Southwest Airlines President Colleen Barrett, via Southwest Airlines
This 25:01 minute video includes a talk given by Southwest Airlines President Colleen Barrett at the Wharton Leadership Conference. This is a good take on how servant leadership applies in business, but the model can also be used in education and many other industries.
“My passion is and always has been serving other people. Today we talk about ‘servant leadership’ but I had not heard that expression. I really did like to solve problems. … We do build our pyramid a little bit different than what you’ve heard today from most of the speakers. We’re pretty bold about it and pretty vocal about it. We say that at the top of our pyramid in the terms of the most important priority we have is our employees. If we treat them right … We spend, I spend certainly my 85% of my time is spent on employees and delivering proactive customer service to our employees. If I do a good enough job of that and if my fellow peers do a good enough job of that, they in turn spend their life trying to assure that the second most important customer to us in our pyramid, which is our passenger, feels good about the service that they are getting because they are getting proactive service delivery.”