Driving Culture Change in the Automotive Industry with Jon Husby

[Transcript]

[00:00:00] Jan Griffiths: 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 Lockton. Lockton redefines business insurance and people's 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.

Today is a very special episode of the Automotive Leaders Podcast. We are live at ADAC here in Grand Rapids, Michigan. What's different about this episode is I have had the opportunity to walk through this beautiful facility and actually see and feel authentic leadership in action. You may know ADAC, they're known for vehicle access systems. They're known for door handles, but they are, oh, so much more than that, and they are well on their way on their transformational journey in terms of culture. I'm here. I see it. It's all around me. So, let's get inside the mind of the leader, the CEO of ADAC. Today, we welcome to the show, Jon Husby. Jon, welcome to Automotive Leaders.

[00:02:26] Jon Husby: Thanks, Jan. Happy to be here and happy to host you here in Grand Rapids at our facility. That was a very generous, warm welcome. Thank you.

[00:02:34] Jan Griffiths: It is great to be here. And as I said in the intro, I can feel it, Jon. I can feel the culture. I see it all around me. I saw downstairs that poster that you have on the wall where everybody has signed up for the mission and the principles. You really do live, eat, and breathe authentic leadership every day. And I have to come in right away and ask you that question, Jon. Who are you, Jon Husby, as a leader?

[00:03:02] Jon Husby: I am imperfect. I'm learning as a leader. Every day is new for me, but I embrace a style of empowerment. I embrace a style of trust and transparency in coaching. I fully, fully believe, and I've learned this through my well over 30 years of leading people, in this idea of roll up your sleeves, get in the trenches, don't be afraid to help people and coach people, right? And I've seen so many different styles of leadership. And so, for me, personally, being able to grab onto that, being able to be that transparent type of leader that empowers people, but also holds them accountable in a fair way and helps people learn to be better versions of themselves where they can go. That's really who I am as a leader.

[00:03:48] Jan Griffiths: What happened in your life, in your leadership journey, Jon, that shaped the leader that you are today?

[00:03:56] Jon Husby: So, many things, Jan. So many things. I'd go back to my days in middle school and high school; I was actually a reasonably shy kid if you can believe that. I was not terribly outgoing. I was a little bit nervous. I was always worried what people were thinking. And somehow, I was catapulted into some leadership opportunities, and I really grasped onto it. I said, "Wow, this is amazing." I enjoy being able to help lead some things and get some things done. That was step one, frankly, for me of transforming.

