A Compelling Vision
K: Maybe we ought to add citizen of choice to our criteria for being a “Fortunate 500” company.
C: Good idea, Ken. Let me circle back to another aspect about having the right target or vision/direction that you mentioned: a compelling vision. I think I know what you mean by that, but tell me more.
K: This is a really important concept that many companies miss. To me, having some clarity about a compelling vision is crucial. Two of my colleagues—Jesse Stoner, who has been studying the impact of vision on organizational effectiveness for almost three decades, and Drea Zigarmi, our Director of Research and Development—identified three key elements of a compelling vision7—one that would inspire people and provide direction:
• Significant purpose—What business are you in?
• A picture of the future—What will the future look like if you are successful?
• Clear values—What guides your behavior and decisions on a daily basis?
To us:
A Compelling Vision Tells You
Who You Are
(Your Purpose),
Where You Are Going
(Your Picture of the Future),
And What Will Guide Your Journey
(Your Values)
A Significant Purpose
K: Without a significant purpose, leaders in organizations focus on their own agenda and personal enrichment. Employee loyalty and passion often go out the window as the point of work becomes simply to get as much as you can for as little effort as possible.8
C: I think a higher purpose is something that takes precedence over any short-term goal like profit.
K: It sure does. A significant purpose is your organization’s real reason for existence. It answers the question “Why?” rather than just explaining what you do. It’s what permits you to have a both/ and philosophy toward people and results. When that happens, the development of people—both employees and customers—is of equal importance to performance. In other words, it clarifies, from the viewpoint of your people and your customers, what business you are really in and where they fit into the equation.
Most companies either don’t have a purpose statement or the one they have is way too complicated. A while back, I worked with a large bank. When I got in front of all the key managers, I said, “I certainly appreciate your sending me your purpose statement. Ever since I got it, I have slept much better. I put it next to my bed in case I woke up in the middle of the night. If that happened, I would just read your purpose statement and it would put me right back to sleep.”
They all laughed because their purpose/mission statement rambled on and on. I felt it couldn’t motivate a flea.
I told them if I were a customer of their bank, I would hope they were in the peace of mind business. If I gave them money, I would like to have the peace of mind that they would take care of my money and even grow it. I asked them whether they would rather be in the financial services business or in the peace of mind business. The advantage of being in the peace of mind business is that everybody—both employees and customers—understands what that means. For example, if a teller is rude to a customer, how is that helping that customer’s peace of mind?
Colleen, what is the significant purpose at Southwest? What business are you in?
C: We’re in the Customer Service business—we just happen to provide airline transportation. It’s that simple. But it focuses all the energy of our People on taking care of our Customers. We have never purported to be all things for all people. We have always been very clear that if people will agree to purchase our services, we will attempt to give them an exemplary return on their investment. That is, we will do our best to assure they have a safe, on-time flight, for a reasonable price, with as little stress as possible, in a caring environment.
Stop and ThinkA Picture of the Future
K: The second element of a compelling vision is having a picture of the future. This picture of the end result should not be abstract. It should be a mental image you can actually see. For instance, at Disney theme parks, since they are in the happiness business, their picture of the future is that all guests should have a bigger smile on their face leaving the park than they had when they entered three, six, nine, or twelve hours before.
Colleen, what’s the picture of the future at Southwest?
C: Our picture of the future is that every American has the “Freedom to Fly”—to be with friends, business associates, or relatives on happy occasions as well as sad ones. To make that happen, we want to keep our costs low (resulting in low fares) while maintaining an efficient, reliable way to fly. We also want people to enjoy flying, so we want to keep our spirits high (warm, friendly, and fun-spirited Employees), which all amounts to Legendary Customer Service.
When we were just starting out, we wanted to “democratize the skies.” To understand that statement, you have to realize that back in 1971 when we put our first plane in the air, generally speaking, only rich people flew for pleasure. There were few women in business, so flying was done mostly by businessmen traveling on expense accounts. Our vision was that we would turn the status quo totally upside-down so that all people would be able to afford to fly for both business and pleasure. We wanted to convince the public that flying was not just for the elite.
