Creating a great culture and exceptional employee experience

Creating a great culture and exceptional employee experience with Bonnie Endicott from Southwest Airlines

Leadership in the middle of a crisis

I'm excited that you're joining me. I've got a great interview for you with Bonnie Endicott. Bonnie is someone that I have been following and wanting to get in touch with for quite some time because I am a big fan of Southwest Airlines. Not only as a flyer but also as a longtime student of business, culture and Southwest. Their founder, Herb Kelleher, is famous for creating a great culture and employee experience, and I was eager to dig into that with Bonnie who's been there for years and now leads talent development at Southwest Airlines.

In this interview, we cover a wide range of topics from building that employee experience and culture to their Southwest response to COVID-19. How the HR team has responded to that, how to support leaders through crises like this, and how Southwest has set up its classic high potential leadership development program that's been around for a long time. Bonnie has been working to update and still get creative and support leaders, and why it's so important to have your senior leaders being involved in supporting the program. We also talk about Bonnie's biggest successes and failures in her career, the trend she's following and a book recommendation, as well as her advice. Without further ado, here's my interview with Bonnie Endicott from Southwest Airlines.

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I'm excited that you're joining me for my interview with Bonnie Endicott. Bonnie is a talent management leader who dreams big about innovation and talent solutions that improve business results. She has more than twenty years of experience developing talent in Fortune 500 companies. She serves as the Director of Talent Management at Southwest Airlines, where she leads people-focused work in leadership and pipeline development, as well as succession planning and career development. Bonnie, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

It’s great to have you on. We were already chatting before and I told you that I am a big fan of Southwest Airlines, not just as a passenger because I am A-List Preferred. I fly Southwest a lot, although not lately as we're in the middle of this COVID crisis. Also as a fan of the culture and everything that was built there over the last 30-plus years. It’s been an amazing case study. I studied Southwest Airlines at Business School.

Creating a great employee experience

It’s great to have you on to talk about some of the programs you've built, your philosophy on talent management, employee experience, all that stuff. Before we get there, let's start with a bit about you, who you are and how you got to where you are now.

Thank you for being a loyal member. We appreciate that. When we're back in the skies, and everything's clear, we look forward to having you again. A little bit about me, I've been doing this for 20 years or more. I started off my career as a consultant focusing on training and development, in terms of learning and development programs and initiatives and things like that. It was a great place to start. I loved being a consultant early in my career and moved more into a corporate environment. I've done everything on the training development front from building new corporate universities to facilitating and designing and delivery and all that good stuff. What I love is leading training, learning and talent functions and things like that.

I joined Southwest in 2008. It’s been years now. They asked me to come on board and put some thought into some high-potential leadership development, which I did for a couple of years and continue taking on more responsibility. We had a small university there that focused on employee leadership training. We've since created Southwest Airlines University, which is all of our training centralized. At that time, I've been doing learning development for probably seventeen years and my boss said, “Would you like to step into some spaces and org development?” I was like, “Yes, I would. I'd love to stretch and grow.”

That's when I stepped into more of the proper talent development world and fell in love with all that goes into helping people and the talent at a company be all that they can be, and bring all that they can be. I've been doing that for a while, as well as leading some org development. I supported HR business partners for a while, which is super fascinating and an important role in an organization. I support a full spectrum of talent management anywhere from your typical talent development practices, talent reviews, succession planning and all that good stuff from leadership development. We're trying to re-envision some leadership development at Southwest and how we reach all of our leaders with good learning and development from a new thing, career development and job architecture. It's fun at Southwest because we have a great culture and we do support our people growing with the company and things like that. You get to dream big and do some fun things. It’s a great time.

You’ve got involved in many different things and it sounds like you've got some freedom to create and get creative. I'm curious, maybe start from a bigger picture perspective, what's your general philosophy on talent management?

I have developed this philosophy where I feel like anything we do in the talent space, whether it's training learning, talent review, succession planning or whatever it might be, is that we need to think simple, integrated and think about business results. That's why we're in the business of talent. It’s to help the business be productive, help people be productive, so the businesses are productive. If we can think simple, make sure we're well-integrated and always wear our business hat, then typically I find that talent professionals are effective and successful. I take that philosophy with me with whatever program we're looking at or when I'm coaching other talent professionals.

When you say “put on our business hat,” and you said you worked with HR business partners as well, can you elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by that?