But, I'll tell you, talking about being an imperfect leader early on, and even when I went to college, and my wife joked with me all the time, you were in every single club, and you wanted every single title. And there was a part of my early leadership days that were a bit of that chasing the title, chasing the recognition. And what I started to learn eventually over time was it can't be about that; with great power comes responsibility, too. And you need to be able to be that more humble, vulnerable leader. Once I started to get that, the whole world of leadership changed for me. It became about working with others, empowering others, always trying to learn, etc. And so, this journey as I went through my college days of being involved in a lot of clubs and organizations, I was so blessed that I'll be in college to be able to go into four different internships, and it was those internships that I was able to work with amazing leaders early in my career. And these were leaders who would sit there and they would take the time to coach you. They would take the time to explain. They would say it's okay to make mistakes. How powerful as a person entering the early stages of their career to be able to have that kind of guidance to know, okay, it's going to be okay? Now, it didn't always stay that way. I went into my professional roles after that, and some of those were command-and-control cultures that I lived in for parts of my career. And what I found was, sometimes, part of leadership is figuring out what doesn't work is just as valuable as what does work. And I've had some amazing opportunities to learn. So, I went through my career. I had some amazing mentors along the way. My early days at DENSO, I had moved from HR and communications at a manufacturing site, moved into HR headquarters, moved into sales when during my Denso days. And I had an amazing mentor who would literally sit there and say, "Listen, I want to help coach you. Don't be afraid to ask any questions." And what I found, Jan, is I wanted to get to work early, not because I felt like I had to earn the stripe of the hours, but it was because I knew that that's probably my best chance to meet with that person and learn from that person, have that direct mentoring experience. And so, going through those days, I learned how to develop teams. I was one of the early youngest managers at DENSO and continue to grow my career. I then had this entrepreneurial streak. And I said, you know, hey, I'm in my upper twenties. I had a company called Tele Atlas come after me and say, "You have navigation experience." And this is back when navigation was only in 1 percent of cars at the time, right? Now, it's in all cars; it's just brought in mostly from your phone, right? But it was back when it was only like 1 percent install rate. And this company came after me, Tele Atlas, and they said, "We want you to start up automotive North America. We want you to open an office." And here I am going, I'm confident. I can do anything, right? And that's really what I went to go approach was I'm going to try this new thing. I hope I don't fail. I know I have a good background, and I can always go back to the big Tier Ones if something happens, right? And it was that opportunity where I really learned you got to be willing to try some things. And I was able to build this great team. I was able to build a team of people that were like-minded entrepreneurial people were in. And it was, frankly, some of the most fun I've ever had in my career, where it was truly a clean sheet of paper, and I try to bring people in to drive change, drive new business, and create something. And we did a great job. We grew it through the aftermarket. We then moved into direct automotive, which took a long time to go to the market to get there, and grew that business. And then, from there, I was given an opportunity. So, we liked what you've done here. Would you take over Europe as well? And I literally was going back and forth two weeks at a time, back and forth to Europe. And that was really my first entree, even though I'd worked with customers all over the world, and it was my first time leading people in a different region. That further gave me the understanding that a one-size-fits-all leadership doesn't work. You've got to adapt to the people, even within a culture, you know, in a particular country, you have to change your style. And I had to do that. And then, come along TomTom acquires Tele Atlas. And now, I'm in a whole other world. I'm moving over to Europe with my family. We're experiencing that expat life. And I'm having to relearn even there, starting to manage teams across Japan and China, in Italy and Germany, France and the US, and all over. What a great opportunity, but a great challenge to really change my leadership style. And so, I learned, again, along the way, what works and what doesn't work is pretty powerful. But every single one of those steps leading up to that point was really about how I continue to grow as a professional to be able to take more P&L General Management. And so, from there, I went into Harman International, a big Wall Street type company at the time, right? Very focused on the quarter. There are those companies that are out there. And that was a very different situation for me where I learned from some amazing leaders against some things to do some not to do, but it was still this important thing in shaping me as a leader because I learned how to be able to still deliver the results, but be genuine in doing it and not selling out who I am, right? And so, for me, it's about how do you get in there and have that authentic experience and not have to sell yourself out. Again, I'm not perfect; I've made mistakes along the way, but I've learned from those mistakes, and it's really helped me. I went on to a Chinese-owned German, wholly-owned German entity in SEG used to be at Bosch. And I stepped into that realm within SEG as the CEO of North America, really to drive all general management pieces. Still a very heavily German-influenced type company, but I had to change the culture. I was tasked with the need to make this profitable. We need to grow this business. And it was through that. And some of this, frankly, was just on-the-job learning. And I got into it, and it was really about it. I quickly had this opportunity with a particular customer, and they said, "We've had a problem with one of our suppliers. Can you help?" And my team was like, "Oh, they'll never work. It's going to take us three years to launch a program." I said, "Hold on, step back. Let's say how not no." And how do we do this? And the team all of a sudden took a breath and they say, "Oh, it's going to be okay to not necessarily follow the normal." I said, "That's right. Let's go tell the customer how we can do this." Now they have to tell us whether they're going to let us do it in that way. And what did we have within 90 days? We had a part ready to go. It's not three years. It was just a really refreshing, different mindset for that culture. And that started us on a path at SEG to start to change things, to start to think about how we innovate better. How do we become more entrepreneurial? How do we work together in a different way? Stop putting self-imposed limitations. And then, I was really blessed with the opportunity as the first non-family member CEO here at ADAC, a great family business, two great families involved here, and they came to me because of that experience at SEG, where I was able to transform cultures and really try to get people thinking. You think about the auto industry, Jan, a lot of people have struggled from the pandemic. It's been a tough period. You have the pandemic, you have semiconductor shortages, you have the Ukraine war built in there, you have this thing called the UAW strike. And oh, by the way, in the middle of all of this stuff, just after I joined, we had a cyber intrusion, as well, here at ADAC. And so, what a massive amount of tough four years for the people. So, I've had to come in as chief cheerleader to work on the morale, change some things, and keep things moving. Every single one of these steps have been amazing building blocks for me, and I embrace learning every single day. I mean, even this week here, I've had numerous lessons from people of how to think differently, networking with my peers, etc. So, every single step is important in that journey.

