Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Lumen CEO Kate Johnson

I recently interviewed Kate Johnson on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is a Fortune 500 CEO and was one of America's leading women in technology. Kate Johnson is the CEO of Lumen Technology, where she leads nearly 30,000 employees at a company that generated nearly $20 billion last year. Kate, thank you for joining us.

Kate: Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Adam: Kate, you grew up in New Jersey, am I allowed to share that?

Kate: Yeah, I guess you are now. Born and raised, extremely proud for all of you New Jersey-ights out there.

Adam: You then went to college, I went to grad school in Pennsylvania, studying electrical engineering before getting your MBA. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons were most instrumental to shaping your worldview into shaping the trajectory of your success?

Kate: Studying engineering was kind of cool because it was all about problem-solving. I wasn't born and raised to be an engineer, I just wanted to study it because I thought it was cool and interesting. And when I graduated, I went into Bell Labs. And I figured out in about 11 seconds that I was the world's worst engineer. It was great to think through problems, but I just wasn't great in a lab. And I needed to be with people. And so I kind of pivoted over to AT&T to sell at first just long lines, and then ultimately business systems. And it was super fun. And I guess you got to follow your heart was the thing that I learned because my heart was in problem-solving, not necessarily the discipline of engineering itself. And I had the courage to pivot early on and turned out to be a great thing. Because I had a nice and long career in sales where I learned about customer obsession, which has been one of the major themes of my career.

Adam: We're gonna dive into a number of themes that have been central to the success that you've been able to enjoy over the course of your career. After your engineering days, you went to work for Deloitte Consulting, and then went to UBS, then to Red Hat, then to Oracle, to GE, and ultimately became the president of Microsoft a U.S. business, you ran a $45 billion p&l at Microsoft, before becoming the CEO of Lumen. What were the keys to rising within your career? And what can anyone do to rise within their career?

Kate: So you know, it's interesting, because when you sort of rattle off that list, it's max as somebody who's bouncing around. But instead, it was much more of an opportunistic, where's the next great problem that I could solve. And I guess the underlying theme is I just love change, I love to be a part of it, I love to instigate it, I love to lead it. And that's really what shaped my entire trajectory. Probably started really, after grad school at Deloitte, where I got a chance to do a bunch of different projects for large multinational companies. Each one was in a different industry, and each function that I was doing a project in was different from the one before. And I got this framework in my mind of, okay, you come in, and you get proximity, and you understand what's going on and what the gaps are to the vision of where you want to be. And you try and figure out how to move teams and people and business processes to the new thing. And I just fell in love with that as a process. And it turns out, the timing was good because with the advent of it, and then the advent of digital, there's a lot of that going around, a lot of companies need to go from x to y, and figure out how to use these technologies to be more productive, to provide better customer experiences. And so once you kind of have that framework, and you develop the skills around change management, it can be a formidable career. Although if you look at a piece of paper, it doesn't necessarily always have a straight line. It can be a little bit orthogonal at times.

Adam: You mentioned, one of the keys to your success was developing skills around change management. Can you talk a little bit more about the most important skills that you develop that helped you get to where you are today? And what are the most important skills that you utilize today as a Fortune 500 CEO? 

Kate: Oh man. So that's, that's a big one to change management skills are super important. And if I were to pick one of them, the most significant, it's this combo platter, it's the ability to communicate clearly is the most important thing. So here's where we are, here's where we're going. And here's the path to get from here to there. And here's the progress along the way. That becomes essential. And that's essential for anyone and everyone associated with these transformations. The leader at the top and the person on the frontline, clarity, and the ability to communicate clearly, those two things are existential, that's without a doubt, a theme, I think, agility, adaptability, collaboration, the ability to work with teams, for teams, to subordinate yourself to the mission of the company and of the team. Those are all really important too. But if I had to boil it down to one and say, gosh, if everybody could communicate, clearly, and if they were committed to doing it regularly, consistently, and persistently, it would accelerate pretty much any change program, period.

Adam: That's great advice. What can anyone do to become a better, more effective, and more successful communicator?