The business of business is making money, so it's easy sometimes for us in talent to forget about that because sometimes it depends on if you've lived in a proper HR team or if you've worked in a business line, which I've done both and they're both great places to be, pros and cons of both. Sometimes when we get into our HR spaces, we think a lot about policy, process and system, that's all good and we need all those things, but sometimes that inhibits the frontline. You think about your frontline and the supervisor supporting the frontline. They're trying to figure out the day-to-day, but you need to help them develop their talents. Think through who their potential is and help them develop their successors. If you're worried about your process and not having a conversation, that can get in the way.

When I say, “Wear your business hat,” it means walk in the shoes of your customers and make sure that you are helping them move their business forward. If your business or your customer is in the business of making widgets, how are you going to help their line workers produce faster and better widgets? That's a simple example, but you can think about that no matter who your customer is. It's our job to help them think strategically about their talent.

Employee Experience: Talent professionals are effective and successful if they are well-integrated.

It comes down to empathy, understanding what your customers, whoever they may be, what they care about and having that business sense or business knowledge to realize that what they care about is often the top line, the bottom line, how do they sell more, how do they increase profits, improve operations or whatever it may be. If you're coming in talking about HR talent development, it's got to connect to that stuff otherwise, it becomes so abstract.

They're not going to give you the time on any kind of day but as Herb Kelleher, our founder said, “The business of business is people.” We're in business to make money, but you have to have people to run your business. Investing in your people and thinking strategically about how you grow them in place and help them be more productive day-to-day is critical. Try to help tell professionals to make the connection there to be relevant. You need to get in the door and be relevant for them even to give you the time to talk about what you can do for them.

I'm glad you brought up the late and great, Herb Kelleher. In my mind, he is one of the greatest business minds in the last couple of generations in the United States. He’s one of the few that's known for putting people first and creating a great employee experience. I've given talks at conferences in different places and talked about the importance of employee experience and how that's becoming more of a trend. I often give Southwest Airlines as an example of an organization that's always put the employees first and let that drive customer satisfaction. Where a lot of companies are thinking about, “How do we create a great customer experience?” without thinking about the employee. I wonder if you could talk about that philosophy on creating a great employee experience and how that's been so important for Southwest.

That's a great topic to talk about in general. We have this philosophy where if we feel our employees are in general happy and productive, they are going to take good care of our customers. If we take good care of our customers, they're going to come back. We're going to have repeat business, which in turn takes care of our stakeholder, our shareholders and that takes care of the company. We believe in that cycle of business, if you will. One thing that struck me when I first joined Southwest years ago, and I come from some other big Corporate America places, was that the first filter that senior leaders use at Southwest is, “How is this going to impact our people? What's going to be the impact of this decision?” It’s like what's happening now. What is the impact on our people and how can we make that better and mitigate it? Think about that.

The second question is, “What is the impact to our brand and to our customers? How is it going to impact our customers?” It's always a people-first orientation, which is different. Especially for long-term success, long-term revenue generation and long-term stability, that's what carries you through versus thinking through this short-term mindset. That's always been the filter and it has been refreshing and I tried not to take that for granted as we continue, especially in times and challenges like this. It's encouraging as we watch Gary engage with our employees and us as leaders and talk about how Southwest is thinking about wearing that people filter first and our customer filter second, and we'll address business. Hopefully, that's helpful.

It's a good start and you mentioned Gary. You’re referring to Gary Kelly, the CEO and successor to Herb Kelleher, as CEO of Southwest who's continued that legacy. When I think about employee experience, another thing that I learned a long time ago that I've repeated many times is that your customer experience will never exceed that of your employee experience. I also think about Southwest creating a great employee experience. I've flown many in airlines and the other big ones, you don't even know what you're going to get, but at Southwest, I feel like the employees are always happy, excited to be at work and treating the customers so well. How do you create that as it comes down to training, benefits, culture and mindset? How do you create that culture where employees are happy to be there and always treating customers well?

We get that question all the time, “What's your secret sauce?” We come back with, “There's not a secret sauce,” and it's a little bit of everything that you’ve mentioned. The first place we begin though is we have our values. We call them our Southwest expectations of what we expect of employees at Southwest. We start with those values in mind as we're hiring. You want to bring in a diverse group of people, but those that represent the values that you have.

