— 10 —
The Power of Community
Think of a time when you accomplished something worthwhile with people you cared about, a time you felt inspired and supported, when you gave your best and felt deeply appreciated, when the emotional rewards far outstripped any monetary payoff. Maybe you were volunteering at a homeless shelter, helping out at your kid’s school, organizing a fund-raiser for a political candidate, or working with a “tiger team” to launch a new product. Whatever the experience, you probably felt you were part of something that wasn’t merely a team, but felt like a genuine community.
As human beings, we’re programmed for community. While primates and other animals form groups, no other species demonstrates the sort of intentional, intimate collaboration that is central to human life. Some researchers have argued that conscious thought, the distinguishing trait of human beings, emerged primarily as a tool for social interaction.1 Our brains, it seems, are wired for community.
Abraham Maslow ranked the need for belonging just above the need for sustenance and safety, and innumerable studies have confirmed the link between social connection and well-being. A 2015 meta study found that loneliness is as dangerous to one’s health as obesity, inactivity, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, or heart disease. Overall, those with strong social relationships have half the risk of premature death as those with insufficient connections.2
In our hyperbusy, digitally mediated world, the sort of human connections that buoy us up—those that are stable, frequent, and caring—are getting harder to come by. This is a problem not only for our emotional health, but for our capacity to solve problems big and small. When French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 1800s, he was surprised to find that the catalysts of social progress were neither aristocrats nor bureaucrats, but voluntary associations of ordinary people:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. [They] use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States. I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely.3
One of the quintessential acts of community on the American frontier was constructing a barn. When new settlers joined a rural community, neighbors would often unite to build a barn for them. Barn raising fortified norms of reciprocity and increased social cohesion. That paid dividends later when a community was confronted with a crisis that required a coordinated response. Today, businesses and government have absorbed many of the functions of community. Despite this, communities remain indispensable to individual well-being and collective accomplishment. To underline this point, let’s look briefly at two examples of community in action.
Alcoholics Anonymous
Each week, roughly 2 million people around the world meet in small groups to encourage one another in their sobriety. As members of Alcoholics Anonymous, they form a vast network of ad hoc communities. There is only one criterion for joining—a desire to stop drinking. Each AA meeting—in a church basement, recreation center, or public hall—is self-organizing and self-supporting. Volunteers secure meeting rooms, arrange coffee, collect donations, hand out literature, and compile phone lists. In every meeting, there will be “sponsors”—regular attendees who are eager to offer time and advice to those new to recovery.
AA’s effectiveness is the product of the relationships that get forged during meetings. Self-acknowledged drunks encourage one another and serve as emotional ballast in the stormy seas of recovery.4 AA’s model stands in stark contrast to the credentialed and hierarchical structures of formal treatment programs. In AA, there’s no certification, supervision, or monitoring. Therapists and physicians aren’t allowed to participate in AA meetings unless they too suffer from alcoholism. Yet despite the lack of professionalism, AA’s twelve-step communities have helped countless individuals overcome addiction.5
Equally remarkable is the fact that AA delivers its service without a formal organization. AA’s 118,000 groups operate autonomously. Guidelines known as the “Twelve Traditions”—such as the tenet that every AA group should be self-supporting and nonprofessional—provide a framework, but there are no formal rules. Groups form whenever two or three alcoholics decide to establish one. Groups in nearby locations can choose to share resources like a meeting space or telephone helpline, but coordination is always voluntary. Despite AA’s global reach, its central organization comprises fewer than ninety people. These individuals are responsible for distributing AA materials and running an annual meeting for local coordinators.
As the former editor of the American Journal of Public Health observed in a piece summing up AA’s first seventy-five years: “From what looks like anarchy—traditions rather than rules, maximum local autonomy and independence, and absence of centralized or layered tiers of authority—emerges consistency and stability.”6 That’s the power of community.
Strive Together
Here’s a tough question: What would you do to achieve dramatic improvements in the quality of public education? Over many decades, this has proven to be one of the thorniest problems facing educators, parents, and taxpayers. Despite countless efforts at reform, the performance of US public secondary schools has been on a long, downhill slide. Once ranked first in graduation rates, the United States now comes eighteenth out of twenty-four industrialized countries.7
The causes of this decline are so varied and complex that it’s tempting to regard the problem as intractable. No single fix—lower student-teacher ratios, higher teacher salaries, greater parental involvement, or curriculum reform—has proved capable of turning things around. Yet in 2006, a window on real progress opened when KnowledgeWorks, an education-focused think tank, launched its “StrivePartnership” in Cincinnati, Ohio. What made this effort unique was the size and scope of the community that came together to tackle the problem of poor academic performance. More than three hundred institutions participated, including school districts, private foundations, city agencies, area employers, local universities, and dozens of advocacy groups.