Kate: Oh, gosh, well, I grew up in a family of English teachers. So it's all about reading as well, my mom and dad would say, although I tried like heck to get as far away from reading as possible when I went into engineering. But interestingly enough, I really do feel like reading every genre of book that you can, and applying those styles in that theory, and the essence, to the way that you write and being very intentional about that is important. And I start with writing because pretty much anytime you're communicating if you're doing it in a context where you have to move lots of people in a direction, you should always really start with, okay, what does this framework look like? What's the foundation of what I'm trying to say? What's the one thing I want everybody to go home with? And you build it up from there. So the written word, especially in business, where everybody's expecting, if the email is more than three lines, they're not going to read it. It's brevity, its clarity, and its poignancy, and being very direct. I like to pull in different styles and captivate audiences based on the things that interest me. I like to read a lot. So I have a lot of different sort of genres floating around in my head at any given time, which by the way, it makes it extremely difficult for my communications team to adapt my voice. And we're going through that right now.

Adam: Okay, you bring up something really interesting and really important. People will look at your background and say, Fortune 500, CEO, undergrad engineering, MBA from one of the best schools in America. Clearly, she got to where she is and is able to be such a successful leader because of her technical skills. But you're sharing, what everyone needs to do to become successful, you need to be a great communicator. How can you become a great communicator? Develop your writing skills and develop your reading skills. So it fundamentally comes down to regardless of your background, regardless of how technical and how quantitative, your background is, learn how to read better learn how to write better commit to it. It doesn't end when you end school doesn't matter what you study in school, dedicate yourself to lifelong learning and dedicate yourself to improving your soft skills, particularly in these two areas.

Kate: I love listening to your podcasts. I love listening to other leadership podcasts because I really think there's science and art to leadership. It's a science, and it's an art, there are practices that we can all do that we should all do. And there's math associated with it. There's the math of trying to transform an organization all day long. And I love that part of the job. But there's also an art to it. And the art is kind of that softer side the softer skills of communication, building relationships, influencing without directing, and listening. All these things are so important. But like I say, the one that I'm grateful for is my parents hitting me over the head over and over and over again. Take that next English class, take that advanced writing class. I use it every day. I use it every day.

Adam: Well as a listener of my podcast, and thank you so much for the kind words. I really appreciate it. I'm honored and flattered. You've heard me say at nauseam. Great leaders are great listeners. And I want to know if you could share with listeners in this podcast, what do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader? And what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Kate: Oh, gosh, I would say the number one thing in the okay, so I've talked about the importance of clear communication, obviously, listening is important. But in our virtual world, I think a lot of times leaders forget about proximity. For me, that's a big word. That's a big tool in the toolkit. It's like, proximity is the thing that builds empathy all day long. And so you gotta get out of your office. And hey, like, for a couple of years, we were all not allowed to come out of our offices. So how do you build virtual proximity, you've got to literally skip levels, you've got to get in the middle of things, you've got to be very curious and ask great questions that don't intimidate, but instead, inspire the intellectual curiosity of the team. And that's one of the things I'm not from the telecom industry. And I took a job running a telecom company, that was a big leap. And the very first thing that I did was I went on a listening tour, which basically every leader is always going to start with that. And if you don't, it's like, what the heck's going on there? But the real learning came when I said, okay, thanks for that high level, can I now sit with somebody in your organization, a couple of layers down, and just ask them everything? And can you find somebody who's not going to be intimidated to answer questions with the truth? I just asked why. Why do we do it that way? Why don't we do it that way? Why do we do that? While we do as many layers as they can go to explain a lot of times they go, I don't even know, you know, let me go ask Bob, Fred, Joe, Sally Sue, and get to the right answer. I'm like, yeah, let's do that. And then you start to move around the organization and make these connections. And you have an opportunity to do two things. Number one, learn everything about this business that you're running. But also, you're able to make these connections. And I try and record them, who have I touched? Where have I been, what have I learned from that person, and then go back in a little bit of time and say, you know what, you taught me how to do X, or you taught me why we do Y. And I'm now connecting it to something that we're doing and as part of the strategy, and here it is, and then they know, oh my gosh, she's not just listening. Like she's taking what we know, and integrating it into our path forward, which is super compelling. It starts with proximity, immersing yourself right next to the problem.

Adam: Kate, you share so much wisdom there. And I want to unpack some of it. Something you shared right off the bat, proximity builds empathy. I love that 90% of success is just showing up, being there being present. Everyone goes on a listening tour. But what happens when the listening tour ends? That's when the real listening begins. Great leaders ask great questions. Having a commitment to getting to the truth, understanding what's going on having a level of curiosity, deep curiosity, essential to great leadership, finding the people within your organization who are willing to tell you what's going on willing to tell you the truth. I love that. And to your point, not only does it get you a deep understanding as to what's actually happening, but it allows you to understand who are the people that you want in the foxhole with you. Who are the people in your organization that you can trust, that are actually going to tell you what's going on, that you actually want on your team? Right. To that end, what do you look for in the people you hire? And what are your best tips on the topic of hiring?

