Aggie Legends Podcast S1E1: Darren Woods ’87

DARREN WOODS:

Leadership is about service, serving the people that you’re leading. I don’t think people often recognize that. That’s the hardest part of it, frankly.

BEN WIGGINS:

Welcome to Aggie Legends, where we talk with founders, CEOs, and other successful Aggies about the lessons in leadership they’ve experienced throughout their careers. I’m Ben Wiggins, Mays MBA Class of 2018, and today we’re talking to Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil.

Darren, how are you doing today?

DARREN WOODS:

Very good, Ben. Thanks.

BEN WIGGINS:

It’s our pleasure to have you here. Darren is an engineering graduate from Texas A&M who holds an MBA from Northwestern. He joined Exxon in 1992 and became chairman and CEO in 2017. He’s widely respected as an industry leader and remains committed to Texas A&M University, including through service on the Engineering Advisory Council.

Let’s start with a look at your early years. What brought you to Texas A&M, and what were some of your most impactful memories in Aggieland?

DARREN WOODS: 

Well, in my early years, my father worked with the U.S. military. So we moved around quite a bit and I ended up, in the middle of my junior year, coming back to Texas, a small town, south of Dallas and met a woman who was to become my wife.

I wanted to stay in Texas because we moved around so much. I hadn’t really landed on A&M as the school, but my wife wanted to go to A&M, and so I thought she was as good a reason as any, and came to A&M and fell in love with the school.

BEN WIGGINS: 

What was the moment where you knew, okay, this is what it’s going to be? You mentioned that she wanted to come here, but is there a particular story where you felt like, okay, that’s the course?

DARREN WOODS: 

I think the academic rigor, the values, the honor code — I can tell you that the Aggie honor code is something that I’ve lived my life with and actually, I think the things I’ve done in my job and my career, are very closely linked to the values of A&M. And so there was just, I think a connection with the values and how the school ran, and the values they had and, the academic rigor, the work that we did. So it was a good fit.

BEN WIGGINS: 

And then memories as a student. What stands out to you most about your time here?

DARREN WOODS: 

Midnight Yell, I have to say is for me probably the thing that I still remember very distinct experiences. It’s a very unique thing I think in life. Football games. So I think the standard things that kids like in college.

BEN WIGGINS: 

So you finished your degree here and then decided to go get an MBA. What prompted that decision?

DARREN WOODS: 

Well, actually, when I was here, my career ambition was to become a Ph.D., and I was going to do research. I did a fellowship my senior year and after doing that for the year I was working in the area that I wanted to study in after I graduated. I decided I needed a bit of a break, and so I decided to go work for three years and make sure that I knew what I wanted to do. And during that time, I was a technical consultant working for the Air Force, moving around to different engineering companies. It became very clear to me that you can be the best engineer in the world. If you don’t know how to make money, you don’t know how to fund your ideas, you’re never gonna be successful. So I decided I need to know how to make money. The business side of the equation. 

I actually made a huge mistake when I was in school by being so narrowly focused on just the technical stuff. I really felt like the way to be successful was get really deep in the areas that I was interested in. It’s all technical, all science. And in hindsight, I realize, you know, there’s a lot of other things that have to come together for a successful career or to launch successful products. And there were a whole lot of things I didn’t quite understand, and I felt like I had a big gap in my knowledge. So I went back to get my MBA to fill those gaps.

BEN WIGGINS: 

So then looking back, you have the opportunity to accumulate the technical knowledge and then the opportunity to accumulate the business knowledge. Looking back, does it seem like it kind of unfolded the way it should have?

DARREN WOODS: 

It worked out perfectly!

DARREN WOODS: 

I think it’s not a unique formula. I think business schools generally like to bring in engineers because of the way engineers are trained to think about problem solving. And then you mix that with some of the skills and capabilities associated with business and how you compete and how you organize and strategy and all the pieces of the business. Those two oftentimes fit very well together, and certainly it was true for me.

BEN WIGGINS: 

Sure, I mean, in the startup world, technical founders are frankly more valuable than non-technical founders — I say that as a non-tech myself. When you joined Exxon earlier in your career, did you have ambitions to one day be in the C-suite?

