Just like in the movie “A Christmas Carol”, old man Scrooge is ruining the holiday season by being cheap and only looking at the all-mighty dollar. Southwest Airlines previous CEO (Gary Kelly) lived up to that name and just like Mr. Scrooge, Mr. Kelly, is to blame for adding the extra zing to holiday travel in 2022. It’s not like this story is new, Dickens wrote the classic in 1843, and as iconic as it is, no one seems to have learned from it.
Read to the end.
The story picked up from Facebook: A source inside Southwest Airlines recently passed this on to Facebook and gave permission to share.
Employee gets real
A WHISTLE-BLOWER LAYS IT ALL OUT FOR US
“What happened to Southwest Airlines?
I’ve been a pilot for Southwest Airlines for over 35 years. I’ve given my heart and soul to Southwest Airlines during those years. And quite honestly Southwest Airlines has given its heart and soul to me and my family.
Many of you have asked what caused this epic meltdown. Unfortunately, the frontline employees have been watching this meltdown coming like a slow-motion train wreck for some time. And we’ve been begging our leadership to make much needed changes in order to avoid it. What happened yesterday started two decades ago.
Herb Kelleher was the brilliant CEO of SWA until 2004. He was a very operationally oriented leader. Herb spent lots of time on the front line. He always had his pulse on the day-to-day operation and the people who ran it. That philosophy flowed down through the ranks of leadership to the front line managers. We were a tight operation from top to bottom. We had tools, leadership, and employee buy in. Everything that was needed to run a first class operation. When Herb retired in 2004 Gary Kelly became the new CEO.
Gary was an accountant by education and his style leading Southwest Airlines became more focused on finances and less on operations. He did not spend much time on the front lines. He didn’t engage front line employees much. When the CEO doesn’t get out in the trenches neither do the lower levels of leadership.
Gary named another accountant to be Chief Operating Officer (the person responsible for day-to-day operations). The new COO had little or no operational background. This trickled down through the lower levels of leadership, as well.
HEAR SAY! YOUR HONOR…
They all disengaged the operation, disengaged the employees, and focused more on Return on Investment, stock buybacks, and Wall Street. This approach worked for Gary’s first 8 years because we were still riding the strong wave that Herb had built.
But as time went on the operation began to deteriorate. There was little investment in upgrading technology (after all, how do you measure the return on investing in infrastructure?) or the tools we needed to operate efficiently and consistently. As the frontline employees began to see the deterioration in our operation we began to warn our leadership. We educated them, we informed them and we made suggestions to them. But to no avail. The focus was on finances not operations. As we saw more and more deterioration in our operation our asks turned to pleas. Our pleas turned to dire warnings. But they went unheeded. After all, the stock price was up so what could be wrong?
We were a motivated, willing and proud employee group wanting to serve our customers and uphold the tradition of our beloved airline, the airline we built and the airline that the traveling public grew to cheer for and love. But we were watching in frustration and disbelief as our once amazing airline was becoming a house of cards.
MELTDOWNS MEAN RED FLAGS, RIGHT?
A half dozen small scale meltdowns occurred during the mid to late 2010s. With each mini meltdown, Leadership continued to ignore the pleas and warnings of the employees in the trenches. We were still operating with 1990s technology. We didn’t have the tools we needed on the line to operate the sophisticated and large airline we had become. We could see that the wheels were about ready to fall off the bus. But no one in leadership would heed our pleas.
When COVID happened SWA scaled back considerably (as did all of the airlines) for about two years. This helped conceal the serious problems in technology, infrastructure, and staffing that were occurring and being ignored. But as we ramped back up the lack of attention to the operation was waiting to show its ugly head.
COVID-19 GETS THE BLAME FOR A LOT OF THINGS
Gary Kelly retired as CEO in early 2022. Bob Jordan was named CEO. He was a more operationally oriented leader. He replaced our Chief Operating Officer with a very smart man and they announced their priority would be to upgrade our airline’s technology and provide the frontline employees the operational tools we needed to care for our customers and employees. Finally, someone acknowledged the elephant in the room.
