Leaving a legacy

The world seldom cooperates with our anticipatory skills. We plan for one thing and end up doing something else. Steve, whose story we bring to you this week, is a case in point. He was all set to retire after having been a successful CEO. He would have loved to have gone out in the glory of his success; instead, he had to restructure the organization, postpone his retirement, and rewrite his capstone/ final assignment as CEO. When you experience unexpected and life-changing situations, you must revise your entire narrative, which Steve did. 

Much of leadership is about making choices. Make the right choice, and leadership works; make the wrong one, you are in for a disaster. Choice-making under these challenging circumstances requires (a) wisdom and (b) agility. Wisdom guides the choices, and agility puts it to work. In making his choices, Steve teaches us that leadership is about knowing what to do when. He balances the two - anxiety and doubts with hope and optimism to center himself. Steve’s final year may be his toughest one yet, but it may also be his best year. He not only had to restructure his organization; he had to 'restructure' himself.

 Read on!

 Steve, in his mid-sixties, is the CEO of a pre-eminent Aviation manufacturer for the last decade and was on the verge of retirement when the pandemic hit. Steve started his career in the industry straight out of university as an engineering management trainee. He climbed his way to the top through an extensive span of roles before taking over as the CEO. His credibility is arguably unmatched in the industry, and his reputation as a pioneer is fueled by his undeniably consistent “eye” for picking winning products. 

 The Aviation business is a long-cycle industry. A new model of an airplane, from concept to launch, can take more than a decade. It is indeed rocket science. A leader must balance advances in technology, manufacturing, market dynamics, globalization, digitization, etc., and place calculated bets. It is genuinely one that requires tremendous technical, commercial, product, customer expertise.

 Steve has been an extremely successful CEO. Under his leadership, the company has doubled its revenues.  Besides, Steve also prides himself on being a great people picker. He has consciously built a culture driven by the purpose of innovation and safety. Steve is proud of his focus on developing talent.

 Steve wanted to retire a couple of years ago, in his early 60s, so that he could pursue his next chapter in life. However, due to extraneous and unusual industry dynamics, he was asked to hold back his retirement. He felt that he would leave a legacy, having done what he could to ensure that the company was healthy and performing. 

 During his tenure, Steve had seen many cycles, but he was shocked at the impact of COVID. As the pandemic started in China, that country fell off the map in terms of air-travel first, followed by the rest of the Asia Pacific region, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. All in about six weeks from the beginning of February to the middle of March. The US alone lost 80% of its departure in about ten days in March. Steve likens this to watching a Tsunami roll across the globe, getting worse and worse every week. Steve considers COVID to be an even more exogenous shock to the industry than 9/11. He thinks the industry will take a while to recover, with his prediction pointing to late 2023 to bring back travel to the 2019 levels.

 At a personal level, Steve reacted to the pandemic on two levels. He was over 60, and many of his friends and peers, and family are older than he is. So, Steve was and still is continuously concerned about the health of the family. Also, Steve’s personality is such that he likes to plan, prioritize, and organize everything he does. But now, "you go to bed every night, and you do not sleep well because you cannot influence this new reality, and you are plagued with relentless concern about it! So, the anxiety levels are huge!" When confronted with a problem, Steve prided himself on being the kind of person who emerged in the morning with a plan and the ability to mobilize his business around it. The situation was so dynamic that he was confronted with the need to rely on his instincts and react - not having a 'plan' or a 'playbook' ready. He confesses, "I felt the accountability of my role, but couldn't necessarily shape the future, yet felt accountable for the outcomes."

 As a result of the chaos, Steve had to push back his retirement. As the aviation industry went into a tailspin, it became apparent that the business would need to go through some significant restructuring. He felt that he needed to do the restructuring and allow his successor to build for the future as the market returned. "I felt an incredible obligation to the business to take it apart properly, as weird as it sounds, rather than have somebody come in new with a learning curve, at this scale, and the need to move fast." 

