September 27, 2009
Corner Office
Bad News or Good, Tell Me Now
This interview with Lawrence W. Kellner,chairman and chief executive of Continental Airlines, was conducted, edited and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Q.What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?
A. A lot of the lessons probably came from my dad. When I was a kid, he was a manager in a Campbell’s Soup plant and had several hundred people working for him. When I watched him at work, he never really seemed to tell people what to do. He always seemed to figure out how to get them to want to do it. He always spent a lot of time figuring out who his best people were, and he spent a lot of time figuring out what it was they wanted to do, and then it all seemed to work flawlessly. So it comes back to getting the right people, and getting them doing the right thing, and getting them the right training.
Q.Any other key lessons that you learned along the way?
A. The importance of listening and, in many cases, getting the quiet person who doesn’t necessarily always contribute to speak up. You’ve got to go ask them sometimes, and I counsel them on the side: “Don’t make me come find you. When you’re in a meeting and you see where we’re going and you’ve got a view on it, don’t wait until I ask your opinion.”
As I moved up the chain, I quickly realized that I knew less about a lot of areas than the people who worked for me, and if I was talking, they were just going to do what I wanted. So it was really important to listen to them and get their feedback. By listening to all sides, I could try to figure out the right answer.
Q.How do you set the tone to make that happen?
A. People have a tendency to deliver good news. I mean if somebody unscheduled pops up to my office, the odds are they’ve got a piece of good news and they’re eager to share it. But when something is going wrong, they have to feel they can flag it as quickly as when it’s going right, so that you can shift the organization and try to solve the problem. It’s a leadership structure that says, “Look, I don’t care how bad the situation is — the sooner you catch it, the better.” But if you’ve known about it for months and have been hoping against hope that all your other contingencies would solve the problem and you’ve burned up all our opportunities to solve it, I’m going to be a whole lot more unhappy.
Q.Are there any bosses you’ve had through the years that taught you something particularly memorable, good or bad?
A. One of my first bosses was nice and friendly during the whole job, didn’t say a word. And then I got this performance review at the end with comments that would have been nice to know during the process. One, I didn’t agree with him, but two, it didn’t matter. He was the boss and I fully respected that, but it’s kind of hard for me to read his mind. He made me look like I did a terrible job, and yet I walked into the room thinking that this would be pretty good feedback.
And so I learned an important lesson about communicating up front, right away, and I think that was probably reinforced by my best bosses. They gave me lots of feedback as I was going along, so even if things didn’t work out perfectly, it sure wasn’t a surprise when we talked about where we were.
Q. Talk about the art of giving feedback.
A. Short, clear and direct. My general view is the first time I tell you something — I mean it may just be my view of the world — that’s not a bad one on you. If I keep telling you the same thing and you keep doing the other thing, that’s when we have a much tougher discussion.
Q. How do you manage your time?
A. I used to have a long, long to-do list, and I’ve always managed my life and managed time by using a to-do list. At the end of the day, I’d click through and see which ones got done and kind of mark them off. Then five more notes might be on my desk, and, as I’m cleaning up for the day, I’d throw them on the list.
At some point, I realized that a lot of times I was doing what came to me as opposed to what was really important. So I started coming to work and saying, “O.K., what are the three most important things I need to do today?” And I’m going to rank them 1-2-3. And if No. 1 is a 12-hour task, then I’ll just spend all day working on it. I need to decide what’s the most value-added thing that I can get done on this list.
As I moved further up in management, my calendar started getting kind of messy. So I sat down and said, “O.K., I’ve got 250 workdays,” or whatever it was. “How many will I spend on Wall Street? How many will I spend on Washington? How many will I spend doing sales calls with the sales team?” And then I went to the head of each department and gave them a budget of X number of days of my time, and told them, “O.K., you get X. You’ve got your budget. If I’m free, you can use it. But that’s all you get.”
And then, the last piece I came to, when I became C.E.O., was to end each of my three most important meetings each month by saying: “O.K., here are the three most important things we’re doing. Here are the three priorities.”
What I found very early was if I put something on the list of three, I was amazed at the amount of resources that would be applied to getting that done, because nobody liked being in the top three. But at the same time, I had to be really careful to pick the things that were going to create the most value.
Q. What surprised you about the top job?
A. I’d been No. 2 for several years. What surprised me was simply how different it is when it’s ultimately your decision. It’s a little bit like being a parent. People can describe being a parent to you and you think you know what it’s going to be like. And then you become a parent and you say, “Wow.” Being a C.E.O. is not quite what you anticipated — the number of people looking for your time, all the responsibilities and the demands.
Q. How do you hire?
A. I don’t believe — and I probably learned this through experience — that any one-hour or two-hour interview can let me figure out, “Yeah, that person is going to be really successful.” What I’ve found is that step one is, “O.K., have I worked with somebody who could fill this job who’s really good?” Because I’ve found my success rate is dramatically higher going that route. If not, the second step is to widen the net to people who I trust, and look for people they’ve worked with. Our third net is we try to find somebody we know and trust who knows the person we’re thinking of hiring. The best possible interview is minuscule in value compared to somebody who’s got even a couple of months of work experience with somebody, who’s actually watched how they work.
Q. Are there questions you typically ask?
A. My general goal is, how do I get them talking, to see what they talk about? And I really watch myself when I’m interviewing to talk as little as possible. I don’t have any piercing questions. It’s much more about seeing where they want to go, seeing what they find interesting.
Q. What would you like business schools to teach more of, or less of?
A. I’d say more about general management, but what I really mean is people and priorities, and how you get people to do stuff. I think the schools are great about teaching finance techniques, and teaching accounting, and teaching economics. But I don’t think business schools spend enough time teaching how you structure incentives, and how you make the whole organization work together. It’s super-critical.
Q. What are your goals as a manager and a leader?
A. Well, since I’m leaving Continental at the end of the year, I’m going to go from an organization that’s got more than 40,000 people to an organization today that’s got two, and I’m one of them. I’ll get back to a spot where I’ll be more hands-on and have a chance to be a little more personal with the individuals I’m interacting with. Part of the reason I did it is because I want to create something from scratch. That will take a different set of leadership skills than it does to run Continental, and I think I have those skills. But I’m going to find out.