It’s hard to say anything surprising or different about Southwest Airlines. It’s been a wildly successful business for decades, and it operates in a sector were virtually all of its major competitors have struggled mightily to stay afloat and make any profit at all.
And there’s a good reason for this, as Micah Solomon pointed out this week in The Washington Post — it’s because Southwest has a consciously developed customer-centered culture as a business advantage.
If it sounds simple, it’s not, because as Solomon notes, culture really does matter when it comes to building a business, and all-too-few executives today seem to understand this. As he wrote in The Post:
This is why someone leading a business today — preparing a bright future for your organization and perhaps for the world — needs to focus not just on nuts and bolts, techniques and standards, but on culture.
Without a consciously created culture, your leadership won’t last beyond the moment you leave the building. Any vacation — or even lunch break — you take is an invitation for disaster: The inevitable complaint I hear from consulting clients and at my engagements as a speaker is this: “Employees act differently when there aren’t any managers around.” But with a great company culture, employees will be motivated, regardless of management’s presence or absence.”
A “treat people right” philosophy
He goes on to list a number of ways you can start leading your business by focusing on culture, and it’s a laundry list of insights that every manager, executive, and HR professional needs to print out and tack on the wall next to their desk.
At the core of Southwest’s culture is a “treat people right” philosophy that legendary CEO Herb Kelleher preached from the time he took over as head of the airline. As I wrote about it a few years back:
Treat people right. This sounds deceptively simple, but I am amazed at how few businesses and managers actually practice it. I reflected on it a few weeks ago when Herb Kelleher finally stepped down as chairman of Southwest Airlines. “You have to treat your employees like customers,” Kelleher would always say. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us. … Our people know that if they are sick, we will take care of them. If there are occasions of grief or joy, we will be there with them. They know that we value them as people, not just cogs in a machine.”
We can all learn a lot from looking at how Southwest Airlines has built and maintained its corporate culture. And that”s why this Washington Post article is worth taking a good look at, because it has something for everyone when it comes to great advice to help you manage your workforce.