Leadership Secrets of Gary Kelly, Chairman CEO, Southwest Airlines

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.

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