Blog Archives
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Energy — How Members Contribute to a Team as a Whole
By ServiceElements, Christine Hill - Wednesday April 18, 2012In last week’s article we introduced the three key elements of communication that affect team performance according to a recent study measuring the effectiveness of teams. The key elements identified are: Energy – how members contribute to a team as a whole Engagement – how team members communicate with one another Exploration – how teams communicate with one another This week we are looking at the part energy plays in the communication of effective teams. Energy is the measure of the number and the nature of exchanges between team members. These exchanges could take several different forms: Face to face comments Acknowledgement by head nod or other body gesture Phone Video conference... -
Eliminate Baggage Fees
By Steve Smith - Tuesday April 17, 2012
Air travel would be safer if we allowed knives, lighters and liquids, according to Kip Hawley, who was in charge of the Transportation Security Administration during George W. Bush’s second term, in a Wall Street Journal essay published last Saturday. “Preventing terrorist attacks on air travel demands flexibility and the constant reassessment of threats,” he writes, describing a system made too brittle by enforcing regulations rather than managing risks. “It also demands strong public support, which the current system has plainly failed to achieve.” Hawley proposes a few baggage-related changes that he believes would make the system better and certainly provide the agency with some sorely needed public buy-in... -
Cameras On The Jet Bridge
By John Goglia - Tuesday April 17, 2012
I was talking the other day with a gate agent at Delta and he was telling me what a difference it makes when there's a camera under the jet bridge. It's so much easier to avoid damage to property and injuries to people when you can see what's around the jet bridge. I know from my own experience how difficult it is to maneuver jet bridges in a congested space, especially with the pressure to make a schedule and without the number of people that used to be available to assist on the ground. So why aren't more cameras deployed at airport jet bridges? Many cars have backup cameras as standard features yet we expect gate agents to maneuver large, awkward pieces of equipment without being able to see the hazards around them. These cameras... -
No Time for Think Time
It goes without saying that life has become…well just very busy. Family, civic and social activities, work, and hobbies if you have time for them, our daily routine and personal lives seem to be full of activity. Unfortunately and all too often one of the last items on the to-do-list is carving out time for strategy and planning ahead, be it vacation planning, education planning, your next career move, retirement, or next week’s workload. Are we always able to accurately plan and research for the next aircraft maintenance induction, tomorrow’s meeting, the next equipment purchase, next year’s operating budget, future product and service offerings? Managing communications in today’s busy world has become nearly a full-time task... -
Do K-9s Profile Passengers?
By Art Kosatka - Wednesday April 11, 2012No, the dog doesn’t discriminate by religion, odd clothing choices, or nervous facial tics, but the dog team might mixed-metaphorically bite you on the rear. The value of canines in explosives detection has been hotly debated in recent years, and I, for one, [full disclosure: being related to a highly experienced police K-9 trainer], have always been a believer in their capabilities, even with their real-world operational limitations. Some new recent research in animal behavior suggests another potential weakness may reside in the relationship of dog vs. handler. Scientists at the University of California, Davis, wondered whether small unintentional signals from a handler might affect the dogs’ response. Seems like... -
Building Great Teams
By ServiceElements, Christine Hill - Wednesday April 11, 2012When we sense a high performing team, that perception is not coming from out of the blue. This sense is a result of our innate ability to process the interactions we observe. These interactions are the communication clues that team members are constantly sending and receiving. Communication clues include things such as tone of voice, gestures, talking, listening, interruptions, head nods, levels of extroversion, how much people talk and empathy to name a few. According to a recent article in Harvard Business Review entitled “The New Science of Building Great Teams”, great team work is observable, measurable and learnable. Research by MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory identified three aspects of communication that affect team... -
Travel Ain't Bad—But Making The Arrangements Is Awful!
By Ralph Hood - Wednesday April 11, 2012
Sometimes I wonder how the airport industry survives, what with the travel industry being so dadgum (that is NOT the word I’d like to use) difficult to deal with. At the moment I’m disgusted with the rental car business, and one of the We’ll-Do-It-All-for-You-Online travel consortiums. I had played it their way. I got quotes and decided that the rental car deal I needed couldn’t be worked out at a price that made it logical. So I made other plans. Then this morning that same travel group sent me an email saying that they could do it for less—a lot less—than they had quoted. I decided to take them up on it. I have now spent an hour on it and can’t get the rate they sent me. I found the “help” line, called it, and got... -
Unthinkable
By Steve Smith - Tuesday April 10, 2012We've been reading much about last week's UTair crash in Siberia. Most of the recent headlines indicate investigators are blaming a failure to deice the plane before departure as the likely cause of the crash. The plane slammed into the ground shortly after taking off and killed 31 people. That possible failure for a procedure we'd think routine is bad enough. But we also picked up a report last week from a Russian news agency, Russica Izvetia Information, that featured an anonymous "air navigation official" saying that the deicing fluid could have been stolen and sold as car windshield deicer. The agency is a bona-fide news service and publishes a long-running newspaper that dates back to the beginnings of the Soviet era. ("Izvetia... -
Leadership Role in Service
By ServiceElements, Christine Hill - Wednesday April 4, 2012The average person is said to influence over 10,000 other people in their lifetime. Influence is found at every level of an organization----CEO and executive management team, division and group-level managers and employees. We are all capable of influencing others; but do our actions reflect leadership? Think of someone that was a great leader. Some of the skills that enabled them to be an effective leader might include: being motivational, confident, comfortable with ambiguity, flexible, tolerant, respectful of others, good speaker, exceptional communicator and so on. Most of the skills would be “People” skills as opposed to “Technical” skills. Technical knowledge relevant to the job as well as knowing how to get the job... -
ACI-NA Releases A Study On The Collective Economic Impact Of Commercial Airports ...
By Brad McAllister - Wednesday April 4, 2012
The association conducted a similar study in 2001 (Visit www.airportsforthefuture.org to view the 2012 study). Comments assocation president Greg Principato, "In a decade with 9/11, and the worst economic downturn since the depression, you still see growth. Transportation is a driver of economic activity, and economic activity drives transportation. "This kind of study really hits you where you live; it really tells the story in a vivid way." Around the world where communities are building and modernizing airport infrastructure, the mechanism that’s used is a passenger-based user fee, which is essentially what the passenger facility charge (PFC) is here in America. In most of those places, you don’t have a lot of tax money...
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