[Transcript]

Jan Griffiths: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Automotive Leaders Podcast, where we help you prepare for the future by sharing stories, insights, and skills from leading voices in the automotive world with a mission to transform this industry together. I'm your host, Jan Griffiths. That passionate, rebellious farmer's daughter from Wales with over 35 years of experience in our beloved auto industry and a commitment to empowering fellow leaders to be their best authentic selves.

Stay true to yourself, be you and lead with gravitas, the hallmark of authentic leadership. Let's dive in.

This episode is brought to you by [00:01:00] Lockton. Lockton redefines business insurance and people solutions with a personal touch. Their global team of 11, 000 is driven by independence, not quarters. To tailor success for your business, discover the Lockton difference, where your goals become their mission.

Independence. It's not just how you think, but how you act.

We've talked a lot on the podcast about legacy automotive companies and how they need to transform themselves to be competitive in the future of the automotive industry. And some of the companies in the automotive industry are very old indeed. Webasto started life in 1901. It's been around for a very long time. It is a German company. I couldn't think of a better example of a legacy company than Webasto. And how on earth [00:02:00] do you transform a legacy company to be competitive in today's marketplace? So, in order to answer that question, we are gonna go straight to the top leadership in the Americas. And joining me at the mic today is Brad Ring President and CEO for Webasto in the Americas. Brad, welcome to the mic.

Brad Ring: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's really an honor to be part of your podcast. I've been listening for a long time, and really respect the people you've had on your podcast. So, to be here myself, it's great, really. Thank you.

Jan Griffiths: And thank you. You were at my book launch for AutoCulture 2.0.

Brad Ring: Yes, I was. Yes. And I've read the book and it's great. It's really insightful.

Jan Griffiths: Thank you. Brad, my number one question every time, who are you as a leader?

Brad Ring: It's a great question. To be honest, I don't think about that very often because the way that leadership comes for me is just trying to be myself. Just trying to be present. Comfortable in my own skin. Approaching the people in authentic [00:03:00] way. For me, that manifests itself as someone who drives for results really in a meaningful way, but in a balanced share. Caring about people and caring about their lives and how they interact.

And I think sometimes this can be perceived as weak, to be caring, in some companies. So, I want to also enforce like there's no weakness. We still demand good results. We're still critical of our performance. We still have high standards. However, we do that and I do that, by also being, I would say, humble, by introducing a personal vulnerability.

My team hears a lot from me that I'm human, that I also make mistakes, and I am transparent about that. I give space to people to express their views and what they want and what they think. But I don't weaken my views for that. I still also have strong opinions.

And so, it introduces a dynamic and my leadership is designed this way, I would say, to be a little [00:04:00] bit messy, right? I think the old command and control methodology is very clean, it's very organized, it's very structured. And the fallacy of it is that, you don't really have control when you're in command and control.

An organization, the size of Webasto Americas where we're 4,000 people. To imagine you can have real control over 4,000 people. It's a fallacy. And I get better results by letting it be messy, building the space for that, go fast. Speed is a big priority because when things are messy, you're gonna make mistakes, and you have to correct those quickly. But you also have to make decisions quickly and this works for me.

So, I think this brings a value to the team. I think the team develops and gets better through that leadership. And it's really, I would say, my style. And underpinning all of that, just to get to the core nature of it is, I really believe that if you care about people, they'll care about you. And putting that at the underpinning, it gives a lot of room for experiment and for testing [00:05:00] different style.

Jan Griffiths: Have you always been that way or is this a leadership style that's evolved over time?

Brad Ring: For sure, it's a leadership style that's evolved over time. I didn't really come in with a lot of coaching and guidance and mentors. My life didn't start that way, so I had to kind of develop that over time. I've always tried to value the people around me, let's say the good and the bad. And even, I've emphasized for myself and for my teams and now even teaching my children, that even when you have a bad leader, there's something to learn from that. There's something to learn not to do. There's also something in bad leaders aren't all bad. There's good and bad elements of all of us, and I'm sure I do some things that people should probably walk away from and do a little bit differently, just like these leaders. But take the moment to learn, right? And take the moment to make a choice about how to behave and how to act in certain situations based on what you see in front of you, especially early in your career.

Jan Griffiths: Brad, as you look back on your leadership journey. When I ask people this question, [00:06:00] there's always one, at least one person that stands out in their leadership journey that they say, "You know what? This person, I really like this person as a leader because.." Do you have that person?

Brad Ring: Actually, there's one person that goes all the way back to the beginning of my career. His name is Jim Hall. He was the leader of the company when I started as a co-op. So, really straight out of high school.

He had attended the same university where both the Kettering or GMI at the time, alumni. And he made a particular point as a president to come down and shake my hand and introduce himself. And he was this presence, right? It's the only way I can really describe him. He was the type of person that when he shook your hand for the first time, you felt like you had a lifelong friend. And I can never replicate that. I don't have that. It's not in my personality. But it gave me this basis to think about how to interact with people and how to care about people.