[00:12:24] Jan Griffiths: You talk about, "One size fits all," that that's not the approach for leadership. And I agree with you. However, as I grew up in the auto industry, and I'm sure you did too, we were expected to fit a mold of leadership that was very much command-and-control. And we were encouraged to treat everybody the same. I was told many times in my career, this is the policy. This is what we do. This is how we do it. Even though it didn't work for everybody at that time in their lives, leadership now is more about tuning into people, to individuals. And I'm not suggesting for one second that it's this soft sort of leadership culture where you just roll over and give everybody what they want, far from it. But there is this sense that leadership is much more about connecting with the hearts and minds of people. So, to go back to my discussion with Stefan Krause, it is much more about conviction than it is about compliance. But that's a hard switch, Jon. How did you handle that?

[00:13:36] Jon Husby: Not easily. I think, again, early in my career, there was a lot of the traditional team-leading type things, but, you know, in hindsight, it was more team managing. It wasn't leading. Those are some of the lessons I had from early in my career. A true leader is going to sit there and want to understand what's important to each person, right? You know, I think about as we go to customers, we want to learn what the value selling approach is, right? We want to learn what their personal and professional agendas are. Well, guess what? Why aren't we doing that with our people? I was able to learn that several jobs ago, which has been very helpful for me to know that I'm going to take some hard stances sometimes and not fall into line with where the corporation necessarily says you have to march to in order to better understand our employees and go do that. I think about today, right? I think about ADAC and the transformation we've been under, right? Very tough several years. I had to come in and really create this vision for the people in the entire team to say, "There's light at the end of the tunnel. We're going to get there. It's going to be okay." But in doing that, I sat down with every leader in the company, and I took a minimum hour or hour and a half with each leader in the company when I walked in, and I wanted to understand what made them tick. I want to understand their concerns. I want to understand what motivated them, right? And a lot of standard questions. What I learned was absolutely amazing because there were some people who were stuck in this is how the company operated. I want to; I like this. Well, it's not working. So, don't bang your head against the wall. If it's not working, we have to work together to figure out how to change that. And now, what we have is in our board of directors. We'll say it: We have one of the best gelling senior leadership teams they've ever seen, and we are all aware of each other. We're aware of our styles. We know what motivates each other. We know when people need to take a little bit more time to analyze and understand. And there's others that will make a fast decision. There are people who are going to have a little bit more of the. I need to feel compassion. I love my CTO. And you had an opportunity to meet her earlier today. Very great engineer, knows the technical stuff, but also a very compassionate leader. You don't necessarily always get that out of your engineering technical person. She's one of the first people to step up and say, "Well, what about this feeling? How about this? I'm concerned about my team. You know, I want to make sure that we're talking through this a little bit more." Those are the important pieces that get to the heart. And that's the way I run my one-on-ones with my team members. We always take a little bit of time to talk about what's important to them and what's going on in their life. So, there is a different style out there.

[00:16:07] Jan Griffiths: Jon, one of the struggles of leadership during this transformation is to get that balance between accountability and the people side of the business. There's a business performance that you're responsible to a board for. There's a very hard piece of that. That's a hard number. It is what it is. The numbers are the numbers. The balance sheet is what it is. The P&L is what it is. And too often in the past, we focused purely on the numbers and not enough about the people, but it's hard sometimes to get that balance, right? How do you get that balance right? And how do you encourage your leadership team to work with that balance?

