Insight From the C-Suite: Linda Rutherford, Chief Administration Officer, Southwest Airlines

As part of a new, members-only series, Women Leading Travel & Hospitality is asking industry executives about their professional journeys, mentorship, how they stay up-to-date on the latest technology and trends, how they take care of themselves, and so much more. This week, insight comes from Linda Rutherford, chief administration officer, Southwest Airlines.

How do you define and communicate your long-term vision for both your personal leadership journey and the success of your organization?
I often say I’m an accidental executive. I never set out a vision to be where I am today. At this phase of my career, it’s a personal mission of mine to focus energy and strategic attention to building the next generation of leaders. I find the best approach is to adopt the Brenè Brown model and find opportunities to be authentic and vulnerable, sharing my career story and lessons learned. My success is now defined by how I build ladders for the future leaders around me and ensuring that the organization I love can be nurtured and grown for many years to come

Describe a situation where you encouraged innovation or took a calculated risk in your leadership role. How do you foster a culture that embraces creativity and risk within your team or organization?
Calculated risks have always been part of the Southwest model of creativity. Our values and fun-loving attitude set the tone from the very top. Our CEO and other C-suite leaders set the example by speaking their minds and always looking for the next creative thing that shows off who Southwest is to the core. You may recall 50 years ago when we gave out alcohol with the purchase of a ticket. Or perhaps you’ve heard the jokes and humorous improv by our world-famous flight attendants. This kind of leadership and spirit has been essential to me personally. I didn’t have to drop my personality at the door and have always been encouraged to take intelligent risks over the years. One example from years ago was when we were introducing a specialty aircraft with the California State Flag emblazoned on the exterior of the plane. I thought the special media moment called for a live California golden bear. All fine and well until the bear wouldn’t come down off the podium and a startled CEO Herb Kelleher was calling down to me to “get this bear out of here".

Share an example of a successful cross-functional collaboration you led. How do you build and sustain effective relationships with peers and stakeholders across the organization?
A cross-functional effort I’m particularly proud of is the creation of our Southwest promise safety initiative in 2020. We needed to garner customer confidence in our ability to keep people safe when traveling amid COVID, and we needed to showcase cleaning methods, HEPA filtration systems, and limited bookings to keep middle seats open. Marketing and communications worked together to create the initiative, all the associated graphics, video and other assets, and media outreach to create the necessary customer awareness and comfort that we were going to do all we could to keep the traveling public safe.

What steps do you take to champion diversity and inclusion within your organization, and how do you ensure that your leadership team reflects a broad range of perspectives and backgrounds? How do you measure those efforts?
Our entire organization focuses on the Southwest way values and have ingrained the values in our approach to work and performance management. We’ve launched both employee-led groups and employee resource groups to build community and teamwork for our people. This year, we launched a new competency to our performance management that focuses on belonging and how we ensure behaviors that are welcoming so everyone feels respected and appreciated. These inform not just your performance appraisal but our long-term talent management and compensation approach for our people. Diversity in our senior leadership is essential to our business as we aim to be a great place to work. Diversity of perspective in background is vital to running a business as complex as an airline. In our boardroom we must have operators, communicators, finance, strategy, commercial and other disciplinary expertise to ensure we bring all stakeholders along and think through the ripple effect and implication of business decisions made every day. In 2020, we set company goals to strengthen and improve efforts to create more diverse, equitable and inclusive opportunities and candidate pipelines, as well as to champion an inclusive environment and experience for all employees. These efforts included a commitment to increasing diversity in senior leadership, double the percentage of racial diversity of leadership, and increasing gender diversity of our senior management by 2025. We track this data closely in partnership with our DEI and people departments and regularly report to our board of directors on this process. I’m proud of the progress we’ve made and know we will continue to work to reflect the diversity of our employees in leadership as well.

Are you a C-suite woman executive in travel and hospitality? We’d love to feature you! Reach us at wlt@skift.com.