at the absolute last moment (type rating done two days before scheduled tour, who hasn't heard of that?), with no room for error. Any failures would be blamed on the individual concerned, with absolutely no introspection on the companies part, or any attempt to do better next time, or seek the root cause of the failure. Recurrency training was often a bit of a farce, again only complying with the barest of minimums.
- Documentation/Process: Whilst ops manuals could be full of good info and proper procedures, these kind of documents tended to be just a whole stack of paper that was ignored by management and personnel alike. Related to training. I had encountered pilots who had done several tours without even
seeing the ops manual, let alone reading it.
- Career Plan: Again, management tended to view employees as a necessary evil, rather than a part of a successful company, and treated them like whiny children in many instances, or just ignored them completely. The attitude was 'I can treat these people in a way that I myself would hate to be treated, but that's life'. Related to this, was quality of life - doing a two month tour, and expecting a month off, often the month off would be cut to ten days or so due to 'operational demand'. Bear in mind that 'operational demand' usually meant the company had screwed up somehow, yet the employee was the one punished.
- Staffing levels: Management often seemed to think that one young girl just out of school could handle the training and recurrency admin of nearly 100 pilots (in one example). Naturally, the drain on personnel in positions such as this resulted in very high staff turnover (the salary was also abysmal), which meant that experience levels were always below standard, with resulting screwups. Often related to that 'operational demand' thing I mentioned previously.
- 'Nomalisation of Deviance': A lovely term, given to me by a good friend, which describes how companies and individual become accustomed to doing things 'out of spec', or in contravention of MEL's, Ops manuals etc. The attitude coming down from above is always 'Get the job done', rather than 'Safety First' (which they might pay lip service to, but never at the expense of getting the job done of course).
I could actually go on and on, but I realised I'm waffling a bit. Ultimately it was the management culture of running everything below par, on what seemed to be a shoestring budget - inadequate staffing levels, salary, maintenance, training, etc. Poor/random long term strategies, with blundering short term decisions, lack of management experience and training, combined with some kind of warped reality all didn't help either.
Call me a sceptic, but I find African operator's management skills to be very much below par. And I have past (and some current) experience of other industries (to add: one in particular, where management skills are regarded as specific skills, ie they receive training and are evaluated in how they manage), where management skills are considerably better. Put simply, if we flew like they managed, the ground would be full of craters lined with aluminium and blood.
Sounds like you have the right attitude though - don't let them drag you down!