DARREN WOODS: 

No. You know, I really didn’t. I didn’t. In fact, when I was interviewing for the job — at the time, we typically hired undergraduates and we developed them through the course of their careers. Very unusual to hire an MBA, and very unusual to hire an MBA in to work directly into the business, which was how I joined the company. So it was made pretty clear to me that I wasn’t going to be the CEO.

Because I think MBAs had a reputation coming into the company that somehow we had this view that we were going to try to get some place, and that was not my interest. And I can still remember one of my interviewers saying, you know, you’re not going to be the CEO. What do you think about that? And I said to him, what does the CEO do? And he said, I don’t know. And I said well then I don’t know if I want to be it. 

And so, I just really focused on I think getting a job that utilized my skills that helped me grow. Every job I had at the company my test was always: Am I learning something? Am I growing personally and professionally? If I am, then just keep going and we’ll see where the next job goes. There’s a philosophy in the company: You’re only as good as your last job. And so this idea. I never had this view about where I was going to go necessarily. It was always about being successful in the thing, the challenge that the company gave me to address, and that’s how I’ve run my career frankly.

BEN WIGGINS: 

So the first question that you ask yourself is, am I learning something? As the CEO, are you now better positioned to kind of learn what you want to learn? Or what are the pros and cons of being able to learn from the CEO seat?

DARREN WOODS: 

Well, I think, with respect to the company I’m responsible for, the arena to learn in is defined. Because the job, the company is so big, we’re involved in so many different sectors, all across the planet that, you know, understanding what’s happening and connecting the dots and thinking how we want to take — where I want to take the company, how we want to position ourselves to win, there’s a lot of learning that’s involved in that. 

And so I would say I don’t have the luxury of if I’m interested in a particular area that’s not relevant to making this company more successful, that doesn’t get time. It’s really focused on what are the things, where do I think the opportunities for the company are? How do we move the company forward. And so that tends to be where I stay engaged. Then obviously our industry is so fundamental to society and to modern living that governments… governments are very dependent on the success of the industry as a whole. Because ultimately, if the products that we make aren’t flowing and and they’re not available and they’re not affordable, then the people that they govern aren’t happy generally. And so we get involved in a lot of political or engaged in a lot of government discussions just in generally helping them understand the dynamics, the macros.

BEN WIGGINS: 

Yeah, that makes sense. So you’ve held many roles with the company and have supported their efforts around the globe. What’s it like moving around and taking on new positions so frequently? I mean, it’s something you were, I guess, used to.

DARREN WOODS: 

Yeah. Well, actually, when I was growing up, we moved about every two years. And, when I went to college, I told my dad I will never do to my family what you did to me. Because I did not like that lifestyle. It was only after a few years of being in A&M, I realized how fortunate I have been to have the experiences to live in other parts of the world, and really, I think, see things from very different angles. I think it’s really hard to step outside the paradigm you live in, and when you’re forced to do that by moving, it’s just, I think, a very enriching experience. So I looked for a job where I could continue to do that and actually raise my kids in that environment. I told my kids when they were very young, there will be times this will be very difficult, but I promise you, you will look back at this at some stage and be thankful that you’ve had the experiences. And all three of my kids today — they’re all grown and out of the house — they’ve all reflected positively on that experience. And they all had some tough times as we were moving around. 

The company very much believes in developing people to their full potential. So, from your very first supervisory job, your job is to find the next CEO. And I believe that coming into the company is how do we get the best out of people? And then we put them in jobs to develop them. I think a lot of companies focus on training. We train through on-the-job work and responsibilities that we give people. And one of the things I love about the company is we will sacrifice the short-term benefits of the job to develop the person. So as soon as an individual who’s got high potential, we can see the potential to get to high places in the company, as soon as they’ve gotten what they need from the job, they’ve got the development experience they need, we move them to the next one. And so my entire career with the company, I was changing jobs every couple of years. And at that time, every job change meant a job move. And so it was, it was brand new, and went very different. I’ve done trading, I’ve run refineries, I’ve run retail service stations, shipping, specialty chemical businesses. The company really gave me an opportunity to see a lot of different parts of the business. And so I had many, many, many careers within one company, one career, which I think was a great, great opportunity. We still offer that today to people who join the company.

