Boeing’s management needs to shape up, listen more to front-line employees, and communicate better, CEO Kelly Ortberg said at a sometimes edgy all-hands meeting Tuesday, as he took some pointed questions about a poor management culture.

Citing employee feedback from a company survey, he said “their voice needs to be heard.”

“We’re going to put an action plan on those things, and I think they’re going to be brutal to leadership, quite frankly,” Ortberg added.

Speaking in-person to employees in St. Louis, and via webcast to Boeing’s other facilities, Ortberg presented a progress report on his efforts to change Boeing’s culture, then took questions from employees.

His remarks, shared with The Seattle Times by a company insider, touched upon failures in internal communication, a sometimes disrespectful management culture and his plans to improve leadership development.

Answering employee questions, Ortberg also summarized Boeing’s approach to the newly controversial diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs.

Employees posting about the webcast on the Boeing subreddit of the Reddit social media site, and some interviewed Tuesday afternoon by The Times, were skeptical the management culture will change.

“Trust me, it’s broken all the way up the chain,” one self-described employee wrote on Reddit, adding that anyone bringing up issues with management is then treated as a problem.

Asking for respectful management

Ortberg said he’s taken input from a working group of employees, including factory workers and engineers, on how to implement the culture shift he believes is needed and to “take another look at the values in the company and … the behaviors of the company.”

Asked what specifically needs to change in the culture, he said Boeing needs to improve its interactions with employees.

Ortberg described the talent at Boeing as “awesome” and said employees are engaged and “want to be a part of turning the company around” but indicated management must change how it treats employees.

“The thing I wish I could change is how we deal with each other,” Ortberg said.

During questions from employees, one woman working in the Global Services division asked what she can do after her complaints to Boeing’s human resources department about her manager produced no action.

While there is a formal internal system called Speak Up that employees can use to report issues, anonymously or not, Ortberg wants broader openness so that employees don’t fear being labeled a problem.

“We’ve got to get to where we don’t have to use a Speak Up system, that we’re just talking to each other about issues, talking with our leaders if we see issues, particularly around the safety system,” Ortberg said.

“We’re very insular,” he added. “We don’t communicate across boundaries as well. We don’t work with each other as well as we could.”

For the vice presidents who report to him, Ortberg has resurrected the intense weekly leadership debriefs that former Commercial Airplanes CEO Alan Mulally conducted two decades ago at Boeing, and later at Ford.

“I’ve changed the whole cadence of the corporation,” Ortberg said. “We weren’t doing that before. So people weren’t as up to speed on what’s going on. There was no avenue for people to voice things. Sometimes things fester.”

He advised leaders and managers within the company to “sit down and talk to your people …. I mean, really talk to ‘em about what’s going on.”

Boeing will step up leadership development training, Ortberg said.

At one point, he offered help to anyone newly “thrown in” to management and not coping.

If “now you’re leading a whole bunch of people and you have no idea how to do that, please reach out,” he said.

Skepticism in the ranks

Several employees who spoke Tuesday to The Seattle Times about Ortberg’s webcast welcomed the direction of his comments but were skeptical.

One Renton quality mechanic, who asked not to be identified to protect his job, said everyone at his work today was much too busy to listen to the webcast, though may do so later.

However the mechanic said he and others typically dismiss such talk from above.

“Most of the time, we write it off,” he said. “It becomes a box to tick. Management has mandated that I have to take the time to listen.”

Suggestive of the difficulty Ortberg faces in repairing Boeing’s damaged culture, the mechanic added that he and his peers need action, not words. “The only thing that matters to us is what we see on the factory floor.”

A flight test engineer, who also asked not to be identified to protect his job, said he too will wait to see results from Ortberg’s direction.

“There is a management-culture problem,” the engineer said. “If we see people being let go, we’ll know he’s serious.”

During the all-hands session, one employee asked if Boeing’s approach to DEI will change following the edict from President Donald Trump to discard any such programs.

“We are a defense contractor, as you all in this room fully well know, so we need to be compliant,” Ortberg responded. “But at this point I don’t see a lot of changes.”

“We have always been a merit-based focus in what we do, and I don’t think that’s going to change,” he added. “We need to put the best people in the jobs to have the best outcome.

“Having said that, we have to create an environment where everybody has an equal opportunity to be successful in the company. And so we’re going to continue to do that.”

Ortberg said the most positive changes already underway are in Boeing’s safety culture, a shift compelled by regulators following the MAX crashes six years ago and the Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout early last year.

There, Boeing has made “great strides,” he said, with safety management and consideration of safety risks now factored into every decision.

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