Taking A Look At Southwest Leadership

Lessons Learned The first lesson learned that has led to Southwest undeniable success starts with the empowering leadership style of Herb Kelleher. Empowering leadership focuses on emphasizing the meaningfulness of the employee’s job by granting them decision-making autonomy. Such autonomous power is substantiated by research as a component to increasing employee motivation, engagement, confidence, self-efficacy, creativity, and innovativeness resulting in increased productivity. This form of leaderships supplies the employee with the tools needed to ensure organizational success as the employee has taken personal ownership for organizational outcome. (Li, Liu, Han, & Zhang, 2016). In addition, Kelleher’s leadership style underscores,

This value is predicated on both the leadership and employee serving the internal and external stakeholders to achieve positive organizational results. Therefore, the employee is a symbol of the organization’s identity, and serves as the brand ambassador as the most important stakeholder that contributes to the organization’s financial performance (De Bussy, & Suprawan, 2012). Thus, employee engagement is of utmost importance as it can be the differentiating factor giving the organization a competitive advantage when employees are enthusiastic and satisfied with their jobs. For this reason, employee engagement throughout the Southwest organization is optimal, as it contributes to the servant’s heart of collaborative teamwork to achieve a common goal of serving their fellow co-workers and customers (Prerana, 2017). Research, indicates that organization’s that practice servant leadership, enhances the employee’s leadership qualities, and strengthen peer relationships as the employee delivers outstanding customer service (Carter, & Baghurst, 2014). One of Southwest practices of the servant’s heart is to cultivates employee engagement and corporate citizenship behavior by building holistic relationships with community partners, vendors, and the employee’s families (Klein,

Fun at work, is defined as “any social, interpersonal, or task activities at work of a playful or humorous nature which provides an individual with amusement, enjoyment, or pleasure” (Fluegge-Woolf, p. 684, 2014). Hence, why this principle is another of the Southwest practices as they encourage employees to “find the kid in everyone and foster an environment of fun” (Klein, p. 37, 2012). The lesson learned from Southwest success, is captured in a statement by Herb Kelleher that essentially states, that his organization’s success is due to the employees, as many competitors have attempted to replicate his business model and failed, because one cannot duplicate an organization’s unique culture that’s entrenched in mutual dedication, loyalty and devotion (Rao, 2017).