Wasting everyone's time. A talk-fest. A typical lip service exercise.
These additional Kumbaya training sessions were all the rage with U.S. airlines in the '90's so maybe it's time to repeat the cycle.
The captain is a 'facilitator' who promotes 'consensus' on a 'plan of action' etc.
It's mostly an American thing I suppose, as the 1999 FAA CRM paper cited above says about exporting CRM:
In many cases, the concepts presented were incongruent with the national culture of the pilots.
From the WSJ article:
None of the safety incidents that helped prompt the training—which ranged from dangerously low fuel to an emergency pull-up maneuver to avoid crashing into the ground—resulted in an accident. But United considered them serious enough to send a dramatic two-page safety bulletin to its pilots early last year. The document highlighted major risk factors, including lax discipline and poor cockpit communication.
Things like playing games on the cell phone while descending in Metric RVSM airspace as pilot flying seem to be considered a workplace entitlement with some of my colleagues. If I show more than mild displeasure, my coworkers will clam up and respond tersely for the rest of the trip. So, I must accommodate my colleagues' procedural deviations to ensure effective communication and team building etc...
What is needed if the company is serious, is not more feel-good additions to the various manuals or exhorting captains to be nice to their copilots. It should be a lot more raw data handling in IMC during every simulator session. More purely visual approaches and circuit handling in the simulator. Get rid of the flight directors during simulator practice.
I'm just as guilty as anyone of being rusty on stick and rudder flying after decades of FMS glass cockpit flying. Sim training has evolved into a rapid fire check the boxes, perform the maneuvers session with little actual training and the last three items pencil-whipped to get you out of the box on time. Remember how LOFT, AQP and CQ were going to eliminate the 'batting practice' of the earlier sim programs? Maybe we do need some batting practice to build proficiency on handling skills.