The Kettering Model: Bridging Academia and Industry for Automotive’s Next Leaders

[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 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.

On this podcast, we talk about leaders in the auto industry, and they're typically leaders who have been in the position for some time or somebody who has something to contribute to the mission of driving cultural change in the auto industry. But what about those leaders who are in charge of molding our future leaders before they even step foot into the auto industry? What about those people? Well, today, get ready to meet the visionary leader who sits right at the intersection of astrophysics, uh huh, that's right, astrophysics, technology, and education. He currently serves as the seventh President of Kettering University. He has a diverse background spanning the world of academia, business, and government. Our guest today has been instrumental in shaping the future of both scientific research and automotive innovation. Before taking the helm at Kettering, his career included a notable role as a senior technology strategist and venture capitalist for In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital organization. It's the first time I've ever said that in my entire life. This unique experience and that breadth of experience that he has undoubtedly contributed to his ability to bridge the gap between cutting edge research and practical applications in the industry. Under his leadership, Kettering University has solidified its position as a powerhouse in STEM education and innovation, and most certainly in the auto industry. Did you know that this university ranks fourth among colleges producing the highest share of inventors per student? Outperforming prestigious institutions like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. Right here in Michigan, in our home state. Kettering has earned recognition as a national leader in preparing STEM and business entrepreneurs and innovators, but perhaps most impressively, the Wall Street Journal has ranked Kettering first in the country for career preparation. Now, that is quite possibly the longest introduction I have ever given anybody, but there is so much there and so many important points that I want to make. So, without further ado, please welcome to the show, Dr. Robert McMahan.

[00:04:09] Robert McMahan: Well, thank you so much, Jan. My father used to say when you get a great introduction like that, you ought to just shut up and leave the room because it can only go downhill from there. So, I appreciate your kind words.

[00:04:22] Jan Griffiths: Well, I didn't realize that you were an astrophysicist. I thought, what?

[00:04:26] Robert McMahan: Yes. Yeah. I was the nerdy kid with the binoculars out in the front yard studying the stars when I was a young boy. So, I've had a fascination with astrophysics and with astronomy since I can remember.

[00:04:40] Jan Griffiths: But now, here you are leading Kettering, and you have a tremendous impact on the leaders and certainly the culture in the automotive industry. So, my very first question for you is simply this, Dr. McMahan, who are you as a leader?

[00:04:58] Robert McMahan: Who am I as a leader? That's actually a hard question to answer, but I was perusing your great list of the traits of authentic leaders, and great leaders really do; they are all of the above. But it's hard for one person to do all of those things well. But if you ask me who I am as a leader, I've always believed that leadership is really about facilitating the success of others. And you hear people say that, sometimes it even sounds cliché, but it really is true. It's about unlocking the potential of the people that you work with, because none of us is an island and it's one of the things that we like to teach students here about leadership and about working in organizations.

You can have the best idea in the world, you can be the most inventive and creative person, but if you can't work with others, if you don't know how to mobilize an organization and move an idea through that organization to create winners along the way, to get ownership will be alone and you won't be successful no matter how good your ideas are. So really, to me, being a successful leader and what I really focus on is providing the framework, providing the support that allows the people that I work with to be successful because when they win, we all win. I always said to my sons, I want to be known as the kind of leader that when they're around, things are successful. It's not that people look at them and say, "Wow, that person," but that they notice all of a sudden that whenever that person is in an organization, the organization is doing well. And I think that's the hallmark of a great leader.

[00:06:41] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. I would agree. And I think that you said that that's a hard question. So many leaders today haven't thought about that. Can you imagine that?

[00:06:50] Robert McMahan: Yeah. No, it's true.

[00:06:51] Jan Griffiths: They think about the task. They think about, well, I'm leading an engineering organization. I'm leading a quality organization. I'm leading a business. I'm leading a Tier One. I'm leading an OEM. But they haven't spent the time to really think about who they are as a leader. And as you so rightly said, that determines how successful they will be in getting their ideas across. And so, we have to get people to think more about who they are as a leader. Now, you know who you are as a leader, but how on earth do you influence all of your students to become great leaders?

[00:07:33] Robert McMahan: The first and foremost thing, coming from a higher education perspective, you have to model to the students what leadership looks like. Because my kids, we all have great hypocrisy detectors, when we're young.

[00:07:47] Jan Griffiths: So true.

