Aerospace Companies Need a New Kind of Manager w/ Matt Gjertsen

What is the minimum level of leadership an aerospace company needs to survive constant change?

Because technical excellence is not enough anymore.

Aerospace and aviation companies are being pushed to move faster, scale highly specialized teams, cut through bureaucracy, and make decisions before every variable is known. But many are still promoting great engineers, operators, and technical specialists into management with almost no preparation for the job they are actually being asked to do.

Then leadership wonders why information gets trapped, accountability disappears, teams slow down, and high performers burn out.

That is the problem behind Matt Gjertsen’s concept of the Minimum Viable Manager.

The name sounds modest. The standard is not. At a minimum, managers need to know how to build trust, set clear expectations, and give useful feedback. Without those fundamentals, all the talk about innovation, speed, ownership, and high performance is just noise. You cannot scale technical capability if the people leading it do not know how to align a team, push performance, or create the conditions for others to succeed.

And this matters because the aerospace companies pulling ahead are not just hiring better talent. They are building cultures that can move.

In this episode, I sit down with Matt, author of The Minimum Viable Manager and former Head of Training and Development at SpaceX.

We talk about what aerospace companies can learn from SpaceX about hierarchy, ownership, and execution, and why technical expertise does not automatically produce strong leaders. We also discuss why companies that fail to develop managers alongside their workforce will eventually hit a wall.

What You’ll Discover In This Episode

Why aerospace companies need a practical definition of effective management

How trust, clear expectations, and useful feedback support technical team performance