Putting People First - Leadership Insights from Former United Airlines CEO | Oscar Munoz

Oscar Munoz (0:00)

Here's the trick for all of us as leaders. It is never, never too late to do the right thing.

Michael Gervais (0:07)

Okay, welcome back. We're welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And today I'm really excited to welcome a remarkable leader who has transformed the aviation industry with his very unique approach to leadership, the former CEO of United Airlines, Oscar Muñoz. In 2015, Oscar became the CEO of United Airlines, a global organization that was at the time anything but United. And its reputation was certainly in freefall. Oscar's journey at United began with a whirlwind of challenges. And it's through those experiences that he gained invaluable insights into the power of listening and learning. So we dive into Oscar's first 100 days at the helm of United as he faced a daunting task of reshaping the company's culture, addressing customer concerns and navigating a rapidly changing industry.

All while 37 days into his new role, he suffered a severe heart attack. You'll hear about that story and how Oscar was able to adjust to those conditions. We talk about his first principles, the ones that guided his leadership approach, and more importantly, how he stayed true to them even during a very public PR crisis for both him and United.

There are so many gems in this conversation. I can't wait for you to learn from Oscar's wisdom and his insights and frameworks for leadership and for life. So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Oscar Muñoz.

Oscar, I am thrilled to sit down and learn from you. And so thank you so much in advance for spending the time with us.

Oscar Munoz (2:05)

Oh, no. Well, listen, it's a pleasure. And it was great to kind of get a chance to meet you and those pre-calls that we all have. I just, such an important part of conversation and communication is to get to know the person that you're talking with. It just makes for a more insightful and I think listenable to, that's a word, conversation. So thanks for doing that. I'm looking forward to this.

Michael Gervais (2:25)

Yeah, I mean, I think you're like, we'll just start there because you are so relationship based. I wanna kind of see if we can bridge that idea of being relationship based with your first 100 days at United and yeah, okay, so good. Because I think that you can't win in the first 100 days but you can definitely lose. You can lose people, you can lose money, you could lose vision and buy and you can lose trust.

So when you look back at your first 100 days at United, can you paint that picture for us?

Oscar Munoz (3:00)

So much happened in particular with me because in the middle of that, I also had developed a very dramatic medical condition and part of that. So let me see if I can be a bit succinct.

First and foremost, from a perspective, so many people and so many experiences I've had in the business, in the market, in the business world, I've learned from many activities that I've done in my previous jobs that when you have a turnaround situation and United was all that and more with regards to, it was broken on so many angles, I've learned to quickly ascertain that you have to figure out what the thing you wanna start with first before you start building all of those other things.

And as you go through that, you're gonna get lots of input. Your consultants are there, your board is there, your senior management's there, of course.

And then guess who's also there? Your customers, your investors. And then the one group that's always left out of that are the actual employees that provide the service in a business like an airline, right? We're not making widgets in the back room and shipping them out everywhere. Our service product is on time, friendly skies level of service and we were doing none of that. And so the first 100 days, and as I first walked in, the first day is always exciting and it was dramatic because the departure of my predecessor had all sorts of activities associated with it. So it was a very surprising move. And then since I was on the board, I knew everyone. So coming on board was a little bit of a shock to many and inclusive in the aspect that I did not have a deep industry experience in aviation. I had deep experience in many of the things that you do to run a company, but not in aviation in particular. And like any industry, if you don't have that depth, people immediately worry and constant. So you have to set that sort of structure coming in.