He's been on my mind a lot lately. He passed away just like one month ago. We stayed [00:07:00] friends though through this whole time. So, I'm part of that process too because he built that sort of relationship with me as an 18-year-old with long hair coming straight outta. Nobody knew that. Sorry, that's a little secret that just got out. The internet searches are going crazy now. But really, I had long hair coming out of high school.

I just wanted to work on cars and this was my passion and he kind of brought that first image for me of what a leader should be in terms of interacting with people, in terms of like breaking hierarchy and just going to make a connection, and that was powerful for me. Still powerful. Up until this year, I've spent a couple times a year going to see him and talk to him and share. He's one. But I don't want to leave this question without really reflecting that there's so many.

Jan Griffiths: Yeah.

Brad Ring: There's so many people that have contributed to my success, to my career. And so many people that have been really great friends through this. I often talk about, what's important to me and especially a lot of young people [00:08:00] like to get coaching and things like that. And I think your motivation is important to understand as a person. And it changes over time, right?

When you come from humble beginnings and you don't have any money and you get your first job, you're motivated by money, 'cause you need to pay the bills. And later it evolves and it becomes more about the people. And today, for me, it's about the people. About developing others. And I've had great people in my life and my career to help me do that.

One, Hadi Awada was on your podcast. He's a great guy. He was part of that. He's not the only one though. There's just so many.

Jan Griffiths: Yeah. I think that there's never one person that you can hold up and say, "This person embodies all the traits of leadership. This is the perfect example of leadership." There are people that we see along the way and we know how they make us feel.

Brad Ring: Exactly.

Jan Griffiths: And when you see that behavior, you go, huh, okay. I like that. I'm gonna start doing that. And then, your whole leadership style starts to evolve.

Brad Ring: Yeah. And I think you have to be careful not to try to exactly model someone.

Jan Griffiths: Yes.

Brad Ring: Right? [00:09:00] I could have never been like Jim Hall, I just..

Because

Jan Griffiths: you're not Jim.

Brad Ring: I'm not him. And one of the big life lessons was to really value being yourself and to recognize, okay, there's a few people around that aren't gonna like who you are, because that's human nature.

But if you try to be something other than yourself, you lose all possibility to be genuine, to be authentic, and you end up, I think, not happy. So I really have focused on that. We also had opportunity in our lives to live overseas a few times. This also puts you in an environment where you're tempted to try to be like those around you because you are really a minority in this new environment, in this new place. And I learned early through those stages that you really have to be yourself. Your strength is to be yourself.

So I always recommend to people take, like I said before, take the good and the bad, but don't change who you are. Build that into the model of what you're creating for yourself.

Jan Griffiths: It took me decades to learn that. Growing up in the auto industry, and maybe being a woman too in the auto industry, the mold that I was expected to [00:10:00] fit was more command and control. It was, you will always sit at the head of the table, you know, if you are the boss, you will set the agenda, you will control the meeting, you will essentially make all the decisions. And I thought that's what leadership was supposed to be. But then I learned that doesn't actually work.

Brad Ring: Yeah. It's wild though. It's still so present. One of the hardest things with my team even now, and it's coming, I see it. But it's really getting the team to make decisions. Because it's so ingrained in our industry, I think, that the top makes the decisions and the bottom follows. But that's not what I want. It's not what works.

And getting people convinced that it's okay. But then, even once they're convinced that it's okay, it's a big change in how you think about your daily work. So, it's a journey, I would say, even after a couple of years at Webasto, we're still every day working on the journey.

Jan Griffiths: Well, I knew Webasto many, many years ago. I worked in the sunroof business over 10 years ago, and I always thought of Webasto as a [00:11:00] very tough, aggressive, male-dominated German company. I'm hearing somebody laughing in the audience already.

That's the culture. Whether it was right or wrong, I never worked here, so I couldn't tell you. But that's certainly the culture, and that is the culture that exists in a lot of German Tier One automotive companies. So, to break that, to keep what's good about it, because it's not all bad.

Brad Ring: Yeah.

Jan Griffiths: There's good parts about the DNA of this company. To keep the good parts, but yet transform the company for the future, that is an enormous challenge. How, Brad, have you been doing that?

Brad Ring: You hit it in what you just said. I think one of the keys was to celebrate what was great, right? And inside of Webasto, there's a great culture of caring about people. Really like competitive advantage level difference from other companies that I know.

There's a real culture about... [00:12:00] I think the word family's thrown around a lot in our business as a kind of tool for motivation. But at Webasto, the word family is real. There's a real desire for the business to be run like a family business. For there to be that connection.

