February 17, 2026Confidence Without Vulnerability Creates Teams That Never Improve

Can ego and vulnerability coexist in teams that actually win?

Most leaders think they have to choose. Either you build confident people who believe they’re excellent, or you create humble people who accept feedback. Either you foster competitive drive, or you develop collaborative openness. Either you reward individual excellence, or you prioritize team performance.

Jack Becker, decorated U.S. Navy fighter pilot and founder of Flight Level Solutions, proves this is a false choice. Drawing from his experience landing fighter jets on aircraft carriers and training the Navy’s best pilots, Jack reveals how the most elite organizations balance confidence with vulnerability in ways that make both more powerful.

Jack brings over 2,500 hours of supersonic fighter jet experience and 10,000 hours guiding Naval aircraft safely onto carrier decks. As a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot, instructor pilot, landing signal officer, quality assurance officer, and crew resource management instructor, he was responsible for over 21,000 mishap-free carrier landings. He now serves as CEO of Flight Level Solutions, Inc., helping companies apply peak human performance skills from combat missions to achieve results at elite performance levels.

What Jack taught me completely changed how I think about building high-performing teams. Confidence isn’t the enemy of growth. Defensiveness is.

✈️ Watch and listen to the full interview about leadership and Jack Becker’s history here

Why Fighter Pilots Need Massive Confidence Walking to the Jet

When the stakes were high, Jack needed his wingman, Mordo, to believe he was the best fighter pilot on the planet when walking to the jet. That same confidence drives Michael Jordan to demand the ball with one second left on the clock. That same confidence makes surgeons willing to attempt difficult procedures and business leaders willing to make bold decisions.

This kind of confidence isn’t arrogance. It’s necessary. When you’re landing a supersonic fighter jet on a moving aircraft carrier at night, you can’t be tentative. When you’re leading a sales team through a difficult quarter, you can’t project doubt. When you’re executing a complex strategy under pressure, you can’t hesitate.

Your team needs people who believe they’re capable of excellence. People who walk into challenging situations expecting to succeed. People who project the kind of confidence that makes others want to follow their lead.

But here’s what most organizations miss: that confidence has to coexist with radical openness to feedback. Jack saw this pattern across thousands of carrier landings and countless debrief sessions. The pilots who became truly elite weren’t the ones with the most natural talent or the biggest egos. They were the ones who could be supremely confident in execution and completely vulnerable in review.

I’ve worked with leadership teams who only valued confidence. They hired competitive people, rewarded individual achievement, and celebrated those who projected the most certainty. What they got were teams full of people who couldn’t admit mistakes, couldn’t accept coaching, and couldn’t collaborate effectively because everyone was too busy protecting their image.

The military figured out something crucial that most civilian organizations still haven’t learned: confidence and vulnerability aren’t opposites. They’re partners. And the balance between them determines whether your team gets better or just gets louder.

What Happens When Fighter Pilots Cross the Blue Line

Something powerful happens when fighter pilots cross the blue line into the debrief room: honesty and openness replace swagger. The goal shifts from proving greatness to making the entire team better tomorrow.

“The whole reason that we do debrief is so we can repeat our successes and stop repeating our failures,” Jack explained. “That’s why we debrief.”

This simple statement contains everything you need to know about building high-performing teams. The purpose isn’t to judge. It isn’t to assign blame. It isn’t to protect anyone’s ego or manage office politics. The purpose is brutally practical: repeat what worked and stop repeating what didn’t.

But this only works if people can cross a metaphorical blue line where the rules change. Outside the debrief room, confidence reigns. Inside the debrief room, honesty reigns. Both are necessary. Both are valuable. But they can’t occupy the same space at the same time.

Jack Becker was instrumental in incorporating the process improvement model of Crew Resource Management to help pilots improve quickly while landing supersonic jets on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. His unique experience as both a Landing Signals Officer and as the Navy’s top CRM instructor showed him exactly how to balance confidence with vulnerability at scale.

Most organizations don’t have clear blue lines. Leaders try to give feedback in the same spaces where they expect people to perform with confidence. Managers mix praise and criticism in ways that create confusion about when to defend and when to listen. Teams never know whether they’re supposed to project strength or admit weakness.

The result is people who are either always defensive or never confident. You get teams that can’t execute because everyone second-guesses themselves, or you get teams that can’t improve because nobody accepts input. What you don’t get is the balance that creates sustained excellence.

How to Separate Confidence From Defensiveness in Your Team

The key insight from Jack’s work is that confidence and defensiveness are completely different things, even though we often confuse them. Confidence means believing you’re great at your job. Defensiveness means refusing to hear input from teammates who see things you can’t from your position.

