The beautifully polite question was asked of me by a flight sergeant at Richmond Air Force Base at the afternoon tea break, on day 3 of our Air Force Coaching Leadership Program.  I had just finished introducing a range of short sharp coaching tools to the group (give yourself a pat on the back if you can name a few of them) and had talked about finding ‘coachable moments’.

‘You can even be a having a stand-up toolbox discussion in the hangar’, I had declared, ‘and that’s where you can ask “what are the options here?” and that’s a coaching moment. An opportunity to coach, and identify what solutions the team can bring.’ To be fair, that was a suggestion that had been given to me by groups in the past.

On this occasion, however, the flight sergeant was less sure of the practicality of the claim and offered me to visit the hangar of the Hercules. Now I had spent a lot of time at Richmond, particularly during Victorian COVID lockdowns (that’s another story) and had the opportunity to watch the operation of the Hercules nearly every day for about 6 weeks including loading, take off, and landings.  But walking into the hangar I was struct by the shear enormity of the size of the building. I had been up close to the aircraft on a couple of occasions at Amberley, but the empty shell that housed the aircraft at this time, was simply surprising. The best thing that came out of my mouth was ‘wow it’s big’.

‘Ok Nat,’ continued the flight sergeant, ‘now imagine this area has an inbound aircraft and the noise that it generates. It’s going to make coaching pretty hard.’

I agreed.

But then, we spent the next ten minutes strolling around the environment and actually talking about what coaching would look and sound like during operations. And that has always been the key for me: you know your operations; you know the battle rhythm; you know your people and who’s going to respond and who is not; and it’s up to you to take some time to consider and pick the opportunities for coaching.