For us, the three that we hinge on are having a warrior spirit, so working hard but also having some fun and playing hard. Having a fun-loving attitude and a servant's heart, so you have to love people. If you don't love people, you're probably not going to want to enjoy your time at Southwest and not have the heart to support customers. We're always looking for those. That's the first place you start. We're always looking for those employees or candidates that are going to represent that well. We wrap a lot of stuff around that, so performance management. We will give folks feedback. It's a lot easier to be released from Southwest if you have a terrible attitude or you're treating your customers poorly, than it is if your average handle time is not as effective as it needs to be.

It's a place where we anchor the behaviors that we expect of our employees and things like that. It's a common point of conversation. You might get feedback on, “You're taking yourself way too seriously. We need to take our work seriously but why are you taking yourself seriously?” or peer-to-peer feedback that we might give each other and things like that. We wrap that into the rewards and recognition that we give. We wrap it into leadership development, even as hinged on some of the leadership expectations that we have to take that a bit further.

Everything we do is talk about these values are at the center of that. That helps to have a common language and expectations. We try to have fun, so we know that our work is serious and the safety of our customers in our environments is paramount. Getting people places on time is paramount but you can have some fun while you do that. You can get the announcements done, but also have some fun with that. Meet all the regulatory needs but still have some fun. That's probably at the heart of it.

They always do, which is great. You mentioned rewards and things like that connected with the employee experience. I wanted to ask you about performance management. Lots of companies are changing things up with regard to performance management like getting rid of annual reviews. Years ago, everybody was doing the same thing and now, it's all over the board. I was reading through a couple of blog posts that you've put up and you mentioned making some changes with performance management. What's your philosophy on that and how are things being done at Southwest?

[bctt tweet="Taking care of your customers promotes repeat business." via="no"]

Performance management at Southwest

We've been testing out for a while this continuous performance management approach, so we didn't jump on the bandwagon right away. We wanted to see what was happening out there because a lot of firms were going away from ratings entirely like, “Let's throw those out the door.” What comes back to is you still have to figure out how you're going to apply rewards. You have to give some framework. We found out that employees wanted to know. We're taught from the grade school that we need a grade. Even as adults, we want a grade, so employees want to know and they want to know more frequently, “How am I doing? What can I do to be better? Tell me what I'm doing great, so I can continue to do that.” People didn't want to know at the end of the year, “If you'd worked on this, you might have gotten a better grade.” We instituted continuous performance management. I've been testing that out for a couple of years and in 2020, it went live with all of our non-contract employees. So far, so good. It's been going well.

In fact, in situations that we have, we have a lot of people working remotely from at least our corporate offices. It's gone well because it encouraged leaders and employees to have more frequent conversations, so they're strange. We gave them permission to have more frequent conversations about, “What are you working on? How is it going? How do you reshuffle things now that we're in this environment?” Instead of waiting and pocketing until the end of the year. It’s odd because I feel like conversations are at heart despite any kind of talent or work that we do. It's been going well. We've gotten great reviews from both employees and from leaders. We still do some tracking in our system. We have an antiquated system, but we still do some tracking in that.

We've gone old school to a PDF document, but it's short snippets of, “Here's your short tweetable summary of how your quarter went.” We talk quarterly. “I will tell you that you're meeting or not meeting or you're exceeding expectations. Here's what you're doing great. Here's what you need to work on.” The employee has a chance also to be part of that conversation. We found that it was more of something that was done to employees. Now it's an employee-leader conversation versus something that leaders do to employees. We've also seen a rise in, “Here's what I want to be in the future. Here's where I want to go. Here's where I want to move my career. Here's how I want to develop.” Those conversations have increased, which is what you want to hear.

I always thought it made more sense to have continuous conversations and not wait for the annual or even quarterly review where a manager sits down and says, “Remember, fourteen weeks ago back in June, you did this in a meeting and that didn't go well, so we're holding you back.” “I don't remember that. What are you talking about? Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“I can't fix it if you don't tell me.” It's crazy. What I love about some of the new generational conversations that we have is that I don't think anybody's asking for things that nobody else wants. They're more forceful about it. Everybody always wanted continuous feedback and conversation.

It's the same thing with people talking about purpose, and Millennials have raised the voice on, “We want to connect our purpose. We want to have a purpose.” I was at a workshop once and an older gentleman stood up and said, “I want purpose too.” We all do. It's just that maybe the Millennials have spoken up more about it.