[00:16:52] Jon Husby: Sure. Great question. How do I personally get that right? When I talk with other leaders in the industry, which is, by the way, leadership's very lonely, right? The faster you learn, the faster you learn how to network with others and ask some of the hard questions. I've learned pretty quickly that some of the best leaders that I admire are just those that try to understand the culture and the people. And so, one of the things I do is you never turn it off, but that excites me. That's what gets me up in the morning. It's thinking about what else we can do differently. How can we improve this? How can I develop that person further? And so, if part of our discussions were, we always have a people component. And one of the things we did was retool our meeting structures. When I came on board, we retooled our meeting structures, right? They've got to be, you know, highly focused, not just report outs. I want to get to actually talking about strategy. I want to talk about accountability, but within those meetings, what we've moved to, and I really applaud my head of HR here, he came, and he said, "Listen, I want to make sure that as you're doing this, there's a focus on people." And we literally have an agenda item in our weekly senior leadership meeting. It's called people. It focuses on what's happening in the business and what's going on with the culture, so it doesn't have to just be a particular person. It can be about, well, I think that department might be sensitive to this topic; how can we work with them and reinforce? And we will go through individuals, we'll talk about what else we can do, and I'm seeing a difference. I see a difference because our senior leaders are now out there giving more recognition, right? We're actually in the middle of launching a new recognition system, as well, to be able to make sure that we're putting it front and center. How do we reinforce the behaviors we want to have? And so, we're making this a living, breathing piece of our daily and weekly activity here at ADAC.

[00:18:36] Jan Griffiths: And I can see it, Jon. I can feel it when I'm here. One of the things that impressed me the most was your 12 Variables for Success. What I love about it is that it's not written in corporate speak; it's written in a language that people can relate to. And so often in our industry, there's all this corporate speak, and there are posters on the walls that are completely meaningless. Not only do you have the 12 variables, but you focus on each one of these every month, and you talk about what it means to practice that behavior or that value. That is exactly the kind of culture; that's how you amplify the values of a culture. Tell me more about the background of the 12 variables.

[00:19:28] Jon Husby: Sure. So, the 12 variables, they stemmed from when I came here day one, I'd prepared a quick, for the leadership team, I said, okay, I wanted to create a material that essentially said, here's who I am, here's my family, here's my career. I want to make sure you understand where I'm coming from. I'm going to meet with each of you, and I want to understand where you're coming from and your background. But this was my chance to give them one presentation for all of them at the same time. And so, part of that is I walked through, and I said, listen, these are some of the things, and they were my leadership philosophies and principles. And I shared those thoughts with everyone to say, "Here's what I've seen during my career. And here's what's going to make us successful. Please understand these are my thoughts. I want to learn yours, and we can help build a more integral group of values together to pursue." And that was really the starting point of that. As we started to go through a cultural change here, we wanted to redo our logo, motto, and tagline. We said this is the opportunity to not only come up with a new mission and vision, but this is the opportunity to come up with how we are going to be successful. And we didn't want to just call them, you know, leadership philosophies. We wanted to say these are the variables of success. If we live these every single day and hold each other accountable for living these every single day, we're going to be more successful. And so, I give a lot of credit actually to our marketing person. You've met her, Grace, as well. She is newer in her career. And she embraced this whole social media piece, but she embraced helping us draft those and create those. So, you want to talk about making this super easy to understand. We took someone that was very early in their career that hasn't been brainwashed by corporate speak, that helped write these pieces out. Now, take it one step further. Social media and internally, we publish one of those variables per month this year. We're launching it this year. We put it out, and we communicate it to our leadership team. The month after we launched it, we came back to our broader leadership team with 50-plus people, and we talked about that variable and asked for examples. And it's really fun. The first time we did it, the people were a little bit shy, and I'm not sure what to do. Now, we have to actually get to the point where, like, please make sure to send them a note; we actually have to get on with the rest of the agenda because people are embracing it, and they're recognizing it, and I'm actually seeing it now on the outside. You know, as I'm walking down the hall, we'll say, "Hey, I saw this person do that. That's amazing. That person, their commitment to accountability is fantastic, right? Their ability to stay curious is amazing." And so, those are the fun pieces that come from that is being able to one, not only push this out into social media where we do a video with an employee who's living and the embodiment of that value and that variable, but we also do it within our leadership team.

[00:22:13] Jan Griffiths: You're bringing it to life, Jon. And that's what culture is. It's not a statement on a conference room wall. It's not something that you put on your website. You have to live it, eat it, breathe it, and amplify those behaviors every single day. And that's what you're doing. And quite frankly, it's the first time I've seen a company do that. Jon, the 12 Variables for Success. I see it. I feel it all around me in this building. It's here. It's ingrained in the culture and the way that you amplify these values by picking one each month. That's how you transform a culture. Why, Jon, are other companies so reluctant to spend the time and focus on these items that are so critical to our survival, quite frankly, in automotive?

