What Makes an Authentic Leader? A CEO Seminar Preview With Oscar Munoz

At BSCAI’s upcoming 2025 CEO Seminar in Cancun, Mexico, attendees will have the privilege of joining a special session featuring former United Airlines CEO and Chair Oscar Munoz.

The session, “Authenticity and The CEO Role: A Fireside Chat with Oscar Munoz,” is one that will inspire any executive looking to sharpen their management skills. Munoz will share how important CEO authenticity is and when chief executives should take a stand on speaking up and out to companies.

A Career Built on Listening

Being able to listen, especially to frontline workers, and understand their needs and wants will be one of the centerpieces of Munoz’s message to building service contractors. When he first became United Airlines' CEO in September 2015, Munoz famously embarked on a listening tour of the company. He met with employees who were sometimes disgruntled and welcomed them to voice their concerns.

“Listen and learn ... only then can you lead,” he says. “This is the mantra that is the core of my leadership philosophy and at the heart of United’s turnaround journey. In 2015, I became CEO of a United Airlines that was anything but united. I had gone through corporate turnarounds previously in my career. And, in those situations, the question isn’t, ‘What needs fixing?’ Because so much is broken. The question is, ‘What do I fix first?’ Everyone from industry experts to Wall Street to the financial media had their preferred answer. My instinct was to ask the folks who actually serve our customers – our frontline staff.”

He informed the mass media that he was going to take 90 days to simply listen and learn before setting out a strategy. “Markets responded to that badly,” he recalls. “But our employees responded to it well. They had rarely seen a CEO actually walking the concourses and hangars, long days and in the small hours of the night.”

Family Roots That Inspire Work Ethic

Munoz has been asked many times since where this instinct came from. In the course of writing his Wall Street Journal best-selling memoir, “Turnaround Time: Uniting an Airline and its Employees in the Friendly Skies,” he had an epiphany.

“It truly came from how I was raised in an immigrant family and from one person, in particular. My maternal grandmother, Mama Josefina, raised me by herself for a time in Mexico before I immigrated to America as a child,” he says. “She went on to work as a housekeeper in Las Vegas, retiring at the tender age of 86. Her work ethic, her dedication to serving others — these are the ssvalues where my belief in listening to the frontline folks was instilled in me.”

An Unexpected Turn

Just over one month into the job, though, Munoz suffered a heart attack so severe that it required a heart transplant to survive. It was life-changing, one he believes transformed his approach at United. “When I woke up from a medically induced coma seven days after I was rushed to Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital,” he says, “not many people in the media and industry thought I was ever going to return as CEO. The headlines wrote themselves: ‘United and Its CEO Both on Life Support!’”

But United’s employees rallied behind him. He awoke to piles of letters, emails, gifts and well wishes, many from the frontline employees he had met during that first month of his listening tour. “Every morning,” Munoz remembers, “my kids would gather around my hospital bed and read the notes, a sacrosanct time we named ‘Mailbag Time.’ They wished me to get well; and, even more urgently, they told me to get back to work and finish what we had begun together — a turnaround project that I had named, ‘The New Spirit of United.’ I have a motto: Proof, not promise. I had made a promise to my employees. I owed it to them to come back and back it up with proof.”

Permission to ‘Swing Easy’

Munoz will offer wise counsel at the 2025 CEO Seminar, but is there a piece of advice given to him early in his career that has stuck with him? Munoz was quick to answer: “‘Swing easy.’ As a guy named Oscar Munoz with my immigrant background, I felt I had a lot to prove in the early stage of my career. This led to a lot of early success, but it also had a limiting effect. I needed to give myself permission to be myself, to open up and be more oriented to the cares and concerns of others.”

Today, he mentors a lot of young professionals, CEOs and entrepreneurs, including those who participate in his venture fund, L’attitude Ventures, focused on seeding Latino-led start-ups. He says, “I love to play golf, and if you grip the club too tight, you often wind up in the rough. If you give yourself permission to swing easy, then things begin to go your way. In any case, it makes life and work a joy.” 

Munoz has specific advice for any executive who's about to take the CEO reins of a company today. “Leadership is not about you,” he urges, “it’s about serving others. Too often, new leaders are so focused on how they are doing and being perceived that they lose sight of what matters: the people you serve. Keep your mind on them and success will follow. Delegate the technical and tactical things to your team. Communication, empathy, listening, forging an authentic connection to the people you serve. This is the language of leadership, and it takes time to speak it fluently.”

On Ambition and CEOs’ Road Ahead

When you’re talking to someone as ambitious as Munoz, there’s always something in their past that just didn’t get done. For Munoz, the opposite seems to be the case. “There’s a reason I seem to keep failing at this whole ‘retirement thing.’ I remain as ambitious as ever — and as busy as ever,” he says with a slight chuckle. “That is why building long-lasting teams is so important. Selecting and developing successors isn’t the last thing you do when you become a leader. It’s the first thing you do. That way, you know that whatever you’ve left undone will get done right.”

As BSCAI leaders close out 2024, the question was posed to Munoz: What is the biggest challenge CEOs will face in the new year? His answer was not surprising: “Technology, particularly AI, will continue to radically transform the world. As the saying goes, ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still function,’” he says. “CEOs will need to be able to stay ahead of the curve of a rapid technological change while never forgetting the human element of leadership. Many things can be outsourced to automation, but not the practice of strong communication, empathy and service to others!”