Interview with Delta Air Lines CEO: Core Capabilities for Any Professional?
With the increasing competition for available jobs, we can all take a cue from Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson.
In Sunday’s New York Times Corner Office, columnist Adam Bryant asked Mr. Anderson if there was any change in the qualities he looked for in candidates compared to 5 or 10 years ago. His reply focused on the intangibles:
“Typically, when you’re hiring a vice president of a company, they already have the résumé, and they already have the experience base. And so what you’re trying to find out about are the intangibles of leadership, communication style, and the ability to, today, really adapt to change.”
Ask any engineer, accountant, or sales professional and they’ll tell you that their week consists of communicating—emails to their colleagues, reports to their managers, proposals and presentations to their clients. But frequency doesn’t equate to effectiveness.
CEO Anderson continued to drive home his point about the increasing importance of communication today:
“People really have to be able to handle the written and spoken word. And when I say written word, I don’t mean PowerPoints. I don’t think PowerPoints help people think as clearly as they should because you don’t have to put a complete thought in place. You can just put a phrase with a bullet in front of it. And it doesn’t have a subject, a verb, and an object, so you aren’t expressing complete thoughts…”
If you read the same corporate reports, hear the same management briefings, watch the same slideshows as I do in and out of corporations daily, then you understand his point. Common-sense communication isn’t all that common—nor that clear.
Communicating clearly, concisely, and compellingly has become a core capability for the job candidate.
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