[00:07:48] Robert McMahan: We're very sensitive, too. They say this, but they don't live this. That's not what they do, and you want to avoid the "Don't do what I do, do what I say," you know, type of thing. You want what you say and what you do to be the same. And so, from an education perspective and looking at the next generation, it's really about modeling first and foremost as an organization—so the organization maintains its values, and it sticks to them, and it articulates a mission, and is true to that mission. And when it can't be, that it is equally as transparent about why and what it is.

Because I know, as a leader in an organization, especially universities, are complex creatures. In fact, I've run corporations, and I've run universities, and universities are far more complicated than companies are. Because for one thing, they don't have the tools that companies use to align interests and motivate action. They don't have the same tools. But more so, universities have many owners. They have many people who believe that the university, and feel viscerally that the university is theirs. And rightfully so. The students own the university. The alumni own the university. The faculty and staff have an ownership role in the university. And so, managing all those different constituencies in the context of a very complex organization is the great challenge of a university. And maintaining a set of values, and being true to those values as you operate in all these various ways, is really the first and foremost element of training that leadership.

[00:09:36] Jan Griffiths: How do you establish the values for an organization, whether it's in the world of academia or in the business world? How do you let people know these are our values? How do you do that?

[00:09:47] Robert McMahan: I personally believe in driving forces of organizations. However complex they are, they can be reduced to a simple set of driving forces. Why do we do what we do? What motivates us? What are we proud to represent as our core —not just mission, but really our driving force?

And I think about that in the corporate world. There are many examples where you'll have these highly diversified organizations. But when you reduce it to that kind of logic, you see that everything they do in all of these ways—I'm thinking about one automotive company that makes cars, but they also make lawnmowers, and they also make jet aircraft, and they have this wide range of product lines globally. And yet, when you ask, what is the driving force? Why do they do this? The answer reduces to, well, what they really make are engines. They really specialize. That's their driving force—to make the best engines that can be produced. And then they make everything that needs an engine as part of their product line. And so, one of the ways that you motivate, that you really establish that vision for an organization like a university is you bring everybody together, and you guide them through that conversation. And you say, what is it about? What are we about? And then, through that exercise, you develop a very concise and very small —with the emphasis on small—set of driving forces. You can call them strategic pillars, you can do whatever you want to, but something that everyone in the organization can articulate and say, "This is what we're about." These long documents with, these long strategic plans with part three, sub part two, slash B stroke—they're useless from a standpoint. You may create some accountability structures in that. You may have reason to do. But from a cultural standpoint, they're meaningless. You have to reduce the driving forces of an organization down to something that will fit on a wallet card—something that everybody can learn by heart because it's part of their heart. And they learn it by heart, and they can repeat it. And so, I'm very proud that in an organization like Kettering, you walk around, people can tell you. If you ask them, what are the values of yours? What are the driving forces? They can tell you what they are. And those values and those driving forces actually don't change. Or they may adapt over time. But the driving forces of an organization typically don't change. It's why we do what we do.

[00:12:39] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. Why we do what we do and how we do it. And you're right, that is leadership. That is the ultimate number one responsibility of leadership is to put together this vision, articulate it, articulate the driving forces, and then model the behavior around it. And I guarantee you that most Tier One leaders, OEM leaders listening to this podcast would be, "Yep, uh-huh, I do that." And they don't. Because the model of leadership that we have grown up with in this industry, in our beloved auto industry, is more of a command-and-control nature. Where this idea of spending time talking about values, talking about culture, rallying people around it—making it so simple that everybody can articulate the three, four or five things—is still considered a waste of time unless the activity is directly related to the bottom-line numbers of the business. It's perceived as soft skills, all that HR stuff, that bullshitty stuff. "Yeah, okay, whatever." You know, or they say, "Oh yeah, we got them on a poster in the conference room," but nobody can recite them. Nobody knows what they are. So, that's a huge change because I honestly see the leaders of the future doing more of what you just described. But how do you get inside their heads to understand that command and control is no longer the way to lead—that it is leadership from the heart and connecting people? How do you get that into the students at such an early age?

