Summary: The Southwest Airlines Way by BusinessNews Publishing

Author:BusinessNews Publishing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BusinessNews Publishing
Published: 2016-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

With this in mind, Southwest takes a different approach. Delays are recorded as “team delays”. By being less precise about the cause of the delay and measuring performance by the metrics which matter to customers, Southwest puts more emphasis on learning how to avoid a repeat in the future than on accountability.

Southwest also does the same in its relationship between field units and headquarters. There is a good deal of two-way communication occurring, which allows the lessons learned in one station to be communicated to other stations. Other than that, however, station managers are given free reign to do whatever works best. By avoiding too much detail in performance measures, the overall system works much better.

“You can get to the point where you saturate yourselves with information, and you get paralyzed. We have more interest in broader categories, rather than analyzing and assessing blame. It’s easier to adjust with broader categories. Maintenance could come up with 50 categories of flight delays, if they wanted to. But you end up chasing your tail.”

– Jim Wimberley, executive vice president of operations, Southwest Airlines

“Preoccupation with functional accountability leads to blaming, which in turn causes information to be distorted or to go underground. Because organizations need to use mistakes as a basis for learning, they should not rely on functional performance evaluation. Traditional measurement systems are flawed because they orient employee attention toward functional rather than cross-functional outcomes and because they provide inadequate information for learning. Traditional performance measurements undermine performance because they weaken relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect.”

– Jody Gittell

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