👉 Background: Qantas, founded in 1922, is the third oldest operating airline in the world, behind KLM and Avianca. Over the past few years, Qantas has been through it all. It suffered more than $7 billion in losses during COVID. It profited off ghost flights, faced an ACCC inquiry, hired a new CEO, and announced mass layoffs.

👉 What happened: Back in October, the Federal Court found that Qantas had illegally fired 1,820 workers in 2020. Despite claiming these were genuine redundancies, the court found that this wasn't true because Qantas had outsourced these roles to contractors instead. Now, Qantas has agreed to pay $120 million to the Transport Workers Union to pay those affected workers.

👉 What else: The Transport Workers Union has called this the “largest case of illegal sackings in Australian history”. But, Qantas new CEO, Vanessa Hudson, has apologised, paid up... and now wants to move on!

What's the key learning?

💡When a new CEO steps into their role, they inherit the good, the bad and the ugly from their predecessor.

💡The good thing for a fresh CEO is that they can apologise for past mistakes without personally owning them. And, these apologies can help the company to rebuild investor and customer trust while distancing themselves from past errors.

💡Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson has leaned hard into this strategy:

• Poor call centre service? Sorry about that. It was on previous CEO’s Alan Joyce’s watch.
• Ghost flights? Deeply regretful for this - Alan Joyce again.
• And now again, the illegal sackings? “Let’s settle the case that happened under my predecessor?
  

And it seems to be working because Qantas’ share price is at an all-time high.