Business Lessons Learned From the United Airlines Crisis

I’m currently writing this article many thousands of feet in the air, on my way to present at this year’s Infusionsoft User Conference (ICON).

My surroundings got me thinking about recent airline-related events that sparked significant nationwide debate.

I’m referring, of course, to the well-circulated video of Dr. David Dao, a 69-year-old United Airlines passenger, being forcibly dragged from his seat after refusing to forfeit it for a United employee.

Regardless of which side of the aisle you find yourself, the image of the near-septuagenarian being dragged up the aisle, bloodied, glasses askew, was hardly a good optic.

But what I found particularly head-scratching was the slow-footed, clumsy initial response from United CEO Oscar Nunoz to the raucous mobs crying foul. This was Bad PR 101, ironically from someone who was just named Communicator of the Year by PRWeek just a month prior.

This unfortunate incident got me thinking about the seeming lack of attention paid to proper crisis management that plagues businesses both large and small. An issue, I believe, that is the result of an interesting paradox.

On the one hand, no one would deny that we all make mistakes. Yet on the other hand, many businesses act as if they will never make a mistake, and fail to plan for one.

Or, perhaps they’re afraid to plan for one?

What these businesses don’t understand is that your ability to handle and manage those difficult moments provides a much more honest perspective of who you are and what you stand for as a business than any canned PR piece.

Without a strategy in place, your business is passing up a golden opportunity to cash in on the most valuable asset in today’s relationship-driven market: trust.

So while the true scope of your strategy goes well beyond the confines of this article, here are a couple of points to consider when those waters get a bit choppy:

Open to feedback

If trust is the foundation of every relationship, then communication is the tool with which it’s lain. In order to build and maintain trust with your customers, you must have open channels of communication — two-way communication — through which quality dialogue can take place. Good feedback is the engine that propels a business from good to great. What are you doing right? What can be improved? This will help you stay attuned to the needs and wants of your clients and customers, to what they respond positively or negatively.

Open to sympathy

Honesty is a great trait. But delivering it in its unadulterated form can do more harm than good. That’s not to say you should distort the truth. Rather, you should deliver it in a sympathetic manner, one that will calm the situation, not escalate it.

United may have had every right to do what they did. The problem is that they told everyone the honest truth – their right to give a passenger the heave-ho — without showing a remote sense of authentic sympathy. How can you communicate properly, you may ask? Well, refer back to the previous paragraph. If you truly have open dialogue, then you’ll have a mighty good understanding and feel for your audience and how they need to be communicated to.

Open to action

As I said earlier, everyone makes mistakes. But not everyone knows how to move on from their mistakes. The most important thing to do is not to say you’re sorry, but to show how you will rectify the error. This means having a set action plan, including what you’re going to do, when and where you’ll do it, and how you’ll go about it. Use the trove of feedback you’ve been able to garner over time to help you form a precise plan of action.

“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor”, as FDR famously said. It’s those turbulent times that, more often than not, prove to be watershed moments of growth, both internally for your team, and externally for your client relationships.

So when you inevitably hit that next bump in the road, how will you respond?