[00:14:22] Robert McMahan: That's a challenge. Again, I come back to this idea of modeling it as an organization. By modeling it, that also propagates down through all the operations of the institutions. I mean, do students see that leadership? Do they see the imprint of that on How they resolve a course conflict? You know. Is the university responding appropriately to it? A corollary of that is really another one of those traits, which is transparency; it's being very honest and open about why decisions are made. I always say to people in the organization, " You are not going to agree with everything I decide." And by the way, I think that's an important point—an organization does need an ultimate decider, right? It needs a president to lead. It's not about, you know, getting everybody always around the campfire and singing Kumbaya. It is about making hard decisions. And sometimes, those are very difficult decisions, and they have negative impacts on people and on programs. And it's important that you are a leader in that way—that you make decisions, that you don't constantly defer. But it's also equally important that people understand why And so, I would say, " You will not agree with everything that I decide to do or any of the directions that we take. But I want you to at least respect the process by which the decision was arrived at and that you understand why I made the decision." And a lot of times, where organizations run afoul, I think, is when the decisions appear to be ad hoc because there's no communication about why—what's driving it. Because people are smart. They figure it out. And they want to know because after all, they are investing a lot of their personal time in this organization. And especially when you get to an organization like a university, it's not just time—it's emotional energy. There's passion. When you're running a university that's teaching engineering, these faculty members that we have, these staff members— they're senior engineers. They could work at many places; they have many career opportunities. But they are here for a reason. They're here because they love being a part of students' lives and having that moment of contact that later on—15 years later—this senior executive from some company comes back to them and says, "Professor Jones, do you remember me? I was in your such-and-such class, and you said the following things, and it changed the entire direction of my life. I took that, and I went with it, and I developed it, and this is where I am."

There is no substitute for that feeling, for that moment. And that's why they do it. But you have to respect that and let them know why.

[00:17:20] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. I'm imagining being a student at Kettering— strong technical focus— somebody coming out feeling like they've got the technical background, the grounding, and they're ready to take on the world. And they've got all these ideas on how to solve major problems in the auto industry, and they come into a Tier One and they are crushed like a bug.

Because they walk into the corporate world and, you know, there are processes and procedures, and there's this silo, and this function, and that function, and da, da, da, da. And we all know that, often, that creativity can be stifled in the corporate world. Now, it's getting better. But how do you prepare your students to face that world—where people are going to look at you and say, "Oh yeah, that's a brilliant idea! Let's put that on the next vehicle."? How do you prepare them for the corporate world?

[00:18:16] Robert McMahan: That's a great question, and it feeds directly into the model. I mean, Kettering University is really—and you would expect a president to say this—but in fact, I would say, if I was looking from the outside, it's a jewel in American higher education. Because Kettering University is unique among American universities. We operate differently than any other university, and it goes back to our founding. So, I can take no credit in this. Our founders, who were among the senior executives and leaders of the automotive industry, founded this university on a principle that, when we talk about what education needs to be doing today, they were building the future of education a hundred years ago. They said if you're going to work in an industry, if you're going to work in an organization, half—half, not a little bit— at least half of what you need to know to be functional and fully educated, you cannot learn in a classroom. You just can't.

The appropriate place for you to learn that is in an organization itself. Because only there can you learn all of these things that we value so highly once they get into professional roles—you know, all the soft skills we always talk about: communication, teamwork, all of these things, organizational behaviors. But you can't teach those in a classroom. The university is actually not the right place. So, they built an educational model that said, "You're going to go to university, you're going to go to one of the top engineering schools in the country, but you're only going to spend half the time in the classroom. The other half of the time, you're going to be a professional —in an organization in a mentored way. So that you learn how to work in an organization. You learn how to work with people. You learn exactly what you asked. —how do you work within an organization? How do you have a great idea and not be crushed?

The way that you do that is that you understand how organizations work. Because an automotive manufacturer, for example, craves innovation. They need new products. They need things that set them apart in the market. They crave this —but they have a process by which that is developed and a process by which it is implemented. Very often, where you get that crushing that you refer to —where they are dissuaded from or discouraged—comes from not meshing with the organization, not the fact that the organization is not open to the idea. Does that make sense? So, learning how to work within an organization and learning how to be a part of a team moving an idea forward is critical. And one of the things that I didn't appreciate about the Kettering model—that really is wonderful that I've learned since I got here—is since our students spend half of their time in engineering organizations, in laboratories, in research facilities, working with senior scientists, working with senior engineers, working on projects, seeing entire project life cycles, they do this before they graduate. As they are doing this, it also informs how they respond to each other. So, Kettering students bring that behavior back to the university, and they engage their education in a very different way. We can have a class here where a faculty member will be teaching some really sophisticated, esoteric topic in engineering, and he or she will turn to the classroom and say, "Jane, I know you're working in the cryogenic wind tunnel at this facility in your co-op. Is this how you do it there?" And Jane will say, "Well, kinda. We use this approximation because that part of the equation doesn't really mean anything to us." And so, you have this dialogue in the curriculum here that's completely absent at other institutions. It's an incredible model. It really is. And it's the answer. It's ultimately the answer to your question.

