“If we could have your attention, please, we would appreciate it - in fact we’d be downright shocked,” she said. The passengers and rest of crew laughed along with her and then, having captured our attention, she went on with her instructions.

That event, on my second flight with airline, may have been point when I became a fan of this upstart, discount carrier. The flight attendant’s small joke was just one of many good-spirited remarks I heard from station staff and cabin crews.

Guess what? I like travelling with people who enjoy their work. And that point is made, too, by Lance Secretan in an IndustryWeek article (May 15, 2000) that argues employees should be treated as well as customers.

Using Southwest Airlines as his example (and WestJet modeled itself on Southwest), Secretan says management needs to put same commitment and resources into internal marketing to employees that it puts into external marketing to customers.

That’s not an unreasonable idea, considering that companies sometimes have to fight harder to get and keep good employees than to get and keep customers. Put another way, can you serve customers well if you don’t have good employees? And, don’t forget maxim that employees treat customers like they’re treated by management.

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Summary: Leaders need feedback to thrive. If they don't constantly evaluate how they are doing as leaders, they face repeated failure. Here is one important feedback mechanism that most leaders ignore.

Your Ultimate Leadership Feedback Loop: Their Leadership by Brent Filson

Life on our planet flourishes through feedback. If life forms don't develop feedback loops and get good information about how well they are interacting with their world, world eventually kills them.

This holds true with leaders. Leaders must get feedback as to how they're doing -- otherwise they won't be leaders for long.

One kind of feedback is results. After all, leaders do nothing more important than get results. You should understand kinds of results you're getting, if they are right results, and if you are getting them in right ways.

There is another kind of measurement that is as important, and sometimes more important, than results. It's a measurement most leaders overlook. That measurement has to do not with you but with people you're leading.

To explain what that measurement is, I'll first describe a fundamental concept of how one goes about leading people to achieve results.

There's a crucial difference between doing a task and taking leadership of that task that makes a world of difference in task's accomplishment.