K: In many ways, that’s similar to the vision Bill Gates originally had for the computer industry. He wanted a computer on every desk and in every home, not just a select few.
C: I never thought about that, Ken. I guess Bill Gates wanted to democratize the computer industry!
“It started with Herb and Colleen...
and Gary Kelly now—they care for their Employees.
They genuinely care for us.
And so we think it’s our duty to care for others, too.
That’s why we like our Customers and we like to give
back. So as long as we have that Culture, I think that’s
what makes us unique.”
—Alex Ponzio, Dallas Captain
One final point regarding our delivery of Customer Service is a simple fact that most organizations do not seem to understand: There should be no difference whatsoever between your principles and values when delivering internal Customer Service versus external Customer Service. The Golden Rule applies there too, for goodness’ sake!
K: You are so right. Some of the worst customer service can occur internally—within an organization itself. In many companies, if you call another department you think you’re talking to an adversary. This can happen not only at work, but also at home. The sad reality is that most people treat folks they work with or love worse than they treat customers or total strangers. Suppose you had a party at your house and new neighbors came. Just after they leave, you notice that the man left his hat and you run out into street to hail him down. When you hand him his hat, would you say, “You idiot! If your head weren’t screwed on, it would fall off!” Of course not. You’d say, “I’m glad I caught you. Here’s your hat. Great to see you.” And yet, we hear mothers shouting awful things at their kids when they’ve left their lunch behind. So yes, Colleen, internal customer service should be Legendary Service, too.
K: You got it. In fact, that’s the third and final element of a compelling vision: having clear, guiding values. I know this is another one of your strengths at Southwest. Why? Because high-performing organizations have values they actually live by—something most organizations don’t have.
Most organizations that do have values have too many—eight, ten, or twelve. They’re for God, mother, and country, and everything else in between. In this case, more is not better. We have found that people can’t focus on more than three or four values, if those values are to guide their behavior.9 We also found that organizations must prioritize values for them to be effective. Why? Because life is about value conflicts. When these conflicts arise, people need to know which value they should focus on.
C: We’re on the same page there, Ken. The highest priority for all of our Employees is safety, which we never compromise. Beyond that, we have identified three key values: Warrior Spirit, Servant’s Heart, and Fun-LUVing Attitude.
K: Warrior Spirit sounds like you want fighters and battlers!
C: That’s not what we mean by Warrior Spirit. Basically, it means that you have to have a fighting spirit to be successful. You want to be the best, work hard, be courageous, display a sense of urgency, persevere, and innovate. You want to be a winner. People don’t want to work for a loser. You want to win at what you set out to do.
K: So it’s a strong competitive spirit, but not in a warlike way.
C: That’s right. It’s similar to one of the two character traits that Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great,10 used to describe great leaders: will, or resolve. It’s the determination to follow through on a vision, mission, or goal. The focus is on giving your all to get the best result so everyone wins—your People, your Customers, your owners, and the communities in which you serve. We think there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be the best at what you do.
“If you’re willing to give 100 percent,
this Company will always give you
100 percent back.”
—Don Digregorio, Houston Ramp Supervisor
K: I would venture a guess that’s what has made Southwest successful for almost four decades: Your people are true Warriors. They work hard and play hard. They work and fight to win.
C: We think that if in the beginning we had just been left alone by those big guys out there—the other airlines—we probably would have been out of business in two years. But we knew we had to fight to succeed and win.
Another reason we need People with Warrior Spirit is because we hire leanly—we don’t want to furlough People. As a result, when we hire People, we’re hoping to have them for life. Although we work lean at every level, due to our Warrior Spirit we have always been extremely productive.
The way we turn a plane is an example of our Warrior Spirit. With the understanding that safety is paramount, we work constantly to improve efficiency. You see, we make money when planes are in the air. So we went to our Dispatchers and Operational People and said, “We have to turn these airplanes in ten to fifteen minutes.” And they said, “It’s impossible.” And we said, “It’s not. You just have to have the mindset to do it.”