And there's this great pride in Webasto about the products and the technology and taking these fantastic cultural elements and not breaking them down and not putting them out the door. I called it all through this process, bolting on what was missing. And in the region Americas, what was missing was really a culture of driving for performance, a culture of working together and being a team and not being silos. A culture of really, I think, deeply caring about people more than a surface level. And bolting these two things together has been what's been the success factor.

Jan Griffiths: Yeah. You talk about breaking down silos. We talk about that all day long. Every company I talk to, it's all about breaking down silos. And it's easy to say, but it's [00:13:00] really, really difficult to do because one of the most important things you have to have is that people have to feel safe in making decisions. There has to be trust. It has to be foundational. And they have to feel safe that they can make a decision, that they can maybe step a little out of their normal silo to make a decision that's good for the business. How do you get that ingrained in the culture here, Brad?

Brad Ring: It's gonna sound crazy. Maybe you've never even heard it before, but we changed the language. So what had happened over time is the language inside the company came to mean things that weren't the intent. So words like accountable, words like responsible, these had morphed into words that meant, it's not me. Or there's no decision, who's going to take charge? And we had to introduce words like promise, where we make a promise to each other. And that promise is, it sounds basic, but it's, what's going to be done? And when is it gonna be done? And we introduced words like breakdown instead of, it's a [00:14:00] famous phrase called put the fish on the table. We don't use, put the fish on the table in the region anymore because nobody really understood what it meant. It was kind of euphemism. So now we have breakdowns because we live in a complicated world with complicated business. We can make promises. There's a good chance we might not be able to keep that promise for good reasons.

So now, we declare that as a breakdown and we work through that together. And changing the language completely changed this vulnerability that was associated with the old words that meant I was getting out of something or that I didn't want to take responsibility or so on.

The key factor in this word promise though is, it's only meaningful if you give the other person the ability to not promise. If you open that door and say, "I'm asking you to promise this to me, but it's okay if you say that you won't," or "It's okay that you say yes, but I need this to get it done," or "I can't make that promise, but I can make this other promise. Would that work for you?" Because just forcing a promise is [00:15:00] command and control again, right?

So, opening that door to say it's okay to push back and to say something not in line with the exact promise, this was what unlocked it.

Jan Griffiths: And promise is personal

Brad Ring: Promise is personal.

Jan Griffiths: It's much more personal

Brad Ring: And it's emotional.

Jan Griffiths: Yes. Yes. It goes right to the heart of commitment.

Brad Ring: It does.

Jan Griffiths: Yeah. I like that. Lots of changes, Brad, at Webasto. I see you got a new CEO in Germany this year, and a lot of buzz, believe it or not, because it's coming out in as a positive around restructuring. What's going on there?

Brad Ring: I mentioned before that, Webasto was quite proud of innovation and technology and growing as a family business. Webasto made some big bets. So there were big bets in battery business. Many people don't realize, they think of us as a roof company, but we have a big battery business. We were in the charging business. We vertically integrated into the glass business.

Even the Bronco hard top roof that's quite famous for Webasto in the market. This [00:16:00] was a big bet on technology. It's never been used for external surfaces before. And these big bets have led to a market situation where the bets were good bets and good tech and really the commitment was there. But with the BEVs slowing down, the China market slowing down, it's led to a situation where the company has to take some action to restructure.

I think this is also, as you said, I think it can be a positive because we're going to come out of this situation still with great people, still with great technology but now we're bolting on performance culture throughout the whole company. And this performance culture, I think combined with those other elements plus the genuine still caring for people, I think Webasto will come out of this and be really a great, amazing company that can go forward and do great things in this business.

And as you said, there's a new CEO involved as well. And he's proving to be really caring about the culture, and caring about bolting on this performance management in parallel. So I think this was also a [00:17:00] great decision.

Jan Griffiths: A German CEO that cares about people.

Brad Ring: Yes.

Jan Griffiths: Okay, maybe I shouldn't say that. Maybe it's my personal bias, but I've had a lot of experience working with Volkswagen as a customer. And again, very aggressive culture. But I did find one leader in Volkswagen who was truly an authentic leader. He just left the company actually, but he was a VP of Sales for the US. His name is Andrew Savvas. Great leader in VW.

So what I'm hearing you say is that a German-owned company is getting it. It's understanding the need for restructuring. And I agree with you, restructuring is not a bad thing. It's a milestone. It's almost like the company is saying, "Okay, hey, wait a minute. We know we gotta do something different. Let's put a line in the sand, boom, and let's do it."

Brad Ring: Yep.

Jan Griffiths: And there's a CEO in place that gets the need for performance, but also the culture piece of it. Did I get that right?

Brad Ring: You got that right, Jan. And I think it's too generalized [00:18:00] to say German culture isn't caring. I also worked with some customers that didn't demonstrate outwardly that they're caring for people. But I think, first of all, I would say, as you get to know people, it's also there's a surface there and then there's what's underneath the surface. And underneath the surface is a lot more warm. And I think that is true really throughout our company, at least. Also with customers, I have experienced with the German customers in the past, and when you put the time in and you get to know the person, people are people, and there is warmth underneath.

