Features

SFN Open Live taps into lessons on leadership

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

[Dallas] Kicking off this year’s Dallas Market, Shaw Flooring Network hosted a full day of presentations and Q&A segments with some of the country’s most venerable leaders from Southwest Airlines former execs to famed Coach Tony Dungy.

Here, each offered lessons learned about leadership and how to build successful cultures and teams.

Ginger Hardage, retired senior vice president of culture and communications at Southwest Airlines, took to debunking myths about cultures — namely that culture is someone else’s job and posting corporate values on the wall is enough to drive it throughout an organization, among others.

“Culture is everyone’s responsibility and we take the lead as leaders,” she said. “All organizations’ culture starts way before hiring.” For Southwest Airlines, she shared, values are “Warrior spirit, servant’s hear and fun-loving attitude.”

She explained that the culture she is referring to “is the kind of culture that can drive the bottom line.” And that, she said, includes, “Go about thinking of ways to focus on customers. Put employees first and have a level of service and knowledge to service our customers.”

Another nugget, she offered, is to boost your leadership availability. “Live your values,” she said.

Tony Dungy is a famed football player, coach, author and commentator. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2016. Here at SFN, Dungy spoke with director of corporate training and organizational development Danny Crutchfield.

Dungy has held coaching positions at the University of Minnesota, Pittsburgh Steelers, Kansas City Chiefs and the Minnesota Vikings. He particularly noted lessons learned from Steelers head coach Chuck Noll in the early 80s.

“If want to do well put a lot into it. The most important thing, Chuck Noll said, ‘Your job is to help your team be better. It’s not what you do but what you do for them. That’s how I structured my whole career,” shared Dungy. “Find out what my players need. The same thing happens with family. You’ve got to find out what each child needs, what my wife needs. You have to deliver to your business and deliver to your family. And Coach Knoll said, ‘Don’t make football your whole life — your profession, but not your whole life.”

Crutchfield also asked Dungy to share his lessons learned throughout his career. Dungy answered, “As I started my career, I thought about which coaches helped me. I want to be someone that teaches and encourages people, be positive and help people.”

He also pointed to conversations he had with his own dad. “When I’d come to him with a problem, he would listen thoughtfully — I’d say, ‘they didn’t give me a ball, they didn’t put me in game today.’ He would listen and then say, ‘How are we going to make it better? What can we do to make it better?”

One of his biggest lessons, he said, was to control what you can control. “You can’t work on cold weather but you can work on not fumbling and on mental mistakes,” he said, for example.

Lastly, Crutchfield looked to Dungy for perspective on dealing with adversity such as COVID. Dungy offered, “The biggest thing, expect adversity — you are going to have adversity. Then it becomes how you are going to address it: it is something to overcome. You have to hang in there. You have to persevere.”