You want people who walk into challenging situations thinking “I’ve got this.” You don’t want people who respond to feedback thinking “I don’t need to hear this.”

Creating this distinction requires intentional teamwork design. You need clear moments where ego steps aside and honest review takes over. You need structures that focus purely on team improvement instead of individual reputation. You need language and norms that make vulnerability safe without diminishing confidence.

Jack saw this play out across his years as both an instructor pilot and landing signal officer. The pilots who improved fastest weren’t the ones with the most natural talent or the biggest personalities. They were the ones who could maintain complete confidence during execution and complete openness during debrief.

I’ve tried to build these clear transitions in teams I’ve worked with. We have execution mode where confidence is expected and celebrated. We have review mode where honesty is required and defensiveness is called out. We use physical or temporal markers to signal the transition: different rooms, different times, different formats.

The impact on productivity and employee engagement has been significant. People perform with more confidence when they know they’ll have structured opportunities to improve. People accept feedback more openly when it’s separated from performance contexts. The whole system works better when confidence and vulnerability each have their proper place.

Why Communication Must Feel Like Support Instead of Blame

Frame corrections as “I’m on your side” instead of personal attacks. This makes feedback feel like help instead of criticism.

Jack emphasized this point repeatedly in our conversation. The way you deliver feedback determines whether people can hear it. If corrections feel like attacks on competence or character, people will defend themselves. If corrections feel like support from teammates who want everyone to succeed, people will absorb them.

This isn’t about softening feedback or avoiding difficult truths. Fighter pilot debriefs are brutally honest. They identify mistakes clearly. They don’t sugarcoat failures that could get people killed. But they frame everything through the lens of team improvement, not individual judgment.

When a more experienced pilot points out a mistake to a newer pilot, it’s not “you screwed up.” It’s “here’s what I saw that you might not have seen from your position, and here’s what I’ve learned about handling that situation differently.” The content is the same. The framing makes all the difference.

I’ve watched crisis management situations where leaders tried to give feedback during high-stress moments. It never works. People are already operating at their limits. Adding criticism on top of pressure just triggers defensiveness and erodes confidence. The feedback might be accurate, but the timing and framing make it useless.

Leadership speaker Jack Becker brings the same passion and excitement to each keynote speech he delivers. As a decorated combat veteran who flew numerous high-profile missions in the Middle East, he understands exactly how to balance confidence with vulnerability under the most extreme conditions.

How Shared Honesty Builds Trust That Feedback Serves Growth

When experienced team members openly admit mistakes to help others learn, it creates confidence that feedback serves the team’s growth, not office politics or ego protection.

This is the foundation of psychological safety that actually drives performance. Not safety from accountability. Not safety from high standards. Safety from political games and personal attacks.

Jack saw this pattern consistently across his time training Navy pilots. When senior pilots openly discussed their own mistakes in debriefs, it completely changed the dynamic. Junior pilots stopped worrying that admitting errors would damage their careers. Everyone focused on improvement instead of impression management.

“Once we started taking the debrief seriously,” Jack told me, “that’s when we became the best in the world.”

That transformation didn’t happen because they hired more talented pilots or invested in better technology. It happened because they built cultures where confidence during execution could coexist with radical honesty during review.

Most organizations struggle with this because leaders model defensiveness instead of openness. They accept feedback poorly. They deflect blame. They protect their image instead of serving team growth. Then they wonder why their people do the same.

The most effective professional development I’ve seen comes from leaders who publicly admit mistakes and clearly explain what they learned. Not in a performative “I’m so humble” way, but in a genuine “here’s what I got wrong and here’s how I’m adjusting” way.

When people see that honesty is rewarded instead of punished, that admitting mistakes leads to support instead of consequences, that feedback serves improvement instead of evaluation, they start engaging differently. Confidence increases because people trust they’ll get help when they need it. Vulnerability increases because people believe the system actually wants them to improve.

Why Organizations That Master This Balance Win

Organizations that master the balance between confidence and vulnerability create teams where strengths overcome weaknesses and the whole becomes greater than any individual part. When people know feedback comes from a place of “I’m on your side,” defensiveness disappears and real growth begins.

Jack’s work with Flight Level Solutions helps companies across industries apply this thinking. From healthcare groups to manufacturing, construction, sales teams, and insurance firms, his dynamic keynotes and workshops leave lasting impressions because they’re built on principles proven in the most demanding environments imaginable.

The Brief-Execute-Debrief-Perfect model Jack adapted from Navy aviation works in any context where performance matters. You prepare with confidence. You execute with confidence. You review with honesty. You improve systematically. Then you repeat the cycle, getting better each iteration.

