This interview with Linda Hudson, president of the land and armaments group for BAE Systems, a military contractor, was conducted, edited and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Luke Sharrett/The New York Times
Linda Hudson, president of the land and managements group at BAE Systems, says it is crucial to study the corporate culture.
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Every Sunday, Adam Bryant talks with top executives about the challenges of leading and managing.
Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?
A. It was when I first became a company president, and it was the first job where I was truly responsible for the performance of a company. I had mastered the day-to-day mechanics of running organizations. But I don’t think the leadership part of it had settled in quite as profoundly as it did when I took over a company.
I was the first female president of the General Dynamics Corporation, and I went out and bought my new fancy suits to wear to work and so on. And I’m at work on my very first day, and a lady at Nordstrom’s had showed me how to tie a scarf in a very unusual kind of way for my new suit. And I go to work and wear my suit, and I have my first day at work. And then I come back to work the next day, and I run into no fewer than a dozen women in the organization who have on scarves tied exactly like mine.
And that’s when I realized that life was never going to be the way it had been before, that people were watching everything I did. And it wasn’t just going to be about how I dressed. It was about my behavior, the example I set, the tone I set, the way I carried myself, how confident I was — all those kinds of things. It really was now about me and the context of setting the tone for the organization.
That was a lesson I have never forgotten — that as a leader, people are looking at you in a way that you could not have imagined in other roles. And I didn’t see that nearly as profoundly when I was leading a functional organization or a smaller enterprise.
But to this day, not only the awareness of that, but the responsibility that goes along with it, is something that I think about virtually every day.
Q. What else did you learn from that?
A. Well, it gets back to the obligations that go with the position, or how do you parlay that position into something that is effective for the organization. And I think it’s all about clarity, where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, what you have to do to do it, communicating effectively and often, and being very accessible and open to the people around you. It’s trying to bring the human part of leadership into the day-to-day aspects of what you do.
I’ve observed it too often: leaders, particularly of large organizations, isolate themselves from the people who work for them, and the personal relationships that often define who you are and what you’re trying to do tend to disappear. I work very hard for that not to be the way I do things or the way I interact with people.
Q. Give me some specifics. What have you done to counteract that tendency?
A. Well, just on a day-to-day basis. I have, what, 20,000 employees now, but I look for every opportunity, when I’m out visiting locations, just to sit down informally with a cross section of employees, from hourly workers to others, and say: “Anything’s on the table. What do you want to talk about?” I do that as frequently as I can find an opportunity to do it. I find that it’s extremely well received.
My e-mail is open to anybody in the organization. Anybody can send me a message, and I answer it. And I find they don’t abuse that.
I’m not a touchy-feely kind of leader. I tend to be very decisive and make decisions quickly. But I think it’s incredibly important to realize that relationships define everything that we do, and it’s all about the quality of those relationships that makes an organization work.
Q. Are there any other lessons you learned that shaped your management and leadership style?
A. I was a teenager in the ’60s and in college in the late ’60s and early ’70s. So I grew up in a very uncertain time, when the country was going through lots of difficulties, the Vietnam War, and riots because of civil rights issues. Women were just beginning to get active in the women’s rights movement. And that time very much defined who I am, along with the fact that I grew up in Central Florida at the peak of the space program.
So I grew up wanting to fly airplanes and be an astronaut, and I was very technically inclined in an era when that was not an acceptable thing for women. I was the only female in my engineering class at the University of Florida.
When I graduated from college, and I graduated near the top of my class, I was turned down for my first mortgage because I might get pregnant. Women were not entitled to their own credit. American Express turned me down for their college credit card program.
In those early years, I was often told and treated like I didn’t count, I didn’t matter. I made more money than my husband, but they wouldn’t count my income. In the workplace, there were no laws at the time to protect women from sexual harassment. There were all kinds of evil and ugly things that happened in the workplace, and there was nothing you could do but find a way to cope and to find a way to make things happen.