[00:22:42] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. And this model started, like you said, a hundred years ago.

[00:22:46] Robert McMahan: A hundred years ago. That's right.

I'll mangle a quote by Charles Kettering— he was much more erudite than this—but he said one time, "If we trained musicians the way we train engineers, we'd make them take 12 years of music theory before we ever let them touch a piano."

[00:23:04] Jan Griffiths: Isn't that so true? Yes. Yes.

[00:23:07] Robert McMahan: And he said, "That's not how you train a great engineer. You train a great engineer by teaching them, letting them practice it, teaching them, letting them see it at work, teaching them." And it's that coordinated practice with the theory that gets you to Carnegie Hall.

[00:23:24] Jan Griffiths: That's true.

[00:23:25] Robert McMahan: That's why you see so many Kettering grads in high leadership positions in automotive and across industries—because when they leave here, they are already there

[00:23:35] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. So, they don't to go through that learning curve of how to get the idea across, how to build a team, how to lead a team—they've already been through it.

[00:23:45] Robert McMahan: Yeah. I've had students that I know who graduate and, upon graduation, are leading teams of engineers—a dozen engineers under them as a new grad. And it just goes to show how far they are in that evolution at that point.

[00:24:02] Jan Griffiths: How do you stay ahead of the curve? You've got all the major OEMs, all the major tiers are eventually going to be bringing in students out of Kettering—or most of them. But how do you stay in touch with them and their needs? What do they need for the future?

Because it's not just, "Okay, we got this model, it works." We've got to keep our eye on the future. And since the industry is going through such a period of—I used to say transformation, but it’s not transformation—it's complete reinvention in the auto industry. But how do you stay connected to and aligned with those leaders, and therefore take their needs, the industry's needs, and channel that back into the world of academia? How do you do that?

[00:24:47] Robert McMahan: Well, it's interesting for us. When the entering class comes in as freshmen, we divide it into two groups. And because we're engineers, we call it the A section and the B section. And these two groups enter a rotation. So, when the A section is here on campus, the B section is out in their professional placements in industry. And then, they rotate. And that rotation occurs about every 12 weeks. Now, one of the interesting things about this is students are not shy. They tell us. We're one of the few institutions, I think, that gets evaluated every 12 weeks as to whether or not we're being relevant. Because they'll come back and they'll say, "No, that's not what we're doing. That's not how it works." And so, we actually get that feedback every year, four times. It allows us to modify our facilities, the types of things we're teaching in the laboratories, the types of techniques as well as the curriculum, to suit the evolution of these industries. It's actually a very powerful model because students, as you know, are not shy about telling you what they think. And I meet with students all the time—it's my favorite part of the job, interacting with students. And I have coffee with them all the time, and they'll say, "You know, at my last co-op term, we were doing this. We need to be doing that here." And so I can go back to the provost and I can say, "I had a student come to me and say, should we be doing that?" And it goes from there, so.

[00:26:18] Jan Griffiths: I love that, you know, like you say, it's like a 12-week evaluation. You're constantly being evaluated because they're bringing it back. They're bringing that information back to you.

[00:26:29] Robert McMahan: They bring it back. We're not the only ones giving report cards.

[00:26:32] Jan Griffiths: Yeah, there you go. And somewhere in there, a little bit of servant leadership is coming out, too, right? It's not just you telling the students what to do—they're coming back to you to give you ideas on how to frame the curriculum for the future. Yeah, I love that.

[00:26:47] Robert McMahan: And what's relevant and what is not.

[00:26:49] Jan Griffiths: You said that students aren't afraid to tell you what they think. And I think that's a generational thing. I know that when I was in college, I don't know that I would have gone up to a professor and said, "You know, you should change this. We need to change this. We need to change that." And even during my time in industry, as a young professional starting, I would never have challenged a VP. I wouldn't have done it. Now, that's totally different—which I love. I absolutely love it. But I think that the younger generation, they're not afraid to do that. And they see senior-level people for who they are—human beings. And this whole idea of authentic leadership is about being who you are, and not being afraid to be who you are, not trying to fit some mold of what you think a command-and-control leader should be, and being somebody that's totally out of sync with your own values as a human being. So, it's a long-winded way of me getting to the point—I want to get to the point of vulnerability. And showing it's okay to show a level of vulnerability as a leader. But that's been a change, hasn't it, over the last few years?