They have a good voice.

You mentioned this new environment that you're in and I wanted to ask you about Southwest reaction and how you, as an HR team, have helped your workforce handle the new normal and the changes under COVID-19. This global pandemic has caused many businesses to shut down or change the way they operate. They operate remotely. Certainly, right in the middle of that of airlines and the travel industry where the business has been cut down well-below what it was before. I know you can't go into tons of specifics but how has Southwest, particularly the HR team, managed and supported the employees through this crisis?

Handling the new normal as a team

It's been fun to watch the various departments at Southwest come together. When we talk about proper HR, we've got our culture teams, engagement teams and more proper HR teams and they're all split out, which is great. They've all come together to put some resources out there for employees. In our corporate offices, we've got a lot of people who are working remotely for the first time, so it was helping them be successful. We've got people out in our stations and in our call centers. How can we help them be successful and make sure that the lines of communication are open to their leaders and to them? The thing that's been most helpful is the mass amount of communication that we have shared with them. I don't think that's anything that HR, in particular, has done separately from a partnership with senior leadership and things like that.

Gary, our CEO and Mike Van de Ven, who's our COO, are sending weekly videos or emails to say, “Here's what's happening. Here's what's happening with the CARES Act. Here's what's happening here. Here's how we're thinking about safety. Here's how we're cleaning the airplanes.” It’s on and on. The communication on how we are, as a company, dealing with things and how we're evolving, we're communicating all of that to employees. As much transparency as we can, we've been sharing. HR has been more on the side of helping the company think through what our options are. It's more about propping up the leaders if you will, “Here are some of our options here. Here are some of the decisions we can or can't make. Let's help you communicate those out.” It's been more of the strong HR backbone of supporting all the decisions that you have to make in these hard times.

When you think about supporting your managers or leaders through this pandemic and helping their people cope, what are 1 or 2 keys that you think have been important to help them with?

I'll go back to some of our performance management concepts. We call them check-ins. We’re reminding people, “You've got some guidelines. You've got some ways to have good conversations. Make sure you're doing these weekly.” We also came together and put some stuff out on our interest site for leaders and said, “Here are some resources for you on how to engage your teams. Here's how to think differently about that.” As well as for employees, “Here's how to think differently about your work.” I don't think it's been terribly different from anything that I've been hearing from my friends, who do what we have been doing differently for their employees. In fact, what was interesting was I thought that the employees were banding together and saying, “Let's start this new social media,” whether it's Facebook or GroupMe or whatever. It’s like, “Let's start this new thing. Let's have a call every day.”

Employee Experience: Performance management has encouraged leaders and employees to have more frequent conversations.

We've been reporting. We are more connected than we were when we were all in the office together, off at our other meetings, in our workshops or whatever we were doing. Now, we talk every day and we didn't talk every day then. I didn't see the faces of my team every day, so that's been refreshing. Other people throughout Southwest, the corporate environment, are saying the same thing that people feel connected like you hear across society in general. That wasn't necessarily anything that our leadership team said, “Here are some things you need to do,” which probably goes back to that employee experience. We enable our employees to make good decisions and to say, “What do you guys need? This is an idea I have.” “That’s great. Go for it.”

What I take out of that is A) Communication is important. B) Giving leaders and managers guidance, so they have some ideas about what to do. C) Listening to your employees with empathy and empowering your employees to make some decisions and say, “This is what we want. We want more meetings. We want to have more communication. We want to use these apps, social media,” or whatever it is. I've been studying this as well. We created a new program to help leaders through this crisis and those are the things that we zero in on. Empathy, communication and empowerment are the things that are critical and you're doing it.

Which are important anytime. It's interesting that it's highlighted now, but if we could do those as leaders all the time, that would be great.

It's interesting how these things come up in the middle of a crisis. We're learning a lot of lessons about people development, connection and all that stuff during this time that is going to carry on through. Many people are more connected and more social during social distancing than they ever have been before. I've been invited to more happy hours. I didn't get invited as many happy hours before social distancing. It's funny.