But I think there are some companies that need to adapt and move from command and control more into caring about people. And we're not unlocking the talent, we're not unlocking the desire of the people to perform and come to work every day and do the best that they can and bring the new ideas. And I think this style has to change.

Jan Griffiths: Yes.

Brad Ring: But in Webasto, actually, what I would say is it wasn't for me a necessarily a recognition of that except for the deep caring about people from the family [00:19:00] environment. It was more the structure. Webasto is, shockingly, for a German company, is decentralized.

And so, there's a very strong message that the regions are responsible for the regions and the central team is not there to intervene. The central team is there to support, and of course, like normal, they ask for a lot of reports and they ask for a lot of understanding. But as long as you are delivering the results and performing and communicating transparently, there's a lot of autonomy to really run a region, my region, China, and so forth, the way that the regions sees fit. And this was a nice surprise for me coming in. And it was another reason we could unlock this big change.

Jan Griffiths: Yeah. That's great to hear because often you hear when a company, not just German, I won't pick on German companies, but companies that are headquartered in another country often the mothership has tentacles.

Brad Ring: I have other examples of that in my past, so I can relate.

Jan Griffiths: Those tentacles can be at times strangling and they'll strangle you, and you're not [00:20:00] allowed to make decisions and it gets frustrating and then people leave, leadership leaves and then it impacts the culture. And it's a mess.

So it's great to hear that you have the autonomy to lead and run the region the way that you think fit, obviously, in line with what they want in Germany. But you have the autonomy to do that.

Brad Ring: Yeah. It's real and I appreciate that from the leadership.

Jan Griffiths: Yeah. That's great. Brad, you've looked at the 21 traits of Authentic Leadership. I know there's a lot in there, it's 21, and they're based on my experience and things that I've learned by interviewing people like yourself along the way. But if you were to pick two or three of those 21 traits that are the most meaningful to you, what would you pick and why?

Brad Ring: The one for me that really stands out as trust. Trust for me is at the core of how I've built relationships. It's at the core of how I do the business. I think trust actually encapsulates several of the other traits that are there. You have to have [00:21:00] transparency, you have to respect people, you have to care, you have to be, on top of that, you also have to be competent. And you also have to deliver your promises. And I think that these elements of trust are somehow built into your other elements and traits that are discussed. And for me, trust has been at the core.

We have a great example in the turnaround of Webasto in the region. The example I'd like to use is really the first budget commitment that we had to make as a leadership team. And to give you some context, Webasto Region Americas wasn't very good at keeping promises around budgets and wasn't very good at being profitable. Even when we started a discussion about making that commitment or that promise to the budget of the first year. There was a prevailing thought that it was impossible. A prevailing thought that it had never happened before, so how were we gonna do it differently? And a prevailing thought that the challenge was far too big because it was a big challenge that we had.

This is where we really worked [00:22:00] on trust, right? We really worked on building things from the top to share them with each other. Building things from the bottom to make sure we weren't getting too crazy with our commitment. Aligning, working with this promise word. Going through all the stages of the team building. All about building the trust and the commitment together.

I find this in my personal life, as well. I rely on trust for my friendships, for my family relationships. And I think that this is the one for me that clearly resonates.

Jan Griffiths: This episode is sponsored by UHY. UHY, and the Center for Automotive Research are digging into how suppliers quote and win with OEMs. The results drop at CAR MBS, September the 15th through the 17th at Michigan Central. Stay tuned.

Trust is one of those words, you can't define it because it's a feeling.

Brad Ring: It is.

Jan Griffiths: It's a feeling. It's very difficult to define, but you know it when it's there. And Stephen Covey, in his work The Speed of [00:23:00] Trust, he talks about, when you have trust, speed goes up and cost goes down. And it is true.

When I first heard that, I rolled my eyes 'cause I didn't get it. It took me a minute to get it. But the more I think about it, yes, it is hard to draw a line between trust and the bottom line of the business directly. But it is there. If you don't have trust, if you don't trust your leaders and don't trust your people and you don't empower them, you are not gonna get the best out of this wonderful resource, people that we have. And people that really get trust, I think, understand that.

Brad Ring: Yeah. And it takes a balance though, right? So, trust has to be given, and trust has to be earned. And it happens every minute of every day. There's a moment where it can get stronger or weaker. And I think once you have the trust, you can't just stop. You have to keep building on that to make sure that you maintain it.

But once you have it, I mean, just think about the action of sending a CYA email. How wasteful is that? And how much does that contribute to breaking down [00:24:00] trust even further? We all do it. We all have to do it because we don't feel trust at times. But when we feel trust, we don't even think about doing things like this, right? When it's real, when you just drive through, and you can make, as you said, I think speed is enabled by this. I think cost is reduced by this. I think people become comfortable being developed and opening and sharing what they think. And you build stronger leaders this way.

