3 Lessons from a Visit to the United Airlines Inflight Training Center
Last Friday, Keith Sbiral and I had the incredible opportunity to join 18 other people in going behind the scenes at the United Airlines Inflight Training Center in Houston. We were part of the first outside group to ever visit the new facility, which is in use 23 hours, 7 days each week to onboard and train 4,000 flight attendants this year alone.
I absolutely loved getting to open emergency exit doors, evacuate an airplane filled with (theatrical) smoke by going down the slide, and my favorite – practicing wet ditching, where you evacuate a 777 fuselage in water by inflating a life jacket and jumping from the plane into a 8 foot deep pool, then swimming and climbing into a raft.
But beyond the fun, the experience left me with several takeaways that I think any leader in any organization – not just a Fortune 200 company – can learn from. There were enough for several blog posts, but here are three:
“You can teach any skill, but you can’t teach kindness.” This comment from one of the facility leaders stuck with me. So often, we want to fill positions or staffed teams based on skillset, and that can make sense, particularly where technical skills are required. But if kindness isn’t there, it’s impossible to overstate the negative effect on the entire team – and the customer experience. Start with kindness.
Create experiences. We saw firsthand how the entire team prioritizes creating experiences for staff and customers alike. From the warm welcome while we were still making our way from the parking lot, through the certificate and gifts we left with, the United and United MileagePlus team ensured it was both an experience to remember, and one that left me feeling valued, respected, and connected.
While I don’t have space to go into depth here about all I learned about how the inflight teams are trained, I can say that the commitment to creating experiences extends to ensuring that the training experience fosters commitment and connection, along with the necessary leadership and hands-on skills. Everything, from the bathroom signage to the trainee attire, is aligned with that goal, and none of it is by accident.
Share your people. The entire experience we had was well thought out, and I loved learning more about the airline industry in general, United in particular, and all those things I’ve wondered as a frequent traveler (I finally know what all those dings mean on the plane!).
But much more than that, it was incredibly meaningful to get to interact with some of the United personnel responsible for the huge project of training flight attendants and ensuring their processes far exceed a host of regulations.
How often do we decide that a team member is busy, so they don’t “have” to go to the client pitch?
Or that it isn’t “efficient” to have one more person attend the client meeting?
I am confident it was incredibly “inefficient” to have so many United staff involved in our visit, but team member after team member shared that they enjoyed getting to interact with customers, and it was a good reminder of why they are all working so hard. And as one of the visitors, being able to meet the people behind the behemoth corporation was a powerful highlight of the day.
As I said, there’s so much more to share about the experience, but only so many characters. I’ll just close by saying thank you to all the United folks involved in creating an incredible experience for those of us fortunate enough to visit, and encourage you to think about how you can prioritize kindness, create experiences, and share your people.
-Amy M. Gardner, Apochromatik