Most people wouldn’t be able to weather the storm that United Airlines went through the past couple of years and still come out on top – but Oscar Munoz is not most people. On his 38th day as CEO, Munoz suffered a heart attack. Not long after, he faced another hurdle as he underwent and recovered from a heart transplant. Then, last April, a third-party security officer forcibly removing a passenger from a United airplane dominated the news cycle.
But despite these early setbacks, Munoz has managed to achieve impressive results during his tenure at United. After tenaciously gathering feedback from customers and employees alike through aggressive listening tours, Munoz quickly implemented policies that improved employee sentiment as reflected in United’s Glassdoor ratings, helping the company achieve “record-breaking on-time performance” and rising customer satisfaction scores.
Indeed, since Munoz took over as CEO of United, the company’s Glassdoor rating has climbed from 3.3 to its current 3.9. Furthermore, Munoz was named to Glassdoor’s 2017 list of Highest Rated CEOs, receiving a 96 percent approval rating from employees during the eligibility period – an especially remarkable feat given that the previous United CEO, Jeffrey Smisek, left with a 42 percent approval rating.
You might be wondering: What’s his secret? Munoz shared a few of his insights on leadership, employee engagement, and recruiting and retaining top talent at Glassdoor Recruit in Chicago during a 45-minutes conversation with Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman. Here are a few of the key takeaways from his session.
On United’s Hurricane Harvey relief efforts:
“There’s nothing to marshal – it’s an immediate, trained response that we help people. We help our own, and we help the communities around us and it’s just a natural instinct. There are so many incredible heroic acts that our people do [for] customers every single day across the globe…that’s what keeps me coming back to work every day.”
What got him through his health challenges:
“That support from our United family was incredible. Bags of mail would arrive at the hospital every morning. It was so emotional for my kids and my wife to read the respect that was being shown, and the thoughtfulness and prayers from the United family. That’s what’s shaping me and my efforts and focus – it’s what shapes everything I’ve done. Good [times] or bad, I know that the foundation of our company is this incredible group of human beings that would do anything for each other, and my job is to do anything for them as well so they can treat you as customers as well as they can.”
On his early strategic decisions as CEO:
“The team decided that our first north star objective was that we needed to regain the trust of our employees before we could do anything else, because over time they’d become disengaged and disenfranchised. We could not invest enough, we could not train enough, we could not provide enough credible, intelligent and strategic efforts…we had to regain the hearts and minds of these folks.”
How United turned around employee sentiment:
“A lot of people will stand on stages like this and describe the incredible level of intelligence and thoughtfulness and tactical direction. I did something really stupid simple: I just stopped and listened, and I listened intently. Before I got sick, it was 37 days [on the job], and I think I was in the office for about two of those – I [visited] every place I could go in an airport, all over the country, and I listened. After you listen, you’ve got to learn from what you heard… and then lead. It’s easy to think that you’re so smart, that you know what’s wrong and you go fix that, but [employees will say] ‘I wanted my oil changed, why did you give me new tires?’ When they know that they’ve provided input, and that you’ve listened and learned from it and provided feedback, it makes a massive difference in the simple thing that I need in our business: human interaction and human connection…from that, we’ve built a pretty good dynamic that you see hopefully when you travel.”
How United leadership responded internally to the turbulence around the forcible removal of a passenger in April:
“It was about supporting our employees because for me, the objective is I cannot lose these folks. As much as people wanted me to potentially blame other people, I couldn’t do it because once they see someone who they think highly of – in this case, me – if they see them in a tough moment giving up on their principles and starting to blame somebody else, I think you start getting at the root and the heart of someone’s true principles, and I could not let that happen. So I had to support our employees despite the intense, massive, ugly scrutiny that we got because of that. It wasn’t them – it was policies and principles that got in the way of them doing the right thing, and those policies and principles I own, my company owns, my people own, and we’re going to fix those.”
On whether CEOs have a responsibility to comment on social and political issues:
“For me, being a Latino and having grown up and experienced bias, it’s very personal. But I have to separate my personal views and the views of my company. I cannot express them too loudly for fear that something might happen to the company because of it, but at the same time it’s difficult to be silent. I wrote a LinkedIn post just a little while ago, and one of my commentaries was, ‘This is not the United Airlines CEO speaking, this is just a simple guy who’s an immigrant, who’s grown up and [received] all of the incredible blessings this country offers.’ But because I can speak, I want to speak for those who can’t. It’s a balance, clearly… we can hide behind that as CEOs, but I choose not to, in a balanced way. I have a pulpit, but I need to use it wisely.”
On balancing social responsibility with business performance:
“Being a CEO, I have to build a company that’s not only principled in nature, but it also has to be profitable. We have to be in the marketplace, and we have to make tough decisions. And when you make those tough decisions, if you [have] that goodwill built up with your employees…they give you a lot of leeway. Compassionate is one word, but principled and profitable as a company is probably the broader term of what we’re trying to achieve.”
On the advice he’d give to a younger version of himself:
“Swing easy. If anyone’s tried to play tennis or golf, if you watch the professionals, their swing is almost effortless. I think early on in your career… you tend to be instructed to not be yourself, and that’s just a fundamental flaw, because you are who you are. When you start understanding who you are, both good and bad, and start playing to those strengths and shoring up areas of development, that makes a difference. I [worked] in really hard political and cultural environments…you always had to be impressing someone. I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky guy who just happens to have a level of intellect and connection, and sometimes it was strained in that place. I learned from there to say, ‘You know what? I’m not gonna be that. I’m just going to be myself and if someone doesn’t like that, I’ll go somewhere else.’”
What he hopes his legacy at United will be:
“Churchill said, ‘It may be the end of the beginning, but we still have a long way to go.’ Flying 100 million+ customers with 700 flights in the air at any point in time in the day, there are eventually going to be failures, so we’ll continue to work on and fix that, and leave a culture of people really wanting to care about you. Someone recently said, ‘Oscar, you have an ability to make everyone feel like someone, and that’s a wonderful thing.’ Of all the things people could say about me, I think I like that one [the most]. To all of you, you are someone in your own lives, and you are to us as customers.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