Jan Griffiths: Yes. And then you are not afraid to make a mistake when the trust is there.

Brad Ring: Yeah.

Jan Griffiths: So, if you do step out and you do something that's a little creative or a little innovative and you try something and you stumble, when there's trust and you feel safe, the leader picks you up, and says, "Okay, I know. Okay, so this didn't work, but that's all right. What did we learn from that? Let's go. Let's put the train back on the tracks and off we go again."

Brad Ring: That's right. I think approach is on a spectrum. And so, I always like to say, hey, at one end, if the building's on fire, I'm not getting a consensus that we should leave building.

Jan Griffiths: Exactly. Yeah.

Brad Ring: Right? I'm telling you to get out of the building, but when there's more time and there's less pressure [00:25:00] and there's different topics, then we should experiment. We should spend that time working on trust and working how we want to be together. So I value that a lot in my teams.

And I think it's exceptionally difficult though as you go across the waters, I would say. Trust is also so interpersonal that when you're far away, it's why people also know that I like to be in the office, and this is why: this is because it's really hard to build trust when you're not looking someone in the eye like we're looking right now. And I think that element has to be maintained in order to be strong and be fast.

And I love what you said about taking risk and making mistakes. It's a virtuous circle. And if you have that trust and you can go fast and you can make a mistake, you can, by the way, correct that mistake faster. And then, it works really in a virtuous circle.

Jan Griffiths: Yes. You talk about going faster. Speed is the competitive advantage that we all need to have in this industry.

Brad Ring: Yeah. Holy cow, in the environment we're in now, the volatility is unbelievable. [00:26:00] And if we're slow to react to the volatility, it's gonna pass us by.

Jan Griffiths: Yes. We cannot operate in silos. We cannot have heavy bureaucracy. We know that the Chinese OEMs are eating our lunch in this industry. And okay, so we've got a tariff situation that's gonna buy us a little time, but really, we're outta time. So changing these legacy auto companies is more important now than ever before.

I won't even say the word change. I'll say transforming. Transforming them now is more important than ever. How do you feel about where you are at on that journey and this idea of speed? Because everybody has a different idea of what speed is.

Brad Ring: Yeah. Where we are on the journey is an interesting question. I think we had to focus first on getting the stabilization that comes with being profitable and being able to rely on the day-to-day. So, this was our first focus and we're there and we still have continuous improvement and so forth.

[00:27:00] It is the next frontier for us that we started actually at the beginning of this year to focus more and more on market. More and more on external. I think the legacy automakers plus companies like ours, we had become so comfortable in the market that the focus all became internal. And when the focus becomes internal that the Chinese that aren't worried about your internal stuff and they're focused on the market. By the way, I lived in China for a couple of years. So I got to be there and see and live 'China speed' as they call it. Really, the magic is they're focused on the market, and they don't get in the way for making decisions. They have some political systems and so forth that also enable speed, I would say.

For us, we have to focus on the market. We have to get rid of the internal debates and debacle around all of the decision making, and just compete, right? And I guarantee, if we look at the market and we look at what the customer wants and we drive towards that goal and we put to bed the internal stuff that doesn't add value. That's how you get there.

Jan Griffiths: Yeah. That's true. [00:28:00] Well, let's take a turn into the personal realm, shall we?

Brad Ring: Sure.

Jan Griffiths: Let's see. What deeply personal question can we ask you? I'm not over the long hair thing yet, but...

Brad Ring: No.

Jan Griffiths: What do you do for fun, Brad Ring? What do you do when you're not focused on Webasto?

Brad Ring: Believe it or not, because I don't actually have the physique for it, I do a lot of cycling. Personally, my family owns 20 bicycles, and I own eight for myself to do it in all the possible different ways. I love this, it's really enriching for me. It's a sport that I can get the, of course, the physical fitness and so forth, but I can also choose. It can be super, I would say, social and you can get out with groups and have a great time and go to the pub afterwards and so forth. Or it could be a really, really solo activity and you can kind of get into your mind and let things go. That's why I have different bikes, by the way, 'cause if I get into my mind and let things go on the mountain bike, I'm running into a tree, right? So that's like not the right moment. So [00:29:00] you have to have different bikes for the different activities. That's at least what I tell my wife. I'm also now into wake surfing.

Jan Griffiths: What the heck is wake surfing?

Brad Ring: Yeah. It's when they make boats for this and you put a bunch of water in the back of the boat. It's designed to do this, and it makes a giant wave, and then you get on a surfboard and you surf behind the boat. And so, I got introduced to this by a close friend and at 50 years old, decided to go ahead and give it a go. At risk of my own bodily harm. But it turns out that it's actually quite a lot of fun. And it's also very social, obviously. We do this together. The family's all doing it now. I spend my summers trying to spend time on a bike and be behind a boat when I can.

