This is a fantastic video of Colleen Barret talking about leadership and service at Southwest Airlines:
Southwest Airlines gets it. Their priority is:
- Employees
- Customers
- Shareholders.
This is the way it has to be.
My favorite quote from her talk:
“The most important priority that we have is our employees… I spend 85% of my time on employees and on delievering proactive customer service to our employees… They in turn spend their life trying to assure that the secondmost important customer to us, ie. the passenger feels good.”
Great find. What a great way to put it “proactive customer service.” When an employee is empowered and cares about making the customer happy, great results happen.
Southwest understands the reason they are successful and actively manage it, so it stays that way. An engaged employee will take good care of the customer. The customer will in turn buy services and products because they get excellent service. The shareholders are rewarded because the customers keep coming back.
It’s a chain reaction. If the employees are respected and treated as the most important asset of company, they will mirror that treatment and pass it on to the customers. People tend to stick where they feel most welcome and valued. That goes both for employees and customers.
I am glad to see we think the same way. I read your post this morning… after having posted my own analysis of the same video clip yesterday. I just wanted to let you know, in case you ran across it =)
It’s good to know that actually there are places implementing practices from “The Dream Manager” book. That’s good to know.
Simple lessons are the simplest to learn… and sometimes the most difficult to remember. Servant Leadership has been around since 1970 when Greenleaf wrote his book — Servant Leadership. Its one of the steadiest, solid investments out there and the returns are always fantastic!
DRL
customer logality still exists in 2009 –it is with the companiesies that get it that keep both their internal and external cusktomers. We know from our own experiences and from research that people leave not because of product or company, but “how they felt” about their experience. Did they feel at the end of the day they were valued?.