I want to change gears and talk about talent development in general and some of the programs you've put together. I know you have a well-established High Po Leadership Development Program at Southwest. You've written about it in your blog and you lay it out in detail. I highly recommend people go check that out at SimplyStrategicTalent.com because I like how you laid that out for people. Walk me through what's the philosophy behind the Manager Development program or the High Po Development program, and how have you set that up to be effective?

High-potential development program

Let me start by giving you a little history because it did not start with me. If you go to the website, you'll see that we call it managers and training, and there are a couple of different levels. In this case, we're talking about the MIT II level, which is geared towards pipelining, manager level people into director-level spots. For Southwest, it’s the beginning of our senior leadership level or the director level. It started off as helping more of our frontline leaders out in the stations and understand the business acumen of Southwest, what all the different departments did and that kind of thing. That morphed and grew.

When I was hired, it was, “Will you come and add some development topics into this MIT II program and make it a high potential into our director level?” That's a little bit of that history. We started by thinking, “What is it that good leadership development programs need? What do we need specifically at Southwest?” At the time, strategic thinking was the big thing, so we're great at efficient operations, some decision making, some agile thinking and that kind of thing, but we needed to lean in on strategic thinking at the time.

They had just launched, when I joined in the middle of the year, a strategic thinking class with an action learning project on it. That was all about, “Go out and figure out something we can do for customers that will bring in more revenue and then present that to Gary and his staff.” That's probably one of the biggest things that we've carried on year to year that has provided the most development. Some of those rapid thinking projects that you don't get time to put a team together. Executives love to use this MIT action learning project to think through what's next in the customer space, for example. We have one class a year and about probably 18 to 20 people. We'll say, “Here's a way to think about strategic thinking, whether it's rapid innovation, web workshop or whatever that is. The problem that you have to solve is we need to grow customer revenues by XML or we need to reduce costs a certain amount or increase the employee experience.”

We’ll give each of the teams a project and then they've got about 4 or 5 months to do all of their homework, do all of their socializing, come back and they present it to all of our senior leaders. There were about 50 of them. The senior leaders love it because it's like ideas out of the door. About 50 of them that they have presented have gone on to become projects. One example, I don't know if you've been in the airports lately, but there are the new video screens that are the more informational screens about where your flight is going. That was one of the projects that came from this action learning project. We try to go more towards experiential. We do have six weeks in the classroom, which I'll start to layout more in my series on what those look like. We’re trying to give people a chance to do because we learned by doing, so we give lots of opportunities to shadow an executive.

[bctt tweet="The best leaders are emotionally intelligent." via="no"]

They go to the shareholders’ meeting and sit with some of the board of directors and learn about, what does it mean to sit on a board? What kinds of things do you worry about? They shadow some of our executive leaders to see what their day looks like. How do I need to adjust my thinking? They have a mentor who's at the senior leader level or executive level. Of course, we fill them up with good things like influencing and presentation skills. They get some media training. If they should do some media interviews, they know how to have that polish. We do all kinds of things to fill them up with all the skillsets that we've identified at Southwest that our senior leaders need and to pipeline these folks quickly. It's not the only way to be promoted into that senior leader level, but it's certainly an accelerated way. That's how we thought about this particular program in general.

It's a lot of great information. I have a couple of questions, one of them is you've built a lot of stuff in here. I like how it's connected back to the stakeholders, the senior leaders who are involved in it, not only sponsors but they're involved and they're having projects go through it. I know they have their support. A lot of mistakes I see organizations make is they put something out there without any involvement from senior leaders and then they’re not supporting their managers going through it, “What are you doing for these six weeks? You should be at work.” When you have their involvement and their support and they're excited for the people to go through, they're more likely to get promoted and all of that stuff.

We have a lot of senior leader engagement. We have a big graduation ceremony. We do a roundtable with Gary and his staff. MIT is a big thing. It's a big brand within the company. If you're at MIT, it's fairly prestigious and we've tried to make it a special experience. Not everybody gets to go. Therefore, our senior leaders do take it seriously. That's important what you said because we didn't get the backing from some leadership or the leadership to give their time and effort and energy. At Southwest, that was one thing that was different that I noticed. Therefore, it's much more effective and they use it more.

When they send someone to a leadership development program, they expect something out of it. Therefore, that heightens up what we, as a leadership development team, want to pour into it and it puts a higher expectation on the folks who are going through it. When they come out the other side then they're asking them, “What did you learn? What can we do about that?” We're pressing as to, “What engagements are you giving them? Where are you placing them? Where are they moving to?” It's interactive or an integrated approach that is why you want to do leadership development programs. It's why you want to do talent programs in the first place so you get the big results.

