The Southwest Airlines Way
Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance
by Jody Hoffer Gittell
This is one of the best business books I have read in a long time. In preparing to write our own book on unleashing the power of business relationships, I have read thirteen books on relationship-driven cultures. While they all had something to add to my knowledge, there was only one book that had me underlining madly, turning down pages, and slapping on multiple Post-it notes for special emphasis. It was also the only book I reread immediately after having finished it. The book, Jody Hoffer Gittel’s The Southwest Airlines Way: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance, was published in 2003 by McGraw-Hill. I believe every relationship point in Southwest’s culture is solid and, whatever industry you are in, has some applicability to your culture.
There are three parts to the book: the first one, entitled High-Performance Relationships: The Key to Southwest’s Success, presents the thesis that Southwest is able to do what it does so effectively because it has established relationships with and all key stakeholders. These stakeholders include unions, suppliers, investors, and, perhaps most critically, all its front-line functions. As Gittel says, “Southwest’s outstanding performance has been achieved through high levels of coordination among its front-line employee groups.”
The second part of the book is called Ten Southwest Practices for Building High-Performance Relationships, with a chapter developing each practice. Included are such practices as “lead with credibility and caring.” Immediately after 9/11, for example, Southwest was the only airline that didn’t lay off employees. While that cost the airline millions of dollars, the employee loyalty that Southwest created is astonishing. Another practice is “Hire and Train for Relational Competence.” This shows how Southwest hires for people who show they can create relationships quickly and effectively. Southwest has realized, as Phyllis Wheatley says in her Leadership and the New Science, that “power is the capacity generated by relationships.”
This second section I see as the real meat of the book, because each practice is presented and then exemplified by many many real cases of what Gittel calls “relational coordination.” One excellent example of this coordination is how Southwest boards its aircraft. All airlines have to coordinate the efforts of eleven separate functions to board quickly and take off on time, : pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, ticketing agents, ramp agents, baggage transfer agents, cargo agents, mechanics, fuelers, aircraft cleaners, and caterers. If these functions do not work together smoothly, the plane takes off late. Southwest, which for years has had the best on-time takeoff record of all American airlines, experimented with ways to coordinate the efforts of these groups and found over time that none of the individual functions could effectively coordinate the boarding. They then added a function called the operations agent, whose total focus it was to coordinate the plane’s boarding and on-time takeoff. Southwest called the operations agent a “boundary spanner” because his/her responsibilities crossed all sorts of functional areas. Of all the roles in the plane’s taking off on time, the operations agent is perhaps the most critical and it is a hard-won position. The employee given the position has to have had experience in most of the eleven other functions as well as possessing critical relational, influencing and leadership skills.
As is the case with many of Southwest’s practices, several airlines followed Southwest’s lead and brought in their own “boundary spanners.” They did not, however, hire for relational competence and faced continual bickering and finger pointing among the functional groups. When money started to get tight, the airlines first cut the boundary spanner position because the role didn’t seem to be very effective. One of the lessons learned in this section is that the practices all fit together and reinforce each other. Adopting one practice without adopting the others is almost a guarantee of failure.
The third section of the book is called Building High-Performance Relationships—and Keeping Them. Here there are three chapters that provide an overview of what Southwest is doing is doing to maintain its culture of relationships. For me, the best chapters in this section are the ones showing how all the relational practices reinforce each other and the chapter on to apply the lessons from Southwest to your business. The key point here is that while you are almost certainly not an airline you can still learn a great deal about organizational effectiveness from Southwest--unless all of your departments already work together in perfect harmony, or if your employees are all excellent relationship managers, or if you already have near-absolute employee loyalty, or if you have perfectly aligned your service delivery systems and processes to meet and exceed customer expectations.
Reviewed by S4 Consulting
© S4 Consulting
