Lessons Learned from Delta Air Lines

Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege to work with some incredible companies: Publix, Scottrade (now TDAmeritrade), Citi, Air France-KLM - to name a few. While each of these experiences offered valuable lessons in leadership and business acumen, my eight years at Delta Air Lines fundamentally altered the course of my personal and professional life.

While I could pen an entire book on the management and culture of Delta, I’ve summarized the five most important lessons learned.

1) Innovate for the Best Customers

Delta is obsessed with their customers. In a competitive environment, they understand how critical the customer experience is to winning market share. As I often heard, an airplane is an airplane - no matter who you fly it will get you from point A to point B. The reason why people choose one brand over another comes down to just three things: price, trust, and the customer experience.

How do you make customers choose you over the competition? You become obsessed with the Customer Journey.

Know your best customers, anticipate their needs, and innovate.

Twice a year, the sales team at Delta would host town halls to gather feedback from their frequent flyers and corporate customers. They had teams research generational and emerging trends. They employed sales teams to build decade-long relationships. They talked to city leaders, officials, and businesses across the globe.

Then they took this feedback to every internal organization in order to tweak and strategize future product changes, routes, and innovations.

Obsess over the reason why you’re in business: your customers. Know your best customers and do everything in your power to innovate for them.

2) Travel to Grow (Externally & Internally)

When you work for an airline, the most unique benefit (hands down) is the free flights. Not only are free flights an incredible privilege, the internal culture encourages travel and expanding one’s mind beyond their existing borders. It wasn’t uncommon to hear, at the coffee machine, stories of coworker’s weekend trips to Europe or a heated exchange on the best steak dinners in Buenos Aires.

The benefit was unique but the lessons taught can be applied to any business. Delta allowed people to dream big, and explore what was beyond its borders.

This culture permeated beyond the trips and travels. Free to “travel” internally, it was possible to have endless careers within one company. I’ve known finance managers who started as engineers, baggage handlers who are now in marketing, and once flight attendants who became current pilots.

By allowing their employees to explore internally and the world around them, they taught their employees to hope and dream. To become better versions of themselves. To live life humanly and exploratory, like the customers who fly on their planes every day.

3) Goals Deliver Results

Working for an airline, you quickly learn the power of cost discipline. When your product costs millions of dollars, and you work in an industry burdened with debt, every penny counts. Emerging from 9/11, bankruptcy, and mergers, Delta grew into a profitable, innovative company (pre-COVID) with financial discipline and goal setting.

What is cost disciple? Simply adhering to a budget and your goals. Simple in practice but not often executed consistently. Unless you are Delta (cost discipline is instilled in your blood).

Every year, each division was giving a goal and then tasked with creating a plan to hit those metrics. Plan a combination included customer-focused strategies, investments, and cost management exercises.

Then throughout the year, every month, the teams would analyze their progress against these goals. More often than not, every single division met or exceeded their goal.

Why? They had a goal, created a plan, executed, and measured results. If that team wasn’t on course to meet their goals, they’d restrategize and pivot.

4) Relationships Drive Culture

When a company is cost conscious, oftentimes internal culture suffers. Yet a company, no matter their budget, can begin to value and promote value-driven benefits, therefore creating a vibrant and inviting culture. It’s starts from the top, with our values and leadership style.

When I interviewed for my first job at Delta, the interviewer told me culture was critical to the organization and people were more “family than co-workers.” I took that as a canned comment - when you work for a public company that employs 80,000 people, the expectation is you’re just a number. I didn’t buy it.

Until… I got hired. And realized this was my family.

Delta is a company that values travel, innovation, and open-mindedness, combined with an incredibly low employee turnover rate (I worked with dozens people who had 40 years of service under their belts). Together, that creates an environment where people look out for each other, help each other succeed, and equally prioritize the right stakeholders: employees and customers.

With employee profit sharing, Delta was able to create a reward driven environment that benefited the whole - everyone had to succeed to realize the benefits. With incredible company benefits, people could show up to work their best selves (side note: parental leave was the one area really lacking).

Meaningful relationships were encouraged, both internally as well as externally. I remember being in shock when one of our sellers mailed fallen LEAVES to her agency customer in Florida. After developing a meaningful relationship, our seller (who lived in Minnesota) realized her client had never seen fall leaves. So she mailed her an envelope of yellow and red foliage so she could experience the beauty! This kind of stuff happened all the time - like the time I received a business handbook on cultural norms for my first international trip.

Delta valued and prioritized their employee and customer relationships. So in turn, every employee valued and prioritized their own individual relationships. Within eight years, because of Delta, I met my most meaningful mentors, countless advocates, business owners, friends, strangers in foreign lands who welcomed me with arms wide open, two of my bridesmaids, and most importantly my husband.

5) Love What You Do

Delta taught me life is too short to not be doing what you love. Take the leap of faith, pursue passions, say yes, build relationships, explore, travel, and buy that plane ticket.

Au Revoir for now!

Delta gave us the adventure of a lifetime, both professionally and personally (we were expats for 2 years, picnicking with baguettes in Paris, France!).