Category: Leadership

I found a great interview where Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines explains some of their thinking behind leadership and culture. Here’s what he says about hiring leaders:

For our interviewing in general and looking for leadership in particular, we use model employees to do it. We bring in our mechanics to interview mechanics, pilots to interview pilots, flight attendants to interview flight attendants, etc. We want their insights. They’re out in the field, they know the kinds of people we want and so we involve them in the hiring process. And of course they can give us some pretty good insight. Most of our pilots have a fairly keen sense of humor. One day a bunch of applicants thought one of our pilots was also an applicant and sat down and started discussing things very frankly and two or three of them eliminated themselves from consideration by their comments. We also watch applicants when they go to the cafeteria and watch how they relate to our people while they’re up there.

So it’s not just a question of sitting down with them and asking, “Are you a good person? Do you have great leadership qualities???? We try to put them in situations and have conversations where this naturally comes out.

This is a fine application of Southwest’s “hire for attitude, train for skill” principle. When you put people skills and being a nice person first when hiring or promoting leaders, you get waaaaay better leaders. And waaaaay better employees!

UPDATE: And this is what happens in real life, when you hire your employees that way (a great story about Soutwhest from Church of the customer).

Some businesses seem to think that they must protect their employees from all the dangers of working life.

Before people can be happy at work, the thinking goes, they must be shielded from all manner of ills: angry customers, unrealistic deadlines, unfair decisions, overwork, boring meetings, stress, annoying co-workers, insecurity, diffiult situations, hard choices – you name it.

Wrong.

The best and happiest workplaces in the world haven’t become so by shielding their people from problems, but by giving their people the skills, the energy and the freedom to deal constructively with problems.
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Anna Farmery has posted the second (and last) part of our conversation at her blog.

In the second part we talk mostly about how you can create a happy business. Give it a listen and tell Anna what you think of it!

David Maister asks a great question: How did you lose your business innocence?

I keep meeting people who have given up their ability to believe in the power of standards and ideals (or to believe that anyone else in business has them).

An example: “the firm pretends that it wants to inspire us, but the truth is that we do boring work, and so do those more senior than us. We cannot imagine that there are people who do work they are still excited about. That’s a luxury we cannot dream about. They just want us to work harder and get the people who report to us to work harder.???

So here’s my question to you: How did we / you end up here? Clearly, something was missing from my education and upbringing – the world forgot to “beat out of me” my ideals, but seems to have done a good job of beating them out of most other people.

I’m really interested: What (specifically) happened to you that made you lose your innocence about how business (or academia) was run (stories please?)

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I have yet another question for ya: What three tips would you give your boss? What would you like him or her to do, stop doing, change, say, not say?

Write a comment, I’d really like to know!

Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten had an article last week about career surfers. In it they describe how employees today often decline job offers or promotions that a company offers them.

Professor Henrik Holt Larsen of the Copenhagen Business School says:

It’s harder than ever for businesses to attract and retain employees who not only possess the required skills but who can also be emotionally bound to the company. People tend to focus more on their own desires and needs and therefore to surf between multiple career paths.

We don’t know enough yet about this narcissistic personality.

You know, Henrik, you say that like it’s a bad thing :o)

I have two comments on this. First, I find it incredible that someone would cast this tendency for people to choose career paths for themselves in a bad light. This is not narcissistic, it’s common sense. I choose my career path based on what’s good for me, not on what’s good for the company.

Secondly, if companies want to “bind their employees to them emotionally”, as Larsen puts it, this bond needs to go both ways. In short, the company must be prepared to offer it’s employees more than just a paycheck. If a company wants it’s employees to feel something about the company, the company must be prepared to feel back. To value it’s employees as people, not just as resources.

And this means yout won’t fire people, just to get a 5% increase in stock price. This means that you won’t carelessley reassign people to a department they don’t want to work for. This means leaders will do everything in their power to make their people happy at work.

The equation is simple:

Want your employees to care about the company?

Start by having the company care about them. Not as employees but as human beings.

Vetle from Norway sent me a link to an article about how bad management is making norwegian employees unhappy at work and costing business tons of money.

From the article:

22% of employees surveyed consider their immediate manager so weak, that maybe that person shouldn’t be a manager at all.
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There is a clear connection between good managers, satisfied employees and profits. Happy employees create happy customers – and better results for the business. According to our research, happy employees mean a 40% increase in profits.

Also one in three rate their manager as technically competent but a bad leader.

The question is: Is this a norwegian phenomonon or is this true in your country too? What do you think?

One large company finds that many of their top performers are absconding:

It’s like clockwork. Every year a portion of our top talent decides it’s time to move on. Once those bonus or holiday checks are cashed, the flood gates open and the resignation letters start flowing in.

They’ve done an exit survey among the top performing employees leaving the company:

Of the 178 files, 83 people listed money as a reason for leaving. 62 listed it as the only reason.

Their conclusion: They must adjust salaries and compensation. My conclusion: They’re wrong. Here’s why.
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