Flight School

By Krista Mahr

Running a multinational airline, says Cathay Pacific CEO Tony Tyler, is a little like playing rugby. It might look like a group of "large and rather ugly men running around a muddy field," he says, but when they work together, it's a thing of beauty. "For the team to win, every player has to do their job well."

That team ethic has helped the Hong Kong-based airline please both passengers and shareholders. Cathay's profit so far this year has surged 55%, built largely on a reputation for excellent service on international long-haul flights. Cathay isn't immune, however, from high fuel costs and competitive pricing. "All airlines are under pressure to reduce their cost base," Tyler says. But rather than relying on slashing amenities, as many airlines have done, Cathay has focused on "increasing the productivity of our people," he says. That means embracing the unabashedly corny team-building exercises that have fallen far out of fashion in the rest of the corporate world.

It's the only way to get Cathay's 25,000 employees working in harmony. The cabin crew, ground staff, gate agents and customer-service reps for any given flight are always different, so "every time you a have a flight that takes off, you have a new group thrown together for a project," says Jeremy Perks, a director in Beijing for IWNC, a corporate-team-building firm that has worked with Cathay. When those teams break down, Cathay is vulnerable to the same problems facing every other airline. For example, in June a mechanical problem delayed a Cathay flight in San Francisco, forcing 400 passengers to sit on the runway for seven hours and hitting the airline with a rare round of negative publicity.

So Cathay has tried to turn its global training headquarters near Hong Kong International Airport into a temple of team spirit. Employees can wander into classes for yoga and belly-dancing and get a drink at Dhakota's, the company bar. "It's like a big playground," says Steve Lawrence, one of Cathay's training and development managers. The rooftop patio hosts just about every hokey team-building exercise ever invented. Trainees regularly participate in 100-person lap sits, in which each person sits on the next one's knees, forming a circle while trying mightily to stay balanced. There are blindfolded "trust walks" and, until recently, group-dancing first thing in the morning. Sadly, Morning Boogie was phased out after the speaker system got blown away in a typhoon.

These exercises can do only so much. "Team-building events just create a shared experience for people," says Lawrence, "nothing more, nothing less." So managers help employees make a clear connection between the exercises and their daily responsibilities. At a recent session in which the trainees played the game red/black (teams score higher by coordinating their strategies), a supervisor from Indonesia linked the exercise to dealing with lost luggage without passing blame.

Cathay's team-building isn't just for the rank and file. At a recent event in Bangkok, top managers, including former CEO Philip Chen, were sent into local Thai grocery stores with 500 baht and the task of planning and cooking new economy- and business-class meals.

The next team challenge? Cathay acquired the Chinese domestic airline Dragonair last year, but integrating its new partner could be tricky. "Chinese carriers do not have a good reputation for customer service," says Richard Aboulafia, an airline analyst with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va. Tyler says he wants "to make sure Dragonair staff feel they belong--to make sure nobody was having lunch alone." Perhaps it's time to bring back Morning Boogie.