BEN WIGGINS: 

Fantastic. Any particularly memorable experiences working abroad?

DARREN WOODS: 

I was running the distribution business in the UK, when they had the big strike there and all the truckers blocked all that, stopped all the fuel moving in the UK. And so I was involved in managing our company’s response to those strikes and fuel not moving. And you know, initially when that happened, people were cheering because they were protesting government taxes on fuel. Very quickly, what people found out is, no food was making it to grocery stores, many hospitals that were in isolated areas, they were running out of power because they couldn’t get diesel. And it became very clear to the population very quickly that, without the reliable supply of fuel, that things started eroding very, very quickly. And so almost in an instant you went from people cheering the strike to people demanding fuel and getting things out, so a very dynamic time. It was all across the country. Government was very involved. So it was a unique experience for someone who at the time was pretty young.

BEN WIGGINS: 

What values guided you through observing conflicts like that and navigating a variety of challenging situations? And what might surprise our viewers in terms of the stuff that you really clung to to get you through challenging situations?

DARREN WOODS: 

I always tell our young employees to, you know, when you think about your career, to thine own self be true. And so one of the advantages of moving around as I did is you’re constantly in new environments. And so you either have to learn how to adapt and try to fit in at every place you go or you just kind of focus in on what do you believe in, what are your values, and you stay true to those. 

So very early in my life, I kind of took that latter approach to just saying, what are the things that are important to me? My father was a very principled man. And so thinking about what’s the right thing to do. One of the reasons I was attracted to not only A&M, but my company is, it is a culture of “do the right thing.” 

I always tell our people, do the right thing for the right reasons and do it in the right way, and that’s the way we’ll run the business. Many, many times over the course of my career, particularly when you’re out in the field… One thing about our company, our business is the jobs that we tend to have involve huge sums of money. You know, you’re running a refinery. It’s millions and millions of dollars a day that you’re responsible for. Making decisions can often cost millions of dollars. And it was always, I always knew, even when we made decisions that was going to cost the company money, that if it was the right thing to do, the company would support me. And so that’s kind of how I’ve grown up. 

And in this job, in particular, all that external pressure that you get to kind of go along with whatever the narrative is, for our business,  that’s not a tenable approach. We make investments that go for decades. And so you’ve got to really stay focused on what are the fundamentals, what’s the right way of doing it, and then implement those investments and live with the consequences of them and not… shift with whatever the political winds are or whatever the current narrative out there is.

BEN WIGGINS: 

I have to ask. What was the thing, the decision that you made, at least in the short term, that did cost the company money?

DARREN WOODS: 

Well, very early in my career, I was responsible for a manufacturing facility. And you tend to have cycles every three to five or seven years, you shut those down and do a lot of maintenance work. We were right into… And once you shut a refinery down, that’s where you start racking up millions of dollars of cost with no revenue coming in. And so you try to make those as short as possible. Right when we shut down the refinery, went into maintenance, we had the organization, the contractor that we had come in to operate all the cranes came in and said, you don’t give us more money, then we’re out of here. That was instant that okay, this is going to blow my turnaround, because once you lose your cranes, you got it. And I basically said, we’re not going to be extorted. I will not. And their view was the amount of money we’re asking for versus the amount of money you’re going to lose by extending this turnaround, they’re orders of magnitude difference, so just give us the extra money. And you’ll save all this delay and therefore, economically, you’re better to do that. My view was that was the wrong decision.

BEN WIGGINS: 

You felt like they were doing it on purpose.

DARREN WOODS: 

I knew they were doing it on purpose. Yeah. Absolutely. So I said, no, no. Goodbye. You’re out and we’ll find somebody else. 

