Last week I had the privilege of presenting a plenary session at the 2016 American Aerospace & Defense Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. This was a well-done, first-class event pulled together and hosted by Generis. The event was great, with a close-knit feel that featured senior executives from top companies from across the Aerospace & Defense industry. While there were many different companies and executives in attendance, with a number of different topics covered, they all shared a common interest in moving the industry forward. Through all of the sessions I participated in, there were three key messages I took away.

Leadership is more important now than ever

Topics at the summit ranged from common problem areas, such as supply chain issues, to the new Airbus final assembly line in Mobile, Alabama, to DARPA’s take on future military technology. While there was a range and diversity of topics, the common thread was the need of strong leadership to solve tough challenges and lead teams to deliver enduring solutions. Strong leaders are going to resolve supply chain issues effectively and collaboratively. They will tirelessly work through the challenges of bringing up a manufacturing line in a completely different part of the world, fresh with its own unique challenges. They will also challenge teams to develop mind-bending technology, and continue to move it forward in spite of the doubts that exist and the hurdles that come.

What does each of these three topics have in common? The common thread is that today organizations are facing issues and challenges that they haven’t encountered before. Challenges are still there, and they are as tough as ever! And that’s where having strong leadership makes the difference. While there are still supply chain issues, the issues encountered today are different than even a decade ago. Airbus never had a final assembly line in the US, certainly in the southeastern US, until just recently and needed to swiftly address the challenges with bringing a new facility up to speed. Even DARPA continues to take the unbelievable and transform those ideas into mere doubt. Every business is facing new, tough challenges and those challenges can only be effectively tackled with strong leadership.

Leadership is about people

The presentation I presented was on a rather innocuous topic, discussing the application of continuous improvement techniques, such as lean and six sigma, in Aerospace & Defense. It certainly paled in comparison to discussing the complexities of new materials technology DARPA was evaluating to support the battlefield of tomorrow. However, to drive change and continuous improvement, just as with finding tomorrow’s technology today, it begins with people. Leadership is all about people. More specifically, leadership is all about having the right people on your team. Back in 2001, Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, said that leaders of great companies begin first with “who” and not “what” or “where”. Leaders put the right people on the bus first, then worry about putting the right people into the right roles. You see, even in driving continuous improvement in your business, you must have the right people in those roles to lead the change.

Frequently companies will say that their people are their most important asset and their people are what differentiates them and allows their company to excel. It’s true. It’s not often a company will say that a particular tool or piece of equipment or software was their key to success, or that the next-generation aircraft was going to usher in a new period of significant prosperity. After all, you need great people operating that equipment to get great benefits. However, not all leaders remember that when approaching the hiring process. There are numbers to achieve and budgets to meet, and they cannot be met without a person in the seat. So they settle, rather than find the right person, the best person they can find. After all, as the saying sometimes goes, having someone in the role — even if they are not the best — is better than having no one in the role. No hiring manager wants to also be faced with a lengthy recruiting process, let alone the scrutiny that comes about from having an opening for so long, and risk losing the opening. There are pressures from above, and sometimes those pressures only encourage, if not dictate, hiring a person just to fill the seat.

Hiring great people is what differentiates great leaders. These leaders are compelled to hire only the best to add to their team and they take the time to do so. They understand that they owe it to their team and their organization to find the best people possible. They understand the multiplier effect hiring great people will have on their team’s performance and the impact to the organization. People are such a precious resource in any organization that you always need to hire the best and cultivate the people you have in your organization. As a former boss once told me, every team can be expressed as an average and there is a bar that represents that average. When you hire, you want to raise the average performance of your team, raise that bar! The key is to find the right people and the right fit to address the needs of your team today and in the future.

Leaders hire great people to solve difficult problems

The Aerospace & Defense industry will never be short of difficult issues to address or problems to solve. There are technological barriers to overcome and the ever-present constraint of cost, schedule, and quality to manage. While the Aerospace & Defense industry has it’s own host of challenges, every industry has their own as well. In each industry the problems are difficult and a lot of them were not concerns just a decade ago. In fact, a lot of the problems were not even on the radar! So great leaders must have a team of great people to solve those difficult problems, even when those problems continue to change and evolve.

Since the issues and problems continue to change over time, organizations employ continuous improvement methodologies to address those challenges. They staff those key challenges with their best people. They invest in and train their best people with the tools and techniques to become even more effective leaders and to enable them to solve those difficult problems. They do this because they know an investment in their best people will reap huge benefits in making the most difficult problems go away. They also teach their people the power of process and data, two key foundations in any continuous improvement program. Remember, tools are just tools unless they are placed in the hands of the right people to employ them.

Great people harness the power of process and data in leading their teams to solve those problems. They help others to see what’s going on by visualizing each of the steps in the process using simple tools such as process maps and value stream maps. They highlight and simplify the problems and pare them down to their essential pieces to aid in effective team engagement in resolving problems, using data to tell the story. Finally, great people maintain the resolve and desire to see an issue to its end.

Strong leadership will always be in high demand, especially as problems become tougher and more challenging. And great leaders will continue to build teams consisting of great people to solve their toughest problems.