Leadership at Southwest has grown the company. The leader has a strong personality and led the company to a great position. Herb Kelleher 's business decisions and out of the ordinary and have had success beyond belief.
Employee empowerment is needed to make any successful company. At Southwest Airlines, the empowerment has led the employees to lead themselves. They take pride in the actions. It allows them to get other involved and makes them more successful in the tasks they perform. When you have this phenomenon, we see that it makes them sufficient, making them less dependent on managers, making them more efficient in their positions. When they do have problems, they are more proactive in solving and lets the employees think for themselves. Southwest looks at the power of the person to provide feedback and make employees the caliber they need.
The leadership style of Herb Kelleher is a democratic team style. He demonstrates this with traits of building participation and support for a shared purpose, prospering the company. He shows a commitment to tasks, people and participation, which he also shows in his leadership. Herb was a democratic team leader that leads on being transformational. He leads his team in the right direction and it shows by some of these examples that his employees are doing: Ronald McDonald volunteering, personally recognizing the new employees with welcome gifts, and the Adopt-a-Pilot program. They demonstrate similar caring to the company as they do to the other individuals. Herb was obviously secure in his leadership style by being able to pass on his leadership ability by training and mentoring someone to take over his position.
One key to the continued success is that he had trained and mentored the two primary successors so that they were well prepared to take on the challenges of maintaining at the level he had attained. Being a large company in an unstable business sector, he was able to
Cited: http://www.southwest.com/about_swa/share_the_spirit/share_the_sp