Twice a year, the Radiant global leadership team gets together in a room for two days. I remember we almost cancelled the meeting a couple of years ago when the recession began, but we decided to forge ahead – partly because we felt we needed each other even more during a crisis, and partly out of  respect for the ritual itself. It would have been foolish to cancel that one, and last week’s meeting proved to be yet another reminder of its importance.

Besides reviewing our current performance and getting a peek into our future opportunities, a couple of things moved me during the meeting. As we often do, we brought in an outside speaker to get us excited about a topic. Jason Young, a former Southwest Airlines Los Angeles airport manager, spoke with us about how he altered his career becoming a self-employed professional trainer. He said a lot of things, but five things stood out for me:

1. When your child falls down when learning to walk, do you criticize the fall or praise the step? He wasn’t really asking about the first step of our children. He was asking about how we treat the people who work for us. I would love to think I praise steps and don’t criticize falls, but I’m not very good at that. I need to be.                                                                         
2. A Southwest Airlines employee broke a major piece of equipment on the runway. He walked into his boss’ office the next day and turned in his badge. His boss replied, “Why would I fire you now? You just received a $30,000 education.” The employee stayed and became a star employee at the airline.
3. A micromanager he worked for liked to stand over the shoulder of the ticket agents. We’ve all experienced the ticket agents who struggle with dozens of keystrokes to perform a simple task. As he stood over one particular woman for an hour or so while she tried to perform her job, she finally decided to encourage him to go elsewhere with the following line, “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?” Nobody wants to be that guy. I know I’ve been that guy before.
4. As Jason described his career change, he walked through his mental process with the group. He said he loved to train and did not like administering so much. So, he said, “I cannot not train.” I thought to myself, “What can I not not do?” I love the question even if the answer escapes me at the moment. I know one thing I cannot not do and that is write.
5. Jason’s brother manages in a chicken factory. He runs one of the top chicken factories in America based on worker injuries, employee satisfaction, quality and output per person. Jason visited his brother recently to see what his secret was. It turns out it wasn’t one thing. It was many things including the insight his brother had with the families of each worker (“Your son played great Friday night at the football game!”). As the two brothers walked out of the factory, Jason’s brother turned around and said, “Ya’ll are feeding America! You’re feeding America!” It would have been so easy to see a chicken slaughterhouse as a depressing job. Jason’s brother chose a different path.

It was a good week.

Tags: Executive, radiant systems leadership team

This entry was posted by Andy Heyman on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 9:49 am and is filed under Executive, Hospitality, Retail, Sports and Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.