What MLM’s Can Learn From The United Airlines “Overbooked” Incident

Posted by naxumadmin / April 13, 2017

As many of you heard, United Airlines is a bit of a public relations pickle.

On Sunday, April 9th, 2017, they had an oversold flight, which is totally normal practice in their industry, and forcibly removed a doctor from the plane to make room for United Staff and the man was injured in the process(not a normal practice).

There are a lot of opinions on what could have been done better.

• Should they have taken seats away from extra crew members that were on board before removing a paying customer?
• Should they have never allowed the overbooked customers to board from the terminal?
• Should the police have removed the man in a kinder way?

There are thousands of opinion pieces circling the internet on these topics and I want to skip them all for our conversation today.

Let’s talk about the response of the United Airlines CEO and the communication from the brand AFTER the incident.

The truth is, in any company, whether an MLM or Direct Sales companies, you will have challenges and emergency situations that arise. No one can guarantee all things will be successful.

• Your bank can pull your merchant account
• Product can spoil on shelves
• Staff and leaders can resign
• So what is the lesson here?

The lesson is what you do as a leader when the challenge is here. How do you create something extraordinary our of a not-so-good situation?

So take the team at United Airlines. The entire world is horrified by the incident, social media is abuzz, everyone is watching….what do you do?

My friend Larry on Facebook said:

“If I were the CEO, I would go to the hospital where the injured man is recovering, and apologize. I would then give the gift of 1 year of business class air travel unlimited to anywhere in the world for him and his wife.”

Do you see what type of feeling this would have created? The entire world would say, “Wow! Even though this crazy thing happened, the leadership came down to a human level and treated this man with respect, I like these guys!”

They had a chance to do something great at this moment, but they missed it.
Think of the requests you get on a daily basis:

• The product arrived late
• The commission check is missing in the mail
• The event registration ticket is lost
• My upline leader resigned.

How can you take these challenges that occur in your customer’s lives and turn them into opportunities for excellence?

It starts with clear communication and ends with treating all people with respect.
Go out there and be remarkable my friends.