Leadership is..."Effectively
supporting your team of Employees." --Gary Kelly
Since 2005, Gary Kelly is the Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive
Officer and President of Southwest Airlines Co., the world's largest low-cost
carrier headquartered in Dallas, Texas.
Starting with the company in 1986 as Controller, Gary moved his way up
through various positions namely Principal Accounting Officer, Vice President
of Finance and finally served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial
Officer from 2001 to 2004 until he was made the President and CEO. Before he joined the company, he served as
Audit Manager of Arthur & Young Company in Dallas and Systems Center Inc.,
a computer software provider.
Aside from Southwest, he also sits in the board as independent director
of several corporations and trade associations. A recipient of many awards and
honors, he has been honored as one of the best and influential executives in
America. He is a Certified Public
Accountant and received a BBA in Accounting from the University of Texas at
Austin where he serves on its Business School Dean’s Advisory Council and
Accounting Department Advisory Council. He is also a Member of Advisory Council
of its McCombs School of Business.
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| Gary Kelly |
As his company’s CEO, Gary Kelly has a unique leadership style which is
perhaps not found in most of America’s CEOs or at least among those who are in
the airline industry. Very charismatic,
his style is so perfectly aligned with the company’s culture of relaxed, happy
people. For instance, he is trouper
enough to come to the office on Halloween in pink dress complete with size-14
high heels. As one New York Times writer
commented: “It suggest to workers that
Mr. Kelly is a little crazy…and perhaps the kind of person others might want to
follow into battles”.
Personal
and Organization Values
Gary’s personal values were shaped by the good-old fashioned Southwestern
brand of good morals and integrity instilled in him by his father with whom he
developed a special father and son relationship. These qualities he brought
along with him at Southwest and manifested in the way he conducted himself in
his day-to-day activities. His values
are centered on encouraging a work atmosphere where people are having fun and
enjoying their jobs, yet doing their jobs well.
How
Gary’s Values Impact the Organization
The four work values of people at Southwest: achievement, concern for others, honesty and
fairness are all aligned with Kelly’s values. Honesty and concern for others
are very present in the organization.
Employees are encouraged to treat others with respect and compassion. To
observers, the company’s mission statement, "The mission of Southwest Airlines
is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense
of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit", is very
evident in the values of George Kelly and his fellow employees. The culture that he has created at Southwest
emphasizes a laid back and efficient environment. In a Southwest Airlines literature, author
and HR consultant Libby Sartain writes, “Southwest’s culture communicates,
‘Bring your personality and your sense of humor to work’”. Kelly’s instrumental values of honesty,
independence, open-mindedness, cheerfulness and imagination shaped the
behaviors in the organization that moved people to achieve goals or meet
objectives.
Gary’s
Strengths and Weaknesses
To observers, Gary is human enough to possess human qualities and
weaknesses. What made him to what he is
today, a successful executive admired by many people, are his values, positive
attitude and upbringing. These
qualities, many believed, pushed him up to his present stature. The values of hard work, honesty, humility
and concern for other people are his greatest strengths. In the corporate world populated by business
predators and opportunists, these very same qualities are also looked at as
signs of being soft. To many, the
conventional wisdom in corporate success is “nice guys don’t win ball games”
and this is one way to describe his weakness.
He is too nice to a fault.
Researching further his personal and professional life, the press
provides a rich source of information about him. But there is not much to dig about his
weaknesses. Is he too good at hiding them like how he sometimes appeared to be
during public appearances?
The
Main Ingredient of Gary Kelly’s Success
The secret to Gary’s success that many people overlooked is his
intelligence. Coupled with the ability
to use that intelligence to his advantage, that to me is his secret weapon. Since his younger days in college, this
quality helped him excel in his studies and be among the top of the class when
he finished Accounting at the University of Texas. This same intelligence led him to land a good
job at Arthur & Young Company. Call
it luck but being assigned to the Southwest account placed him in an
advantageous position to again use his intelligence to see a future in the
company. As a former outside accountant
of the airline company, he was bright enough to see all the signs that pointed
to a bright career ahead of him.
Group
Dynamics
Under Gary Kelly’s leadership at Southwest Airlines, it is very evident
how communications and collaboration as well as power and politics have great
influence on its group dynamics, especially on the company’s decision-making
process. Everyone is attuned to what the
company’s mission is and everyone has internalized it as almost gospel truth,
and it shows in the individual actions of its more than 40,000 employees. At Southwest power and politics means
empowerment of each and every one of them to make on the spot decisions to
please passengers. Anecdotes after anecdotes have shown this to be true. Like the pilot who decided to wait for a
father who’s attending to a dying son but was stuck in traffic; or the plane
and ground crews who used their credit cards to help a distressed woman get
transportation and hotel accommodation in a strange city. This mindset, a product of effective
communications and collaboration within the organization, kept on moving all
these thousands of executives and employees across America to act as one
organism 24/7. Talk about group
dynamics? Gary Kelly and Southwest have
so much to teach us on the subject.
Photo
Credits: About Southwest Retrieved from
http://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/
This article is an excerpt of a paper I wrote at this question and answer
site https://www.likeplum.com/ask?aid=205
