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Southwest Airlines once hired a high-level employee for its information technology operations and quickly began to suspect it had made a mistake. After he’d been on the job for only a week or so, the company’s HR chief asked him how things were going.
“People here are strange,” he replied. “They want to talk to me in the hallway! They ask how my day has been, and they really want to know! And I just want to go back to my cube and work.”
An IT guy who wants to be left alone in his cube is not exactly a surprise. It’s practically a stereotype. But it was a big problem at Southwest.
This company succeeds in one of the world’s most miserable industries. It prospers because, as its managers have always understood, it knows the value of human interaction externally and internally. The ability of employees to engage customers with humor, energy, and generosity is crucial to creating value in an experience that is not, on its face, all that appealing. For employees who work strictly with one another behind the scenes, the business is as grindingly competitive as it is for any other airline, and doing the job is not a walk in the park. Co-workers who ask about each other and like to tell a joke are key to keeping everyone going.
So an employee who’s uninterested in human interaction is trouble. His immediate depressive effect on those around him, bad enough by itself, could start to spread. Even if it doesn’t, it’s a problem. The company’s culture is a big reason, maybe the main reason, that so many people want to work there. It’s why, when the company has 3,000 jobs to fill, it gets 100,000 applications. If a newly hired young person comes to work on his first day and meets this guy, he’ll conclude that the Southwest culture isn’t at all what he had thought. He’ll be unhappy, possibly resentful, and he’ll spread the word.
So Southwest’s managers decided that their new IT guy, despite his excellent credentials, had to go. He was dismissed in short order.
For people like him, life will be increasingly difficult. Organizations used to have places for them, in solid middle-class jobs in offices and factories. But those are the jobs that technology is already taking over rapidly. As the shift in valuable skills continues, organizations are finding not only that they have no jobs for the disengaged and socially inept, but also that such people are toxic to the enterprise and must be removed.
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