Southwest Airlines' CEO Cried Over Major Change
He weathered the furor over Southwest's policy change ending free checked bags for many customers. He dealt with additional customer questions about the airline's decision to get rid of unassigned seating.
But there's one thing he cried over.
Layoffs. And there were a lot of them.
Jordan made the comments on June 26 to author David Novak on the How Leaders Lead podcast.
'As we processed the layoff, I had a lot of times where I was sitting in my office crying, to be honest, crying about the decision,' Jordan said. 'Not crying as in making that decision, but just the difficulty it was going to be for our people.'
He said in the podcast that he tries to to give "too much air to the negativity."
"The airline industry is tough," Jordan conceded. "I'm not sure there's a tougher business on the planet."
The layoffs were massive.
"The workforce reduction of approximately 1,750 employee roles is focused almost entirely on corporate overhead and leadership positions and represents approximately 15% of corporate positions, including senior leadership and directors," Southwest wrote in a February news release.
'So we eliminated functions that we decided we just don't need any longer. Two different departments doing the same thing, put them together, layers of leadership that we just didn't need … because those layers add more and more decision making and more and more meetings and more and more process,' he said of the layoffs.
Jordan added: 'If folks are upset, be mad at Bob because Bob made the decision."
Jordan defended some of the other major changes at the airline at the Bernstein 41st Annual Strategic Decisions Conference in May, according to a transcript posted by Seeking Alpha.
"It isn't a set of initiatives that are sort of crazy things that Southwest is doing that are unique to the industry. These are really things that the industry is doing. So I look at that and I see number one: low risk of implementation," he said.Southwest Airlines' CEO Cried Over Major Change first appeared on Men's Journal on Jun 27, 2025
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