flaptrack,
First let me say that no, I am not a pilot. As someone else pointed out I am a management employee. However, I'm not a manager, so I don't make policy or dictate it. Have I taken a leadership role? Absolutely. I do what I can each and every day to help this company succeed. I help co-workers without being asked and work very well in a team atmosphere without which my department couldn't get their job done. have I put my ideas to work? Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. My co-workers and I come up with ideas continually. They may not always be re-inventing of the wheel, but we are always looking for better ways to do things and new ways to improve our failing position. However, UA suffers from an ailment that seems to be prevalent in this industry: the disease of we've been doing X for 25 years, so why should we do Y? amongst many of it's managers and directors. So, in many cases, good ideas that should be explored further don't get elevated to the proper level due to certain managers and directors not agreeing with the idea, not wanting to look bad, or fill-in your own excuse. I'm not saying this goes on everywhere at UA, but it does go on. Which speaks to the whole idea of needing a change of culture. I speak from lots of experience in that area. I spent over 11 years at TWA. I was a Manager in my last position before coming to UA. I would try to find new ideas and new ways of doing things and make suggestions to my boss. However, it was the same old, well, I've been in this business a long time and we've been doing it this way, so why should we change? Here's an example. One big problem we had at TWA was that we were paying a ton of money for crew hotel rooms that would go unused each month. Well, we started seeing trends that showed this number was climbing to an alarming figure. So my boss asked me what we could do about it. At that time, our entire SOC/Crew Scheduling dept was in STL, but our Hotel Desk was still based at JFK. And they were only a M-F 9-5 operation. Individual station operations personnel were in charge of ordering unscheduled rooms or canceling unnecessary rooms for crewmembers in their station. As you can probably tell, this system simply had too many fingers in the pie and too much room for costly screwups. So I suggested that we (SOC) take over the Hotel Desk and handle the ordering and canceling of rooms from our department. We were a 24 hour, 7-day a week operation, so there would always be someone there for the crewmembers and hotels to deal with. It would stop the multiple hands in the pie problem by having the buck stop with one department. But my boss didn't want us taking on that responsibility. It was far easier to blame someone else for the screwup than to assume the role yourself. So the issue died without even being explored further. Would it have worked? I think it would have. But it needed to be analyzed further. It had the potential of saving TWA thousands of dollars each month in unused hotel rooms. But the idea wasn't even allowed to reach the light of day.
Would I just leave? I don't think this example applies to me because my attitude is positive and I work my butt off each day trying to fix problems. I'm not lazy and I don't poison my work environment with negativity. And as for making a positive impact for my company, I do that each and every day. If you'd like more examples, PM me and I'll be glad to give them to you.
P.S. Sorry for the long post.
41 PM 757fixer wrote: 
