The pilot who came back on the intercom every 10 minutes

What Dustin Campbell learned leading a company through a 60% layoff, a rehire four weeks later, and 50-week lead times (up from five days).

Clarity and consistency

I came to my Full Picture Leadership conversation with Dustin Campbell straight from a call with a group of managers leading their teams through a big change. A lot of that hour had been about what to say when you don’t yet have an answer.

Dustin has spent years on that question. He built a video conferencing company into a global business, led it through COVID, and sold it in 2022. Along the way, his team wrote down how they managed, in a playbook for every new manager to learn. Now at @[Persistently], he guides other companies to write theirs.

Two words kept coming up as we talked: clarity and consistency.

The pilot who comes back

“We got a ground stop.”

The pilot says nobody knows what’s going on yet, and they’ll let you know when they hear more. Then no one comes back on the intercom for three hours.

Dustin used that scene to name a habit he kept hearing from frontline managers at that company: “Well, I haven’t heard any updates on that. I’ll let you know when I do.”

They called the fix “Pilots on the Runway,” and every new manager learned it. Same ground stop, but this pilot tells the cabin, “I’ll be back with you every 10 minutes,” and comes back each time, even if there is nothing new to report.

The plane still sits there for three hours. Nothing about your trip changes, Dustin said, except that the person who might know more than you “remembered that you exist.”

The longer the gap runs, Dustin said, the more people fill it with “bad stories.”

The vision is a draft

When COVID hit, Dustin’s company laid off 60% of its staff. Four weeks later, the federal funds came through, and they brought almost all of them back. He called it “a whip-saw change for people to digest.”

Then the chip shortage hit, and lead times on the gear they sold went from five days to 50 weeks.

His answer to staying connected with the team and reinforcing the trust, from which recent events had detracted, was a daily cadence. In the worst of the shutdown, everyone met at 4pm every afternoon for about 6 weeks: “Here’s what we’re focused on. Here’s what we learned today.” The cadence then stretched to weekly, then back to monthly.

“In times of significant change,” he said, “you have to recalibrate more frequently.”

He thinks leaders are in another stretch like that now, with so much hype about AI that “a lot of people believe that they’re further behind than they are.” His advice starts with an admission: “You’re almost certainly going to be wrong.”

He suggests presenting the vision as a draft to his team. “Here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s where I think we’re going to go. We’re going to recalibrate as we learn more. And I need your help, because you are going to see things that I’m not going to see.”

He calls it “painting the mosaic.” Leaders pick up chips from every conversation with an employee or a customer. The picture only comes together when everyone contributes.

I see versions of this on the teams I advise. In one session with a client’s managers, something resurfaced from five years earlier that was still very present in people’s minds and nowhere on current leadership’s radar.

That’s why I like his language about the vision being a draft. You can have a direction without assuming you can see everything from where you’re sitting.

The impact of a constant drip

Near the end, Dustin shared an analogy he’d heard that same morning from his co-presenter.

Picture the organization as a big rock. Each culture and change initiative is a bucket of water splashing over it. It “coats the whole thing, makes a big noise,” and has a dramatic effect. A few minutes later the rock is “completely dry and unchanged.” If you really want to shape the rock, you put a small drip on it and keep it going.

Dustin’s own take is that most organizations need to “get off the painkillers” and do the work. And the work, he said, is not as hard as they tend to think.

I sit with a lot of leaders who are disappointed that a big moment didn’t change their culture. I get it. The offsite is visible and it feels like progress. The constant drip is the thing you do daily or weekly, that nobody would call an initiative, like a pilot coming back on at minute 10 with nothing new to say.

Back to clarity and consistency

One of my frameworks is about trust. Trust sits where authenticity, clarity and empathy meet. Consistency holds it together.

That’s what I kept hearing in Dustin’s stories. Clarity doesn’t require having all the answers. Consistency is about coming back predictably, at regular intervals.

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This is part of my Full Picture Leadership series, where I talk with experienced leaders about what really happens in high-stakes moments. You can connect directly with Dustin Campbell and me on LinkedIn.

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