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Published May 2008

Coaching His Way to the Top

  Agatha Gilmore

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Jeff Lamb, senior vice president and chief people and administration officer at Southwest Airlines, is a real team player. Approaching his work with passion, dedication and enthusiasm, he has translated his unique brand of leadership into a development program for more than 32,000 employees nationwide.

Growing up in Amarillo, Texas, a town of about 165,000 located in the Longhorn State’s panhandle, Jeff Lamb thought he had his life planned out. He was going to be a football coach.

It all started when he joined his high school football team as the quarterback and got certified to teach driver’s education so he could practice his coaching abilities while saving up money over the summer. At 18, he attended West Texas State University (now West Texas A&M) while holding down a desk job at Mesa Petroleum, an oil and gas company based in Amarillo. For the next six years, Lamb studied and worked toward his goal of becoming a high school teacher and coach.

There was only one snag in his otherwise well-laid plan.
“I wasn’t a very good athlete,” he said, half joking in his soft Texas drawl.

That, and after six years of working his way through college, Lamb was obliged to get a degree, stopping only nine hours short of teacher certification. Lucky for him, his boss — and de facto mentor — was the legendary T. Boone Pickens Jr., a successful oil entrepreneur who, coincidentally, had once wanted to be a basketball coach himself.

“Boone Pickens at the time said, ‘You can do a lot of the things that you enjoy about coaching and teaching in the corporate world: building teams, recruiting, evaluating talent,’” Lamb said. “Through his encouragement, I moved into human resources at the ripe old age of 25.”

Now senior vice president and chief people and administration officer for Southwest Airlines in Dallas, Lamb manages the development of 3,500 leaders and more than 32,000 employees nationwide. True to his roots, he approaches his work with a bona fide team mentality, practicing a brand of management known as servant leadership that relinquishes the traditional top-down business structure for a more collective configuration.

“Sometimes people view the word ‘servant’ as ‘subservient,’ but it’s service-oriented, putting people first,” Lamb explained. “We work for the frontline employees, [asking ourselves], ‘How can we support them and make their jobs easier?’ and not, ‘How can they make our lives easier?’ It really permeates everything we do.”

Lamb traces his adoption of this business philosophy back to his days at the Staubach Co., a real estate consulting firm founded by former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach. Lamb worked for Staubach after a seven-year stint at publishing company Belo Corp., which followed his 12 years at Mesa. As executive vice president at Staubach, Lamb worked closely with Staubach himself, who initially exposed him to the concept of servant leadership.

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