Steve also has had to deal with COVID among his employees. His business is considered an 'essential' industry by governments, requiring continuity in the operations. "So, we have kept everything open, with all the CDC recommendations- as fast as they make a recommendation, we implemented it." As the crisis continued to mount, over five hundred cases of virus among the workers globally (more than 80 sites around the world) and a couple of deaths. While deeply saddened by the lives lost and affected, he is grateful that the protocols implemented have kept the contact traces at work to an extremely low number. The fatalities occurred due to contracting the virus outside of the work environment. 

 At the onset of the pandemic, Steve reflected that finding the bottom of this thing was like “trying to catch a falling knife-edge every day and that it was razor-sharp." He draws a parallel to how Captain Sullenberger felt when he was trying to figure out what to do with the US Flight 1945 when, on ascent from La Guardia, the airplane hit a flock of birds. In a matter of a few minutes, 'Sully' had to make difficult choices, which eventually lead him to land the plane in the Hudson without loss of life. Steve uses that analogy to point out that it is about prioritization in an air emergency; you are taught “how you aviate, how you navigate, and how to communicate, in that order." First, to ensure that the airplane is under the control of the pilot, you aviate. Once you have control, you navigate, 'figure out where the heck you're going to land the plane." Once you have a plan on landing and control of the airplane, you communicate your intent." Steve made sure that nobody in the organization was distracted from these principles when dealing with the emergency caused by COVID. 

 Once he set this framework for the organization, Steve personally ended up focusing on three things: "I woke up every morning thinking about what's going on with our people, with our customers, and then with the business," splitting his time equally between these three stakeholders. He also has had to “turn the wick up” on 'really' listening to people who could be quite emotional in their communication, acknowledging that this was not a skill he was known for. He says that he has realized people express compelling and intellectual ideas in an emotional situation. He adds," and you need to listen, and absorb, and pick those pieces out to help you connect the dots. That is a big lesson for me: to listen and give people the benefit of the doubt quietly; the emotions of the situations they are dealing with are so significant that they need to express themselves. I find myself quieter." And once he discerns, Steve used this information to build his strategy and start connecting the dots so that the business and the team had a sensible way forward. "I have learned how to appreciate and respect the incredible intellectual capability of my customers and my responsibility to synthesize all of that, at one level above, at a systems level." He believes that his role is now systems thinking- take pieces of all the information from different groups and sources, figure out the puzzle, and find a way forward.

Steve has also made it a habit to call at least one customer a day. He prides himself on talking to all his crucial airline customers at least three times each since the beginning of the crisis. "I am on the phone with them, and we're talking as friends and colleagues, who are both trying to deal with the reality of this. In doing so, he feels that his relationships – that were excellent before the crisis- are incredibly better now. He believes that creating a shared context and using it to foster personal relations and learnings is a way of navigating through the crisis. The knowledge that you are there for others and others are there for you gives a degree of comfort and confidence to do what it takes in times of uncertainty. He does miss physical connections, though. He says, "I can't wait to get on an airplane and see every one of my customers, for the sole purpose of just reconnecting, to have dinner with them, to have an emotional connection that comes from being in the same room. That's how one engenders trust with others."

 Steve had felt that 2020 would be the best time to retire- on a high when the company was performing well and delivering for the customers and the shareholders. He was proud of his legacy as a CEO and felt that he could leave on a high after a dedicated service career. The pandemic changed all that. He has had to reframe his mindset as he finishes his tenure. He acknowledges, "I feel incredibly accountable for structuring this business properly for the next leader to take it where it needs to go. It is one of the things that inspire me- to lay the foundation for the next chapter in this business's life." Steve does not want his legacy to be about his past success. Instead, he wants his legacy to live on in the foundational reinvention of the business … a foundation that sets the business in motion to emerge from the pandemic… even STRONGER and more sustainable than ever! “This has been a hell of a year and one full of learnings I hadn’t anticipated but am respectfully very appreciative of.”