Jan Griffiths: That sounds great. Tell me about your routine. When you get up in the morning, people are often fascinated with CEO mindset and what are the first three things that you do in the morning when you get up? What? Tell me. And if you say check your email, I am gonna throttle you, so don't say that.

Brad Ring: I know, but, uh..

Jan Griffiths: Don't. You are not gonna say that. Come [00:30:00] on.

Brad Ring: Well, you also don't want me to lie, right? So..

Jan Griffiths: I don't want you to lie. Ugh. We're all about authentic leadership.

Brad Ring: You just put me into a spot. So..

Jan Griffiths: Just say what it is. I'm not gonna judge you.

Brad Ring: Yeah. I feel like I'm gonna be judged.

Jan Griffiths: No judgment. No judgment.

Brad Ring: So I do catch up on the emails and so forth.

Jan Griffiths: Right when you wake up though?

Brad Ring: Yeah. Right when I wake up. It's the first thing I do.

Jan Griffiths: Okay, no judgement.

Brad Ring: Yeah. It's the first thing I do. The second thing I do is usually exercise. So, most of my bicycling is done in the basement, on a trainer because of time constraints and things. So normally I'm doing 45 minutes or an hour on the bike. That's probably five days a week-ish that I'm doing this.

And then, I always have a breakfast, right? That's the third thing. I always put the fuel in. Now, I get to have that breakfast with my wife. So we're just empty nesters. My youngest just went to university last year. So, by then, my wife is up and we have breakfast together and we talk about our day and it kind of, I would say, cleanses me to get started between the exercise. But I can't do it before I know what's [00:31:00] going on. It's a shame maybe or pity, but I do start with the email. Yeah. And then, I exercise. Then I spend some time with my wife eating breakfast.

Jan Griffiths: That sounds like a good start of the day. And I said I'm not gonna judge you. I'm not gonna judge you. But I will tell you this, for many years I did the same thing when I was in supply chain purchasing in Tier One space. And I found that my brain wasn't ready to deal with the realities of automotive at 6:00 AM or whatever time it was. And I needed a little time to get in the right head space, because I found if it was something bad, you feel the need to react. I wasn't ready. There is no right or wrong to this. There is whatever works for you.

Brad Ring: For sure.

Jan Griffiths: Your routine works for you. That didn't work for me, to get into email right away. So I need a little time. I need a cup of coffee and then exercise and then I'm ready to take on the day.

Brad Ring: It's funny because it's actually sort of the opposite for me. I can't relax until I've caught up. I have to do that so that my mind can be put at ease for an hour.

Jan Griffiths: [00:32:00] Yeah.

Brad Ring: It's similar but it's just a different approach.

Jan Griffiths: Different approach. But again, no judgment. I think the important thing is that as a leader, as a human, you have to know what works for you. Don't try to fit a mold.

Brad Ring: Yeah, that's great advice.

Jan Griffiths: Of what anybody else says you should do.

Brad Ring: It's great advice.

Jan Griffiths: We're fed so much information, Facebook, Instagram, all of this. LinkedIn. Take some ideas, try them out, whatever works for you, do it, and be authentic about it. Be comfortable in your own skin. That's what authentic leadership is.

Brad Ring: I couldn't have said it different to this audience by the way 'cause they all get emails at 5:30 in the morning, so...

Jan Griffiths: Yeah. I'm sure they love that. Sure they love that. Well, talking about the audience, shall we open this up for questions?

Brad Ring: Yeah, let's do it.

Jan Griffiths: Let's do it. Okay. So, studio audience, let's have our first question. Who's got the first question?

Gretchen Komarzec: My name is Gretchen Komarzec, and I am in program management, responsible for the process, methods, and tools. I [00:33:00] guess I have a couple of different comments, but I'll limit it to one, and then I'll let somebody else, and then maybe come back around.

But I do wanna say, I've been with the company for 25 years. As a woman, I've been involved pretty regularly with the women's initiative over the years trying to promote us in the organization.

As you had mentioned, it has been a very male-dominated organization. And I believe that there was maybe one other time where we had a brief VP woman that was a contract worker but not really part of the organization. And so, Brad is really the first CEO who has come into the organization and really promoted women. We have our first VP woman that he mentioned, Kelli. And it's given us women a real sense of, "Okay, there's this glass ceiling that we can now break through, and we actually do have an opportunity for those who wanted to potentially become Vice President." So, I wanna thank him.

Brad Ring: Or [00:34:00] President, that's also there.

Jan Griffiths: Yes. Yes.

Gretchen Komarzec: I think Brad will say, "Well, it just makes common sense." But no, it really has been a difficult road over the years. And then, to finally have that hope for certain women that yeah, this can happen so, thank you.

But I also wanna ask you, Brad, maybe in your career, did you realize that you could be that influential and be able to promote, maybe what wasn't necessarily the common strategy, in coming to make that change?

