Episode 159
Leading Through Change: The Culture Shift Automotive Leaders Need to Compete Today
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No one would try to stream a 4K video on a '95 Windows computer—but in the auto industry, we're still trying to lead today's transformation with leadership models built decades ago.
That's the hard truth Jan puts on the table in this conversation with Terry Woychowski, President of Caresoft and former GM executive. Together, they unpack what's holding the industry back—and it's not a shortage of technology or talent. It's the culture. It's the leadership.
Terry walks through real examples of how legacy systems get in the way—from product specs that haven't been questioned in decades to organizational structures that reward risk avoidance over innovation.
He compares that with how Chinese OEMs are approaching development differently. They make faster decisions, rely less on in-house development, and focus on speed and learning rather than perfection. They're not immune to fear, he says, but they don't let it dictate the pace of progress.
But this isn't just a teardown of bad habits. Terry zooms in on what good leadership looks like today. It's not command-and-control. It's mission-first, culturally aware, and brutally honest. It's being willing to get "dragged across the hone"—his metaphor for the painful but necessary growth process. Because leaders who avoid discomfort? They stay dull.
There's also accountability. Terry learned it early, growing up on a dairy farm, where cows—and their mess—don't wait for permission. You get the job done, period.
That same mindset carried him through the plant floor at GM, where he once let loose in a way he thought would end his career, only to be welcomed with applause. Not because he lost his temper, but because he finally spoke the language of the plant.
Jan and Terry talk honestly about the cultural gaps that legacy auto still hasn't closed. Technology? Finance? Those are solvable. However, if the leadership culture stays frozen in time, no investment will be enough.
In the end, one thing is clear: you can't lead the future of automotive using the same culture that got you here. If the industry wants to survive the disruption ahead, it needs leaders willing to question everything, especially the way things have always been done.
Themes discussed in this episode:
- The need to replace outdated leadership models to compete in the EV era
- The culture gap between Chinese OEMs and traditional automakers
- Why true leaders embrace discomfort—and what happens when they don’t
- The cultural transformation needed to support EV and software-defined vehicle innovation
- The importance of fast decision-making in today’s global auto market
- Why cultural alignment matters more than strategy when leading change
- Why the auto industry needs focused leadership amid rising global competition
Featured guest: Terry Woychowski
What he does: Terry J. Woychowski is the President of Caresoft Global, a leading automotive engineering, benchmarking, and consulting firm. At Caresoft, he has played a pivotal role in driving strategic growth, developing next-generation solutions, and mentoring the global leadership team.
Terry brings over four decades of automotive experience, including a distinguished career at General Motors, where he held senior leadership roles such as Global Vice President of Program Management and Quality & Vehicle Launch. Notably, he served 12 years as Full-Size Truck Vehicle Chief Engineer. After retiring from GM, he joined American Axle and Manufacturing as SVP of Engineering and Quality.
He is a graduate of Michigan Technological University and serves on several boards, including MTU’s Board of Trustees and the Rackham Foundation, where he is a lifetime trustee.
On Leadership: “I would say, the foundation of my leadership hasn’t changed at all. I believe that leadership is based on a hunger—a hunger for things to be better than they are. A vision that this would be better. And I think a leader needs to be hungry. If you're not hungry and not making things change, you're not leading. And so, there's got to be that hunger to say, "Yeah, we're here. But this isn't good enough. This won't last. It should be like this." That hunger's been an element of my leadership, and wherever I've been,1 that's been true.”
Mentioned in this episode:
Episode Highlights:
[03:10] Change Is the Job Description: Leadership isn’t just about keeping things running—it’s about driving bold, necessary change when the industry demands it.
[05:12] Comfort Doesn’t Build Leaders: Too many leaders are promoted for past performance, not future vision—and without the right mindset for change, they stall progress where bold leadership is needed most.