I noticed that you have a lot of different components in there, and you mentioned business acumen and influence and all these different things. I'm curious, have you developed all of this internally? Do you work with partners? A lot of people are always curious about that.

We do a little bit of both. We've tried out different programs. When something new comes, I'm always like, “There's this new program. Let's give it a try. Let's pilot it.” There are a few modules that we’ll create in-house and there are a few that we'll partner with. I can probably count them on two hands, the folks we partner with externally. We do build a lot internally. We have a talented staff of designers, developers and facilitators. We'll draw on that staff as we need to as well.

I noticed in the setup of the program that it's congruent with some other programs I've seen, including a couple that I offer as well to clients, and that you start with self-awareness and leading yourself. That's critical for leadership. I'd love to hear from you why it's important to start with that.

Having been in leadership development for lots of years, when I look at the best leaders out there, they're emotionally intelligent and they're settled and content in where they come from as a person and as a leader. I feel like that's probably the best place to start. If you don't know yourself well, how are you going to lead others well? Leading others is much more than directing their day-to-day or how much time they're taking with customers. If you want to grow and develop and help people and have a high performing team, you've got to do a little investment in them. Get to know them and spend some time with them. It's hard to do that if you're not comfortable with your own self. They want to know that you're human. Most of my team, I'm asking them, “How are you doing during this time? How are you faring? How's your family?” They're like, “How are you doing?” They care as much about you as we care about them.

Emotional intelligence is important. I've watched leaders who don't have a lot of emotional intelligence fumble around and they eventually peer out. You’ve got to know your own limits. You’ve got to know your own buttons. Nobody is perfect. Knowing where you're going to screw up and be willing to admit that and be vulnerable is important. We spend time talking about what makes you tick, what your values are. We spend some good time on emotional intelligence. What is your awareness of your own go-to leadership style and how to flex in and out of that as you need to? Things like that.

That all makes sense. It's important to start with that self-awareness and leading yourself. It's hard to lead others when you don't even know who you are. You can't trust in your own abilities and get awareness around your strengths and weaknesses and all that stuff. Emotional intelligence is critical. I appreciate the overview. That's going to be helpful for a lot of people. You wrote more about it. You even have a chart and graph on your blog at SimplyStrategicTalent.com. Let's switch gears to you, Bonnie. What's been your greatest accomplishment or proudest moment in your career so far?

I don't know. I'm not that interesting. This is going to sound cliché, but I am proud of my team. When I develop someone who continues to be promoted or takes on a new crazy, fun assignment, that makes me pleased as punch. The people on my team that I've seen learn and grow, that's where I take the most pride and I have the most fun. Getting hired at Southwest was cool. That’s one cool career opportunity. That was great, but it probably more hinges around the people that I lead and as they grow and develop.

You've been able to do some cool stuff and you have a lot of interesting things to share. People reading would agree. On the other side, what's been your biggest mistake or failure in your career so far? What did you learn from it?

I'm a big-time driver. I like to drive forward. I'm a futurist. I can see what's coming. I was trying to drive some things forward at Southwest without getting all of the collaboration or the buy-in that I needed. I knew that if we didn't invest in this XYZ program, that it was going to cost us a lot of money in the backend. It was more of a system and things on the HR space. I didn't have the influence. I have a lot of great ideas sometimes. If you're familiar with the StrengthsFinders for Gallup, my top two are futuristic and strategic. Unfortunately, at the low end are some communications. It makes a lot of sense in my head and sometimes it doesn't always come out of my mouth as I like. That was hard because people are like, “Where are you going? What are you doing? What is happening here?” It didn't move forward quite like it needed to. It was hard to overcome it because it was a good two years’ worth of investment and trying to convince people. It didn't flourish as I wanted it to.

Employee Experience: If you want to develop and have a high performing team, you have to know them and spend some time with them.

What I learned out of that, because I feel like there's always a good lesson out of all these things, is that I didn't like the pushy person I had become and trying to push all these ideas through and get frustrated all the time. It wasn't only me. What I realized is, back to our conversations, you’ve got to know who you are and you’ve got to be solid in who you are. I wasn't having any fun. Life's too short not to have fun where you work every day. It was a good step back for me. Let somebody else take the lead from here on out and learn your influence lesson and learn your communication lesson. Get back settled into who you are and how you lead best.

