Why do Southwest Airlines people act like owners?

Hudson Valley businesses must communicate that job security depends on everyone acting like an owner and train employees so they can carry out the strategy of serving the customer. Not every job candidate will have an attitude that fits your culture.

Southwest Airlines hires for attitude and trains for skills. They insist that employees have a sense of humor. This improves their productivity, creativity, flexibility, and morale. Their ideal applicants have outgoing personalities and will fit into an extended “family” environment. They work hard, think on their feet and have fun at the same time.

If you hire people with an attitude that can live, sleep, eat and breathe your culture, you can train them to do anything else. At the heart of Southwest”™s seemingly frivolous focus on self-expression is a very practical idea. If employees pretend to be people they”™re not, they will take out the stress they feel on their co-workers and customers. Through humor, employees create more enjoyable experiences for passengers.

Serve the customer. In “Win,” author Frank Luntz says that CEO Gary Kelly is always asking customers how to serve better? “Travelers responded by telling him exactly what they wanted out of an airline experience. Then, he devised a business model to deliver on their desires, and to do so with excellent, cheerful, upbeat service. When you fly Southwest, you can feel how they built an airline around your needs for price, simplicity, and choice.”

Luntz continues, “It”™s easy to read and listen to stories about winners and their life-changing ideas and think to yourself, ”˜they’re just better than I am. They”™re smarter. They understand their field or area of expertise more than I ever will. I”™ll never become a winner.”™ In fact, most of the success we see is due to being people-centered rather than intelligent. From the outside, it looks like winners are brilliant because they unlocked the secrets of a great mystery.”

People are our most important asset and in order to keep growing, we need to keep innovating. Southwest trains and encourages its people to question and challenge every assumption. In one case, when 800 computers were needed, the company debated whether to buy the hardware from IBM, Apple, or Compaq.

An employee, who had been trained to think independently, spoke up and asked, “Why can’t we make the computers ourselves?” He purchased the parts off the shelf at wholesalers, recruited Southwest volunteers to work on an assembly line, and reduced the cost of the computers by 50 percent ”¦ a savings of more than $1 million.

Do people in your organization have an appreciation for another person”™s job? At Southwest, the pilots will sometimes put on a ramp agent”™s uniform and unload the baggage. At the same time, ramp agents climb into the cockpit and discover how a 30-second delay on their end can cause a wait behind other planes, making them late for every flight that day.

There are more successes waiting to be created in organizations all over the world. Regardless of your business, by treating everyone like an owner, hiring people who can enthusiastically live, breath, eat and sleep your culture; you will grow dramatically because of hiring for attitude and training for needed skills.

Questions for discussion:

Ӣ Have we communicated that everyone is an owner because for profits and job security everyone in the organization needs them to serve customers better than anyone else?

Ӣ Are we willing to treat all of our people like owners by sharing increased revenue enjoyed through savings or growth with everyone? How will we do that?

Joe Murtagh is The DreamSpeaker, an international keynote speaker, meeting facilitator and business trainer. For questions or comments, Joe@TheDreamSpeaker.com, www.TheDreamSpeaker.com or call (800) 239-0058.