Brilliant Moves: Coffee with United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is focused on ensuring the company is built to thrive in any context. In this episode of Brilliant Moves: Coffee with CEOs, McKinsey Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels sits down with Kirby, who reflects on resetting culture after the pandemic upended the airline industry, building radical transparency with customers, and leading with optimism grounded in responsibility. From hiring for attitude to creating time for foresight, Kirby shares the habits and convictions shaping United’s next decade.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Acting like a start-up at 100 years old

Bob Sternfels: One reason I was excited to have this conversation is that our organizations have some common history: We’re both in our 100th-year celebrations. As you know, not many organizations make it to 100.

I know you’re focused on the future. Even if we can’t predict the next 100 years, looking at the next decade for United, what are some things you’re confident won’t change? And what are some things you think will? 

Scott Kirby: At United, one of the things I tell our employees is that we’re now a five-year-old start-up embedded inside a 100-year-old airline. Coming out of the pandemic—which was so existential for us—we took the opportunity to really reset our culture and technology across the board. As I look forward, I think we’re going to keep driving a lot of change.

Of course, a lot of things are going to stay the same. Unless somebody invents a transporter, which doesn’t seem likely.

Bob Sternfels: No Star Trek? 

Scott Kirby: I’d love it. It’d be super cool. It’d blow up our business, but it’d be super cool.

There will be technology changes—blended-wing bodies, and I think at some point we’re going to have supersonic aircraft again, though it will be a niche.

But the focus will be on how we make the whole experience feel good for passengers. Some of that is the onboard experience—having seat-back entertainment that’s relevant and gives passengers something to do.

But those are not structural changes. Those are evolutionary changes, not revolutionary changes. 

An epiphany for me was a decade ago when the CEO of a Fortune 50 company told me, “One thing I don’t like about travel is that it’s the only time in my life that I’m not in control. I have no idea what’s going on with a flight.”

I think what will feel more revolutionary to customers is being communicated to transparently. I want to tell every customer exactly what I would hear, so you know what we know.

Hiring for attitude and aptitude

Scott Kirby: I say that I have the easiest job of anyone at United because I have only one responsibility: Create an airline that our employees are proud of. Because if they’re proud, they take care of everything else. And when something goes wrong, whether it’s weather or anything else, they want to take care of you and make you feel the same way. If you’re proud of something, you want everyone else to feel the same about it. It sounds so simple, and it really is so simple, but if you can get a team rallied, they can accomplish wonders. 

Bob Sternfels: I love your idea of a five-year-old start-up inside a 100-year-old company. In that five-year span, you’ve added a lot of folks. You’ve also been innovative, at least from the outside, in creating pathways for people to join United—from flight attendants to pilots.

How is that going? How are you thinking about sourcing talent? Where are you on that journey? 

Scott Kirby: We’re one of the few places left where people with a high school diploma can come work as a flight attendant, a gate agent, on the ramp, or in tech ops, with overtime pay. Once they get to the top of the seniority scale, they can earn six-figure incomes with great benefits, buy a house, send their kids to college. There just aren’t many careers like that left. So I’m proud of that.

When we open up our flight attendant hiring for 2,000 to 3,000 positions, we get about 75,000 applications within a couple of hours.

So for us, the question is: How do you find people who have the right mentality and customer service attitude? We can train them to do the jobs, but how do you build a process to pick the right people and keep them excited?

Bob Sternfels: We get a lot of applications as well. I think worldwide, we receive more than a million applications every year. And this idea you mention—do folks have the right attitude, the right orientation—did you ever rethink how you were assessing your talent approach?

Scott Kirby: I started a new process. I asked our head of flight operations to select a dozen of our pilots who were well-liked by everyone. And when candidates would come through for interviews, these pilots would escort them around the building—go to lunch with them, take them to the interviews, and so forth. I told this group of pilots, “Your job is just to assess: Is this interviewee someone I would like to take a four-day trip with? And if you say no, then they’re out. You get a veto vote.” The idea is to pick people who care about others, who you want to hang out with, who you want to be with. 

From excuses to ownership

Scott Kirby: The best thing I learned while in the Air Force Academy—for life and for business—was this: “No excuses, sir.” As a cadet, something might happen that’s not your fault, but there are still consequences. If someone asks you about it, you have to say, “No excuses, sir,” and you have to accept the consequences, whatever they are.

