Excerpt from Term Paper:

......A second scenario also illustrates how the decision making process at Southwest pushes accountability and ownership for results into operational teams rather than keeping it centralized in senior management. The outcome of this specific decision making process is the attaining of the enviable safety record of not a single fatality in the history of Southwest Airlines operation. In 1985 Southwest was the first airline to realize that Crew Resource Management (CRM) was critical to inter-department and intra-crew communication in their planes and between crews and functional teams at gates (Bovier, 1993). Instead of having senior management responsible for routine safety training and for taking responsibility for periodic safety training as defined by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Southwest senior management made the decision to make pilots the safety training, department cross-functional, and intra-crew training leaders across the company. This decision was made unilaterally; there wasnt much of an egalitarian level of voting to opt in or not on the pilots. The decision proved to be one of the best ever made by Southwest as having pilots the safety leads galvanized the team spirit and individual accountability and ownership everyone working on an aircraft had in every gate, for every flight.

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