LET US GIVE THEM SOME HELP AND COMPASSION.
How about Departmental Managers and Human Resources departments set up a means of indepent councelling or therapy for any team member is demonstrating inappropriate behaviour.
Personally I am not into this warm and fuzzy psychobabel. I know former military pilots who were known loud-mouths for years in their service career and only got worse in their civil aviation jobs.
For example: Many years ago, I joined DCA after many thoroughly enjoyable years flying in the RAAF.
One day after after I was tucked behind my desk in DCA Head Office and having earlier being politely informed of my true place in the heirarchy (at the bottom of the totem pole), I was asked by a couple of management big wheels did I know a certain chap in the RAAF who had applied to join DCA as an Examiner of Airmen. Yes, I did know him but as he was with another squadron, not all that well. . That's good, they said - what do you think of him?
I hesitated and said I had never flown with him but he was probably a very good pilot. We couldn't care less about very good pilots -we want an Examiner of Airmen, was the reply. Come on now, said the Inquisitors, you are hiding something. Not so said I (well I was, but didn't want to cruel anyone). Listen said the No 1 Inquisitor, how can we recruit the best people when we cannot get a handle of what people thought of him in his last job. You have a duty to be straight with us.
Now if I had just shut up and said `no comment` that would have been the end of the matter and they would have assumed the worst ie the candidate had a personality problem (which in fact he certainly had)
In the end I was leaned on heavily for an opinion and said "Look here chaps - I have never flown with him and I am sure he is a fine upstanding fellow with a good record as an officer and a gentleman, but around my neck of the woods he was seen as bit of a friendly idiot" I meant that in a jocular fashion but that was the end of the interview.
The Inquisitors seemed happy with that because they hired him soon after as an Examiner of Airmen RPT - (as it was known then). I was gob-smacked because I knew they would have a problem eventually with him. Yet, on the other hand, I was relieved my joking reference to a friendly idiot hadn't cruelled him.
Turned out the same fellow was a disaster as an Examiner of Airmen. Arrogance and nit-picking was his problem. So much so, that a couple of years later I happened to invited to the jump seat of an civil airliner Melbourne to Perth. As I was sipping a coffee and chatting to the two pilots, the captain turned around and said seeing as you are in DCA, do you happen to know an Examiner called XXXX? Yes I know of him, I said. Why do you ask? Well next time you see him, said the captain - him tell him if he gets aboard my aircraft ever again I will personally punch his lights out because he is an arrogant
pr..k
Perhaps all the friendly idiot needed to straighten himself out was help and compassion?
