Excerpt from an interview with Herb Kellerher, Executive Chairman of Southwest Airlines, concerning his ideas and beliefs on building leaders.

Babson Insight – Let’s start with how you build leaders for the future at Southwest, especially how you give them room to learn and grow without creating too many problems while they’re learning?

HK: That’s a good question. We believe that every person in the company is a leader in one way or another, no matter what their position in the company might be, ramp agents, flight attendants, whom ever it might be. So we start by asking our People Department to look for leadership capability at the point of hiring, because in addition to hiring people that are altruistic, who like to serve and like to work with others, we also want them to have leadership potential.

Babson Insight - What do you look for to help you identify whether a person has leadership potential?

HK: One of the things that we do in an informal way is to question people. There aren’t any psychological or written tests, but we discuss many subjects, whether it’s baseball, opera, whatever the subject may be. And we watch how they react to the questions. This is very helpful in determining their leadership capabilities and potential and also gives us an insight into their values.

To give you an example, I originally interviewed a guy who just became VP in charge of our financial planning. We talked for two hours and I never asked him a single question about his experience, his expertise, or anything connected with the job description. And the reason I mention that is that he later told some interviewers “I didn’t know I was being interviewed.” That’s what we try to do, so people are at ease and they’re not masquerading. We try to really get to the heart of where they are by asking them to give examples. Examples of difficult situations they’ve been in and what they did to solve them. Particularly, how they work with other people, how they accomplish