Herb Kelleher: Servant Leadership

In, Leadership: Theory and Practice, Northouse (2016) says that the servant leadership focus on seven behaviors such as emotional healing, empowering, conceptualizing, putting followers first, behaving ethically, helping followers grow and succeed, and creating value for the community. According to these behaviors, it is possible to affirm that Herb Kelleher demonstrated a servant leadership behavior when he decided to not follow the traditional hierarchies and hire people with a thoughtful attitude. Also, he showed the behavior of helping followers grow and succeed when he hired Colleen and treated her as an equal and helped to developed her career. Later, Colleen also exhibited servant leadership behaviors, not just because she followed Herb's steps, but she implemented the "Golden Rule", which emphasizes the importance of treating others the way you like to be treated. In addition, Colleen established that the employees' satisfaction comes
This attitude led all employees to a high level of service where the customer's satisfaction is crucial to them, and they will not measure efforts to accomplish this objective. The case study gave us a great example of this philosophy, where the flight attendant sympathized with that mother's problem, and helped to solve the issue at the same time preventing a bad situation, which could lead to several unhappy customers. Moreover, the situation serves as an example of the "Golden Rule", due to the fact that the flight attendant putted herself in that mother's shoes and thought how she would like to be treated. Definitively, the golden rule plays a vital role in the Southwest Airlines and any company that fosters servant leadership, which is people oriented, in other words, focuses on employees'