Kate: Yeah, that's a great question. So we're right in the middle of this magnificent transformation, where we're a telecom company with incredible assets of the physical network. And there's commoditization pressure on the business model across the industry. And what you have to do what customers are expecting is for you to sort of move up the stack and provide higher-end services that solve their greatest business problems, right? Okay. So that means you need to know what those business problems are. And the only way to do that is through proximity. Going to get close to the customer, sit side by side with them and start to really ask those great questions and learn customer obsession also requires all the same things I think that great leadership does because that feeds into innovation. And if you want to lead the industry and innovation, you got to get close to your customers, you got to understand what their biggest challenges are. And then you have to build a portfolio of capabilities to skate to the puck if you will, right? We're finding out problems like every second counts now in these technologies or when every second cost, for example, so don't have time to send your data back up to the public cloud, to crunch it to come back for some sort of manufacturing change on the fly, you got to use edge cloud. So it's a latency buster. And we have invested in Edge, for example. And that's an incredibly important part of our transformational story. When you think about it, the things that I'm talking about are what tech does all day long, they co-create and innovate side by side with their customers, to build next-gen capabilities, to skate to the puck to chase to solve those business problems. That's not necessarily I mean, it can be but it's not necessarily at scale, a forte of the telecom industry. So I've really been looking to bring in some technical skills to the company to combine it with our deep telco roots and deep telco capabilities and is better together technology on top of this amazing telecom physical network. And if you think about it, culturally, those two industries are very different. So I need people who are great collaborators, I need people who are great teammates and want to win together, but also ones that are great at partnering to go solve really complex problems, because we're not going to win just out by just being telco we're not gonna win by just being tech, it's got to be the combination of the two. So getting players that can build chemistry across the senior leadership team, and bring everybody along to go solve these really complex problems. That's the skill set, I'm looking and when you unpack that in a set of interviews, you need that deep history, but you also need to go really wide and get their philosophy around relationship-building trust, building their philosophy around transparency, and chasing really complex problems and, and how they encourage teams to bring the truth to bear all those things are really, really important as we seek talent.

Adam: You gave a lot of great advice there. And I want to dive into a few of the things you shared. Starting off with the fact that I could not agree with you more just how important it is to ensure that you surround yourself with people who are team-oriented, and focused on helping everyone around them get better. What tangibly can you do? As a leader, what can you do as someone interviewing people trying to figure it out? Do I want to bring someone into my organization or not? What are some of the questions? What are some of the exercises that you can utilize to assess whether or not this person is a team player?

Kate: Yeah, two things really. And I do this with everybody. The first is I talk about our operating principles. Lumines operating principles are team trust and transparency. You got to be a great collaborator, we got to build a culture of deep trust. And we've got to be transparent with each other. Where are the problems? What are we doing? Well, what do we need to improve? How do we give great feedback? All these things are really, really important. So I typically ask about their reaction to that, that set of operating principles, and for them just to sort of wax on about it. But if you ask people in interviews, are you any good at teaming? They're always gonna say yes, the question is, how do you prove it? And I think it's twofold. Number one, you give them super hard problems. And you say, how do you solve this problem? By the way, you give them one that you're sure they don't know the answer to because asking for help is the number one litmus test for our culture as to whether or not somebody's going to fit in this magnificent transformation story that we got going. But then the second thing, and this is really, really important, references really matter. And you got to take time to talk with teammates that they've worked with in the past. And you have to learn about their best day and their worst day, because those real-life examples, people's character really shines when times are tough. And when times are tough, and you're on a team, are you reaching out and building tighter connections? Or are you shunning people because your tempers are flaring and things like that? And by the way, that's not to say that everybody doesn't have a bad day and it's okay if you yell once in a while, but for the most part, are you constructive and productive in the context of solving wickedly hard problems with other human beings? And do you leverage their skill sets and help and do you commit yourself to building diverse opinions around you? Because that's the only way that you can get to the answers to today's problems.

Adam: A few words that have come up over the last few minutes. Culture, transformation innovation, you said customer obsession. Yeah. How can leaders build cultures that fuel customer centricity that fuels innovation and, ultimately, fuel transformation?