Recognizing the systemic nature of the problem, members of the Strive community set themselves the goal of improving education “from cradle to career.” To ensure cohesion, the partners adopted a single set of overarching goals. Fifteen subcommunities, deemed Student Success Networks, self-organized to focus on specific issues such as early childhood education and tutoring. Each network agreed on common metrics to evaluate progress and committed itself to being scrupulously evidence-based in recommending and evaluating actions. Many also elected to use common problem-solving methodologies such as Six Sigma. This helped forge a common language and a shared understanding of root causes.
Network members met in person for two hours every two weeks to refine goals, craft plans, and calibrate progress. Between meetings, their conversations moved forward on social platforms like Google Groups. As networks became more cohesive, parochial concerns receded into the background. For example, when data showed that private preschools often did a better job of preparing children for kindergarten than public ones, the city school system redirected resources into private programs.8
The Success Networks often spawned subsidiary networks within member institutions. Many local schools established “data war rooms” with performance charts plastered on the walls. Teachers would meet every two weeks to review data on academic performance, absenteeism, and behavioral problems. By carefully tracking these trends, teachers became better at connecting at-risk students with outside help, and identifying the sort of interventions that could make the biggest difference.9
Within four years of its launch in Cincinnati, the StrivePartnership had produced gains in thirty-four of fifty-three key performance areas. Kindergarten readiness advanced by 9 percent, fourth-grade math skills went up by 14 percent, and high school graduation rates jumped 11 percent.10 These results attracted national attention, and today there are seventy Strive communities across the United States.
The challenge of scaling up forced Strive’s coordinating body to articulate its “Theory of Action”—the core steps required to build strong, problem-focused communities:
- Clarify shared, measurable results important to community partners
- Identify audiences that need to be involved in working to achieve the result
- Determine the skills different partners need to take effective action
- Design teams of leaders and practitioners and support them in ongoing, experiential learning
As different as they are, AA and Strive are both committed to solving complex, nonroutine problems. Every recovering alcoholic is a unique bundle of predispositions, traumas, and traits, and needs to be uniquely supported in recovery. Every underperforming school faces a unique mix of circumstances—demographic, cultural, pedagogical, and institutional—and must develop a similarly distinctive set of responses. In both cases, success depends on local improvisation. That’s why these organizations are communities, not hierarchies. They are driven forward not by executive fiat, but by unity, selflessness, determination, and accountability.
Bureaucracies excel at solving routine problems—like processing millions of credit card transactions or churning out a zillion computer chips. They’re also good at integrating diverse inputs, as long as the coordination tasks can be clearly specified in advance. Bureaucracies struggle, though, when confronted with novel problems that require new and unscripted patterns of collaboration. As Strive’s founder, Jeff Edmondson, rightly notes, “Under conditions of complexity, predetermined solutions can neither be reliably ascertained nor implemented.”11
Markets are similarly powerless to solve cutting-edge problems. Markets can reveal preferences, like establishing how many people are willing to part with $55,000 to buy a Tesla Model 3, but they can’t solve novel problems like designing a car that drives itself. That takes a community, not merely a clutch of contracts.
To solve unprecedented problems, individuals have to surmount unforeseen obstacles and extend the frontiers of human knowledge. That’s best accomplished by a community—a band of physically proximate compatriots who trust one another, are unmindful of rank and unencumbered by petty rules, and are mutually accountable and knit together by a common goal. This is the reality one experiences in a startup, on a winning football team, or in a platoon of US Navy Seals.
The rich, moist loam of community yields a harvest of commitment, capability, and creativity that can’t be extracted from the desiccated soil of bureaucracy. That’s why “performance-oriented communities” are the backbone of a humanocracy.
Before going any further, let’s spend a moment defining what we mean by “community.” A community is more than a work group—a collection of individuals who report to the same boss, or do similar work. Instead, it’s a network of trust relationships among people who are breaking new ground and have a shared passion for making a difference.