So, there was a decision where I consciously decided to disoptimize the turnaround plans we had put in place, extend the turnaround, which was going to cost millions and millions of dollars. I wasn’t unique in that respect. You have to make those types of decisions. You do those enough times, people stop asking and they realize they know what the answer is going to be, so don’t even try it. I think you earn that the hard way and then you hang on to it. And that’s how we run the company.

BEN WIGGINS: 

So then running the company. You become CEO. You’re now the top leader of one of the world’s largest companies with 60,000 employees. Tell a story from that transition. Did you go and sit in the office and just kind of smile to yourself and appreciate the opportunity? How did you react to that?

DARREN WOODS: 

[laughing] No. Not at all. 

Well, um I’ve said this before publicly, I wasn’t vying for the CEO job. I didn’t really want the CEO job. Primarily because it’s not a job. It’s a lifestyle. And with a company this big, you take on a huge responsibility. I was talking to the engineering students yesterday and said, you know, people think that the higher the income you go, the easier it gets because you get to tell everybody what to do. Reality is, you have more obligations and for me, stepping into this role, I felt the weight of the responsibility of, you know, I’ve got not only all my employees that I have to run this company to be successful, but their families and the contractors that work for us and the resource owners that we support and all the retirees and our shareholders. And we start to mount up the number of people who rely or we will impact if we’re not successful, it’s a heavy, it’s a heavy burden. So I recognize that responsibility. And it’s with you from the time you step into the job and you don’t put it down until you step out of the job. 

And so, I would say that’s how I thought about going into it. It felt like I’d just been given a big weight to carry. And while I was very appreciative of the opportunity and was very committed to doing my best, I recognized that. I don’t think you step into these jobs knowing that you can do them. I think if somebody goes into a job like this and their attitude is I got this, then, either you don’t understand the job or you’re way overconfident because there’s a lot of learning on this job, obviously. And so I think you go into it with understanding this huge obligation and responsibility you have and the uncertainty and how successful can you be in doing this job.

BEN WIGGINS: 

So in startups and so forth, the things that we look for and that investors look for in founders the most is I think number one is a sense of curiosity, which kind of pinged in my mind, as you were saying, that, like sort of going in, sort of ready to discover what the job is, is kind of what I’m hearing from you. Do you feel like that’s an important quality for someone stepping into a CEO role is just sort of, a sense of curiosity and a kind of what is this going to be? I wonder what this will be like?

DARREN WOODS: 

Yeah, I don’t know. I think the way I would characterize it for our company. And as I came up through the company, it’s an expectation that you make it better. And so I think every job I’ve had with the company, you know, first of all, you’ve got to deliver on what that job responsibility is. I kind of call that hygiene, it’s table stakes, you’ve got to do, you’ve got to perform the function of the job. But that’s just where you start. The real question is, What can you do to make it better than you found it? As I came up through the company, every job I had, the expectation was leave it better than you found it. And, frankly, for our company, if you made improvements that didn’t sustain themselves after you left the job, then it wasn’t a good improvement. The advances that you made, the improvements that you made had to stand on their own. They had to be sustainable and not propped up by an individual person or the power of that person. So coming into this job, it was the same thing. It’s what’s the opportunities? How can I help make this company more successful? You kind of go on an exploration to figure out where’s my opportunity set at.

BEN WIGGINS: 

Right, and you have people watching everything you do, critiquing every move, you know, critiquing gestures and, you know, like a wrong individual word that you chose. How does that impact you? That seems like it could be a very heavy weight to carry.

DARREN WOODS: 

