Leadership Lessons From The Blue Angels

When Commander Alex Armatas swings his six-foot-four frame out of bed and looks at the clock, it’s 5 a.m. in Pensacola, Florida, which means that six F/A-18 Super Hornet jets will have been run through their paces an hour earlier at Naval Air Station Pensacola. One of those jets literally has his name on it. After grabbing a quick shower, he puts on his blue flight suit, the famous uniform of all U.S. Navy Blue Angels pilots, and inserts two pens into a pocket on the right sleeve of the suit.

In the silence of the house, his thoughts drift to the fellow five demonstration pilots he will lead that day as the Blue Angels perform at one of their 32 two-day airshows for the 2024 season. Pilots Jack Keilty, Wes Perkins, Amanda Lee, Griffin Stangel and Thomas Zimmerman will be going through the same ritual, right down to the two pens—one a Sharpie for signing autographs, the other a ballpoint pen for taking notes before the show. They will also be placed, in exactly the same position, in the sleeve of their flight suits.

It’s a sunny day in the Florida Panhandle, so Armatas dons his sunglasses for the drive to the airfield, where, parking his car, he sees the other pilots chatting in front of the hangar. Although none are wearing sunglasses, all reach into their pockets and put them on as Armatas greets them with a calm, deeply resonant voice that exudes leadership.

“How’s everyone today?” he asks.

“Glad to be here,” they all chime back. “How’s it going, Boss?”

“Boss” is the name Armatas wears with equal parts pride and humility as the commander and leader of the Blue Angels team. It’s not specific to him or this team; all Blue Angels flight leaders, or “No. 1’s,” in reference to the aircraft number they fly in formation, are called Boss.

“Yeah,” Armatas told his interviewer that morning. “There are a number of ways that tradition shows up here within the team, including the idea that everyone’s pens are placed in the same order every day and that there should never be just one person with shades on. When people look at us, we want them to see Blue Angels, not Alex, Amanda and Jack. We’re a team, and a team is more important than any individual.”

Later, Armatas and the five other demonstration pilots make the walk to their planes at the air show. They walk in perfect sync, knees rising to the same height despite the fact that Armatas is a head taller than the rest. One by one, each salutes his or her crew chief and peels off to board their F/A-18E while the others continue marching toward the remaining planes.

Unlike commercial pilots, Blue Angels pilots board the plane and strap themselves into the cockpit without so much as a glance at the underpinnings of the plane to which they are about to entrust their lives. It’s a deliberate omission that expresses everything you need to know about the Blue Angels’ culture of leadership.

How the Blue Angels have accomplished their mission of recruiting future Navy pilots by performing flight demonstrations for the public since 1946 offers an object lesson for leaders of any organization wishing to build high-performance teams based on trust, humility, gratitude, attention to detail, continuous learning and respect for tradition.

Building Radical Trust

Commissioned in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, Boss Armatas was stationed at bases around the globe until he entered the Top Gun program in 2009. He spent his career learning to master and teach other Navy pilots how to master jets, both for military and demonstration purposes. If he’s learned anything, it’s that holding a diamond shape with three other jets at near-supersonic speeds as low as 200 feet above the ground takes an approach to leadership that leaves nothing to chance and everything to trust earned.

“I loathe micromanagement,” says Armatas. “It’s the single worst thing you can do as leader because it undermines trust. Our boarding ritual expresses the opposite of micromanagement. It says that I’m letting my crew do their job by giving me a safe and well-maintained plane, and in turn, my crew will let me do my job of flying the plane correctly and bringing it back in one piece.”

Trust is so baked into Blue Angels culture that it transcends personal consideration. Armatas doesn’t simply trust his specific crew to prepare his plane for a safe and successful flight. Instead, he trusts in the process that has guided every crew member who ever worked with the Blue Angels. He trusts a culture that values attention to detail and delivering on commitments with absolute commitment and discipline.

“I have a little saying that respect must be earned, but not necessarily with you in the room to hear it,” observes Armatas. “What I mean is that when one of our jet engine mechanics is working on a jet engine, I don’t know anything about where they trained. I don’t need to, because I do know that the Navy Marine Corps has a very specific training process to qualify an aircraft maintainer and a jet engine mechanic. I trust that process to produce excellent maintainers.”

Such next-level trust rests on a belief that “nothing is too minute” to deserve attention. If you handle the details to an extreme extent, says Armatas, the big stuff falls into place. “As a leader, when you have that level of trust, it allows you to keep your mind on what’s most important,” he says. “The expectations here are extremely high that everybody does their job not only well and correctly but also independently, so that teammates don’t need to keep going back and checking on them.”

The Blue Angels are also devoted to continuous improvement. After every demo, the flight crew and pilots meet for a debrief. “All of us are very, very comfortable with going out on a flight, completing the flight, coming back and then spending a couple of hours being told everything we did wrong,” Armatas says.

In addition to feedback from others, pilots review their goals from the preflight debriefing and set new ones. They’ll utilize this debrief to make constant improvements over the course of the season, always striving for the perfect demo, yet understanding they’ll never quite get there. To the team, it’s about making it a little better each time.

Blue Angels’ training takes place from early November through the middle of March, with 15 flight sessions each week—a demanding three per day. Early on, the planes start at 10 to 15 feet apart and close in tighter and tighter until the pilots achieve what Armatas calls “an overlap in our controlled surfaces,” or wings. At every point, precision is mandatory. By March, the team is ready to hit the demo circuit and then spend the better part of the year putting on shows, which allows them to further refine their teamwork.

