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Greetings!
Two attempts. Two failures.
A refuelling tanker she'd never used before, in the middle of a sandstorm over Saudi Arabia, at two in the morning, with just enough fuel left to reach the target and get home.
She could try a third time. Her navigator (more experienced than her) told her to press on.
She stopped.
Mandy Hickson is a former RAF fast-jet pilot, one of the first women cleared to fly on the front line, and a veteran of combat missions over Southern Iraq. That refuelling decision happened the same night a surface-to-air missile had locked onto her engine, while she was leading her very first combat mission, the most junior pilot in a formation that included her own squadron boss and two senior instructors.
She evaded the missile. She led the retasked strike. Then, with almost nothing left in the tank, she made the call her navigator was telling her not to make.
He later admitted why he'd pushed her to keep going. That reason is worth hearing.
What Mandy took from that night - and from everything else her flying career threw at her - is something most organisations get badly wrong. The RAF can't hire its leaders in from outside. It has to grow them from the bottom up. Which means junior people get handed real responsibility, and real permission to say stop, long before anyone expects them to need it.
Most teams don't work that way. Most managers find out what their people are actually thinking only when something has already gone wrong.
There's also the story of Emily - a teenage Air Cadet who flew better than anyone Mandy had trained in twenty-eight years. When Mandy found out why Emily had nearly never tried at all, it changed the direction of her own career.
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