Yeah. I think, you know, I was advantaged. I talked about moving around a lot when I was young, and this pressure to conform, but then always going to a new place and then changing to conform, or you decide to be your own person. And as a young person, I think we all know that, you know, kids can be pretty tough. So you take a lot of, growing up, there was a lot of “bullying.” You know, but because you were different, that attracted a lot of attention. And because I insisted on staying different, that attention was probably longer than most people might experience. That actually prepared me very well for this job, because I got to this stage where, you know, I don’t judge myself based on what others are saying. I judge myself based on this value system that I have and the standards that I hold myself to. That’s been very helpful in this job, because you’re right, there are a lot of critics, and they’re very loud. You gotta have a very thick skin. And I just keep coming back to am I doing what I think is the right thing? I won’t say that you always do the right thing. You try to do the right thing. You can never know for sure that everything you do is right. But the intent to do the right thing and commit yourself to it and do your best. And that’s what I was talking to the engineering students. You do all these things. How do you handle the stress? All you can do is your best. If you’ve done that, you know, I always say, if I left it all on the field, there’s nothing more I can ask of myself. And so, I’ll hold my head up, and if it wasn’t good enough, then it wasn’t good enough. But the other thing is, I didn’t pick this job. It picked me. So I’ll give it my best, but I didn’t sell myself into this job. I don’t have to pretend to be anything other than what I am and work hard, give it my best, try to do the right thing, and then the rest will take care of itself. And I will say it’s a bumpy ride. There are a lot of loud critics out there.

BEN WIGGINS: 

I believe that. You refer to ExxonMobil as a technology company rather than an oil and gas company, which is what some folks would call it. But obviously there’s a ton of innovation happening all the time. So I don’t know, how do you manage those dynamics?

DARREN WOODS: 

Well, it’s actually to me, one of the exciting parts of the job. What people — you make the point that they don’t think of us as an innovation company, but they often forget that oil and natural gas is a depleting resource. So as you produce it, it’s gone. It’s not like you build a manufacturing plant and just keep stamping out whatever product you’re making. And so you’re always on a treadmill. Things are running out. So to be in a business where what you sell is always running out, puts a lot of pressure on the business. How do I refill the pipeline, how do I replace the things that I produced? And it gets harder and harder for you because generally speaking, the industry starts with the easiest stuff, and then they work their stuff, and that’s how it works. And so, the industry in general has been an industry of innovation. 

And if you look at the progress, the industry has made and actually the resources that are being developed today, if you went back 25 years, 10 years, much of it would not have been under production or been able to be developed because the technology wasn’t there. I mean, fracking here in the U.S. is a great example of the unconventional shale. Fracking has been around for a hundred years, but the ability to apply that and get oil out of rock that looks like granite is a huge innovation. And so, that’s always been part of, I’d say, the blood of the industry. 

Because we’re an integrated company with a lot of different businesses — we also have a chemical business. People forget that we’re one of the largest chemical companies in the world as well. There’s huge innovation in those products. If you think about the plastics and the rubbers and the materials that go into every product that modern life now uses, most of it comes from hydrogen and carbon molecules. And so, we had referred to ourselves as an energy company for a long time and an oil and gas company. I actually thought that was a mistake. It became very clear to me when I got into this job because of that “energy” label, the expectation was, well go into wind and solar because, you know, the planet is going to transition. We’re going to a new energy system. We looked at it and said, we don’t know anything about wind and solar. And frankly, that’s an electron business. We’re a molecule business. And so, we can’t bring a lot of value to that, to, to wind and solar because it’s not where we have a capability set. Instead it’s really around the molecules. And how do we transform and manipulate those molecules to make products and meet the needs of society? 

And that’s frankly, that discussion, I was just trying to convince people, you don’t want ExxonMobil doing wind and solar, because all we bring is a checkbook. You want us using our unique capabilities to help solve this problem. So we’re committed to trying to reduce emissions, but we’re going to do it based on what we’re good at and where we have capabilities, not where somebody else is good. And that early discussion really developed into this, we are a technology company. If you look at the fundamentals of everything we do, the projects that we build, the products that we make, they’re all anchored in technology and evolving technology. And we’ve now consolidated all of our technology organizations into one organization, and we put it at the heart of our campus. It’s the heart of what we do, and all these other things are very important, but if we’re not evolving, if we’re not discovering, if we’re not innovating from a technical standpoint, we will not be successful in the long term. 

We’ve been around for 140 years. And the horizon that I think about is the next hundred. I’m not focused on the next five years. It’s much, much, much further than that. 

BEN WIGGINS:

Print it on the archway to the courtyard: Molecules, not electrons 

DARREN WOODS:

People get that, you know. People say that makes a lot of sense. I finally found a way to kind of explain why we don’t do wind and solar. It’s just not a capability that we have.

