Southwest Airlines: A Culture Worth Understanding

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Southwest Airlines A Culture Worth Understanding

• Prepared by Jim Messina, Ph.D
• Available at
• www.jamesjmessina.com

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The mission of Southwest Airlines

• Southwest Airlines is dedicated to the highest
  quality of Customer Service delivered with a
  sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride,
  and Company Spirit.
• (Freiberg and Freiberg, 1996)

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Southwests Commitment to its Employees

• We are committed to provide our Employees a
  stable work environment with equal opportunity
  for learning and personal growth. Creativity and
  innovation are encouraged for improving the
  effectiveness of Southwest Airlines. Above all,
  Employees will be provided the same concern,
  respect, and caring attitude within the
  organization that they are expected to share
  externally with every Southwest Customer.
• Since January 1988 (Freiberg and Freiberg, 1996)

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What Makes Southwest Unique?

• Southwest Airlines began operating in 1971
• Much of Southwest's success is due to the
  willingness of its leadership to be innovative
• Southwest's primary operating philosophy is low
  fares and lots of flights
• Southwest management has created a culture where
  employees are treated as the company's number one
  asset
• The benefits it gives it employees, include
  profit-sharing and empowering employees to make
  decisions
• Southwest mixes in New Age management techniques,
  such as celebrating different milestones, and
  letting love play a part in running the airline
• The company's stock ticker symbol is LUV
• (Freiberg and Freiberg, 1996)

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Southwests Organizational Structure

• Limited emphasis on formal organizational
  structure
• Leadership meetings are taped and shared with
  employees
• Leadership is Leadership by example
• Environment combines humor with responsibility
• Worker responsibility programs
• Team environment
• (Freiberg and Freiberg, 1996)

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Decision Making Strategies

• Decision making is by worker/management
  committees
• Employees are encouraged to be responsible and
  are given authority to make decisions
• Employee input into all policies and procedures
• All decisions are weighed against Southwests
  commitment to honesty and integrity
• Golden Rule Behaviors/Focus on the family
• (Freiberg and Freiberg, 1996)

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Southwests Achievements

• Southwest Airlines has become a legendary example
  of the power of servant leadership principles
• Its achievements are impressive considering the
  competitive, cut-throat airline industry in which
  it thrives
• Southwest Airlines has been named "one of the
  "Top Five Best Companies to Work for in America"
  by Fortune Magazine
• It has had the fewest customer complaints 18
  years in a row as reported by the DOT Air Travel
  Consumer Report
• The Southwest Airlines has been profitable for 31
  consecutive years, named the "2nd Most Admired
  Company in America by Fortune Magazine, and has
  an average employee turnover rate of less than
  10
• If you made a 10,000 investment in Southwest
  Airlines in 1972, it would be worth more than 10
  million today.
• It has developed strong employee and customer
  loyalty - a feeling of devotion, duty and
  attachment to Southwest
• (West, 2005)

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Southwests Culture is Focused on Relationships

• Southwests most distinctive organizational
  competency is its ability to build and sustain
  relationships characterized by
• Shared goals
• Shared knowledge
• Mutual respect
• Focus on relationships is the fundamental driver
  of leadership, culture, strategy, and
  coordination at Southwest
• (Gittell, 2003)

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Impact of Strong Relationships at Southwest

• Employees embrace their connections with one
  another
• Which allows them to coordinate more effectively
  across all functions (Gittell, 2003)
• We at Southwest Airlines foster and embrace fun,
  creativity, individuality, and empowerment. We
  love our employees. We trust our employees.
  (West, 2005)

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Impact of Shared Goals at Southwest

• Motivates individuals to move beyond what is best
  for their own narrow area of responsibility
  within their own function
• Motivates them to to act in the best interests of
  the overall process of the organization and
  lessens competition between different functions
  within the organization (Gittell, 2003)
• Hire People who can Laugh at themselves. (West,
  2005)

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Impact of Shared Knowledge at Southwest

• Shared knowledge at Southwest is about how the
  tasks of one person or group are related to all
  other tasks
• This enables the workforce to act with regard for
  the total process
• This enables the workforce to be more competent,
  efficient and coordinated than their competitors
• (Gittell, 2003)
• The philosophy at Southwest has always been,
  Never forget where you came from. (West, 2005)

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Impact of Respect for Others at Southwest

