Executive Summary

Over three days at CALS, Lisa Archambeau, CAM, president of Service Elements and co-chair of NBAA’s Business Aviation Management Committee leadership conference, moderated a roundtable on leadership in corporate flight departments. Each session drew a different group of directors of aviation, chief pilots, and department leaders, and their comments have been anonymized by role only. Despite the different rooms, the same three themes surfaced every time: how to earn a seat at the table with the company while knowing where that seat’s boundaries are, how to lead each person on a team differently rather than applying one leadership style to everyone, and how small, consistent actions build the kind of trust that holds up under pressure.

Earning a Seat at the Table, and Knowing Its Limits

Across all three sessions, participants agreed that flight departments no longer get to operate as a walled-off fiefdom serving one executive. Multiple leaders described deliberately building relationships with finance, tax, HR, and legal long before they needed anything from those departments, including one director who set up a standing office at company headquarters specifically so colleagues would see him walking the halls, and another who holds quarterly meetings with key stakeholders across the company just to stay visible. Several framed the flight department as a profit center rather than a cost center, pointing to productivity, speed to market, resiliency, and executive retention as the return on that investment, and argued that a frictionless, high-touch experience, plus the ability to have sensitive conversations in the air that would never happen in a first-class cabin, makes the case directly to the people who control budget.