Why United Airlines has much more than a PR nightmare on their hands

While many are talking about the PR nightmare that has been United Airlines for the past year, there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about the core issue- an unhealthy corporate culture. 

Compare the stories about United Airlines- man being hauled off the plane, dog dying in the overhead to Southwest Airlines. Southwest is often in viral videos about the crew singing happy birthday to passengers and many other light hearted but touching stories. What’s the difference? They’re both successful airlines. It’s the culture and United has had a long-standing cultural issue that goes beyond any particular CEO. 

Although many of the issues happening with United appear to only be occurring with the crew members, we must remember that the behavior of the crew members is a direct result of the shadow cast by the leaders.

Here’s are a few reasons why United Airlines has a bigger issue than they think. 

1. With the exponential increase in transparency with big corporations who for a long time couldn’t be touched, it’s no longer possible to sweep an unhealthy culture under the rug. Social media gives consumers a platform to create movements to raise money, boycott companies, even just pressing “share” gives consumers the power now over the big corporations. 
2. Millennials care about purpose, they care about mission. They will pay extra to buy from a sustainable company that gives back, and they don't have a problem taking their dollars somewhere else once they find out a company has done something wrong. 
3. In retailing (and most B2C businesses in general) it’s pretty well demonstrated that employees treat customers the way they are treated, you can’t expect an employee to listen to customers if no one is listening to the employee. You can't expect flight attendants to be nice to people if leaders aren’t being nice to the flight attendants. So if the core of this problem goes unchecked, we will unfortunately continue to see more of these kinds of stories. 

To their credit, they have started a series of trainings on customer care and compassion, but you can’t fix a culture from the bottom up, and you can’t necessarily change people with a four hour class. Trying to fix the flight attendants by training them could very well be a failed effort because you need to fix the whole system they live in. Since organizations always become shadows of their leaders, there’s a need to focus on a top down intentional culture shaping process- not just retraining flight attendants.