While a community shares some features with agile teams, such as clear targets and a measure of autonomy, there are important differences. The prototypical agile team is a small group of programmers tasked with developing a particular piece of software. For the most part, agile teams operate independently. Where interdependencies do exist, they tend to be embodied in technical standards that specify how various bits of software connect together. More complicated interconnects get handled in periodic team leader meet-ups. For all their advantages, agile teams are limited in their ability to address broad, complex problems that can’t be easily partitioned. When interdependencies are varied, multidisciplinary, and difficult to specify in advance, you need a community.
“OK,” you say, “but can you actually build a pervasive sense of community in a large, commercial organization?” Luckily, the answer is yes.
Southwest Airlines: Community at Scale
With more than fifty-eight thousand employees, Southwest Airlines has been profitable for forty-six consecutive years. Between 1990 and 2018, the company generated half of US airlines’ net income while accounting for only 6 percent of industry revenues.12 Not only is Southwest America’s most profitable airline, it’s also the largest domestic air carrier by passenger numbers. On average, more than four hundred thousand passengers take flight each day with Southwest. According to one industry website, Southwest commands an average 65 percent market share on its one hundred busiest routes.13 More importantly, the airline handily beats all its major competitors in revenue per employee, passenger seat miles per employee, and other efficiency metrics. (See table 10-1.)
|
TABLE 10-1 |
||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Selected performance data for major US airlines (2014–2018 averages) |
||||||||||
|
Passengers/employee |
Employees/ aircraft |
Flying hours/employee |
Available seat miles/employee (thousands) |
Revenue/ employee ($ thousands) |
||||||
|
Southwest |
2,978 |
74 |
53.1 |
2,901 |
370 |
|||||
|
Delta |
1,697 |
104 |
36.0 |
2,691 |
341 |
|||||
|
American |
1,437 |
106 |
34.6 |
2,429 |
296 |
|||||
|
United |
1,180 |
122 |
32.3 |
2,648 |
310 |
|||||
|
Source: MIT Global Airline Industry Program’s Airlines Data Project; authors’ analysis. |
||||||||||
Southwest’s cost advantage is due in part to its preference for low-cost, second-tier airports such as Chicago Midway and Baltimore-Washington International. Savings also come from a laserlike focus on simplicity. Southwest operates a single aircraft type, the Boeing 737, and doesn’t offer assigned seating. Nevertheless, the airline’s biggest advantage is not its business model but its people model. As Herb Kelleher, Southwest’s whiskey-loving, chain-smoking founder, put it: “The core of our success—that’s the most difficult thing for a competitor to imitate. They can buy all the physical things. The things you can’t buy are dedication, devotion, loyalty—the feeling that you are participating in a crusade.”14
Dedication, devotion, and loyalty—these are the hallmarks of genuine community, and the things that distinguish Southwest from its competitors. Though 83 percent of Southwest’s employees are unionized, the company has never experienced a strike—a remarkable exception to the adversarial labor relations that typify the airline industry. The company also boasts the industry’s highest employee retention rates.
Planes don’t make money sitting on the ground, so airlines work hard at minimizing turnaround times. Though seemingly a plebeian task, getting a jet liner unloaded, reprovisioned, and back in the air is a demanding test of real-time problem solving.
Ground equipment has to be prepositioned before an arriving aircraft is guided in. The jet bridge must be connected, and assistance offered to disembarking passengers. There is cargo to unload, waste tanks to empty, and water tanks to fill. The aircraft must be cleaned, catered, and fueled. There may be a faulty seat to repair or a cockpit instrument that needs replacing. Departing passengers must be boarded, and safety checks performed. Weight and balance factors have to be calculated, and departure paperwork filled out. Onboard, there’s a mountain of carry-on luggage to secure while checked bags are loaded below. In all, a turnaround involves more than a hundred distinct tasks distributed across a dozen or more teams, including customer service agents, gate personnel, ramp agents, baggage handlers, maintenance crew, provisioners, fuelers, pilots, flight attendants, and others.
In just about every turnaround there will be gremlins—malfunctioning equipment, extra-needy passengers, computer glitches, last-minute gate changes, late-arriving crew, bad weather, and inadvertent screwups. The ability and willingness of the station team to swarm and solve these problems makes the difference between a flight that departs on time and one that doesn’t. At Southwest, there’s a strong sense of collective responsibility for achieving quick turns. A delayed flight is seen as a team failure, whatever the cause. Hence, it’s not unusual to see a pilot picking up rubbish, or a skilled mechanic pitching bags. At crunch times, silos and titles disappear. Everyone works shoulder to shoulder to get the plane back in the air. While employees at Southwest have clearly differentiated roles, every job description includes the implicit injunction to do, in the words of a ramp manager, “whatever else you need to do to enhance the overall operation.”
