One of the benefits of traveling over 150,000 miles a year delivering Business Leadership, Business 
Acumen, and Strategic Business Selling learning journeys is that my job presents endless fodder for creating blogs that share ideas and insights about the very topics I train our global clients on.
The story of this blog post really happened, and I am sharing as a learning tool for leaders who need to develop a foundation level of business intelligence within their organizations and teams.
I arrived at the gate my customary 15 minutes before the announced boarding time to check in with the gate agent and to see if we needed any special tags for the luggage. Today, I was flying on a smaller plane and sometimes the luggage fits and some as sometimes you can gate check it and pick it up right as you get off the aircraft.
As I approached the gate check-in area, I noticed two flight attendants in an animated conversation with the gate agent. Being a frequent flier, I know this specific gate agent well and have found him to be friendly and more importantly, a straight shooter. He tells is like it is and has excellent control over his gate. He’s professional and takes his job seriously.
It seemed unusual for him to get flustered and as I was waiting to speak with him, I overhead the issue between him and the two flight attendants. Your first fear as a frequent traveler is that there is some sort of a delay and the flight attendants were finding out they couldn’t board the aircraft or something to that effect.
But that wasn’t the case today. It turns out that these two flight attendants were what is called in flying lingo as “deadheads.” A deadhead is an attendant who is not working the flight but is flying on it to get to another airport to work another flight.
The next words from the gate agent shocked me as the conversation went from slightly animated to loud enough that everyone within 20 feet could hear. “I’m sorry, you are not going to bully me into giving you a first-class upgrade when I have a list of passengers who qualify for those seats.”
One of the flight attendants replied in disgust. “Uch. Well, I guess you don’t believe in taking care of your own. Everyone else does this for us and we deserve to be in those seats. We work hard and have earned them.”
The argument continued for several more minutes until the gate agent printed out their boarding passes - not in the first-class- and told them to move aside as he now had a line of passengers to take care of. The two deadheads huffed away.
But then it got crazy…
Instead of moving to the side, they boarded the plane without permission. One went directly to the “real” flight attendant who was working the flight and the other toward her last-row seat. Both of the deadheads were carrying four bags each (eight in total) and put them all in the first-class passenger luggage bins virtually, taking up every single space that should be used for paying passengers.
In the two minutes she was on board, the first deadhead must have convinced the real attendant to let her take one of the open first-class seats and remove it from the upgrade list (preventing a paying passenger from being upgraded). She was sitting there laughing as the regular passengers came on board.
After all of the passengers had boarded, the other deadhead flight attendant came to the first-class area and started to ask passengers to move around so she could sit next to her deadhead friend! It was brazen and rude and the people in first class were having none of it. That’s when the man in 2B said something…
“Excuse me. Do you two realize that you are making a spectacle of yourselves and this airline? Not only did you take all of our luggage space, you act like you own this plane and are demanding people move seats for you? And I saw what you did upstairs to the gate agent, you should be ashamed of yourselves. I’ve been flying for 28 years and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
The response was one for the ages. The deadhead put up her hand (as if to say “shut up and talk to the hand”) and just went back to eating her third Auntie Anne’s butter pretzel.
I thought I had seen it all, but this was something completely new. These two employees had no regard for anyone but themselves and had zero clue or caring about their customers. It got me thinking about how did it come to this and if this was a something going on in different organizations?
Unfortunately, I have a feeling a lack of business intelligence, business acumen, and business leadership is going to hurt many organizations and prevent them from creating the value their shareholders are hoping for. If I was the leader of this airline, I’d make sure that every employee had foundational skills that would make them self-aware and focus on their customers instead of themselves. I know it sounds like common sense, but from what I saw today, common sense had flown away.
