From the Heart: Leaders at United
Effective leadership is perceived many different ways by many different people. Some see it as an illusion; an unobtainable ability just out of their reach. Some see it as something you are either born with or it. Regardless of it all, the evidence is clear: leadership skills are learnable behaviors. Nearly all the biggest and best names agree on that, from Jim Kouzes, Barry Posner, Simon Sinek and Ken Blanchard, one of the only things that ends up stopping us as being effective leaders is essentially ourselves.
Over nearly the past two years I have had the pleasure of leading development workshops and coaching for over 1,500 leaders at United Airlines. In this time I have seen some of the absolute most compassionate and caring collaboration for colleagues within an organization that I have ever seen. The beauty of what I have learned is that the best leadership has not come from sitting workshops for two-days at a time with facilitators like me (as fun as that is I'm sure). It comes from the art of the stories that these leaders share about their people. Stories like the Customer Service Representative that went above and beyond to take care of a customer with a language barrier to ensure they were well taken care of.
Yet one of my favorite is one that happened right in front of me. At an event involving several hundred leaders, a colleague learned about a death in their family. Within minutes leaders from different departments were around her, some focusing on comfort and some focusing on getting her home to her family. From a distance I watched as they carefully and quickly planned out how they were going to drive her to the airport, get her on the next flight out, inform the flight crew of the situation and making all arrangements to take her to her work assignments.
I have worked in a number of industries and I have never experienced a culture where colleagues innately seemed to have this heartfelt connection and compassion for each other. It's from that core that I've seen leadership behaviors grow throughout all levels. From this heart, greatness is emerging.
Leadership is an affair of the heart - Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner