Trust Your Employees, Not Your Rule Book

Here’s the good news: The big airlines are revising their rules for booking and boarding flights — rules that led to one of the great business fiascos in recent history, United 3411. Here’s the bad news: If the long-term lesson that leaders of the airline business (or any other business) take away from this episode is that it’s time to rewrite policies and practices, to fine-tune bureaucratic procedures, then they will have missed a huge, perhaps even historic, learning opportunity. The truly important lesson, one that applies to companies in all sorts of fields, has to do with the grave shortcomings of an approach to business, culture, and customer service that relies on rules, procedures, and guidelines at the expense of common sense, improvisation, and the capacity of flesh-and-blood human beings to solve problems and make sound decisions. It’s time for leaders to toss out their rule books and trust their people.