Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the movie, Top Gun: Maverick, this blog post gives away parts of the plot as well as a glimpse into the wisdom that the storyline provides.  If you plan to see the film and want to know absolutely nothing about it before watching it, go ahead and bookmark this page, buy your ticket online, and go see the film.  It’s terrifically entertaining!  Then come back, read the post, and know-how to translate lessons from Top Gun into top performance within your organization.

Who doesn’t love the classic 1980s action drama, Top Gun?  If you’ve seen the just-released sequel or even a trailer, you know that the Tom Cruise character, Maverick, comes back to train an elite group of Naval Top Gun pilots for a special mission.  The group of flyers are highly competitive and operate as they have been taught, to see each other as the opponent.  Maverick is charged with recasting the group into a cohesive team, one that relies on and believes in each other.  In the process, Maverick has to convince these young pilots to believe in the purpose of the mission and, most importantly, that they can successfully achieve the mission. 

When it comes to helping our organizations to perform with excellence, we can take a lesson from our old cinematic hero, Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell.  As the film’s story unfolds, we see how Maverick solves the problem of preparing his squad for victory.  To be successful, they need to be able to fly a dizzying course at super high speeds through the canyons of a soaring mountain range at low altitude with lots of expected life-threatening obstacles.  They must be able to perform intricate and dangerous maneuvers while handling exceptionally high “G” forces that could cause them to blackout and crash.  While most of us don’t work in such life-and-death environments, we can relate Maverick’s approach to our own work of upskilling our organizations.  In order to train his group, Maverick breaks down the mission into its core deliverables and trains on each part of the mission. This is exactly how we need to address corporate training – by breaking down each role into the skills (and associated behaviors) needed to be great at our jobs.  This is called competency-based learning. 

Competency-based learning is critical to properly upskilling our organizations.  This approach requires that we break down each role (such as Sales Representative or Sales Manager) or set of skills (such as Leadership skills or Selling skills) within our organization into the behaviors associated with those skills.  This is ideally achieved through workshopping with a group of high performers.  This model allows for high performers to validate each other while building community and advocacy around what it takes to succeed in the organization-that kind of collaboration and advocacy from the organization’s top performers ensures buy-in, that is “belief in the mission” and “belief that it can be achieved” from the rest of the organization.  The resulting competency model literally becomes the roadmap for success and can be, when effectively implemented, the catalyst for organization-wide performance improvement.