Trust and Accountability: The two-engine crew concept bizav leaders forget

Most leaders don't demand accountability. They're soft on standards - core values, priorities and weekly commitments. Why? Fear of losing people. And the convenient excuse of being "too busy" to enforce what matters.Nokia CEO Stephen Elop diagnosed exactly this disease in his infamous 2011 "burning platform" memo, saying the company "lacked accountability and leadership." Nokia held 40% of the global mobile phone market. High performers watched mediocrity go unchallenged. By 2014, Microsoft bought the carcass. Being nice is not the same as being good. In flight departments, charter operations and MROs, we want tight-knit crews. Loyal teams. Technicians who stay. So we avoid hard conversations. We let subpar performance slide. We confuse harmony with health. Patrick Lencioni nailed part of this in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. His pyramid is simple - trust at the base, accountability near the top. Most leaders read that and demand accountability before earning trust, and then wonder why their teams get defensive and check out. But here's the thing, Lencioni's model can be obscure if you read it too linearly: Enforcing high standards is itself a trust-building act. If we're playing chicken-or-egg, the answer is clear: The standard is the standard. Day one. Non-negotiable. The question isn't whether you enforce, it's how. Leaders who hold the line while showing they're genuinely invested in their people don't wait for trust before demanding accountability. They build trust through accountability. Your team is always watching. When you let mediocrity slide, your high performers notice. They start wondering if excellence matters, or if they're suckers for caring. Enforcing the standard tells them: "This matters, you matter, and I won't let someone else's laziness devalue your effort." That's not just accountability. That's trust. "Nice" Is Not "Kind" Harvard Business Review contributor Ron Ashkenas drew a clean distinction in a piece published last month: Niceness avoids discomfort; kindness does hard things in service of long-term good. In aviation terms, "nice" is letting a sloppy handoff happen because you don't want conflict. "Kind" is stopping the handoff and fixing the behavior before it becomes an incident. If you want people to be open to feedback, they must believe two things: You're for them, not against them, and the standard is real. High performers already believe this. They're waiting to see if you do. The Chicago Bears Example Ben Johnson took over a 5-12 Chicago Bears team in January 2025 after a10-game losing streak the year before. A talented young quarterback, Caleb Williams, had been sacked 68 times and didn't trust his coaching staff. Eleven months later? The Bears finished 11-6, won the NFC North and beat rival Green Bay in the playoffs for the first time in 15 years. Same roster. Different culture. From Day 1 of training camp, Johnson made execution non-negotiable. When his first-team offense botched alignments twice during practice, he pulled the starters and sent in the backups. Immediate accountability. Immediate message. That accountability was trust-building. Johnson didn't wait until the team liked him to enforce standards. He enforced standards in a way that built trust - consistent, fair and clear - in service of the team winning. He spent weeks in one-on-ones with Williams, staying transparent about his demands while showing he was invested in the quarterback's development. Williams initially wondered if Johnson even liked him. But when Williams saw Johnson publicly own his mistakes and hold himself to the same standard, trust grew. Williams called him "everything that Chicago needed as a coach." Players ran through walls for a guy who benched starters for execution errors. Bears team member Kevin Byard said the tough training camp set the tone. What made it stick was that accountability and trust weren't sequential; they were simultaneous. The standard was the standard. The way Johnson enforced it built the trust that made it sustainable. The Aviation Parallel In business aviation, we talk about "just culture," where employees report mistakes without fear of retribution, so organizations can learn and improve. The NBAA called trust "the basis of a just culture" and said it "must come from the top down." But just culture isn't permission for mediocrity. As one Fortune 500 safety manager put it, "Personnel must feel safe exposing their errors, so we may openly discuss those situations and identify trends that we may then address and mitigate." That's the loop: Trust enables honest reporting. Honest reporting enables accountability. Accountability enforced fairly builds more trust. Do your pilots feel comfortable filing complete incident reports? Do your mechanics raise safety concerns without fearing career consequences? If not, you've got a trust problem. But the fix isn't going soft on standards, it's enforcing them in a way that shows you're invested in your people, not just looking for someone to blame. The Practical Application - Make it Concrete The debrief after a bad trip: "We missed the catering detail and the client noticed. Walk me through the handoff. Where did you assume instead of confirm?" Direct, curious, not optional. The repeat lateness problem: "You're a strong contributor, but you're breaking the team's rhythm. This changes now. What's the constraint?" Respect plus expectation. The safety drift: "We're normalizing exceptions. That ends. If you feel schedule pressure, escalate early. I'll take the heat; your job is to tell the truth." The high performer watching you: Every time you enforce the standard fairly, you're telling them their effort matters. Every time you let something slide, you're telling them it doesn't. When standards are clear, and enforcement is fair, accountability doesn't feel like an attack. It feels like care. Ben Johnson's mantra: "Good, better, best. Never let it rest, until your good gets better and your better gets best." That's not niceness. That's the pursuit of excellence, made sustainable because the way he demands it builds the trust that makes people want to follow. Your flight department, your charter operation, your maintenance team: They don't need you to be nice. They need you to be good. And being good means holding standards that build trust, not waiting for trust before you're willing to hold standards. The standard is the standard. Trust enables accountability to land. Accountability enforced fairly builds the trust that makes it stick. Build both, or you will eventually lose both.Dustin Cordier is a Certified Exit Planning Advisor and EOS Implementer®. Through his firm, StepZero Coaching, he specializes in strategy, execution and sales coaching, prioritizing ways to maximize business value and cultivate purpose-driven success.