Southwest Airlines Co. announced the promotion of Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer Linda Rutherford to executive vice president, people and communications, effective June 30. Rutherford will succeed Bob Jordan in what was the executive vice president, corporate services role, as he pivots to making the CEO transition as smooth as possible and spending time with employees across the company.

Rutherford will report directly to Jordan and will continue to serve as the chief communications officer for the company. She will continue to oversee communications, outreach, culture and engagement, while adding diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I), people, and Southwest Airlines University to her responsibilities. Reporting to Rutherford in her new role will be Vice President and Chief People Officer Julie Weber, Managing Director Communications and Outreach Laurie Barnett, Managing Director Culture and Engagement Whitney Eichinger, Vice President of Southwest Airlines University Elizabeth Bryant, and Director of DE&I Raquel Daniels.

Rutherford is approaching 30 years at Southwest after joining the company in 1992. In recent years, she has helped build enterprise change agility, continued the strategic implementation of programming and incentives aimed at nurturing corporate culture, led enterprise efforts to develop and implement an employee experience road map, championed the enterprise social business strategy, devised relevant programming for employee engagement, and evolved a multichannel communications support system for multiple stakeholders internally and externally. She guided the company’s response effort at the enterprise level to the COVID-19 pandemic and the death of the company’s founder, Herb Kelleher.

“Linda is an innovative leader who challenges Southwest to continually evolve how we engage and champion our employees and communities, and she consistently delivers on our Southwest purpose to connect people to what’s important in their lives with friendly, reliable and low-cost air travel,” said Bob Jordan, executive vice president and incoming CEO.

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