Leisa:  Hello I’m Leisa Holland Nelson and welcome to another edition of Women Mean Business where we’re going to take you up close and personal with extraordinary women doing extraordinary things.  My guest today is Lorraine Grubbs, former Southwest Airlines executive and creator of Creating a Happy Workplace, a series, and a lot of other books.  Lorraine welcome to Women Mean Business.

Lorraine:  Thank you Leisa, I’m glad to be here.

Leisa:  I’m honored to have you here.  I’m going to guess maybe as a little kid you thought you would be a bestselling author but most people don’t’ start out like that, tell us how you got to achieving writing something like this.

Lorraine:  Sure.  Well I’ve always loved to write and I’m the one in the family that wrote the Christmas letters every year because nobody else would take the time to do it.  So I’ve always written and it’s always been something I’ve loved to do.  The way that I came about in my first book I worked for Southwest Airlines for 15 years and I had to end up leaving Southwest, it was a really painful decision but it was the right decision.  I was working in Dallas and my father was living in Houston and he was sick so I knew I had a limited amount of time to spend with him, so I chose to leave Southwest.

And when I left Southwest I kept thinking what has this company done to make me so darn loyal?  And so I began to outline the principles of my first book Lessons in Loyalty; How Southwest Airlines Does It and as soon as that book got published it threw me into the consulting world; people wanted to be Southwest Airlines, how can we do that?  And so I began to consult for a number of years and the frustrating thing for me was they would bring me in for we don’t need you for this piece, only this piece, and so I finally decided 2 years ago I had to – or I wanted to develop my own system, my happy workplace system.  And so that is what precipitated writing this book How to Create a Happy Workplace, having worked with a number of companies throughout the world.

And in this particular segment, as you know we were talking earlier about it being four different areas and all areas must work in concert with each other, and so this book actually validates my system through 8 award-winning companies in Houston – and they’re all very diverse companies from David Weekly Homes to Methodist Hospital to Gillman Automotive – so they’re all diverse companies.  And what I hope to do with this book is really whether you have 3 or 4 employees or thousands there is a blueprint here that you can follow to make yourself an award-winning top employer and enjoy the benefits these companies do; low turnover high productivity, greater stock return.  So there’s a lot of benefits to becoming an employer of choice.

Leisa:  Thank you very much.

Lorraine:  You’re welcome.

Leisa:  There you have it, another extraordinary woman doing extraordinary things.  I’m Leisa Holland Nelson, author and voice of Women Mean Business.  You can find us on Facebook at Women Mean Business, follow me on Twitter @LHNelson or come back again nest week for another edition.