When The Container Store was going public in 2013, co-founder Kip Tindell wanted his friend Herb Kelleher to join the company’s board of directors.
But the legendary Southwest Airlines co-founder had another idea.
“He said he would do it, but he was getting too old,” said Tindell, who retired in 2019, four decades after co-founding the Coppell-based household goods retailer. “But he said, ‘We’ve got the best young business leader in America right here at Southwest Airlines and his name is Bob Jordan.’”
In February, Robert Jordan takes the lead as CEO at Southwest Airlines, the company Kelleher helped build into a commercial aviation juggernaut.
Jordan, 61, who joined Southwest as a computer programmer in 1988, faces a much different set of challenges than Kelleher ever did in the era of the inter-Texas airline, free bottles of alcohol and flight attendants in go-go boots.
Dallas-based Southwest today has 55,000 employees and carries 445,000 passengers a day, making it the largest domestic carrier in the U.S. and boasting a 47-year streak of profitability heading into the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jordan was somewhat of an unusual pick for CEO, not because of his long tenure at the company, but because he spent years behind the scenes leading important but low-profile projects for the 50-year-old airline — from the move from paper ticketing to online boarding passes to the merger with Orlando-based AirTran Airways in 2011. Jordan’s most recent title was executive vice president of corporate services, a job that doesn’t exist at most companies, and even if it did, would be well below the ranks of presidents and other C-suite executives.
It’s been a winding journey for Jordan, who grew up in Indiana, went to Texas A&M University and then jumped around Southwest Airlines through finance, corporate communications and other jobs until he was named in June as the successor to longtime CEO Gary Kelly. Jordan jokes that he celebrated his 30th, 40th, 50th and 60th birthdays as a Southwest employee, with his only other job working for Hewlett-Packard before being snatched up by the airline to help in its technology department.
“I’ll admit, it took me a while just to get my mind around it because in my mind, I’m still a programmer and it’s hard to feel like you can be good at all the things you need to be good at to be a terrific CEO,” Jordan said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “But when this company that I love and these people I love ask you to do something, you can’t say no, no matter what you think.”
Jordan described himself as a family man who dotes on his two grandchildren, ages 1 and 4, a die-hard fan of Aggie football (he serves on the university’s board of the Association of Former Students), and as a fitness buff who still enjoys weightlifting, cycling and running. He met his wife Kelly at Texas A&M and the two live in Flower Mound, where they attend Cross Timbers Community Church.
They have two grown kids who both went to A&M. He told the Texas A&M Foundation magazine in 2019 that he doesn’t work long hours every day because he doesn’t want to set the example for his employees that they need to spend so much time away from their families.
The challenges
Now two months away from Jordan taking over the top spot, Southwest is facing another period of turmoil after a relatively steady five decades. The airline is still trying to claw its way out of the pandemic and dealing with delay and cancellation problems that damaged its reputation for fun and reliability.
The company is facing a labor crisis with a shortage of thousands of workers and an existing workforce that’s tired and frustrated after the COVID-19 pandemic. That could make Jordan’s first few months on the job difficult with contract negotiations open for pilots, flight attendants and thousands of other crucial workers.
Then there are the leftover challenges from before the pandemic of international expansion and eventually picking a replacement for Boeing’s 737 Max that could come in the next few years after the airplane drew international scrutiny following two fatal crashes due to design and software flaws.
What he doesn’t plan to do is radically remake the way customers interact with Southwest. He also said he doesn’t plan to add bag or change fees or add first-class seating to planes.
But Jordan is hoping the company — which saw revenue plummet from over $22 billion in 2019 to $9 billion during the 2020 pandemic year — will look much different after a few years under his leadership. Among his top priorities are making the company executives’ ranks more diverse in gender and race.
“If you look at our broad population of employees, we mirror the United States, very diverse,” Jordan said. “Then if you look at the supervisory group, we are very diverse; then you look at the manager group, we’re less diverse. You look at the director group, we’re less diverse, and you look at our senior group.”
Overall, Southwest’s workforce was 58% men in 2020 and 60% white, according to the company’s annual report. Black and Hispanic workers accounted for a combined 30% of the employee count.
Jordan said he takes the issue of diversity in senior management to heart because he was given opportunities throughout his career that led him to the top spot. When he started in 1988, he quickly befriended another young professional, Gary Kelly, who would go on to be the company’s chief financial officer and then CEO.
Despite Jordan’s computer programming education, Kelly tapped Jordan to replace him as corporate controller in 1997, part of a string of 15 or more job titles he’s had at Southwest as he moved around to high-need projects, often where he had little or no experience. In 2011, Jordan was named the president of AirTran following the acquisition by Southwest.
“That’s what Gary did for me my whole career,” Jordan said. “He would come in and say, ‘Hey, I want you to go do this AirTran project.’”
“Well, Gary, I’ve never done any M&A and I’m really not sure where you would even start. But he said, ‘I know, you can do it.’”
Another major priority for Jordan is transitioning the airline into a more environmentally friendly one. The company has pledged to be carbon-neutral by 2050 along with other major airlines. Even though the company has committed to using millions of gallons of sustainable aviation fuel, Southwest and other airlines are dependent on major technological breakthroughs, such as electric airliner engines.
Diversity and environmental sustainability are becoming an important focus of the business, Jordan said. The issues are showing up in more discussions with corporate customers and investors, who have set their own racial diversity and environmental goals that they expect their contractors to live up to as well.
But before Southwest goes about saving the planet or addressing racial equity, Jordan and other company leaders are going to have to make fixes to a company damaged by the pandemic. Southwest had a high-profile operational meltdown in October that it blamed on bad weather in Florida, but which led to more than 1,000 cancellations over a high-traffic weekend and stranded passengers at airports across the U.S.
Pilots and flight attendants say they are frustrated after several months of heavy flying and broken trip schedules.
“Time will tell,” said Transport Workers Union Local 556 president Lyn Montgomery, whose labor organization represents Southwest flight attendants. “He’s definitely wanting to get in tune with people and talk to people.
“There’s a lot for him to take on,” she said. “And I think it’s probably the worst time in Southwest Airlines history, so there’s there’s a tough job ahead.”
Federal vaccine mandates also have divided employees, with many saying the decision to require vaccines would not have been made under Kelleher. All major airlines, except Delta, imposed a mandate after pressure from the Biden administration.
Rebuilding the trust will start with “loving on” the thousands of employees at Southwest who have endured the pandemic with potential furloughs in 2020, unruly passengers and the rapid return of customers in 2021, Jordan said.
In the past five months, Jordan has been trying to visit three or four Southwest Airlines stations a month. So far, he’s been to 15 across the country, with additional trips to more of the company’s 130 destinations over the next two months.
When he’s made visits, he’s tried to make sure employees are fed, particularly flight attendants and pilots who have had difficulty getting food due to shortened airport restaurant hours caused by staffing shortages there as well.
“We’re not broken, so there’s no need to turn the airline 90 degrees,” Jordan said. “I think we need a focus on what I’ve called reinvigorating our culture.
“We’ve got a winning culture here at Southwest Airlines but the pandemic especially has been hard on everybody,” he said. “While the culture is intact and in good shape ... it’s just a little frazzled right now given all the people have gone through.”