But two decades of neglect takes several years to overcome. And, unfortunately to our horror, our house of cards came tumbling down this week as a routine winter storm broke our 1990s operating system.
The frontline employees were ready and on the station. We were properly staffed. We were at the airports. Hell, we were ON the airplanes. But our antiquated software systems failed coupled with a decades old system of having to manage 20,000 frontline employees by phone calls. No automation had been developed to run this sophisticated machine.
We had a routine winter storm across the Midwest last Thursday. A larger than normal number flights were canceled as a result. But what should have been one minor inconvenient day of travel turned into this nightmare. After all, American, United, Delta, and the other airlines operated with only minor flight disruptions.
The two decades of neglect by SWA leadership caused the airline to lose track of all its crews. ALL of us. We were there. With our customers. At the jet. Ready to go. But there was no way to assign us. To confirm us. To release us to fly the flight. And we watched as our customers got stranded without their luggage missing their Christmas holiday.”
OUR OPINION,
Let’s look at two key points of the author’s explanation. The first ingredient of this soup sandwich was a changing of the guard. This choice alone in a vacuum was brilliant because the company was successful financially during his tenure. The CEO’s job is much more complex than just the bottom line. Earning a position at the top means the equation you used to get where you “are” needs to change. The focus of the EOs and the CEO goes from bouncing one ball in one game to working with 6 balls in 18 different games. Then if that wasn’t enough, the CEO has to be aware that their job is always on the line. So what does any scared person do when backed into a corner and their hands are full? They build a team of protectors. This fear is where the change of guard went sour.
And the second ingredient was a failure to calculate the value of the feedback received. What I mean by that is that most given feedback is negative but not all. All feedback has value but due to its nature the gold nuggets of wisdom are difficult to find. The best approach for an organization of that size would have been to have a dedicated team working on internal/external feedback. For the rest of us…
Feedback Analysis Formula
- Identify the purpose of the feedback analysis. What do you want to learn from the feedback? Are you trying to understand customer satisfaction, identify areas for improvement, or something else?
- Collect the feedback. There are many ways to gather feedback, including through surveys, customer reviews, focus groups, and more.
- Organize and classify the feedback. Once you have collected the feedback, you will need to organize and classify it in a way that makes it easy to analyze. This might involve categorizing the feedback by theme or topic, or grouping it by customer demographic.
- Analyze the feedback. This is the step where you look for trends, patterns, and areas of opportunity within the feedback. You might use statistical analysis tools to help with this process, or you might simply read through the feedback and look for common themes or issues.
- Communicate the results. Once you have analyzed the feedback, it’s important to share the results with relevant stakeholders. This might include your team, your customers, or other key people in your organization.
- Use the results to inform decision-making and action. Finally, use the insights from the feedback analysis to inform decision-making and take action to improve your business. This might involve making changes to your products or services, improving customer experiences, or implementing other types of changes based on the feedback you have received.
Ultimately,
YES! You must have as much ROI as you can get in every area. Without good ROI you won’t be in business long. That being said, balance is essential to sustaining success. The story we just read was told by a current and long time, employee. The pilot makes this cautionary tale pretty cut and dry. To sum up his story in five words, “Too many pennies were pinched.” The “ghost” problem I see is what I call unbalanced capitalism.
And, in the event you don’t know, a quick history lesson about Southwest Airlines, as per their website “We first took flight in 1971 from Dallas (Love Field) to democratize the sky through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.” Southwest Airlines’ business model is based on extremely efficient operations, low-cost pricing, and innovative logistics solutions. Furthermore, their strategy also includes a deep focus on customer experience and looking ahead, or that was the idea in 1971.
So it seems that the antiquated idea of a balanced holistic approach to business has been abandoned in exchange for quick money. Yes, evolution claims its fair share of victims but we can not allow quality to become one too. As explained in the story, when the CEO and COO are all looking at the same focal point from the same perspective, it will spell doom. This is what is meant by diversification. We all are in business to make money but some companies were created to solve problems, not make money. Profit vs Function is a losing fight.