BEN WIGGINS: 

Sure, sure. Okay. Talking about the next hundred years, not the next five. You famously attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference for the first time in 2023 to add your voice to the conversation. And your attendance there was a bit of a surprise to some people. What was that like?

DARREN WOODS: 

Yeah. Well, you know, it’s funny because in this job, I told you earlier that we really focus on the fundamentals, figure out what the right answer here is. And we could see that the solution set for addressing the risk of climate change for the energy transition was a very narrow one. And really driven by more of an ideology than I’d say the physics of the real world. We were never against wind and solar. It has a role to play, but it’s not — it’s necessary but not sufficient. And so we weren’t having a discussion about what else needs to happen. 

So we were pushing back against that. I was pushing back against going into wind and solar, but also that we need to open the aperture. This is a very hard problem to solve. We need a lot more solutions. We shouldn’t start out by narrowly focusing on just one or two. And so let’s think about what else we can do. 

That message was not very well received early on. I think as time went on and we got more penetration, people began to see some of the deficiencies. And then what else do we need to do? And so I think what I’ve noticed in this job over the last nine years is a maturity in the thinking and the recognition. Yes, wind and solar are important. EVs are important. They all play a role, but they’re not, we need more. We need other things. We’ve got a huge challenge on our hands. We should get every industry, every company figuring out how they can contribute based on what they’re good at to the solution set. And I think there’s a growing interest in that. So I went to COP at a time when I think people were beginning to be interested in,  we need to think more about what else we should be doing here. And my sense of responsibility is, you know, I should, based on our experience, what we know, contribute to that. You don’t have to agree with me. You don’t have to tell me I’m wrong. I’m just going to tell you, based on what we know, this is what we think would work in our area. I’m sure there’s other things that other people know, but everybody contributing their best thinking to this is going to get us to a better answer.

BEN WIGGINS: 

So what is the most favorable adaptation then, in terms of how the broader community is thinking about? Wind, solar, but what else? Where do you think, alright, we’ve made some progress here?

DARREN WOODS: 

So, I think we’ve made progress in wind and solar. We made progress in EVs. But the problem with wind and solar, you can think of it a little bit like farming. You can only, you’re only going to have a productive farm where you’ve got good soil and the right amount of rain and sunshine. And that’s true with wind and solar. You’re not going to have a successful wind farm if, you know, the place doesn’t have any wind and you’re not in a sunny location. So they have a very important role. 

The thing that I find, you know, we jumped into solutions before really understanding how we’re going to tackle the problem holistically. The thing I find amazing is if you think about climate change in limiting CO2 emissions, today, there is no mechanism to account for CO2. No accounting mechanism for it. So my first question is: If you want to eliminate it — which we’re committed to doing — how can you do it if you’re not accounting for it? You don’t know where it’s at. Where’s it coming from? What products are driving the most emissions? How should we think about that? And so step one is the world needs a carbon accounting system, one that balances the total emissions of the planet. If we’re going to reduce, it’s going to be absolutely critical. Once you have a carbon accounting system, you can begin to understand what products and services and society generate the most emissions and who’s producing them the most responsibly by measuring carbon intensity. 

BEN WIGGINS: 

Because you hear a lot of conjecture about this kind of stuff, conjecture.

DARREN WOODS: 

Conjecture?

BEN WIGGINS: 

Well, because you’ll hear people say that the, the biggest problem for carbon emissions is this. And then two weeks later, you’ll hear somebody else say, the biggest problem for carbon emissions is this. And it’s something totally different. I just mean to your point, it seems like we kind of don’t really have good data on this. 

DARREN WOODS:

We don’t have a good data, and another, I think, big miss in this space is we jumped right to, let’s replace everything we’ve built over the last 140 years. And I would not push against evolution and transition to something new. But my question is why aren’t we working on the stuff we’ve already got while we transition? Because I promise you, it’s going to take a lot longer than people think. It’s going to be a lot more expensive. And so let’s work on decarbonizing what we’re already using while we work to change and bring in products that don’t have the carbon. And a carbon accounting and carbon intensity allows you to start down that path. It also allows you to understand the trade-offs that you’re making. And it also allows policymakers to understand the policies they are putting in place, how effective are they. 

