How Being a Lawyer Helped Kelleher - Part Two
In the first part of this section on 'How Being a Lawyer Helped Kelleher,' we talked about how the focus on finding the facts and not listening to gossip are so important. The point of all of this isn't that you need to be a lawyer to understand these things and apply them, but that they are valuable additions to our management tools arsenal.
The second important thing that Kelleher said he learned from being a lawyer was to find out what the real issue is. This is tremendously valuable in any type of communications we are partaking in.
Have you ever been in long conversations that needed to have issues resolved only to find out that the thing being discussed was only a symtom of the issue and not the issue itself? How many hours do we waste trying to put out fires without 
ever getting to the source of what's causing all the problems?
As I said, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand that we need to get people to identify what is really bothering them, rather than talking about the endless consequences of what is causing it.
The results of problems are like trying to counsel an extremely troubled person. I remember one counselor saying one time that helping people like this is like taking a punchbowl dipper to the ocean and trying to empty it one scoop at a time.
The point being made is that if you don't go to the core of the problem and find out what the real issue is, you'll be dipping water out of the ocean endlessly.
Usually the problem in doing this is getting past the emotional responses of people to situations and helping them to identify what the source of the problem is, not the consequences of the problem.
You can never make progress on any problem in the workplace until the issue is correctly identified. Make sure you identify the problem accurately before you attempt to solve problems. Otherwise you'll find yourself by the ocean dipping water endlessly.
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Other Herb Kelleher Sources:
Herb Kelleher on the Record, Part 1
Belief Model for The Leadership of Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines)
Herb Kelleher, Chairman, CEO and President, Southwest Airlines
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How Being a Lawyer Helped Kelleher - Part ThreeIn this final section of the three-part series on how Kelleher's training and experience as a lawyer helped him as CEO of Southwest Airlines (LUV), we'll finish by looking at the importance... [Read More]
Tracked on: April 13, 2007 5:41 PM | Permalink to Trackback