[00:23:05] Jon Husby: As I'm out talking to a lot of CEOs in the industry, I get such a push on we have urgent fires we're in the middle of, we're under a semiconductor piece, we're doing this, we're doing that, there's always such a focus on KPI, but where's the KPI on culture? And most companies don't have that KPI and culture. And frankly, I'm not going to proclaim that we have the exact math and science behind it, but we take the focus to make sure that we're going to talk about people. We're going to talk about what we need to do. We're going to talk about the messaging. And so, we make a just a really concerted effort and commitment to go do that. I just think there's so many companies that can't get out of their own way when it comes to KPIs. It stops them from being able to evolve the culture. And that's really dangerous.

[00:23:53] Jan Griffiths: They think it's weak to talk about culture and people. They think that to be a good, tough leader, you talk about the numbers and the metrics all the time, constantly, and that's where you keep the focus. And you have to have both; from my interview with Doug Conant from Campbell Soup, he said, "You have to be tough on standards and tender-hearted with people." It doesn't mean because you have a culture focus and a people focus, it doesn't mean you're a soft leader, it doesn't mean that you're weak. In fact, it means that you have strength, you have great strength, and the ability to focus on both. And that's a point, Jon, that I believe we have got to drive home in this industry to bring more focus.

We have got to transform the culture because we have to operate in this industry at a level of speed and efficiency that we have never seen before. We have five generations in the workforce. We're dealing with millennials or old hat now. We've got Gen Z in the workforce, and now we've got Gen A coming up right behind that. We cannot follow the old ways of culture and leadership. Jon, I don't know what I need to do to convince everybody else to get with the program. You're clearly well ahead of it.

[00:25:14] Jon Husby: Well, and I'll tell you, I give a lot of credit. So early in my career, I mentioned earlier. I started in communications in HR.

[00:25:21] Jan Griffiths: Oh, okay. So, that explains a lot.

[00:25:22] Jon Husby: I started in the some of the softer sides of the business. Frankly, I think it's made me a more well-rounded leader who understands the impact on people, the impact on feelings, and people being nervous. How do you address this? How do you get ahead of it? I had to write those press releases or those memos and those communication things early on. I had to be in the room as we did think carefully about how to communicate this organizational change, right? And I think those things really helped me build a very strong foundation. So, maybe we need to get some more HR people up to all the senior level roles, it could be.

[00:25:59] Jan Griffiths: But it makes me think of a brand; you're really developing a team brand, a leadership team brand, a brand for culture, which is all part of it. It's all part of the new ADAC brand. It all rolls in together. It's not just a new logo, a new graphic, or a new product or technology. It all comes together because people respond to a brand or to a company name with a feeling or emotion that will then determine how they will respond or behave. And it seems like you understand the power of that brand.

[00:26:36] Jon Husby: Absolutely, we do. And we're pretty clear about it. I mean, we, as a leadership team, again, one of the things we did is change the cadence of meetings the minute I walked in the door. And we went from just being a report out to being a strategy meeting and being an alignment meeting. And I promise you that when that senior leadership team walks out of that room, we all have the same message. We all have the same understanding. And some of those are tough discussions. We have a lot of very healthy debates, but those debates weren't happening before. And now, those debates are happening. And for me, that's awesome because that's starting to change the way of we're going to advance the strategy and the culture because we're having those tough discussions now. We're not just going to launch something, but we hope it sticks. And then, walk away from it because it's the flavor of the month. No, that doesn't happen. So, it is tough, but there's a commitment to it. And we get a lot of compliments now from our broader team saying we see it. We feel it. I don't feel like I'm getting one answer in one place, one answer in another.

[00:27:32] Jan Griffiths: And when you have the team, when everybody's on board going in the same direction, that impacts the numbers and the bottom line of the business because now you can operate faster and more effectively.