It’s so common in the business world for people to make a list of excuses. Oh, the weather. Oh this, oh that. All these things that are not my fault. Our chief operating officer says, “It may not be our fault, but it is our responsibility.”

Bob Sternfels: And it moves you back to that mindset of, “So what are you going to do about it? What’s the solution?”

Leadership is about energy

Scott Kirby: One of the most important jobs of a leader is to make people feel optimistic about the future. But it can’t be naive optimism. It can’t be Pollyannaish. 

Bob Sternfels: It’s almost an earned or fact-based optimism. 

Scott Kirby: I also believe in self-fulfilling prophecies. By saying you’re going to do incredible stuff, you make it a whole lot more likely that it’s going to happen.

Bob Sternfels: We’ve done a lot of work on leadership and one thing we’ve learned is that great leaders find a way to constantly radiate energy to others. My son, who was taking chemistry, said, “Dad, it’s like they’re exothermic.” It feels like that’s a piece of it—that there are these moments when you’re giving other people energy. 

Scott Kirby: And people can feel if you have energy and passion. Another thing I say is that people often confuse management and leadership.

Management is about compliance. It’s about: Did you show up to work on time? Did you do the checklist? And that’s really important.

But leadership is about inspiration and vision. It’s about how you make people feel.

Bob Sternfels: Are you management or leadership? 

Scott Kirby: There’s always some mix, but the further you move in your career, the more you index to leadership. And by the time you’re in my job—by the time you’re the CEO—it’s 100 percent leadership. If I’m the one doing compliance checklists, we’ve really screwed up. It’s 100 percent about inspiration and vision. 

Creating space for foresight

Bob Sternfels: You lead a global airline, you travel a lot, there’s always something going on. What’s your personal operating model? How do you make it work? How do you make sure you don’t burn out? 

Scott Kirby: I’m going to make you and many of your partners either angry or jealous. On my calendar, I have a rule—or guideline, at least: no more than four hours of meetings a day.

Bob Sternfels: And you use the rest of the time to think? 

Scott Kirby: To think, or to call people, or just whatever. 

Bob Sternfels: Unstructured.

Scott Kirby: Pretty unstructured, but I’m really efficient with my time. Some important things are, one, having time to think instead of sitting in meetings you don’t need to be in. And two, you need to be a genuinely curious person, reading about a very wide variety of subjects. 

I read about three hours a day, on average. And you just never know when the things that you’ve read are going to click together.

Bob Sternfels: I’ve been at McKinsey for nearly 32 years, and over that period, I’ve seen how CEOs have changed the way they operate. When it comes to sleep and exercise, CEOs today treat themselves more like elite athletes.

Scott Kirby: A thing I do that people have thought is weird is that, throughout my whole career, when I’m in the office, I’ll close the door and take a 20-minute nap. When I first got to United, people were, like, “Oh my God, where do you take a nap?” I said, “I lay on the floor.” They said, “We’ve got to get a couch in here!” They were all stressed out.

But if I take a 20-minute nap, I’ve accomplished more than anything else I would have accomplished in that time. When you’re tired, your brain is not 100 percent. If you’re not 100 percent, you shouldn’t be making decisions. 

Lightning round

Bob Sternfels: Let me close with some lightning-round questions. First flight of the day or last flight home? 

Scott Kirby: First. I’m a morning person. 

Bob Sternfels: Me too. We’ve both spent a lot of time in airports—what’s one thing that you’ve learned just by watching people in airports? 

Scott Kirby: Traveling through an airport from start to finish is stressful. De-stress it. 

Bob Sternfels: I love that. Window or aisle seat?

Scott Kirby: Window, for sure. 

Bob Sternfels: Why? 

Scott Kirby: Oh, I love to watch all the places go by—the cities, the rivers, the mountains. My favorite is flying over the Colorado Rockies and trying to pick out each of the “fourteeners” [mountain peaks higher than 14,000 feet], which is easy from the ground but harder from the air. Looking down, I can say, “I’ve been there, I’ve hiked there, I’ve hiked that.”

Bob Sternfels: Did you ever think you’d end up the CEO of one of the most influential airlines in the world? Was this ever part of the grand plan?

Scott Kirby: I never had a grand plan. That’s actually one of the unusual pieces of advice I give people when they ask for career advice. Two pieces, really: “Don’t have a plan,” and “If you’re not having fun, do something different.”