To give you one example, if you look at the subsidy that the government is giving for electric vehicles, it works out to be about $900 per ton of CO2 removed. If you look at the subsidy the government is giving to reduce carbon capture and storage, it’s $85 a ton. So, I’m not saying that to argue against EVs. I’m just saying that every entity is an organization that has constraints. We’re all resource constraint. So you need to optimize your spending. If you want a portfolio of things, fine, invest in them, but recognize what it’s costing you and allocate your dollars appropriately. And today we don’t have a mechanism for doing that. 

So, for something that is as critical as the climate and for something that people talk about being an existential threat, to not have these fundamental building blocks to really evaluate how best to approach this, I think is, a huge miss and is, frankly, getting in the way of the world making a lot more progress, a lot faster, and at a much lower cost. People are slowly starting to realize we gotta put some of these building blocks in place, some of these foundational things if we’re going to be successful here.

BEN WIGGINS:

That makes total sense. With all of that in mind then, top leadership lessons that you would

share with young professionals? What would surprise them about the leadership guidance that you would offer them?

DARREN WOODS:

Well, I mentioned earlier this idea that I think true leadership starts with knowing yourself. People talk about are leaders made or are they born? And then I’m kind of like, yeah, I think it takes both of those. There are all kinds of styles and different… But you have to, you can’t, you have to be true to yourself. You have to know who you are. And then you have to understand what is needed from you. And the one thing I think people, certainly in my career as I’ve mentored and helped people grow, and as you move up and you have more and more responsibility, bigger leadership jobs, the service factor becomes bigger and bigger. It stops being what you’re good at or what you’re comfortable doing, and it’s more about what do they need from you. And the bigger the organization and the heart of the challenges, the more they need from you. And so it’s really, you’ve got to start with what you are and then you have to figure out a way to grow and to meet the needs of what they need, what the people you’re leading need. And that is, I think, oftentimes not recognized. But it is, leadership is about service, serving the people that you’re leading. And I don’t think people often recognize that. That’s the hardest part of it, frankly.

BEN WIGGINS: 

I believe that. 

You mentioned that your wife was your high school sweetheart. You decided to come together here. And you’re a father of three. Grandfather. How has family influenced your career and the way you show up as a leader?

DARREN WOODS:

Well, I actually would not be where I’m at today without my family. There’s no doubt about that. And, certainly, it starts with my wife. I think she’s been a very good influence on me, and helped me support the person that I am. But I keep a very distinct line between work and family. I don’t bring work home. I just feel like, when I’m working, I’m working focused on that. When I’m home, I’m focused on my family. Moving around, all the years I had with the company, we got very close as a family. So, it’s a very important part of my life. If I’m not at work, I’m with my family. And even to this day, as the kids have gotten older and have gotten married or they’ve gotten significant others, you know, I always wondered whether that would draw them away or whether that would grow the circle, bring them closer. And we’ve been very fortunate that as the kids have found their partners in life, they’ve come into the circle. And so the family’s getting bigger. The grandkids add a very loud new dimension. It’s a way of disconnecting from the challenges of the job because you cannot bring the job into, and play with a 5-year-old. I mean, they’re distinct things. And so it’s really, for me, a way to kind of disconnect from everything that is back at the office. Having the kids around, they’re just a joy. I tell people that grandkids are the only magic left. Once you reach 60 in life. And I really believe that. It’s magic.

BEN WIGGINS:

That’s fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you for sharing your lessons in leadership with us today on Aggie Legends. It’s been a pleasure having you here.

DARREN WOODS:

Thank you for the opportunity.

BEN WIGGINS:

On behalf of Mays Business School, I’m Ben Wiggins. We hope you’ll like and subscribe to Aggie Legends. Feel free to leave a comment. It really helps. Here at Mays Business School, we are building a better future through business, and we thank you for being a part of it.