Kate: So it's actually it's really, really hard. And so you've got to do it in a bunch of different ways. Number one, performance management systems really matter when you're trying to change a culture. And you go really, because how do you do that? We're building a new performance management system that really dives deep into the behaviors that we want to see around team trust and transparency. So that's going to be important, and then communicating those out and having the crisp examples and getting everybody to be great feedback. And, and all of those things are absolutely essential. But I think you asked the Ph.D. level question of our transformation, which is how do we become customer-obsessed, and as a telecom company, with history being a utility, back in the day, customer obsession, and utility, that's like an oxymoron, right? Those two things don't go together. So we're doing it in a couple of different ways. Inside the context of our KPIs, the way that we think about performance in the way that we pay people, customer NPS is important. So-net promoter score, our customers saying that they would do business with Lumen, are they saying that they're happy with Lumen, the whole company gets paid on our progress with respect to that. So that's the first orientation where you go. However, there have been times in the past when we've been paying them that so that's not different. What's different, is actually building skills for customer obsession. That's new. And I always say this, you can't tell a team to take the hill, and then not give them any of the tools they need to take the hill. Like if they're climbing Mount Everest, they need oxygen, and they need really good gloves, and they need layers, and they need all the technical systems to make them successful in that climb with practice is the same thing. For taking the hill in terms of our transformation, we've got to give them the skills. And so the method that we're using to try and train our people around customer obsession is called the growth operating system. And it was born out by David Pitar and Anne Brockovich and is a methodology for a book that they wrote called New to Big. And it's really all about using VC-style innovation with really short funding and little gates, where you're constantly checking, does this product hunt, and will a customer buy it? Are they sitting side by side and co-creating with us and saying, I gotta have this, I can't wait. And putting that in the context of a giant company, where we're used to going from big to bigger, but we're not necessarily very good at going Nunavik. And so we're seeding these growth operating system teams inside of lumen product and technology organization. And they're sitting side by side with customers who are saying, I can't believe you guys are this dedicated to my problems into innovating to solve them with your portfolio of capabilities. This is pretty cool, but it's different. So I talked about seeding innovation, and I talked about measuring customer outcome, every single function in between product and customer support also has to orient around customer obsession. So it's one of the hardest and most complex elements of our story, but also probably one of the most important

Adam: You can't tell people to go take the hill without giving them the tools that will help them get there that are universally applicable. And another topic that I wanted to ask you about that this applies to so directly, is a topic that you've been incredibly passionate about throughout your career. You were a champion of diversity and inclusion long before those two words became as important as any topic in business. And everyone in business today understands that they need to build diverse and inclusive organizations, but they don't necessarily have the tools that will help them take the hill. How can leaders build truly diverse and truly inclusive organizations?

Kate: So I thought the last question was Ph.D. level. So I'll try and be succinct here. You're absolutely right in saying that you gotta give everybody the skills to do it. But it starts with a plan. And the plan has to say what the goal is. And our goal at Illumina is to look like the markets that we serve. And we don't today. And so you have to know what those markets look like. And then you have to translate that into this is like the classic problem-solving thing I said, where you start with the as-is and you figure out what you look like. And you look at what you want to be like, and you calculate the gaps. Same thing with diversity and inclusion. And since so many other companies have made amazing progress, looking at their publicly available materials is a great way to build a plan. But inside the context, the four walls of Lumen, what we're doing now with that plan, is to say, okay, what behaviors do we need every leader, every people leader to exhibit to ensure that we're making progress, because one thing I know for sure, publishing your aspiration around building a diverse workforce is not enough to drive behavior change, you have to instigate and I'll go back to where I started, you have to have proximity. So one of the tools that I've used in the past and the tools that we're using here, is to make sure that the plan that's at the company level is translated all the way down to every single people leader so that they understand, okay, this year, I'm hiring 30 people, how many of them have to be diverse in order for me to change the composition of my team to help the company achieve its goals? Okay, now, what am I doing to get the best talent, but also to consider this important performance element called diverse and inclusive, because that's what we're talking about. Here, we're talking about building a high-performing company. And so in order to do that, you actually have to show them the math, you have to say that, hey, in order for you to help the company make the goals, this is the kind of progress that we need to make. So what are you doing to make sure you're doing that? Well, you got to make sure you have diverse slates, okay, check. What are you working with recruiting that has it look like it's not good enough, push back on recruiting, and tell them you want more diversity in your pipeline? Number two, you got a screen instead of screening out, it's a well-known fact, in every book you ever read psychology that we have an affinity for people who look and sound like us. And that is not helpful in trying to build a diverse workforce. So if you have somebody that's on the fence, when in doubt, you screen them in, so you can make sure you're applying a broader net of candidates, and that you're giving them a fair chance to show up in all the right ways and that you're adjusting for internal biases. There are like 100, different behaviors that we watch for. But probably the most significant thing that we are starting to do, and we're gonna do a heck of a lot more is the outreach program. So I've jumped down levels, and have conversations with people leaders, with my HR person by my side, and I say, hey, tell me how you're going to make a difference in terms of helping Lumen become more diverse and inclusive this year. What are you doing? Where are the behaviors? Have you communicated with your hiring managers? Oh, look, here's what your team looks like, by the way, this applies not just to hiring, but also to developing the people promoting the people bonus allocation, all those things, those little interventions that you have, you really only need to have a one or two of them before your leaders understand that you are deeply committed to this. And they need to be in the behavior changes. They're so subtle, and they're so impactful. So that's how I think about it. I learned a lot of this from my days at Microsoft, where they really had a very formulaic approach, and we're very committed to it. And we're gonna shamelessly take from that playbook and apply it to limit technologies.