At thirty-five minutes, Southwest’s average turnaround time is the best in the industry—a remarkable accomplishment given that Southwest’s gate crews are half the size of those deployed by other airlines.15 A Southwest 737 averages fifty-three hours of flight time per employee per year, 50 percent more than the airline’s nearest rival. At other carriers, narrow job roles, poor communication, status differences, and a lack of team spirit frustrate the sort of community spirit that underpins Southwest’s dynamic real-time coordination.
Despite its zeal for keeping costs low, Southwest ranks high among travelers. This, too, is the product of the company’s community ethos. For Kelleher, who passed away in 2019, the secret to building a great business was to “treat your people as family and lead with love.”16 The logic is simple: when employees feel valued and respected, so do customers. That’s why employees have always come first at Southwest. Depending on the role, salaries at Southwest exceed industry norms by 16 to 31 percent. Notably, this premium doesn’t extend to managers, where average compensation lags industry benchmarks by about a third. Southwest also has a generous profit-sharing program. In a recent year, the plan paid out $544 million, or roughly 11 percent of each employee’s base compensation. As Kelleher once said to a group of employees: “We want to reduce all of our costs, except our wages, benefits and profit sharing. This is Southwest’s way of competing, unlike others who lower their wages and benefits.”
Many things go into building an organization that is a community first and a business second. At Southwest, the building blocks include …
1. A Mission Worth Caring About
What brings a community together is a sense of purpose—like getting sober or helping high schoolers go to college. Since its founding, Southwest’s mission has been to make air travel affordable and fun for all. In 1971, when Southwest launched its inaugural flight, air travel was a luxury. Kelleher and his colleagues were determined to change this by “democratizing the skies.” Up against tough competitors and a hostile regulatory environment, Southwest doggedly pursued its dream of giving everyone “the freedom to fly.” As Roy Spence, a longtime Kelleher confidant, once remarked, “Business strategies change, but purpose does not change. Everyone at Southwest is a freedom fighter.”17
New employees at Southwest are flown to the company’s Dallas headquarters for an orientation session known as “Now Onboarding.” Employees get practical advice on how to live out the airline’s values of a “Warrior Spirit,” “Fun-LUVing Attitude,” and “Servant’s Heart.” Company veterans share the airline’s origin story, emphasizing Southwest’s abiding passion for giving everyone the opportunity to fly. Says Cheryl Hughey, an internal adviser on culture, “We teach our people about where we came from and what we stand for, because that’s what families do. Families share their history with each other.”18
Just about every company has a mission statement, but most don’t have employees who believe they’re on a mission. More than fifty years after the airline was founded, the freedom to fly is still the beating heart of Southwest’s companywide community.
2. Open Communication, Transparent Data
Heart-to-heart relationships make a community, and relationships are based on communication. Forthright conversations can be difficult in any circumstance, but are particularly challenging in hierarchical settings. In a bureaucracy, censorious managers often deter individuals from asking questions or admitting mistakes. Functional silos bottle up information, factionalism sabotages teamwork, and an atmosphere of distrust discourages people from sharing information.
These pathologies cripple coordination. Turning around an airplane requires real-time, high-fidelity communication between dozens of individuals. When someone is slow to share a problem, or ask for help, a small delay can turn into big one. That’s why Southwest encourages honest, proactive communication. As a Southwest pilot put, “It’s a matter of working together. No finger-pointing.”19
Open communication also requires open books. At Southwest, financial information gets shared each quarter in LuvLines, an internal newsletter. Particular attention is given to four “magic numbers”: net income, margin, costs per available seat mile, and return on capital. Employees can see how the airline is doing against its “prosperity goals,” and calculate the implications for their compensation. They would know, for example, that if the airline doesn’t improve its performance on a particular variable, profit sharing will be reduced by $850 per $25,000 of compensation.20 The fact that everyone at Southwest speaks the same financial language adds immeasurably to the quality of communication and the spirit of collaboration.