[00:28:02] Robert McMahan: It has, it has. There's an interesting twist on that. You need to be accessible —this goes back to your earlier question about educating students in leadership. You also need to be respectful of the leadership structure as well. And one of the things that students in the current generation sometimes get in trouble with is that they are very much used to being very casual in their conversations with people. And I've had many conversations with students over the years where they will come to me and we're talking about their experience and they say, "You know, I wrote this email, and they got really upset, and I really don't understand why." And I will say, "Well, show me the email." I'll read it and I'll say, "I can see why they got upset—I'm surprised you haven't been fired.” And I say, "Well, let me explain to you. There's transparency, and then there's protocol. You went three layers up the organization, and organizations don't respond well to this."

So, there's a lot of that dialogue that comes. But I think that's true. There is very much a shift away from the kind of central command-and-control structures for many of these organizations to more collaborative leadership and a lot more empowerment and transparency through the organization. But there's still a need to observe those protocols as well. And hitting that right balance is part of understanding the organization in 2025.

[00:29:30] Jan Griffiths: That's right. And then, as a student or a young professional, just when you get one organization all figured out, you move to another one...it's completely different.

[00:29:38] Robert McMahan: It's completely different.

[00:29:39] Jan Griffiths: You know, when I started my career, it was the idea that you started with a company, you stayed with a company, and you stayed in your lane. I started off in purchasing, in materials and purchasing, and it was, "Oh, don't switch—whatever you do, don't switch." I think most of my strength—in what I can contribute to an organization—comes from the fact that I moved cross-functionally and learned to assimilate into different cultures through different Tier One organizations. And now, that's sort of. applaud it almost, and it didn't used to be.

[00:30:15] Robert McMahan: Oh yeah, no, no. In fact, we frame it this way with a lot of our students: we said, "Your career 10 years from now probably doesn't exist today." I mean, the job title probably doesn't exist. So, how do you prepare for that? Because in that older structure where you had kind of a long-term contract of "You join an organization, you stay with that organization, and you move up." you had very well-defined boundaries for skills and what you needed to do and how you would up-skill those as you move through the organization. It's no longer true. Students have to prepare for a different kind of professional reality. At the end of the day, what is the university really teaching them? Is it the factual knowledge that they get out of a book or in a lecture? No, no, it really isn't. We are teaching that, of course, but what we're really teaching is the habits of mind—the resiliency, and the flexibility, and the ability to decompose complexity. Take a very complicated system, break it apart into tractable pieces, solve those problems, and then put it together and have a solution. It's kind of like—I hate to use Hollywood philosophy—but I always liked Matt Damon in The Martian. At the end of the movie, he's lecturing to a group of people and he said, " You solve the first problem. Then you solve the second problem. Then, you solve the third problem. And if you solve enough problems, you get to go home." And that's ultimately what we're teaching. We're teaching how to see this complex thing, solve the problems, and get home. And those habits of mind, if you do that well, then they can teach themselves. The organizations can teach themselves the particular knowledge they need to do a particular job. But they can never learn the flexibility and resiliency that comes from that orientation in their education.

[00:32:25] Jan Griffiths: Yeah. That's so true. Well, authentic leadership is about being comfortable in your own skin. And it is about sharing, sometimes, part of your personal self, which, again, many years ago, I was taught never to do that. But people need to really relate to their leaders as human beings. So, it's time to take a turn into the personal realm. Are you ready?

[00:32:48] Robert McMahan: Okay. And I'm not necessarily good at talking about myself, but yes.

[00:32:52] Jan Griffiths: Okay. So, easy question. What's the last book you read?

[00:32:57] Robert McMahan: Oh gosh. I have to confess—I have a nightstand with about 10 books on it, all in partial completion, you know, in varying degrees of completion. But the last book I read, which was very recently, was actually two books together about two very famous astrophysicists: one was Vera Rubin and the other was Fritz Zwicky. And these are two very different individuals, both of which, in my professional life, I used a lot of the knowledge that they generated over the course of their careers. But I've always been fascinated by both of those individuals. Vera Rubin was an incredibly talented astrophysicist and did so many wonderful things in the discipline and was responsible for so much knowledge. And so much so that there's a huge new telescope being built in the Southern Hemisphere that was named after her. She was one of those that just busted down doors, door after door after door after door, to do what she wanted. And then Fritz Zwicky was a German astronomer who was known for his acerbic, direct attitude. And I had a picture on my wall when I was in graduate school of Fritz Zwicky standing next to the pile of books that he wrote, with his arm on it, you know, smirking out at the cameraman as if to dare him to make a comment. So, whatever its worth, those are the two of my most recent completions.

