Poor Leadership?

As you have probably seen, this week a man was forcefully removed from a United Airlines flight that was overbooked. The video went viral, and people were outraged. They should have been.

According to the Department of Transportation 46,000 passengers were involuntarily bumped from their scheduled flight in 2015. It is an every day occurrence in the industry.

So why the outrage? Normally an airlines offers an incentive for people to delay their departure to a future flight. In this case United claims to have offered an $800 voucher, but had no volunteers. They decided to randomly select four people to remove from the flight. But they also revealed later that they needed the seats for their employees.

This is a prime example of poor leadership. Employees followed procedures blindly without regard to the consequences. This is not how empowered employees would have acted.

There are a multitude of ways that United could have resolved the issue without violence. It is the company culture that allowed this situation to escalate to this level.

Strong leadership would create a work environment that was built on values, that support the procedures in place. Strong leadership would encourage employees to solve problems and make tactical decisions based on the current situation. Procedures can rarely cover all situations that would arise in a work place. Strong leadership would want employees that know how to successfully resolve issues.

When we ask employees to blindly follow procedures, we remove all personal responsibility from those employees.

United’s actions reflect their lack of respect for their customers. This is poor leadership from the top that has permeated their organization. We can only wonder what company values really drive their actions and their procedures. If we knew, we would probably stop using their services.