Many companies default to secrecy. Southwest defaults to openness. A poster adorning a Southwest office in Phoenix makes the point neatly: “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles off it.”21
3. Feeling Safe Enough to Be Yourself
When you’re part of a community, you feel safe and able to be yourself. That opens the door to learning and improvement. It also gives people the confidence to take risks, which is essential for innovation.
Unlike many big-company CEOs, Herb Kelleher never took himself too seriously. He’d wear brightly flowered Hawaiian shirts to business meetings, stick out his tongue to feign anger, show up at company parties in over-the-top costumes, and regale his colleagues with self-deprecating anecdotes. Kelleher once settled a legal dispute with an arm-wrestling contest, having closed the company’s head office so employees could watch the spectacle at a run-down boxing ring.22 By being his unbridled, unedited self, Kelleher gave everyone at Southwest permission to be equally authentic. Said Kelleher, “We give people the opportunity to be a maverick. You don’t have to fit in a constraining mold at work—you can have a good time. People respond to that.”23
If you feel safe enough to be wacky, you’ll also feel safe enough to raise your hand when you bungle something. Forgiveness, like fun, is part of Southwest’s culture. Colleen Barrett, whose long career at Southwest culminated in a seven-year stint as president and COO, explains:
You have to be forgiving. We are very tolerant and forgiving when people make an honest mistake. You have to be very careful about how you approach that mistake, call it to the person’s attention, and how you discipline, if at all, and how you counsel, if at all.24
Finally, encouraging employees to be themselves upgrades the customer experience. Every Southwest passenger has a story that involves a gate agent in a zany costume, a safety briefing delivered in rap, or a silly inflight game.
It’s tempting to believe that a high-performance culture has to be stiff, judgmental, and ruthless, but Southwest proves otherwise. Authenticity, fun, forgiveness—these are the things that make a community worth joining.
4. The Right of Self-Determination
America’s nineteenth-century homesteaders didn’t have to ask anyone if it was OK to erect a barn, paint it red, or give it a tin roof. Then, as now, the most effective communities are self-managing. During her tenure as Southwest’s COO, Barrett told employees “[Y]ou are empowered to make decisions on behalf of the customer and to ignore and waive policy and procedure as long as by doing so you are not being illegal, immoral or unethical.”25
Frontline teams at Southwest know they have the freedom to do whatever it takes to serve the customer. It’s this freedom, rather than a set of protocols, that allows Southwest employees to create memorable moments for their customers—like helping a couple arrange a midair wedding, house-sitting the dog of a harried passenger who showed up at the gate without the requisite animal crate, or inviting home a cancer patient who arrived for treatment in an unfamiliar city and had no one to greet her.26
Shared accountability and the freedom to make choices welds a community together. This simple truth underpins Southwest’s culture and is also a Nucor hallmark. As Ken Iverson, Nucor’s pioneering CEO, said, “We let our employees define their own jobs as they search for ways to optimize their productivity.”27 It’s through ongoing conversations about goals and tasks that personalities and viewpoints get revealed, hopes and fears get expressed, and the bonds of friendship get built. That’s why there’s no such thing as a community of order takers.
5. Peer-to-Peer Accountability
At Southwest, team members are accountable first to their customers and colleagues, and only secondarily to their overseers. As one station manager noted, “We all succeed together and fail together.”28 Echoing this sentiment, a gate agent said simply, “You can always count on the next guy standing there.”
As a rule, peer-to-peer accountability produces higher levels of collaboration and commitment than minion-to-manager accountability. A pilot who joined Southwest from another airline expressed amazement at his colleagues’ productivity: “I’ve never seen so many people work so hard to do one thing.”29 Said another team member, “Here it’s one goal: 100% customer service. You can see it just walking through the terminal. There’s a desire to be part of the team.” In a performance-oriented community, there’s little tolerance for idlers. Yet the pressure to excel feels qualitatively different when it reflects the shared aspirations of colleagues rather than the exhortations of a whip-cracking boss.
Southwest knows you can’t expect employees to be accountable to one another if the company isn’t accountable to them. Though the airline business is highly cyclical, Southwest has never used downsizing to shore up profits. As Kelleher often reminded his colleagues, “Nothing kills your culture like layoffs.”
6. Mutual Respect
As human beings, we’re inclined to rank one another—by wealth, education, competence, physical attractiveness, fashion sense, athletic prowess, or the number of likes garnered on social media. At times, these rankings are useful, but they’re often the product of egoism. To feel better about ourselves, we down-rank others. Needless to say, condescension is toxic to the spirit of collaboration.
