When I worked at Airbus, I had the privilege to work with on occasions and get to know the President and CEO Tom Enders. Initially when Tom became President and CEO in August 2007, he seemed, in my view, to be a reluctant leader. Taking over a vast organisation (as the third CEO in two years) plagued with new aircraft delays, low morale among staff, elite silos all around the company within the Airbus core country perimeters, he most surely had his work cut out in turning the organisation around.
I remember one of the first occasions he met the senior management team in the UK. It was with the full Executive Committee (EC) to explain the new vision for the company. It was all stirring stuff and made loads of sense. As we were responsible for arranging the communication session, and is the form with Town Hall meetings, it was an open forum, with a question and answers debate at the end. All was going well, sensible questions with equally sensible answers from various EC members and Tom. That was until the end. A final question. A question, that if answered with conviction, would send the management team away from the meeting energised and motivated. The question went something like this; "Do you have any plans to set out an engagement process with employees on behaviour, values and vision?" Now it wasn't a planted question (not that we do such things!) but a genuine enquiry because it made sense at that juncture.
Tom responded without a moment of hesitation and there lay-in became the issue, "We don't have a plan and neither do we need one." It wasn't so much the reply but how his response was received and the way it was delivered. For one short moment, Tom seemed to loss composure and his frustrated, hurried, ill thought out response had crushed all the good communication before hand.
Meeting over, EC leave, managers grab their belongings and in groups, as they leave, discuss the last comment. No plan for employee engagement?
The effect of that interaction sent the management team with a distorted impression. Something that they felt needed to happen to deliver the transformation of the company was not even considered.
But Tom is not your usual leader. He is unusual in that he is unique. While he may not have reckoned on the impact of his answer that day, from there on in he proofed his remarkable leadership skills on - you guessed it - engagement. He was at the forefront of the employee engagement process when it was eventual launched, encouraging employees to reveal how engaged they felt with the company. He took the result on the chin, it wasn't a pretty picture the survey painted, but Tom had started the process of turning Airbus around, developing a high performance culture in a truly transparent organisation.
And lead from the front he has and the results will be fully realised in the next couple of years.
An example of Tom's commitment can be seen in the attached video. Now I ask you, how many CEO's do you know would be the first to test out a product and potentially put their live on the line? Here Tom Enders parachutes out of the A400M.