Today, though we no longer have ten-minute turns, we still turn our planes faster than the other guys by far. Our vision in turning around a flight is to make it look like an Indianapolis 500 pit stop. When you pull into a gate and you’re looking out the window, you will see our People gathered around, perched and ready to help turn that flight. If you fly on another airline, even when you go into their hub, you don’t see that occur. It’s fascinating to watch, and it’s a mindset. There’s a real team Warrior Spirit there. Everybody knows that everyone has an important role in that turnaround.
“I think it’s easy when the weather is good,
the airplane’s running on time—
anybody can look good in that environment.
It’s when the weather goes bad,
we’ve had a mechanical (failure),
we’ve had a security breach—those types of issues.
That’s when you really tell the mettle of an airline.”
—Rod Jones, Phoenix Captain
K: Tell me about your second value: a Servant’s Heart. To me, that’s the core of knowing how to lead with love.
C: Absolutely. When we interview, hire, and promote, we’re looking for People who are Servant Leaders—no matter what title or position they are going to hold, they have to want to serve. They need to have a Servant’s Heart—a passion for serving others. We want all of our Employees to follow The Golden Rule, adhere to our basic principles, treat others with respect, put others first, be egalitarian, demonstrate Proactive Customer Service, and embrace the Southwest Airlines family.
I just love the kinds of things that result from this philosophy. I get calls from Passengers all the time who say things like, “I haven’t seen Carroll Herzog (who is a Customer Service Agent for us in Houston) at Gate 41 for a couple of weeks; is something wrong?” Most companies don’t have that happen. And we see it often. Or Carroll Herzog, the Customer Service Agent, will call and be in tears because she just read that one of her favorite Customers had a heart attack, is retiring, or whatever, and she wants to do something special for him or her.
“Colleen always says,
‘Follow The Golden Rule,
learn from your mistakes,
and listen to your heart.’”
—Tammy Romo, Senior Vice President Planning
Our Passengers may not know all our names, but they know our faces, and they’re not just conducting a business transaction with us—it’s more personal than that. And that’s what pays off. It’s tangible in the sense that you can see it, but it’s hard to quantify. But I know in my heart that it’s huge. And I know in my heart that most companies are not lucky enough to have that kind of daily experience. Why? Because our People enjoy what they do, and they pass that joy onto our Customers.
I can’t tell you how many letters we have received over the years from senior leaders of other companies who say, “I’ve tried to find the flaw; I’ve asked your people why they enjoy working at Southwest or to tell me what they don’t like, and they’ll always go back to the way you treat them and respect them and the way they trust your word and trust you.” These letters always say, “I wish my people would talk about me that way.”
K: Why do you get that reaction?
C: Because our People know that they can expect us to always treat them with respect. They know we think they are our most important resource. In contrast to the often repeated phrase, “The customer is always right,” we recognize that there are times when the Customer is not right.
When Herb first made that statement many years ago and it appeared in a well-known publication, we received literally thousands of letters from people who thought it was a terrible statement to make for a Customer-oriented Company like ours. To flesh out this thought a bit, let me explain. We will not tolerate an Employee’s physical or verbal abuse by a Customer, and we will back the Employee completely if we see this happening. I think it’s important for our People to know we’re on their side. At the same time, if our investigation shows that we were in the wrong, we will offer our profound apologies and make amends for our wrongdoings.
All of our Leaders try to model Servant Leadership. Herb led the way, clearly, although I don’t think he even knew what the expression Servant Leadership meant until we told him. And to be honest with you, neither did I, until my friend Ann McGee-Cooper introduced me to the book Robert K. Greenleaf: A Life of Servant Leadership by Don Frick.11
But, while our recognition of the term Servant Leadership might have come late, for almost four decades Herb and I have said that our purpose in life as Senior Leaders with Southwest Airlines is to support our People. To me, that’s what Servant Leadership is all about.