Brad Ring: I think, first of all, I've been blessed to have strong women in my life. My mother is amazing. My wife is super amazing. And I've had leaders before, women that were great, that I learned a lot from.

I think it was just natural for me to think about women in the workplace being part of the workplace. As you said, you thought I would say it's just normal. But I think that was a gift for me after seeing the automotive space and seeing a lot of [00:35:00] suppliers. I don't think everyone in leadership roles has had that gift in their life to really see that.

I used the word messy before, and I really value diversity of thought and having different approaches. Homogeneous teams are easy. You can come to an answer and a conclusion really fast. But you don't really get the best answer, and you don't really get different thoughts, and different ways to think, and different ideas, and so forth.

And 50% of the population, more or less, or 51. Someone probably has a statistic on male and female splits. For me, it's insane to exclude half of your population from who's going to add value in your company and in your life. So I'll never do that. And if I end up in a company that wants me to only have men, I'll just leave.

I have choices in my life, too. I just won't work for that kind of organization 'cause it's just not right.

Jan Griffiths: Great. Thank you. Next question.

Dexter Sandy: Dexter Sandy, I'm the VP of Purchasing and Supplier Quality. You might have alluded to this in the discussion, [00:36:00] but the question is how do you believe your leadership style aligns to or impacts the company's culture?

Brad Ring: Thanks, Dexter. I actually believe that the leadership of the company helps set the tone and the culture. I believe that it's impossible to drive a culture through an organization that the leadership isn't behind and isn't supporting. So there's a key role in leadership.

But, so you know how I view culture, I think a lot of organizations view culture as a few statements that are on a plaque that goes up on a wall. And you point at that when you're not sure what to do, or you point at that when you're being cynical about something that happened.

Culture for me is, I like putting it on the wall 'cause it's a good reminder, but culture, for me, is a living organism. When people talk about, oh, our culture is shifting, or our culture has changed, that's on all of us. Like, how we behave and act every single day together, and how we interact, and how we choose to come to work and be present [00:37:00] together. That's what defines the culture, right?

And so, I hold my team accountable. I, myself, my team knows; they can tell me if I'm out of bounds, and I appreciate that. I want to know 'cause sometimes at the top it's quite lonely, right? Nobody bothers to even tell you when you're doing something dumb, right? So I like that. And I believe that interaction and that freedom to work together on culture that's what drives it.

So, I appreciate that I definitely have a place in that, and I have to say what I would like it to be, and I have to live that. By the way, if everyone else in this room and in the rest of the company doesn't work on that organism every single day. It's gonna change, and it's probably gonna change to something you don't like, because when you let something so complex and so emotional just evolve on its own, it devolves, it doesn't evolve. And so, it's daily work and we all have a responsibility to make that organism what we want it to be.

Jan Griffiths: Yeah, I would agree. I think culture is very intentional. You have to be very intentional about what your culture needs to be in an organization. And [00:38:00] I've heard somebody say that it's the glue that holds everything together. And it truly is.

Brad Ring: It is.

Jan Griffiths: Good question. Thank you. Next question.

Brad Ring: She's a Kettering alum, by the way.

Jan Griffiths: Oh really?

Brad Ring: Yeah.

Danielle Didia: And ironically, I was gonna touch on that. You talked about how in your internship, you formed that connection and that mentorship with your CEO at the time. So, how do you foster that kind of teaching moment or mentorship within Webasto and twofold, what advice do you have for those early in their careers?

Brad Ring: My advice to leaders on this topic is just take a moment, right? Just go say hi and ask how it's going, and ask what those interns — usually, in our case. It was co-ops when I was doing it — but just ask them how their day is. Ask 'em how they like their work. Ask 'em what's good; ask 'em what's bad. Listen to what has to be said.

There's a great life lesson in having children, by the way. If you listen to your children, you learn a lot about yourself and you learn a lot about what's happening in the world.

And it's the same, I think, as you get older and more mature in a company. It's the same with the younger people who are coming in. I [00:39:00] think the younger people have a totally different perspective, and I think that if they're willing and open to share, you should listen. And you should take that and try to act on that.

For the younger people, I always give the advice to be brave, right? To be brave. Like, put it out there — what you think. I say this to everybody, by the way: be respectful, right? There's ways to present yourself and there's ways to say things. You can say really negative things in a respectful way, and it gets received in a particular way. But if you do it in a disrespectful way, you're gonna get a different reaction. So I always give advice not just to young people, 'cause all it's all of us that have to be reminded. Do it in a respectful way, but say what you think, right?