When you let other people take the lead, then you're empowering them. They're more involved, they’re more bought in and they feel they're learning more from the process. Are you familiar with Multipliers, the book by Liz Wiseman?

I’m familiar with that. I haven't read it yet.

It's a book that I recommend often. I run a program based on that. She talks about the Accidental Diminisher, the way we accidentally diminish our people. One of them is the strategist, which is your big picture, always putting that stuff out there. If you don't empower your people to communicate and get them involved in stuff, people get tired of it and they tune out.

I need to read that because that is probably one of the things that happened there. It was a great lesson. I appreciate it for that. You move on and grow.

That's why I asked that question because we always learn from our mistakes. I love learning from other people's mistakes. What we try to do is we learn from mistakes and then we hopefully teach others so that they don't make the same mistakes.

Talent development trends

Bonnie, what's a trend in talent development that you're following closely?

I'm going to find a new trend probably. Before the whole COVID crisis, I was following the reskilling that companies were trying to do. Trying to move mass reskilling of employees from one area to another and thinking through that. The war for talent was a real thing and not having some folks skilled in what companies needed. That was an interesting trend that I was poking around in.

It makes sense. You mentioned being a bit of a futurist. I am as well. I love studying this idea of the future of work. Where we're going are people doing more project-based work, gig economy type stuff and not sticking with one role for a long time. You're going to have to learn new skills, whether you take it as your own responsibility, as an employee or the company gets involved in “reskilling” or giving people the training and development they need to move from one job to another one, so they're not stagnant and become obsolete.

At Southwest, we'd love to bring people in. We’re aware that people don't want to do the same thing for lots of years. They want to learn some new things. They want to add to their tool belt. How can we create some career development opportunities and some transparent competency work? They can say, “I want to be this when I grow up. I want to be this in three years.” Here's how I can develop some of those skills so they can do it for themselves. We don't have to say, “You transition over here.” I want people to stay a long time at Southwest, but I also don't want them to feel like they have to stay in the same role forever, unless they want to and that's great too.

You empower them and let them make that decision. I'm all about people letting people own their careers. I’m writing a book on that. Speaking of books, what's a book or a TED Talk that made a big impact on you or that you often recommend?

Patrick Lencioni and Brené Brown are two classic favorites. I go back to Primal Leadership a lot by Daniel Goleman and his couple of co-writers that he often works with. It’s back to that emotional intelligence topic but he applies it to leadership more directly. That's been something that I read probably years ago and have always hung on to some of those lessons. That's one that I pass on a lot.

Last question for you, Bonnie.

Advice from a pro

For anybody reading who works in talent development, learning and development, HR, who's looking for ways to get to the next level, accelerate their career, what's one more piece of advice that you would give?

I counsel folks to make sure that they understand the full spectrum of what goes into talent development or talent management. Don't just get good in your one area. Make sure you know how it integrates. If I'm primary on the talent reviews or succession planning processes, I make sure understand what goes into leadership development that goes into performance management or even what goes into hiring, so I can understand what that full-spectrum is of talent management. We are going to be called on more to be integrated and to think about, “How is what I'm doing in the talent space or learning space impacting my rewards?” I want people to think more integrated and holistic when they think of talent. Maybe find a new friend in their organization who does that work and take them to lunch or grab a cup of coffee, and understand what it is that they do and how they connect.

Bonnie, this has been great. I love learning from you and all the stuff you've been doing at Southwest Airlines throughout the last 11, 12 years and beyond. For anybody reading who wants to get in touch with you or follow along more of this journey, I know that they can probably connect with you on LinkedIn and your blog as well, where should people go?

LinkedIn is great. Also, SimplyStrategicTalent.com is a great place to go as well.

I was hunting around on there, reading your blog. I love how you have the whole program mapped out there. For anybody reading who wants more information on that program, make sure you head to that website. This has been great, Bonnie. Thank you for making the time to come on the show.

• Bonnie Endicott
• Southwest Airlines
• Gary Kelly
• High Po Leadership Development Program
• StrengthsFinders
• Multipliers
• Primal Leadership
• LinkedIn – Bonnie Endicott
• SimplyStrategicTalent.com