K: Colleen, with your emphasis on Customer Service and The Golden Rule, I’ll bet you tell your People, “Don’t ever ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t be willing to do right along with them.”
C: That’s an important part of The Golden Rule. It doesn’t mean you can sit down on every project and work with them, but it does mean you’re not above doing just that.
One of the most influential things that ever happened to me illustrates this. It occurred when I was a young secretary working with Herb. We had a mailer that had to get out, and everything that could go wrong with it went wrong. It had to be in the mail the next day. Well, the day before, the copy machine broke down and the postage was somehow wrong. So, all of these envelopes that had been stuffed had to be retyped, and this was not when you could just push a button and it would happen. You did it all yourself, manually. So it was about eight o’clock at night, the night they had to be postmarked, and we had to start all over again.
Herb sat right there with me until four o’clock in the morning, on the floor, licking envelopes and putting stamps on envelopes, because we didn’t have a postage machine. I’ll never forget it. My gosh. And he could have even thought that it was my fault that the mailing had gone wrong. But he didn’t. He just jumped right in there with me. That was a really valuable lesson for me, so I’ve always tried to remember it and emulate it.
“We’re all in it together.
No one’s job is too important that they
can’t pick up trash on the airplane.
The Pilots come back and help us
pick up trash during our quick turns.
Everyone’s pitching in and helping each other.”
—Candace Boyd, Dallas Flight Attendant
Just like Herb modeled for me, we want all decisions to be made from a Servant’s Heart. When a person joins our Company, if we outline for them what our mission, values, and expectations are, in my mind they’re making a pact and they’re agreeing that they’re going to follow that way of life. If they decide not to do this, we have two choices. The first is to give them a loving reprimand for not living up to our expectations. That’s tough love. If that works, they are forgiven and they are back on the Team. If it doesn’t, our second choice kicks in: career planning. We let them pursue their career someplace else. This doesn’t mean they’re bad people. It simply means that they no longer want to go where we are leading them and be a part of Southwest Airlines.
K: Garry Ridge, President of WD-40 Company,12 has a wonderful way of describing this process:
When People Don’t Fit
Your Company’s Culture,
“Share Them With The Competition.”
C: That’s the ultimate in tough love, but I agree with that approach. If you let someone remain in your Company who doesn’t buy into the Culture, it will create problems.
K: That’s for sure. One of the important things I’ve learned over the years is that behavior is controlled by its consequences. If people thumb their nose at something you think is important, like your culture, and they don’t get treated any differently than your best citizens, after a while people will begin to think that all the things you have been saying are important are just words—lip service.
C: That’s one of the things I really like about Garry Ridge. He’s not afraid to take a strong stand to protect his company’s culture. He’s also a fun-loving Aussie. That leads me to our third value, which is a Fun-LUVing Attitude.
K: That’s another unusual value for corporate America.
C: I can’t tell you how hard we worked on the proper descriptive we wanted to use. We ended up with “FunLUVing” to highlight our LUV symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.
Basically, a Fun-LUVing Attitude means just that: We want to enjoy our work life as much as we do our home life. We want to show each other and our valued Customers that we care about them, and we want them to feel like extended family members while they are in our presence. We have fun, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, we maintain perspective, we celebrate successes, we enjoy work, and we are passionate Team players.
Now, we’ve been laughed at, we’ve been scoffed at, and we’ve been ridiculed for all of that; but I’ll tell you, it works. You have to know your audience, and you have to be respectful of others. But having fun is part of our Culture. Our People are truly known for their sense of humor. The only time we’ve ever had a problem with that was right after 9/11, because it was such a tragedy for the whole nation, and humor wasn’t appropriate then. So we toned things down for a while.
K: How do you find People with a good sense of humor?
C: We actually test for a sense of humor when we hire People. That’s part of our application process. The first time Herb told our VP of People, which is our human resources area, that we wanted her to test for a sense of humor, she said, “Well, how the heck am I gonna do that? Should I put a whoopee cushion in their seat and see if they laugh?”