[00:27:44] Jon Husby: Absolutely. I mentioned earlier, we went through a cyber event. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. I wouldn't wish it on our worst enemy. Even some of our competitors in the industry. I wouldn't wish it on them. The funny thing about that is that really made us so much stronger as a company and as a senior leadership team. And why was that? Because we actually had gone to the extent of understanding each other's leadership profiles. We understood where people sat in the circle. We understand what their strengths and weaknesses were. And at that moment, we put the right people into the right swim lanes and we respected it. And so there, when we needed someone that was going to be more analytical to root cause some things and get some things in, we put that person in. We need a little bit more of a messaging-type piece or roll-up-your-sleeves piece; we knew that person. It was actually that leadership exercise, which had only happened, you know, about six weeks before the cyber event. So, it was fresh in all of our minds, and we were able to play off of the strengths of each other, but respect and everyone knew that person is going to handle this, this person's going to handle this. And that changed the game on our responsiveness time. Our customers gave us compliments for that on how we responded; how quickly we were able to get things back up and running was really, really important.

[00:29:00] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. Jon, the variables for success and the leadership principles. There's an awful lot in there, but I feel like they're all in the 21 Traits of Authentic Leadership; it's very much aligned. But what resonates with you the most out of the 21 Traits?

[00:29:20] Jon Husby: Yeah, boy, there are so many that hit me there, at least five, but I'll talk about two today that I think really hit me. The first one is transparency. And if there's anything I've learned, and it doesn't matter if it's my career, if it's in industry groups, it can be in nonprofit boards, it can be whatever. There's got to be that sense of transparency. There has to be that sense of help explain the background. Just don't tell something. Don't go to that command control; you will do this; here's our mission. Help people understand and talk through it. I have a rule, and I've done this for a couple of jobs now. When we have a town hall, I don't leave the room until every question is answered. I want to make sure that if something's on your mind, it's probably on someone else's mind, too. And it's been a task. It's been a chore to get people to open up and feel more comfortable. But as they see that they can ask the questions without retribution, it's really important. So, I am over the top transparent. I'm over-the-top transparent about why are we making this decision. I'm over the top about here's the vision and where we're headed. Do you understand? I mean, part of getting, you saw that you mentioned the banner that people signed. I mean, that's signed by our board of directors, the entire executive, and all of our employees, and it's hanging in every single facility that we have. And the reason we did it is we wanted to be over the top transparent about our mission, vision, and our strategy going forward. And we wanted people to make a commitment to it. We wanted them to sign up and say, "I heard it. I get it. I'm all in." And now that sign serves as that constant reminder.

The other one is mindset. And I'm a big believer that too many times, people put self-imposed limitations on themselves and on the organization. And there has to be a different mindset. And so, when I walked into the organization, great family business, great familial type feeling when you walk through here, but the reality is we as an organization needed to make some harder decisions. We needed to really hone in on thinking differently, and that has been a massive transformation to get the mindset to step away from the glory days to how do you move faster? How do you make decisions? How do you say "how" not "no"? How do we go and approach things not from a subservient way, but solving for us as ADAC, right? We talked about "Solve for next," but we have a lot of take lines that go with it. And solving up for us, part of it, is where we have to stand up and represent ADAC properly when we're having discussions with our customers, when we're having discussions with our partners in the supply base, et cetera. And so, mindset is completely there. Just last week, we had our partner day. We did a little bit fireside chat with our Head of Procurement. I answered the question and challenged, but I first challenged the ADAC team, and I said, "I'm expecting full transparency and trust between our procurement team and our partner base." And this cannot be a transactional type piece. So, this isn't just inside our company. This is about how we're starting to interact with our customers and how we're starting to interact with our supply base as well. And it's changing, it's really changing the way, but the mindset piece is also very important for me.

[00:32:29] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. And that trust, Jon, particularly with the supply base, we've seen that come out recently with the Plante Moran WRI study. And I'm concerned about our traditional legacy automakers, particularly Ford and Stellantis, as they're at the bottom of that chart; there's an awful lot of work that has to be done. You are sitting in the position of CEO for a Tier One; as you talk to other tier ones and other CEOs out there in the industry, what would you tell them? What advice would you give them in terms of the massive transformation that we're going through for leadership and culture? What should they start doing right now? Because you're on this journey, and you're on it, and you're ahead of it, I can see it. I'm here today. It's all around me. What would you say to help them to really move the needle on leadership and culture?

