Boeing CEO asks workers for ‘brutal’ feedback in an attempt to overhaul the company's culture

Kelly Ortberg who had taken over as CEO in August, expressed dismay over Boeing’s culture, referring to the lack of civility people treated each other with.

Boeing's CEO Kelly Ortberg is inviting employees to help expose deep-seated problems in the company, even if the responses are “brutal” to the management.

A Boeing 737 MAX sits outside the hangar during a media tour of the Boeing 737 MAX at the Boeing plant in Renton, Washington December 8, 2015. (Matt Mills McKnight/Reuters)

“I want to hear what the employees have to say,” a Bloomberg report quoted Ortberg as saying during his second companywide address to Boeing workers on Wednesday. “And what we’ll do is 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 who had taken over as CEO in August, had expressed dismay over Boeing’s culture in November, referring to the lack of civility people there treated each other with.

He even highlighted the harsh backlash that lower-level workers and managers can face for flagging operations breakdowns, like whistleblowers have documented.

While speaking to workers on location in St. Louis with tens of thousands more tuning in via a webcast, Ortberg also singled out Boeing’s top-down culture and lack of leadership training as areas of focus, according to the report.

His target is to take the company to a point where it won’t need hotlines for employees to flag issues anonymously since they have to feel empowered to speak openly.

For this, Ortberg said that he has set up a “culture working group” of workers to advise him on the values and “behaviors” of the company, the report read.

This group represents a cross-section of Boeing sites, unions and other employee groups.

All of this is to turn around a storied aircraft manufacturer whose reputation and finances have been badly dented by two fatal 737 Max crashes late last decade as well as an alarming near-catastrophe in early 2024.