Adam: Kate, you gave so much great advice, you gave a lot of really helpful tactical advice. But to hone in on something you shared that more high level that I took away. Commitment to diversity and inclusion, like effective leadership in general starts at the top. You shared your personal commitment to this issue, meeting with the people on the ground who are going to drive your vision. And without your personal commitment, it's going to be a lot less likely to happen. And the message for me is, regardless of where you are in your organization, if you're the CEO, commit yourself, step up to the plate, and make it happen. But if you're not the CEO, regardless of where you are, do whatever you can to set the tone, do whatever you can to influence those who you have influence over to help create a culture that prioritizes diversity and inclusion.

Kate: Yeah, you said something earlier, just half of this is just showing about showing up. It applies to so many things, including this diversity and inclusion topic, show up to the training, show up to the employee resource groups show up to the event, and communicate that you care, because it'll make a huge difference. So it's not just about people, leaders. You're kind of reminding me that I talked about people and leaders, every human is accountable for this and just showing up and making sure that you're showing interest, curiosity, connection, and commitment, these are things that people feel and they see and they notice, and they recognize and it gets them pumped up.

Adam: I love it. What advice do you have for women in male-dominated industries like tech? And what advice do you have for men in those industries, on how to be great allies?

Kate: I think it's almost exactly what I just said, it's the whole notion of showing up as the way to communicate your commitment to others, which I think is important, and for men to be allies for women is so powerful. And I've had some in my career, which had been amazing. But a community is key. And I'm learning it in this role as well. It's not as easy to create a community when you're the CEO. And we all know that. And it's used as part of the job. And as part of the thought, when you're taking a job like this is okay, how am I going to build community and you tend to maybe go outside, but what I'm finding is that a lot of the women on the inside, they want to make a connection. And it's giving me a lot of sort of positive lift as well. And so I'm spending some time doing that with our women's ERG, and with smaller groups of women around the company, and focusing on them talking about their issues and how they're feeling. And also validating. Yeah, I see these things too. And here's what we're doing at a company level, here's what I've done personally in professional life, or whatever, those connections are key. So whether you're a man or a woman, whether you're Black or African American or Hispanic Latinx community is the way that we address what I think is a systemic loneliness problem associated with a hybrid workforce, with a workforce that is not as diverse or inclusive as it could be. And the way through that is to make connections with other humans, or what I like to call community and it can be in so many different forms.

Adam: Kate, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Kate: On any level, I would say, the ability to take hard feedback is a muscle that anyone at any level can get benefit from. So can you hear from someone else? What do you need to do to get better? And can you work on a plan constructively to address that issue? Can you take off the armor? Can you get rid of the defense? Can you truly internalize it? I'm not saying you have to be perfect at it every time. I'm just saying, do you have the ability to receive the information? Because if you do, you can do anything. I'm stealing directly from Carol Dweck of Growth Mindset. She basically wrote the book on the ability to put your sights ahead for whatever it is you want to do is really about your commitment to working hard to do it, but your ability to listen to what it's going to take to improve your game enough to get to your goal.

Adam: Kate, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Kate: It's so much fun. Thanks, Adam.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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