This creates completely different team dynamics than most organizations experience. Instead of people hiding mistakes and protecting image, you get people proactively identifying problems because they know it serves collective improvement. Instead of feedback creating tension and resentment, you get feedback driving rapid elite performance gains.

I’ve implemented versions of this model in teams I’ve built. We establish clear execution phases where confidence is expected. We establish clear review phases where honesty is required. We train people on how to give and receive feedback that supports instead of threatens. We model the behavior we want at every level.

The results consistently exceed what we could achieve through individual excellence alone. Teams solve problems faster because more perspectives contribute openly. Innovation accelerates because people share partial ideas without fear of judgment. Mistakes get corrected quickly because nobody wastes energy hiding them.

How Jack Becker Brought Fighter Pilot Excellence to Civilian Organizations

As one of the Navy’s most highly decorated Landing Signals Officers, Jack was responsible for over 21,000 mishap-free carrier landings. His unique experience as both an LSO and as the Navy’s top CRM instructor showed him an opportunity to relay the same skills to the American workplace.

He saw that the principles that made fighter pilots elite could transform any team focused on productivity and business results. The specific context doesn’t matter. What matters is creating cultures where confidence and vulnerability reinforce rather than undermine each other.

Jack Becker earned a BS in Political Science emphasizing organizational leadership from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he competed as a varsity football and ice hockey player. He understands team dynamics from multiple angles: as a player, as a pilot, as an instructor, and now as a CEO helping organizations achieve sustainable excellence.

He continues to model his “repeat your successes and eliminate mistakes” mindset in the civilian sector as an international wide-body airline captain and evaluator instructor pilot. This isn’t theoretical work for Jack. He lives these principles daily in contexts where mistakes have serious consequences.

What makes his speaking valuable is the combination of extreme experience and practical application. He’s not describing what might work based on research or theory. He’s sharing what definitely works based on thousands of hours in the most demanding performance environments that exist.

What Your Team Needs to Learn About Confidence and Vulnerability

Most teams I work with have imbalanced confidence and vulnerability. They have too much of one and not enough of the other. Either everyone projects false confidence and nobody admits mistakes, or everyone second-guesses themselves and performance suffers.

The fighter pilot model Jack teaches solves this by making both confidence and vulnerability non-negotiable. You must have both. You must know when each is appropriate. You must be able to transition between them seamlessly.

This requires training that most organizations never provide. We teach people technical skills and domain expertise. We rarely teach them how to maintain confidence during execution while staying open during review. We rarely give them language and structures for delivering feedback that feels supportive instead of threatening.

Jack’s dynamic keynotes address this gap directly. He doesn’t just talk about the importance of teamwork and leadership. He gives audiences specific tools they can apply immediately to balance confidence with vulnerability in their own contexts.

The impact extends far beyond individual events. Organizations that embrace these principles report sustained improvements in employee engagement, faster personal development, better crisis management, and more effective strategy execution.

Why the Future of Work Requires This Balance More Than Ever

As work becomes more complex and interconnected, the need for teams that can balance confidence with vulnerability only increases. The future of work belongs to organizations that can execute with certainty while learning with humility.

Remote and hybrid environments make this even more critical. When you can’t rely on informal conversations and casual observations to maintain team cohesion, you need formal structures that create psychological safety and honest feedback. You need clear blue lines that everyone understands and respects.

Technology acceleration means the pace of change keeps increasing. Teams can’t afford to keep repeating mistakes or failing to capture lessons from successes. The debrief mindset Jack teaches becomes essential for staying competitive in environments where standing still means falling behind.

I’ve seen this play out across industries. The companies adapting successfully to rapid change aren’t the ones with the smartest people or the most resources. They’re the ones with cultures that balance confidence during execution with radical honesty during review. They repeat their successes. They eliminate their failures. They get better every cycle.

Elite performance keynote speaker Jack Becker helps organizations build exactly these capabilities. His experience landing fighter jets on aircraft carriers and training the Navy’s best pilots translates directly to any team trying to perform at the highest levels while continuously improving.

He lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with his wife, three young daughters, and dopey golden retriever. He brings both the intensity of military excellence and the relatability of someone navigating normal life challenges. That combination makes his message accessible while maintaining credibility from extreme experience.

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✈️ Help your team balance confidence with vulnerability using teamwork speaker Jack Becker’s proven fighter pilot debrief strategies. Book him for your event today!

📅 Let’s discuss how Brief-Execute-Debrief-Perfect can transform your organization’s performance and learning culture

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