Servant Leadership Is Love in Action

K: Colleen, talking about serving, I think you are a Servant Leader. Servant Leadership is love in action—and that’s what you and Herb have been doing at Southwest for forty years.

C: I appreciate your calling me a Servant Leader, Ken, but when I mention that term to people, they often associate it with soft management. If I were to add that Servant Leadership is love in action, they would freak out! Love isn’t a word that’s used too often in corporate America. In fact, we’ve received some push-back about the very subject of this book.

K: You’re right. Most people don’t think love and leadership go together. Therefore, they want to know how we can lead with love. I think life constantly presents us with opportunities to choose love and serve one another, especially in our roles as leaders. Someone asked my wife, Margie, “You have been married to Ken for more than forty-five years. What do you think leadership is all about?” Margie nailed it. She said, “Leadership is not about love—it is love. It’s loving your mission, it’s loving your customers, it’s loving your people, and it’s loving yourself enough to get out of the way so other people can be magnificent.”

C: Ken, you certainly married above yourself. I’m always blown away by Margie’s wisdom. Indeed, we have tried to practice what she is saying throughout our history.

Most airline employees won’t proudly confess in social settings that they’re airline employees, because people always have an airline story, and it’s usually a bad one. But we are really blessed. Nine times out of ten, if we say that we work at Southwest, people have a story about us, and it’s a good one. The stories are filled with love and exemplify The Golden Rule in action. That makes me really proud. Let me tell you one of many memorable Southwest Airlines love stories.

A few years ago, we lost a much-loved Line Mechanic from Dallas, Roger Elliott, to cancer. Traditionally, Southwest has not shipped human remains, but we will do it for family members if there’s a special need. So, because it was the right thing to do, we made plans to ship Roger’s body from Dallas to his family in Detroit.

On the day Roger’s body was going to be taken home from Love Field, we happened to be having a meeting in the downstairs training room at our headquarters in Dallas. One of the Mechanics in the room came over to me and said, “Colleen, Roger’s plane is leaving in about ten minutes.” He asked me if it was okay to leave the meeting for a few minutes to go out and stand at the fence.

Now, this was during the most brutal heat of the summer—hot enough that I usually don’t go outside for ten minutes because I react poorly to heat. But I said, “Of course. We’ll all go.” So we did. There were over a hundred of us.

As luck would have it, there was a huge thunderstorm in Houston, where Roger’s plane had to fly to on its way to Detroit. We pushed the plane back in Dallas and gave it a military-style salute, which was touching. Then the plane was put on a ground hold and it sat, and sat, and sat on the runway. It was so hot that one young woman actually fainted and was taken off by ambulance. Yet nobody went back inside. I mean, no one. I’ll bet we stood out there for forty minutes. We actually missed an entire presentation in the meeting.

Some of the People standing at that fence didn’t know Roger Elliott at all. In fact, some of them had never met the man. But he was one of our own, so when a few folks cried and started singing “Amazing Grace,” everyone joined in. I received grateful notes from Roger’s relatives who were on the airplane, watching us through the windows. They couldn’t hear the words we were singing, but they understood right away what was happening, and it deeply touched them. They could feel our love.