Alaska Airlines Executive Summary

Kotter’s steps 5, Enabling Action, and 6, Creating Short-Term Wins contribute to the success of a change effort by enabling all involved parties to make meaningful contributions to an organization’s progress, while seeing timely results that maintain the effort’s momentum (Cohen, 2009). Alaska Airlines successfully implements a sustainable change agent with key performance indicators and measurable metrics to empower employees for broad-based action that allows employees to see how short-term successes within each department turn into long-term growth for the organization. Ben Minicucci manages to integrate universal key metrics that focus on cross-divisional collaboration and alignment to reinforce the actions and interdepartmental communications

This encouraged a lack of accountability for monitoring and improving performance, with each department passing the blame for inefficiencies. Alaska Airlines’ success in the late 20th century was due primarily to the low cost of fuel and stronger economic environment than what was experienced post 9/11 (Avolio, Patterson & Baker, 2015). Once the airline began to experience financial troubles, this non-competitive culture became a hindrance to overcome. In transitioning to a performance focused organization, Alaska Airlines would also need to overcome the lack of communications between departments to demonstrate how the successes or failures of each department affects the

Because they are technically not Alaska Airlines employees, enabling and empowering them to embrace the change efforts taken on by the airline needed to be handled with a different approach. Minicucci’s creation of the Vendor Oversight Group served as a communicative tool that enabled the vendor to approach their contract with Alaska Airlines within their recommended guidelines and procedures without being punitive. As previously mentioned, a punitive or top down method was a part of the airline’s old business model and was not sustainable for long term success. Demonstrating how individual performance, be it individual employee or individual department, contributes to the overall success of the organization became Minicucci’s theme of change, leading to the implementation of scorecards. The scorecards for each department provided key performance indicators directly related to company goals. Alaska’s first attempt to streamline processes with the Mad Dog task force was unsuccessful because of their inability to implement their suggestions. Furthermore, their approach focused on results, with little regard as to how they were achieved, making attempts to perform under their recommendations inconsistent at best. With Minicucci’s scorecards, employees could not only recognize how their actions translated to company results, but what processes were necessary to get there (Avolio, Patterson & Baker,