Actually, it’s really easy to see if People have a sense of humor. It just takes your eyes and ears and observation. When we do group interviews as part of the hiring process, we might ask the group a question such as “How did you use humor to extricate yourself from an embarrassing situation?” Not only do we listen carefully to each applicant’s response, we also like to watch the faces of the candidates who are not speaking and observe how they react to the interviewee’s answer.
When we tell new recruits about Southwest during the orientation process, we give them a lot of history. We give them our legacy. We are great storytellers. Herb is probably the best storyteller I’ve ever met. I’m not as good as he is, but I learn every time he tells us stories. He has taught us to laugh at ourselves—to not take ourselves too seriously. We take our business seriously, but not ourselves, and we want our People to be that way, too.
“When I first started with the Company,
everyone said, ‘Hey, have fun, have fun.’
The People who interviewed me—everybody—
would say, ‘Have fun. Be yourself. Have fun.’
And so, when I got on board, I just started having fun.
I just have a smile on my face, and it seems to rub
off on people.”
—Olander Coleman, Oakland Customer Service Agent
K: Your Fun-LUVing Attitude comes across every day to your Customers. I just laughed out loud one time when, after landing, I heard one of your Flight Attendants get on the microphone and say, “As we are taxiing, please keep your seat belts on. If you do stand up, we are going to send Bruno, our bag crusher, to the baggage claim area, and you’re not going to like the condition of your bag.”
I also love to hear the story that my friend, the great management author and speaker Patrick Lencioni, tells about your Fun-LUVing Attitude:13 “You know something is a core value for a company if the people take it too far and create a problem, but the leaders are okay with it.” He goes on to relate that someone wrote to Southwest and said, “I’m a long-time customer, and I don’t like the fact that you make jokes during the safety announcement part of the flight.”
Now, most companies would write back and say something like, “We value you as a customer. Please trust that we care about your safety. Here’s a free flight coupon, and we’ll talk to the flight attendants and correct the problem.” And then they would send out an e-mail to tell their people that the humor and fun thing is good, but they need to tone it down.
When Patrick tells the story, at this point he always gets a big smile on his face when he says, “But not Southwest. No. They sent the customer a note that said, ‘We will miss you.’ That’s when you know it’s a core value—‘We will miss you.’”
C: I love to hear Pat tell that story too, although it’s not entirely true. The Customer he was talking about was not only complaining about our behavior during safety announcements, but about everything. This person wasn’t a happy camper. That’s what motivated us to say, “We’ll miss you.”
K: That’s interesting. Once you become legendary in your service, your Customers and fans often exaggerate or even fabricate stories. I’ve never forgotten a great Nordstrom story. As you know, this great retailer has a reputation of taking anything back from a customer and reimbursing them with no questions asked. A popular story was that a customer brought back a pair of snow tires, and Nordstrom took them back even though they don’t sell tires. That story became legendary, and in talking to Jim Nordstrom, one of the founders, years later, he laughed about that story. He said for a time they actually did sell snow tires in one store in Alaska, and that was where the customer returned the tires. That little detail was left out of the story by customers who spread it all over the country.
C: Whether Pat’s story was exactly true or not, it does highlight how central fun is to our corporate culture. For example, I’ll never forget when Tonda Montague, one of the original members of our Corporate Culture Committee, said to me, “I learned in the first few months of employment here not to schedule my vacation without checking the calendar, because there are certain days you don’t want to miss being here—it’s just too much fun.” One of the days she was talking about was Halloween. We dress up in crazy outfits and have a lot of fun.
K: So you folks are real party animals!