• Encourages all employees to value the
  contributions of their colleagues
• Encourages all employees to consider the impact
  of their actions on others
• Reinforces the tendency to act in the best
  interests of the overall work process (Gittell,
  2003)

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Southwests 10 Practices for Building High
Performance Relationships

• Leading with credibility and caring
• Investing in frontline leadership
• Hiring and training for relational competence
• Using conflicts to build relationships
• Bridging the work/family divide
• Creating boundary spanners
• Measuring performance broadly,
• Keeping jobs flexible at the boundaries
• Establishing partnerships with the unions
• Building relationships with suppliers
• (Gittel, 2003)

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Credibility CaringKey to Southwests Culture

• At Southwest, credibility and caring are the two
  critical ingredients of effective leadership
• Credibility and caring are the ability to inspire
  trust and the ability to inspire in employees the
  belief that their leaders care deeply about their
  well-being
• Southwests top management team have gained the
  complete trust of managers in the field, and of
  frontline employees, by being forthright and
  consistent in their messages to employees
• (Gittel, 2003)

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Role of Leadership in Southwests Culture

• Leadership at Southwest is understood as a
  process that can take place at any level of the
  organization
• Southwest believes that leadership at the front
  line can play a critical role in organizational
  success so it has more supervisors per frontline
  employee than any other airline in the industry,
  despite the fact that many think the organization
  is flat and team-based
• It is an approach that directly contradicts many
  contemporary management thinkers who argue that
  supervisors tend to perpetuate bureaucracy and,
  thus, get in the way (Gittel,2003)
• New leaders at Southwest are told, Dont try to
  learn your job. Your first priority is to get to
  know your people!
• (West, 2005)

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Role of Supervisors in Southwests Culture

• Southwest supervisors are not obstacles to
  coordination among frontline employees, but play
  a valuable role in strengthening coordination
  through day-to-day coaching, counseling, and
  participation in frontline work, even baggage
  handling
• Supervisors go far beyond measuring performance
  and disciplining bad apples and focus on
  problem solving, advising, and providing support,
  encouragement, and recognition to individual
  subordinates
• Supervisors view their subordinates as internal
  customers who deserve help in doing their jobs
  better
• (Gittel, 2003)

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Role of Relational Competence at Southwest

• Teamwork at Southwest is based on relational
  competencethe ability to relate effectively
  with others
• Relational competence is a critical ingredient of
  organizational success, though it tends to be
  undervalued in the world of work
• Other organizations usually underestimate the
  importance of relational competence, especially
  when it comes to people who perform highly
  skilled jobs
• Often excellent performers are hired, but they
  cannot integrate their work effectively with the
  work of others which results in undermining of
  the organizations goals, which does not happen
  at Southwest (Gittell, 2003)
• If you live by the Golden Rule, empowering your
  people do the right thing, how can you go wrong?
  (West, 2005)

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Get and Train Relationally Competent Individuals

• Southwest goes out of its way to hire those who
  will contribute to the overall operation of the
  airlineelitists need not apply
• In recruiting pilots or mechanics they obtain the
  best who are also team players and able to relate
  well with other functional groups
• They then train acculturate newly hired-most of
  whom come from other, more functionally divided
  airlines (Gittell,2003)
• A candidate who thinks he can snow a recruiter
  during the interview may have already eliminated
  himself because hes proven to other employees
  that he isnt a fit for the system. (West.
  2005)

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Get and Train Relationally Competent Individuals

• Southwests training is geared toward fostering
  relational competence, as well as functional
  expertise
• New staff learn about the overall work process
  and understand where they fit in and how their
  job relates to and supports jobs of coworkers
• Those not able to catch on to Southwests
  perspective are let go (Gittell, 2003)
• We put every possible support in place to help
  trainees succeed, and we work with those who are
  truly sincere and put forth the effort. (West,
  2005)

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Training at Southwest

• "We often say that Southwest hires for attitude
  and trains for aptitude. However, besides
  teaching technical aptitude, we also provide
  Leadership training, and our Managers in Training
  (MIT) program is a part of that learning
  process.
• Colleen Barrett , President Southwest Airlines
• (West, 2005)

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Handling Conflict to Learn How to Improve Culture

• In the airline industry, where highly
  interdependent work processes span multiple
  functions, not only are conflicts the norm, they
  are likely to have highly intensified effects
• People in different functions occupy different
  thought worlds that make shared understanding
  difficult
• Although many believe conflicts are destructive
  and to be avoided, Southwest believes
  constructive aspects exist, so actively
  identifying and resolving conflicts is a means of
  strengthening relationships that inspire
  effective coordination
• (Gittell, 2003)