In a community, status differentiators are muted. Everyone feels as if they matter. This doesn’t happen by accident. Instead, it reflects a conscious choice to treat everyone as an equal and to celebrate everyone’s contribution.
Over the years, Southwest has worked hard to ensure that every associate feels valued and that every role is seen as equally critical to delivering great customer service. To drive the point home, Southwest encourages employees to shadow one another at work. A pilot, for example, might load luggage to better understand the work of baggage handlers.
In most airlines, there’s a clear hierarchy on the ramp, with highly skilled mechanics at the top and cabin cleaners at the bottom, but not at Southwest. “I would never go work at [a competing airline],” said one Southwest gate agent. “The animosity there is tremendous. Here it’s so cool. Whether you have a college degree or a GED it doesn’t matter. There’s no status here, just a good work ethic.” A customer service agent concurred: “No one takes the job of another person for granted. The skycap is just as critical as the pilot.”
Southwest understands that mutual respect is a performance booster. While markets reward some skills more highly than others, it’s dangerous when the respect paid to colleagues is indexed by the size of their paycheck. Kelleher was famously adamant on this point: “Positions and titles mean absolutely nothing,” he said. “They’re just adornments; they don’t represent the substance of anybody. Every person and every job is worth as much as any other person and any other job.”30 To Kelleher, Southwest was a mosaic of capabilities, not a pyramid of power.
7. A Sense of Family
Family is the most intimate community most of us experience, followed closely by the fellowship we have with close friends. What distinguishes these relationships is love—the sense that you have inherent worth, that you are known and loved in spite of your faults. Love is food for the soul, yet most of us don’t get much of it at work. In Gallup’s State of the American Workplace survey, which polled more than 195,000 employees, only two out of ten respondents said they had a close friend at work.31
Ask anyone at Southwest, “What makes your airline different?” and you’ll likely hear the word “family.” Since its founding, Southwest has worked tirelessly to build strong bonds of affection across its workforce. It’s no accident the company’s stock symbol is LUV.
Remember Kelleher’s admonition to “treat your people as family and lead with love”? This would sound hopelessly corny if it weren’t backed up by a consistent effort to embrace the virtues of generosity, kindness, and inclusiveness. At Southwest, this starts with recruitment, which encompasses much more than formal interviews. As Luke Stone, senior manager for people, said to us:
We take into account how our candidates interact with our people throughout the entire process, since they all have a say in the final decision. From the moment we contact them, how do they treat our frontline employees when traveling in for an interview? How do they treat our employees who schedule their travel and interviews? How do they interact with everyone in the interview room—not just the most senior level leader? We want employees to be themselves at work—just as they are at home—so our interview process is all about the interactions they have with everyone.32
Empathy—the capacity to understand and respond to the feelings of others—is the essence of love. Southwest knows it’s easier to teach someone how to be a flight attendant than to teach them empathy.
The value Southwest places on love is captured in the phrase “a servant’s heart.” Every team member is encouraged to “follow the Golden Rule,” “treat others with respect,” and “embrace our Southwest Family.”
In 1990, Barrett established the “Companywide Culture Committee” and charged it with nurturing the company’s unique values. Today, the Culture Committee encompasses approximately 240 individuals drawn from across the airline. Throughout their three-year term, members serve as advocates for culture in their locations and come together at an annual summit to share best practices.
Throughout the year, there are numerous rewards, both local and corporate, for employees who’ve been recognized by their peers for living out the company’s values. In addition, there’s an ever-changing roster of events designed to foster the spirit of service. During “Hokey Day,” for example, members of the Culture Committee surprise incoming crewmembers with treats and a packed lunch. Committee members then help tidy aircraft with their “hokeys”—small hand-powered sweepers—while crewmembers take a break. One Hokey Day participant said, “What makes our company a success is that employees appreciate employees.”33
Nowhere is that more evident than at Southwest’s employee rallies. Held annually in three or four cities across the US, these events attract thousands of team members, many of whom attend with family or friends. Employees visit booths set up by teams from across the company, get updates from the executive team, celebrate milestones, and party with their “cohearts.”