C: Yes! But fun doesn’t always have to mean parties with all the trimmings—although we do have a few of those every year—we call them Spirit Parties. Fun means we enjoy and celebrate life and each other in a laid-back, down-to-earth environment that is welcoming, warm, and enjoyable. It means we celebrate everything—both small and big victories and successes. It means we make a big deal out of the folks who “Live the Southwest Way,” which means they display a Warrior Spirit, a Servant’s Heart, and a Fun-LUVing Attitude on a daily basis. Sometimes we do this through special recognition events; sometimes with informal, spontaneous recognition ceremonies; sometimes with written celebratory congratulations in our newsletters; and sometimes with more formal awards. Our Annual Awards Banquet could give the annual Academy Awards ceremony a good run for its money!
We have picnics and barbeques and tailgate parties. We hold fundraising events for Employees down on their luck. We have all kinds of contests. We give showers for weddings and first births, and we throw retirement parties. We compete in many activities in which we give silly awards. We sponsor bowlathons, golf tournaments, baseball and softball tournaments, and ski trips. We have perfect attendance celebrations, and we give Winning Spirit Awards. We have a gazillion Employee recognition programs.
K: Why is a Fun-LUVing Attitude such a high value for you all, and worth sustaining?
C: Early in our history we occasionally flew on “the other guys,” and we saw that there were no smiles, no warmth, and no enjoyment. It was all very robotic. Well, Herb can’t be robotic, so we decided that we were going to have fun be an extremely important word at our Company. I think a number of companies try to do that today, but back then nobody was doing it. We decided fun was going to be a word we used a lot.
We made a decision that we didn’t have to be stodgy or stuffy to be a successful business. It sounds kind of funny today, maybe, but when we first started talking to new hires, we didn’t even want to use the word professional. Why? Because in the 1970s we thought that word denoted a “stiffness” that we didn’t want. We wanted some light irreverence. We wanted some spirited fun. And—I hesitate to say the next thing just because of the generally uptight demeanor in today’s social environment—we also wanted to be sexy. We thought the airline business could be, and should be, sexy. Now, I don’t want to go down this trail too far, but the truth of the matter is that that was what Texas was all about at that time. So we did have girls wearing hot pants and go-go boots, and our first ad for Flight Attendants had the heading “We’re looking for Raquel Welch lookalikes.” What we were doing, of course, was getting the personalities that we needed and wanted for 1971, when the only people who were flying were Texas businessmen. Women weren’t flying. So we knew our audience, and we went after them.
We stayed in those outfits about five years too long. I got the distinct pleasure of going in, with the head of our Flight Attendant union at the time, to tell Herb we were not going to wear those clothes anymore! That was a fun experience in and of itself. Herb knew we were right, but he never wanted to drop the fun from our way of doing business. What convinced him was his empathy: We told him the uniforms, selected by a prior CEO, were an embarrassment to wear in the early 1980s. So from that point on, our fun became more focused on our People and how they treated our Customers, rather than on what our People were wearing.
K: Colleen, it sounds to me like your culture, driven by your guiding values—a Warrior Spirit, a Servant’s Heart, and a Fun-LUVing Attitude—permeates every aspect of your Company.
C: It is our essence, our DNA, our past, our present, and our future. Although these values are not officially rank-ordered, probably in practice they actually are. As I mentioned, safety is first. Then our next priority is getting the job done, and done well, for our Customers. That is driven by our Warrior Spirit. Yet we don’t want to give our all without a Servant’s Heart, expressed with a Fun-LUVing Attitude.
“In my view, when a brand understands that mission,
core values, and stakeholder engagement (especially
employees) are the essence of the brand, then that
brand becomes sustainable.
Southwest Airlines sets the standard.”
—Rex Whisman, Brand Champions Blog
K: You all really nail the triple bottom line—or maybe I should say the quadruple bottom line—and have a compelling vision that is communicated throughout the organization. Strategic leadership is rounded out with short-term goals and initiatives that tell your People what you want them to focus on right now. But now those things take on more meaning because they are tied to a bigger picture.
C: Sure, we have annual goals and initiatives that we want our People to focus on. But the big picture is what we want them also to focus on all the time—our compelling vision and the quadruple bottom line.