Mike Van de Ven spoke to students this week in the BHP Lyceum Course. Van de Ven is the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Southwest Airlines. He joined Southwest in 1993 as the Director of Internal Audit, became VP of Planning in 2001, and took on his current role in 2005.
He started his career at Arthur Young & Co. (now Ernst & Young) as an auditor, where he said he gained insight into companies of all sizes and learned to solve complex problems. He worked on the Southwest Airlines account for 10 years and became so interested in the company that he ultimately decided to leave the company and join Southwest full time. He took a pay cut and moved out of his posh office to a small office with just a card table and a folding chair. He was so excited about the job and company’s potential for growth, that he said he didn’t mind.
One of the biggest lessons Van de Ven said he learned right away from Southwest President Emerita Colleen Barrett was that if you want to lead people, you have to serve people. She taught him the importance of serving the people who are making your company great. Under her direction, he served hot dogs in the blistering heat to ground crews, and painted walls and hung photos around the office. A student asked him about the great customer service and friendly attitude Southwest is known for later in the class, and Van de Ven said he thinks part of that can be attributed to executives of the company serving and recognizing their employees.
Another experience he shared with the students was what it was like to be six months on the job as the head of planning for the airline on September 11, 2001. “It was the most eventful and chaotic day of my professional life,” said Van de Ven. There was a massive amount of problem-solving needed and he didn’t know if the plan he had for the airline would still be viable after what happened. “You will have defining moments like this in your career,” he told the students. “The things you are doing today will prepare you for these. Situations are going to arise where you don’t have an answer and you are going to have to fall back on something you know.”
Here are a few of the things Van de Ven knows and shared with the students.
- “Pass the lunch test” – be interested in people and a good communicator, because if someone doesn’t want to go to lunch with you, you can’t be a good leader. Also hire people you want to go to lunch with.
- “Have a mantra” – his has been to be “In scope, on time, and in budget” and he learned that from his time as an auditor. Good processes and procedures are key, but you also have to narrow problems down and solve what is most important first.
- “There’s something about Mary” – actually, it isn’t something about Mary that is important, it is something special about you. You become crucial to an organization when there is some kind of experience that only you can provide.
In addition to these lessons, he stressed the importance of networking while you are in school, citing connections he made to professors and classmates whom he ended up working closely with later in his career. “Be deliberate in the connections you make now. The people you are sitting next to in class now are going to be the leaders of companies twenty to thirty years from now,” he said. “I never in my wildest dreams would have thought I would be COO of Southwest Airlines.”