In a bureaucracy, relationships are primarily defined by roles and power differentials. In a community, they’re defined by bonds of compassion and camaraderie. This distinction between love and power intrigued Hans Morgenthau, one of the twentieth-century’s leading thinkers on global politics. His views, published in a 1962 essay, were neatly summarized decades later by a pair of American academics, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary:
The main difference between love and power is that love aspires to a mutual dissolving of personal boundaries, leading to an egalitarian merging into a new whole, whereas power seeks a unilateral overcoming of boundaries, by which the will of the more powerful person becomes the will of both.34
The quest for power is incompatible with the quest for authentic relationship. That’s why Southwest makes such a big deal about “servant leadership.” Unlike most CEOs, Kelleher wasn’t afraid to use the L-word. “A company,” he said, “is stronger if it’s bound by love rather than fear.” For him, every team member was family. The result: a culture that is full of heart. A customer service supervisor in Phoenix summed it up nicely: “The main thing is that everybody cares. Now I know why everyone is smiling here.”35
Without vigilance, communities can become insular and clannish. Kelleher was always quick to head off tribalism. He once related the story of an employee who started a conversation by saying, “In my department …” Herb jumped in and said, “Oh, are you not part of Southwest Airlines anymore? Excuse me, I didn’t realize you’d split off. Have we notified the SEC?”36 The point: everything Southwest does is aimed at creating not only local communities but a “community of communities” that spans the entire company.
Toward Community
Most of us have two distinct selves. There’s the professional self that shows up at work each day, and the private self that sticks its head out in the company of family and friends. The professional self is stiff, on guard, and emotionally cautious. Our colleagues catch only glimpses of our inner selves. They are generally uninformed about our hobbies, family dynamics, health issues, emotional wounds, and dreams. We tell ourselves, or are told by others, that these things aren’t relevant at work. That, of course, is rubbish.
If you are going through a divorce, have a child struggling with addiction, have recently lost a parent, are facing surgery, or find yourself in the midst of some other life crisis, you need people to talk to—people who care. If there’s no such person at work, if you’re obligated to spend a succession of eight- or ten-hour days alone with your anxieties and fears, then you, your colleagues, and your organization will be the worse for it. Remember the Gallup finding that only two out of ten employees say they have a best friend at work? Based on its research, Gallup estimates that if this number was tripled, to six out of ten, the average company would increase its profitability by 12 percent.37 Again, when you think about it, this just makes sense. You can hardly expect employees to be engaged in their work if they’re not engaged with each other.
You hear plenty of chatter about work-life balance, but much less about work-soul integration. Work should neither deny the personal nor overwhelm it. Instead, it should acknowledge and integrate it. In a performance-oriented community, the professional and personal are neither disconnected nor fused, but instead are intertwined. At work, as in life, we spend most of our time simply getting things done. But when it matters, we need to know we can depend on the people around us. We need more than mere coworkers; we need advocates, allies, and mates—workplace friends who are sympathetic and stalwart.
As we noted earlier, Southwest and Nucor have remarkably similar cultures. Where Nucor claims to “build people not steel,” Southwest describes itself as a “company of people, not planes.”38 Both companies have spent decades embedding the ethos of community in their hiring, training, and processes. And for decades, both companies have handily outperformed their rivals. A coincidence? Hardly.
Getting Started
What can you do to strengthen the bonds of community in your organization? Here are seven suggestions, based on what we’ve learned from Nucor and Southwest:
- Recraft the mission statement for your unit or, if possible, the entire organization, in a way that makes it emotionally resonant for every team member and gives people a common cause.
- Do whatever you can to provide team members with the skills and information they need to collaborate and exercise their collective judgment. Help them become less reliant on their managers.
- In interpersonal encounters, look for opportunities to reveal something of yourself, and encourage others to do the same. Have a tender heart for those who are struggling with issues outside of work.
- Ask your team to identify areas where greater autonomy would help them deliver a better customer experience or improve operations, and then carefully expand their decision-making prerogatives.
- Institute team-based goals and rewards as a way of encouraging mutual accountability.
- Cultivate mutual respect by creating opportunities for individuals to shadow other jobs, and work to reduce distinctions of rank and hierarchy wherever possible.
- Hire for compassion, follow the golden rule, and celebrate acts of kindness.
In all of this, take the long view—strong communities don’t get built in a month, or even a year.
You’ll know you’re succeeding when the people on your team, in your unit, or across the company can say, like Nucor’s John Ferriola, “We are more of a family than a company.”39