Boeing's Dave Calhoun on Leading at a Distance

What you need to know: I will be co-authoring a new book called Leading at a Distance with my Spencer Stuart partner, Darleen DeRosa, our resident PhD and expert in virtual work and leadership, who presciently co-authored a book almost 10 years ago on Virtual Team Success. The book will be based on our insights working with CEOs and leaders in face of the pandemic and the resulting work from home mandates.

As part of the research, we are conducting interviews with over 50 top CEOs and C-Suite and other Executives, and we’ll be sharing what we are learning along the way in this LinkedIn newsletter. We’ll also be conducting an punchy survey which we’ll invite you to participate in.

This week, I caught up with one of the top CEOs in the world, Dave Calhoun, CEO and President of Boeing. Here’s what Dave had to say on…

…the benefits of leading virtually:

• It’s amazingly effective for the personal efficiency of a leader.
• I reach more people in a day. I can now have 6-8 substantive meetings in one day that would have required a day per each meeting in the past, plus additional extensive time on logistics.

…how he is communicating with employees:

• In some ways, I am in better and higher frequency touch with our 180,000 employees. I host all-employee webcasts without a script. I have my priorities but will talk about what I’m thinking. 
• We have a site leader review every week with a few thousand people, which allows me to be current (and in the know) and have greater presence among our extensive organization. Pre-Covid the communications used to be perfectly orchestrated with in person meetings and on our website, but now I can pop into many meetings and be present.

…how leading virtually is impacting Boeing’s culture:

• That’s the money question for me. We’re on a mission to shape our cultural agenda here at Boeing, and there is no doubt that there are advantages to having a face-to-face meeting to talk about values and dig into what a value means. You can’t do this quite as well with videoconferencing and over a digital format. But I try to make up for this with frequency of talking about important topics about our culture journey and making sure it’s not overly programmed. 
• The other thing that helps me, and this is probably the biggest lever we can pull to enhance our culture at Boeing, is greater transparency. With videoconferencing and working remotely, different parts of the company have stepped up to explain what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Transparency is core to changing a culture, and the digital tools help dramatically.

…what the future looks like for Dave and Boeing?

• I’ll go back to traveling when all is safe, but not the same way. I will do as much or more customer travel, because that is still essential to build relationships and to compete.
• There is no doubt we’ll have a higher virtual workforce in the future. This is essential to attracting and retaining the best talent to Boeing as many employees now want to work in a virtual environment. Any for facility that doesn’t make or engineer something we will consider it virtual first. 

We'll be visiting with other leaders and individuals as we continue this journey together. Thanks for joining!