[00:33:26] Jon Husby: Yeah, I'm going to keep coming back to transparency. I think being able to identify, not put the self-imposed limitations, but be transparent about where an ideal state is. How do we get to that? There will never be a true ideal state. You'll never get there. But how can you try to get to this new aspirational type level? And I think it's equally important when I'm out talking to executives, at our customers, even, I'll sit there, and I'll have a discussion and say, listen, I just have to share with you here's how your decisions and how you are acting are impacting our business. I want you to know that if you operate differently- again, how not no- if you operate differently, this is how we could help you. And they'll say, thanks for telling me that. You know, oftentimes, I get no one to share that with me before, right? I had a executive in our plant right after the cyber event, and he said, what the hell have we done to you? Our complexity that we've driven, the part number complexity, design complexity, what we've done from a marketing department, a design department, all these other things. It was just eye-opening for this person to see. And I said, okay, but we're here to work with you on this. I mean, we benefit if we reduce complexity, too. And so, it's just having that transparent willingness. Now, I'll share this with my friends in the auto world and automotive companies. I hope they listen to that. I hope they're willing to truly have open ears to that transparency, but we have to, as an industry, be ready to get there.

[00:34:51] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. And I think there's a lot to what you just said about giving that feedback to the OEMs and to the customers because I think often, in the Tier One supply base, it's easy to blame the OEMs. It's easy to say, well, they do this, and they don't do that and this. They've done this to us. And yeah, that's true, but we, as a community of supply chain, a supply base in the auto industry, have to help them and give them feedback. When I interviewed Martin Fischer from ZF, he talked about taking some of the lessons learned from working with EV startup companies and feeding that back through the industry, through MEMA, through whatever channels. And that goes back to another point that you brought up, which is mindset. Don't be a victim. Don't sit there and just complain about the OEMs. Make sure that we really have this transparent and open communication because we are all in this together, Jon.

[00:35:46] Jon Husby: No question. You bring up Martin. I love Martin, by the way; I think he's a fantastic guy. He followed me as Chair of MEMA OE, and you had Collin Shaw on your show, as well. He does not have an easy task, right? Collin Shaw does not have an easy task. I mean, where we go as an industry is only going to be more transformational. Not in terms of, well, where are we going to be a decade from now? It's where we're going to be 12 months from now, right? When we talk about the changes that are going on with EVs around the world, with Chinese suppliers and automakers, and what's going to happen with tariffs and all these other things. The job of suppliers in this industry is only going to become more complex and harder. And this is it again: why do we have to be transparent and open? Trying to solve it all by yourself isn't going to work. I mean, one of the things I did with my team was try to get them to understand that you don't have to do everything internally. Let's go network with people. And I've been really proud of my team what they've done in networking and getting involved in joining industry groups and councils, even in the short time of 21 months I've been here. It's been amazing to see how that's transforming as well. So, that's where we have to go.

[00:36:52] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. And we have the organizations there, and they're ever more important. We've got MEMA, we've got AIAG, we've got MichAuto, they're there. We need to truly engage with these organizations and contribute and give back and not stay in our company silo.

[00:37:07] Jon Husby: That's right.

[00:37:09] Jan Griffiths: Enough of that, Jon Husby. I'm going to take a turn and go right into the personal. Are you ready?

[00:37:13] Jon Husby: I love it. Let's do this.

[00:37:15] Jan Griffiths: What do you like to binge-watch?

[00:37:17] Jon Husby: Oh boy. I'm really big on history. I'm big on business. I love documentaries. So, for me, The Crown, big time, went right into it. Billions.

[00:37:28] Jan Griffiths: Oh, I love Billions.

[00:37:29] Jon Husby: It was fantastic.

[00:37:30] Jan Griffiths: I love Billions.

[00:37:31] Jon Husby: Succession.

[00:37:32] Jan Griffiths: Oh, yeah.

[00:37:32] Jon Husby: Fantastic. Documentaries. I love documentaries. There's one that was World War II in color. They colorized all of these old World War II films, and they talked about, okay, here it is in Europe. And now, this happened in Pearl Harbor. And now, we're over in Asia. And it was just a fantastic series. I love the history side of it. I love that business and that aspect of it. And that's what I binge.