[00:34:29] Jan Griffiths: Wait a minute. You had a poster of an astrophysicist on your wall? Is that what you just said?

[00:34:35] Robert McMahan: I did, yeah. When I was in grad school, I loved Fritz Zwicky. In fact, I named the computer I worked on Zwicky as a result because he was a curmudgeon. Not that I was trying to emulate his curmudgeonliness, but he was brilliant. A brilliant astrophysicist.

He was the one that among the very first to postulate the existence of black holes and neutron stars and all these things. But he did it so early on when everybody made fun of him. "This could never happen." "No, that's the silliest thing we've heard." And later on, he was proven over and over and over to be correct. This picture was just so engaging because it was... it's hard to describe, but having him sitting with his hand on this big pile of books, with this look on his face, it was just kind of like, "You wish you were as good as me." Kind of.

[00:35:28] Jan Griffiths: Now, what did 18-year-old Robert listen to, music-wise?

[00:35:34] Robert McMahan: Oh, I would say it's probably the same thing I still listen to. Maybe we patterned early on, but I've always been a Joni Mitchell fan.

[00:35:41] Jan Griffiths: Oh.

[00:35:42] Robert McMahan: Ever since I was very young, I always loved female vocalists. But Joni Mitchell in particular—she's always amazing. And she's had a recent comeback, an amazing comeback, and it's so wonderful to see her again because I didn't think we were going to have anything else where we'd get see her and perform.

I tried to get tickets to her performances, but I was unsuccessful.

[00:36:05] Jan Griffiths: What do you like to do for fun?

[00:36:06] Robert McMahan: I love spending time with my family. I have two boys and wife. Personally, I love to fly. I'm aerobatic pilot—a very bad one.

When I fly a figure in the sky, it's perfect in my own imagination. It's just not so perfect to the people on the ground. I love flying. It's always been a passion of mine, but not a vocation, but an avocation.

[00:36:27] Jan Griffiths: Ah, last personal question. Distractions. We all have to deal with our demons of distraction. For me, it's social media, right? If I start to go on my phone to look at the weather, the next thing you know, I'm down a rabbit hole on Facebook. And of course, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn because that's my business. But I mean, I have to fight with that almost every day. What is your demon of distraction, and how do you deal with it?

[00:36:59] Robert McMahan: My biggest demon is just being time-sliced so narrowly that I don't have head space to the issues that I need to deal. And the way I deal with it is to just put blocks on calendar out and just say, "I just can't."

Because, like I said earlier, when I was an undergraduate, I saw the president of the university twice. I saw him once when he had a freshman reception in orientation week, and I saw him the next time when I was walking across the stage at commencement. Those are the two times I interacted with him as an undergraduate.mI never want that to be the case for students that come to Kettering. I want them to know, to feel like they can come and talk to me. And when I'm walking in the hall, they can stop and say, "Hey, can I talk to you about something?" Or walk with me.nOr I go over to—we have a Great Lakes coffee here on campus. I go sit in the Great Lakes coffee, and I just ask people to come over. Usually, I buy them a cup of coffee—that always starts the conversation—and then we go from there.

And so, I'm my own worst enemy in that because a lot of the time-slicing that I talk about is because I love interacting with the students, and I love walking and talking to the faculty. And in the corporate world, I was a huge proponent of managing by walking around and I retain that here at the university.

That's my biggest distraction—when I'm working on something that I don't want to necessarily work on, and if I'm pushing some paper on the desk, I'll get up and I'll go talk to some students. And then, at least that refreshes me, and I can come back and do the paperwork.

[00:38:39] Jan Griffiths: But that is a beautiful way to close our conversation today. You are indeed the astrophysicist who is shaping our future model leaders in the auto industry. And you are at the helm of Kettering University. And you're the guy who wants to buy the student a cup of coffee. And I love that.

[00:38:59] Robert McMahan: Absolutely.

[00:39:00] Jan Griffiths: Dr. McMahan, thank you so much for your time today.

[00:39:04] Robert McMahan: Thank you so very much for having me. This has been wonderful.

[00:39:07] 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 leadership.