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Incorporating Personal Lives into its Culture

• Traditional organizational practices often demand
  that, while at work, employees disconnect
  themselves from the aspects of their identity
  related to family, spirituality, personal pain
  and tragedy, and race or ethnicity. As a result
  individual attitudes and performance often
  suffer.
• Southwest blurs the boundary between work and
  personal life and strives to enhance rather than
  undermine employee ties to family and community
• Southwest openly recognizes deaths, births, and
  other major events in the lives of employees and
  their families, and has established a
  Catastrophic Fund to provide aid when needed
  (Gittell, 2003)
• Southwest Airlines does many things well. But
  one of the things it does best is taking care of
  its people in the bad times, as well as the
  good. (West, 2005)

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Incorporating Personal Lives into its Culture

• Culture Committees were begun in the early 1990s
  to ensure that the companys rapid growth would
  not result in barriers between functions. Each
  station has its own committee to organize
  fund-raisers, parties, and ways for employees to
  give back to the community. These events bring
  family and other personal relationships into the
  workplace in a highly visible way.
• Southwest has a long tradition of bridging the
  work/family divide by seeking to accommodate the
  needs of families through flexible scheduling and
  ensuring that managers do not devote too much
  time to the job at the expense of their families.
• (Gittell, 2003)

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Using Agents as Boundary Spanners

• Although many different functions play a critical
  role in coordinating flight departures, the
  operations agents role is especially central
• An agent is at the center of communications among
  the various groups working to unload a plane,
  service it, reload it, and send it on its way
• An agent is responsible for bringing together and
  reconciling conflicting agendas among the various
  functions, regarding passenger needs, commitments
  to freight and mail customers, and the
  requirements of flight safety
• Essentially, operations agents act as boundary
  spanners, collecting, filtering, translating,
  interpreting, and disseminating information
  across organizational boundaries
• Effective boundary spanners do more than just
  process information they also build relationships
  of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual
  respect as a means of facilitating work
  coordination
• (Gittell, 2003)

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Using Agents as Boundary Spanners

• Since the mid 1980s, many airlines tried to
  reduce the cost of this function by reducing the
  number of agents, increasing the number of
  flights they are assigned to, and relying more
  heavily on computer technology to coordinate
  departures-quality and detail of communication is
  not very high this way
• Southwest has chosen opposite tack and is unique
  its operations agents are assigned to lead only
  one departure at a time so that they can
  interact, face to face, with every party involved
  in the flight departure process
• By developing a web of human relationships across
  boundaries, Southwest operations agents are able
  to create a broader sense of shared identity and
  vision among previously divided functions,
  creating more opportunities for collective
  action.
• (Gittell, 2003)

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Cross-functional Performance is Measured

• Cross-functional performance measures that
  Southwest uses encourage employees to focus on
  learning, rather than on blaming, when things go
  wrong and, as a result, bolster relationships of
  shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual
  respect.
• Cross-functional approach to performance
  measurement is associated with higher levels of
  relational coordination, which, in turn,
  contributes to improved flight departure
  performance, faster turnaround times, greater
  staffing productivity, fewer lost bags, and fewer
  customer complaints. (Gittell, 2003)
• Insist your employees live by a doing more with
  less philosophy. (West, 2005)

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What do we learn from Southwest?

• The primary lesson is that though relationships
  are relatively soft organizational factors and
  therefore tempting to neglect under challenging
  conditions, strong working relationships allow
  organizations to move beyond the traditional
  trade-offs between efficiency and quality and to
  achieve higher levels of both, simultaneously.
• Relationships are not just a nice addition to the
  hard factors, but are powerful drivers of
  organizational performance, if they are
  consistently integrated into organizational
  practices over the long term.
• (Gittell, 2003) (West, 2005) (Freiberg
  Freiberg, 1996)

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References

• Freiberg, K. Freiberg, J. (1996) Nuts!
  Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and
  Personal Success. New York Broadway
• Gittell, J.H. (2003). The Southwest Airlines Way
  Using Power of Relationships to Achieve High
  Performance. New York McGraw-Hill
• West, L.G. (2005). Lessons in Loyalty How
  Southwest Airlines Does It - An Insider's View.
  Dallas, TX CornerStone Leadership Institute

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