So there's several people on my direct team who have heard from me that they don't need to apologize for who they are. I want your whole self — to whoever you are and what that looks like and what that is. That's what I put onto my team. So bring your whole self, tell the whole story. You're gonna be disappointed sometimes, I'm sorry to say, because there's priorities and there's a ton of things going on, and maybe [00:40:00] what you say will fall on deaf ears. But I guarantee at some point, in some topics, it's gonna land — or maybe it'll land two years from now when the person remembers. And if you don't say it, they don't get a chance. So just be brave. Be brave and put yourself out there. Share what you think.

Jan Griffiths: Next question.

Audience 4: It's gonna be a similar question, but going back to long hair, Brad — what is the lesson, in your time now, either in the industry or personally, that you can give yourself that you had to learn the hard way?

Brad Ring: Yeah. I wouldn't be so stubborn in the beginning. I was really driven about what was right and what was wrong — and really from my very narrow perspective, which I only discovered was narrow later in life. It's another advantage of leaving your home country, by the way. You get this great opportunity to look back on yourself and back on your culture from a totally different lens, with different voices saying, "Why are you guys like that?"

And when you're in that and you grow up — and I think it's even a particular case in the US— we really have pride [00:41:00] about who we are. I'm not so sure these days; it's changing a lot. But when I grew up, it was like the American flag and the bald eagle and we're Americans and we can do anything.

And this can drive you to not listen, right? To not catch other people's perspectives. To decide, in the first third of what someone's saying to you, that they're wrong. And I would give advice to myself to be less stubborn, to be more open, to be listening — to challenge like, who I am.

This was a breaking moment for me, I would say, in terms of my career and my ability to work with so many different kinds of people. I would've kept the hair longer too, 'cause, you know, I'm bald now. So it's like — thank God I had it long when I could.

Jan Griffiths: Well, but I think that there's a mold. Again, I'll talk about this mold. There's this mold, particularly when we are younger, we think we need to fit right? And you had an idea in your head: things need to go this way. I need to look this way, I need to act this way. And it took me a long time to realize that it's okay to be me. I have a dragon tattoo on my arm. I can tell you that when I was in the corporate [00:42:00] world, I would never have had that done, because I would be afraid of judgment, that they wouldn't take me seriously as a VP of Supply Chain anymore because I had a dragon on my arm.

Which is ridiculous. But that's the story that I told myself. So now I'm very proud of my dragon tattoo, thank you very much. So the message of that story is: get the long hair, get the dragon tattoo and go for it. That's what I heard.

Brad Ring: Yeah, that's the message.

Jan Griffiths: Alright, who's next?

Ana Favila: So, Ana Avila from the legal department — we sit right across each other, Brad, you know me well. So my question is: how do you make sure that those values — the company values and your own values — are reflected in any decision-making and in daily operations?

Jan Griffiths: Ooh, that's a good one.

Brad Ring: Yeah. Yeah. It's extremely hard to make sure that it's there for every decision. First of all, I don't have control over every decision, and I don't want control over every decision. I used [00:43:00] "trust" earlier in the podcast, and trust is behind how I sleep at night, assuming that everyone is trying to do the right thing.

And I think you have to start by believing that people are generally good, that people are generally interested in doing the right thing and interested in being successful. You have to live with this positive attitude, because if you're cynical and the other way around, I don't think you can ever do it.

Then I try to hold at least myself and my team, and the decisions we do make, accountable to these things. And it's still hard. We're in a business right now where we're going through restructuring and we're having to reduce costs. Every day, we have to face super difficult decisions — and decisions that could be in contrast of the values and how you place them.

And then you have to focus on how you take those decisions and how you execute those decisions, and how you face the people in a human way if you're impacting their lives. And you have to take that risk yourself too. [00:44:00] Some of the decisions we have to make, they're really hard personally. And when a decision's really hard personally, you have to be brave. And I think being brave is also quite relevant to making sure that we keep our values in every decision we make.

And this is, I would say, the answer for the company values. Personal values, I don't have any problem. Personal value is not hard for me, because I know who I am, because I know what matters to me, and because I'm not gonna compromise that, even if it means I have to do something different or change my life somehow. Like values or values — and that's not hard for me.

And it was a decision to make it not hard for me. So I think people who struggle with their own personal values and their decision, take some time to work on that, because that's what helps you get through all the hard stuff, and it's what helps you enjoy the good stuff more. And so, if you struggle with that, take some time and work on it, because that's what makes life interesting for me.

Jan Griffiths: Values. That's a great question, a wonderful answer, and a [00:45:00] great way to close us out today. Brad Ring, thank you for joining us at the mic. It has been an absolute pleasure.

Brad Ring: Yeah, thank you so much. It's really been my honor, my pleasure. It's exciting to be part of this great group of people that you've put together, so thank you.

Jan Griffiths: Thank you for listening to the Automotive Leaders Podcast. Click the listen link in the show notes to subscribe for free on your platform of choice, and don't forget to download the 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership PDF by clicking on the link below and remember. Stay true to yourself, be you, and lead with gravitas, the hallmark of authentic [00:46:00] leadership.