[00:37:55] Jan Griffiths: You know, with billions, I want to be Wendy. I want to be the performance coach. I love that.

[00:38:01] Jon Husby: Yeah. What a cool job to have. More companies should have that, right?

[00:38:05] Jan Griffiths: Yes. She's a psychologist, but when something isn't right, she's focused on leadership and culture. Okay. So, it's a little bit of an aggressive environment, but I love that. I absolutely agree. I think we need more people focused on culture and performance, not a performance review, but a performance in terms of how you feel about that. How come this is changing? How come this is happening?

[00:38:28] Jon Husby: Absolutely.

[00:38:29] Jan Griffiths: I absolutely love that.

[00:38:30] Jon Husby: You had a chance to meet Jackie on my team earlier, my chief of staff. She is brilliant. I mean, she's like Donna from Suits, right? I mean, she is that get it done before you realize it needs to get done. It is awesome. Just awesome.

[00:38:43] Jan Griffiths: No, I agree. I agree. What's the last book you read, Jon?

[00:38:47] Jon Husby: I read, well, in addition to yours, I love your book; by the way, I just started one, which is Atomic Habits.

[00:38:54] Jan Griffiths: Yes, I read that.

[00:38:55] Jon Husby: So I'm starting to get into that. My head of procurement read it and said, "You've got to read this." So I'm in the early stages of that. The other ones I've read, I love some historical fiction-type stuff. I love Mitch Albom books, right? And I did this whole thing, The First Phone Call from Heaven, and I read that one. And then, The Little Liar, and he wrote this, and it's all about World War Two, and it's all about this fictional character, but the trials and tribulations that he and his family went through with the Holocaust, but moving through Europe and doing all of this and just a lot of strange twists and turns to it, so yeah, I loved it.

[00:39:29] Jan Griffiths: Jon, what do you do when you get up in the morning to get your head in the right place? Mindset's important to you. I think it's so important how we set up our day. What do you do?

[00:39:43] Jon Husby: Well, I'll tell you what I've really transformed in the last half year as I focus more on health and wellness and balance. I don't do this most days or every day, but I try to get up early and go out, and there'll be days I'll do three miles. There'll be days I'll do five or six miles in the morning. And I try to get out and walk, clear my head. I listened to podcasts, and you know, I listened to yours and other podcasts in the morning. It really gets me thinking about, and hearing thought leadership-type activities that really serve as an inspiration to start thinking differently. So, that helps me out. It gives me time to think about topics. So that's really an important start to my day, and I'm really trying to purposefully do that. The other thing I will do is make sure I map out the things I want to get done today. Here are the things that I want to hold myself accountable for to get done, you know, as well as I do. It doesn't always go that way. You know, fires will come up, you get distracted, you got to be pulled away. But I have to have that focus to be able to go do that. I try to make a commitment to obviously make sure that I'm taking time for my family. That I'm checking in. That I'm seeing what's going on, you know, with a couple of 20-something kids, they're not always going to be readily available, but trying to make sure that I'm keeping a focus on all aspects of my life, not just the job at hand, not just the task at hand today. And the other thing I will do all the time is I'm always thinking about my team. I'm always thinking about them and their direct reports and how can I help think differently. How can I help develop them? What do I think is going to make them stronger contributors, leaders, etc.? And so, I'm always thinking about projects or assignments or feedback or things like that. So, I use my morning time to do a lot of that activity to say, how am I going to frame this up? How do we go accomplish some of those things?

[00:41:30] Jan Griffiths: Yeah, I absolutely love that. Well, Jon, it has been a pleasure talking to you today, but more importantly, it's been an awesome experience to be here and really feel the culture and to know that you really do walk the talk here at ADAC. So, thank you.

[00:41:49] Jon Husby: Thank you for coming and joining us today. As I always say, it's about the team. I'll use a little Bo Schembechler; I always say the team, the team, the team.

[00:42:01] 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 Leader Leadership PDF by clicking on the link below. And remember, stay true to yourself, be you, and lead with Gravitas, the hallmark of authentic leadership.