Kevin Plank, founder and CEO of Under Armour, recently traveled to Los Angeles and the UCLA campus where UCLA Anderson presented him with the 2017 John Wooden Global Leadership Award. After the event, held in Pauley Pavilion, Plank sat down with the UCLA Anderson Blog team to talk about leadership, Under Armour, and his role models. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Q: In terms of your leadership style, what was the transition like, in going from entrepreneur and head of a small start-up to manager of a global company?
Number one, I feel like Under Armor is entering Chapter Three of our business. Chapter One was grandma’s basement — just fighting to survive — and Chapter Two was (when) we moved the company to Baltimore, (where) we tried to build a global company, and really worked on being a global brand. Chapter Three moves us to where we are a corporation and you lose the agility that you have as a small company, particularly a small company led by an entrepreneur.
As a small company, I’d see, or we’d smell, problems and I’d be able to have myself or my executive team jump on something and spend time on it. We could work 23 hours in a day, get it fixed and move on. Now the company is just bigger. It doesn’t mean you lose a sense of urgency, but you lose the ability to make as quick of an impact as you’d like. It just takes time, because the only way to get anything done, is by leaning on what I brag so often about, our team, and it has to be that way. I like to say that good leaders have good ideas, great leaders have great ideas and make others think of their own.
How do we position people with the right ideas, but also empower them to actually be able to make a change and create difference? We are a corporation with an entrepreneurial basis, foundation and culture. Hopefully, we can be the best of those two things, because I think every big company is trying to get small, and every small company is trying to get big. I just want to be a great company.
Q: How would you describe your leadership style but also, if we were to ask your employees, how would they describe your leadership style?
You’ve got to be careful, because sometimes your whisper can be a roar in an organization. But asked how they would define me, hopefully they’d say I was empowering. I’m not just saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sit here and figure it out together.’ What you’re truly saying is that I’m just going to define for you what I think success is. And then — if that means meeting in Los Angeles on a Wednesday — I’m not going to tell you how to get there. Whether it’s a train, a plane an automobile or whatever you choose to do, you just have to be there at this time. And that’s the difference between running a larger organization verses a smaller organization.
Q: This recognition, the John Wooden Global Leadership Award, is not just about leadership, but rather ethical, values-based leadership. Why is that important? Why is it important to have those qualities when running a company instead of just managing to the bottom line, and nothing but the bottom line?
I think it’s everything.
And when I say that, I say that with the view that today’s consumer is much smarter. You can’t just talk the talk. You actually have to walk the walk and that’s about your activism as a company, it’s about the way you act and treat your community, it’s about the way you act and treat your employees or, as we call them, our teammates.
Look, no one is perfect, but what people care about is that you’re forthright, and that you try really hard. I’ve been really blessed with a great family, I come from a great hard-working mom and a dad who died when I was 19 years old. Sports were the way that I would communicate with my father, and it’s probably the reason that I’m so passionate about it today.
Q: Who are your leadership mentors and what lessons did you learn from them?
My mother. And my grandmother, who was a really special lady. She died at the age of 92, she outlived three husbands, all of whom were Marines. The first died when my mother was 12 and her sisters were eight and six respectively. So imagine it’s 1940-something and you’ve got three little girls and you’ve never worked a day in your life. She gets a real estate license, and learns how to sell real estate. She drove her car to the office every single day until she was 91. One of those houses, one of the properties she had bought in Georgetown, was one of the houses that I ended up starting Under Armor in.
She was a really strong powerful woman, and my mother was a really strong woman in her own right too. She was the mayor of my town and on the city council for 13 years, and then she served in the Reagan and Bush administrations as a director of intergovernmental affairs and liaisoned with state and local government officials.
I learned how to walk up to someone and look them in the eye, and shake their hand from my mother. She is a really powerful force for me even to this day and she is 84 and is not slowing down a lick, so I'm very, very fortunate.
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