Improvements are so gradual that pilots often don’t notice the progress they’re making, says Armatas. “Then, suddenly, you’re flying as close to the ground and as close to each other as you’re going to get.” Team members close in on perfect aerobatics just in time to hang that blue flight suit in the closet and head to a new assignment—a new ship, a new base of operations. But those pilots will always be members of the Blue Angels.

‘Glad to Be Here’

The Blue Angels’ top core value is gratitude—and they live up to it in every conversation. Armatas says the Blue Angels’ single strongest tradition is the greeting/affirmation, “Glad to be here,” delivered by team members in casual conversation as well as before briefings and other more formal gatherings. The words are so significant that they’ve turned into an acronym signature line on each team member’s emails.

“The phrase is intended as a constant reminder that those chosen for the Blue Angels team are not special, but rather lucky to have been pulled from a submarine or aircraft carrier of the Navy fleet and given the opportunity to do difficult but ultimately rewarding and even fun and exciting work,” says Armatas. “It reminds each and every team member that what got them there was earned, not given to them, and that keeping your spot should never be taken for granted.”

The phrase also wards off hubris and complacency, which Blue Angels pilots say are dangerous in a line of work that requires not only total trust and synchrony during flight time but also that current team members teach new ones the ropes on a recurring two-year basis. Like their Top Gun counterparts, Blue Angel pilots and instructors are the best in the world at what they do. “They know it, but with that talent comes humility,” says Armatas. “You can’t be arrogant, because at the end of the day, if you get somebody who’s supremely arrogant in the front of the room, everyone else in the room will tune him out.”

A strong culture is critical in an organization whose team members continuously cycle in and out of service. Each team consists of six pilots who perform in the flight demonstrations, two pilots who provide advance show planning and nine officers who direct operations within the organization. An additional 143 crew work in support of the pilots, managing everything from maintenance to administration to public relations. All are responsible for both learning how to perform and training their replacements.

The Blue Angels demo team spends roughly 300 days a year in one another’s company, so Armatas chooses team members not only for the ability to fly upside down near the speed of sound but also for well-developed soft skills. “When I got here, my goal was to say as little as possible and just listen and watch,” he explains. “I wanted to see what mattered and didn’t seem to matter to people. Since part of the Blue Angels’ mission is to interact with the general public, I wanted to identify the most affable of [our] aces.”

Observing pilots handling conflict can also be insightful, he adds. “When people disagreed, I wanted to see how they expressed their disagreement, as well as how they received disagreement from others,” he says. “That tells you a lot about personalities.”

“Alignment” is a well-trod concept in business today, but the Blue Angels raise it to new heights. Watch a Blue Angels air show from the ground, and you’ll see the diamond formation screaming and slicing across the sky upside down, upright and sideways, carving up the sky with thin lines of smoke. Watch the same demo from the boss’s cockpit camera— you can find them on YouTube—and you see and hear something completely different: a single organism gently climbing, rolling and turning almost silently through the air to the melodic and near-meditational cadence of the boss’ coaxing voice.

“Uuuuuuuup weeeeeee gooooooo… aaaaa little pull… smoke on… adding power… rollin’ out… aaaaa little drive… in a left turn setting up for the diamond roll… smoke off….”

That’s alignment at the speed of sound. The team rehearses that cadence during “chair-flying”—each pilot closing their eyes and mentally picturing themselves flying through the entire maneuver, to include cadence, verbal calls and responses, hand and body movements—on the ground, of course, but the degree of synchrony still astounds.

Ship, Shipmates and Self

The power of a great culture comes from transcending the individual yet linking individuals to a mission and set of values bigger and longer-lasting than themselves. More than 250 pilots have been part of the Blue Angels culture over the decades, all documented in photographs displayed on the walls of the Pensacola headquarters building. All 17 officers are in the photograph of Armatas’ 2024 team. This culture is what makes “top guns” like the Blue Angels feel satisfied being relatively anonymous custodians of greatness.

While the pilots may be the much-admired public face of the Blue Angels, Armatas is fervently inclusive when talking about the broader organization. “When people look at the Blue Angels, most see six F-18 demo pilots,” he says. “If they’re more knowledgeable, they know there are other pilots and officers who support the demo pilots. But they don’t know that there are 160 members of our team, which includes aircraft maintenance, logistics, public affairs, events, planning, supplies and so on. I publicly thank them at every air show.”

While recognizing the contributions of the entire team is a priority, Armatas acknowledges that it’s the performance that is meant to capture audience attention. “People are interested in the blue airplanes and the blue flight suits. They’re not interested in the people who are wearing the suits. That is how it should be,” he says.

A 2023 article in the Harvard Business Review assigned leaders of purpose-driven cultures the responsibility “to clearly communicate and authentically embody the company’s purpose and values” while also drawing “clear connections between purpose, values and performance, acknowledging the inevitabilities of short-term trade-offs in favor of a grander mission.”

Armatas says the Blue Angels have always put their grander mission at the heart of their values and performance. “In the Navy, leaders learn to do what is best for the ship, one’s shipmates and yourself, in that order,” he says. “I think that lesson translates to CEOs. The organization is not the person or people. We get to be a part of it and, hopefully, pass it down better than when we got it. If, as a leader, you can follow that philosophy… well, you’ll sleep well at night.”