No snapping allowed

By “expectations,” I mean professional behavior with clients. Here’s a cautionary tale to explain.

A student pilot was struggling with her landings. She was feeling discouraged.

At the end of the flight lesson, after a particularly jarring touchdown, her flight instructor made a Snapchat post about the landing and sent it to his friend. (Snapchat is a social media messaging app that lets users send quick messages to each other. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, these messages disappear after 24 hours.) He offhandedly told his client what he’d done, and that he’d made a joke about her bad landing, ha ha ha.

She tried to laugh it off, but it made a bad lesson worse. She said she’s a young person and so is the CFI, so she wasn’t bothered that he was on his phone during her lesson, but it did bother her that he had made fun of her.

I think the student pilot was surprised when most responses to her post on Facebook suggested she fire the CFI for being unprofessional. Her willingness to cut him a break “because we’re both young” is well-intentioned and she said she enjoyed flying with him otherwise. But the CFI needs to cut that nonsense out right now. It’s not professional. They’re not in high school. What he did borders on cyber-bullying. And all while she was paying for his time.

A brand-new flight instructor may be joining your ranks never having worked in a professional setting before, and what we think they should know, they may not know. Just as we leave a campground better than we found it, a responsible employer tries to impart wisdom to workers to better prepare them for jobs to come. This young man needed some immediate instruction on professional communications and the appropriate use of social media in a workplace setting.

Communication is key, and yes, the client should tell the instructor she found his Snapchat—and the fact that he told her what he said—unprofessional and he should not do it while training her. But we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now if this flight instructor understood how he was expected to behave with clients.

A rundown of professional expectations at your flight school should be part of your new-hire process. If you develop standards on the use of social media, those standards should go into your employee handbook. Here’s a well-crafted article from Hootsuite on how to develop a social media policy for your organization.