Gary Kelly Essay

Mr. Gary Kelly is the chief executive officer, CEO, of Southwest Airlines. Mr. Kelly was the chief financial officer, CFO, for Southwest Airlines from 1989 until 2004. He has served as the CEO of Southwest Airlines since 2004. I will provide concrete examples of how Southwest Airlines displays its corporate culture. I will describe what traits and skills Mr. Kelly possess which make him an effective leader. I will identify the core competencies of Southwest Airlines. According to Herb Kelleher, Southwest started on focusing on people as people and identifying them as rich assets of the company.Herb Kelleher and his management team emphasize an easy going relaxed corporate style that provides employees with extensive operational independence. Southwests culture, which emphasizes employees as the airlines first customers and passengers as the second, has been integral to Southwests success. (Smith) The concept of treating your customers well and your employees better is not a new conc ept, by any means. The botheration with that concept occurs when the company loses touch with the people that actually pay the salaries, the customer. I have worked for a company, that no longer exists, that treated their upper managers like royal family the IT person drove a company car that was a brand new Hummer. All of the profit went to bling and not back into the company.The skills and traits that he possesses atomic number 18 world resourcing. Making sure his team has all the proper training knowledge and knows how to make his customers happy. He also believes in making sure his people (employees) are even happier. They are the key to making his business a success, if your employees are happy there is no reason why your customers will want to travel along back and be serviced by them. Kelly is a great decision maker in these trying economic times. With his decision making skills led him to the innovative thinker of bags fly free.Tag that up with his leadership skills an d there is no reason why thiscompany wouldnt be a success. (Shaw, 2013) I consider somewhere that Mr. Kelly would hold cookouts for his people and that the overnight crews got upset because, due to scheduling, they could not attend. Kellys solution the pilots and he held cookouts for the overnight crews at 200 am. That way the crews could eff the fruits of their hard work. Talk about insuring employee loyalty WOWThe core competencies of Southwest Airlines that I was able to find are secure up fuel hedgerow contracts, throttleing cost down through fast backsliding times, flying only one type of aircraft, treating customers like kings and queens, and treating employees even better than the customers. By locking up fuel hedging contracts, Southwest was able to pay less for the fuel than other competing airlines. While facing possible layoffs, Kelly challenged his ground crews to reduce the turnaround times from 55 minutes to 15 minutes.The crews were at to achieve that goal and e liminated the possibility of layoffs. By having a fleet of only having Boeing 737s, Southwest has been able to keep maintenance cost extremely low. Southwest has had their flight attendants play games with their customers, while in flight. An example of this is the flight attendants would say that the first customer to show them that they were tiring socks with a hole in them would receive a free round trip ticket anywhere that Southwest flew. As for treating their employees better than the customer the firm cookout idea pretty much covers that core competency.I have provided concrete examples of how Southwest Airlines display its corporate culture. I had explained the traits and skills that make Gary Kelly an effective leader. I had place the core competencies of Southwest Airline. With what I have learned about Gary Kelly and Southwest Airlines, the more companies and their leadership that try to immolate him, the more satisfying being a customer would become. ReferencesShaw. ( 2013, May 24). http//www.antiessays.com/. Retrieved October 8, 2013, from Anti Essay http//www.antiessays.com/free-essays/476967.html Smith, G. (n.d.). An evaluation of the corporate culture of Southwest Airlines. Measuring Business Excellence, 8(4), pp. 26-33.