[10:09] No Ego, Just Execution: Unlike legacy automakers, Chinese OEMs decide quickly, skip the ego, and improve fast by learning from others instead of reinventing everything in-house.
[13:27] The Bracket Problem: Jan and Terry reflect on decades of missed opportunities in design—why we still can’t get integration right, and how extra parts are often just patches for poor collaboration.
[20:00] Own the Process: Terry shares why real innovation happens when teams break silos, work shoulder-to-shoulder, and take full ownership of the process—not just the paperwork.
[23:37] Change It or Lose: Terry explains why startups and Chinese OEMs move faster by ditching legacy thinking, embracing risk, and reworking cars even after launch.
[29:15] The Grind That Sharpens Leaders: Terry shares how great leadership demands relentless hunger, painful self-growth, and the courage to stay true to your word—even when the process drags you across the hone.
[32:20] Colorblind in the Paint Shop: Terry shares the wild story of being dropped into GM’s paint operations, the culture shock that followed, and the surprising leadership lesson he learned after losing his cool.
[37:07] Culture Is the Real Gap: Terry warns that the auto industry’s greatest threat isn’t tech or money—it’s the cultural gap, and only leaders can close it.
[39:01] Calm in the Storm: Terry urges leaders to face existential threats with calm resolve and unflinching honesty—because the truth, however hard, is the only thing that gives people a fighting chance to act, adapt, and survive.
[46:50] Cowboy Up and Lead: From existential threats to logging chains, Terry reflects on grit, urgency, and teaching the next generation that real leadership means figuring it out—no matter how heavy the load.
Top Quotes:
[03:39] Terry: “Things have to change. The auto industry is changing in radically diverse ways and extremely fast. Change is the arena of leadership. That's what leadership is. It's about change. If things aren't changing, quite frankly, I don't think you're leading. You may be managing day to day, just keeping the ball rolling, but leadership says there's a better way. There's something we need, and it doesn't look like this. It's going to look like that.”
[07:15] Terry: “The skills that you need to be a successful leader aren't the same skills that were required when you were an individual contributor and doing your job.”
[12:49] Terry: “The Chinese seem to seem more like, “they're doing it. They got some really smart people. They've made this decision. We're going to do it.” And then they simply trump that by saying, "And we're going to do it better." Because they put all the R&D and they iterate. We have the advantage of looking at it now, and we can see, we can polish it like this, we can do it like this, and we can make it even better and even faster and even cheaper and improve upon it. So I think if you can park the ego at the door, and say, "Can I learn? Who can I learn from and can I just leapfrog from that as opposed to reinventing everything myself?” If you have to reinvent the entire car yourself, it's going to take a long time.”
[30:08] Terry: “if you have a knife and if you want your knife to remain keen, sharp, dangerous, effective, it has to be drug against a hone. It has to be continually honed. It's anthropomorphic to think that the blade has feelings, but if it did, blade doesn't want to be drug against a hone—that would hurt, that scrapes, that burns. But a leader needs to be vulnerable. So, you need to be willing to be drug across the hone, and you need to be willing to learn. Always. There's always something to learn and to get better. Do you want to be sharp? Yeah. Do you want to be effective? Yeah. Do you want to be dangerous? Yeah. Then be willing to be drug against the hone, 'cause it hurts, but you have to pay that to be a good leader.”
[39:37] Terry: “The greatest gift you can give to a person is the truth because if you are armed with the truth, at least you can make intelligent decisions. You can better your situation, and you can move in the right direction. It's when you don't have the truth that you are just kind of wandering. You need to be able to let people understand the truth.”
Transcript
[Transcript]
[: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.
You wouldn't run a 4K video on a '95 Windows operating system. You just wouldn't. The very idea of it would be crazy. It would be ludicrous. So what makes us think that we can transform our beloved auto industry—with all of the technology and the change from ICE to BEV and beyond—that we can do that using the same operating system, the same leadership culture, processes that we've had in this industry for decades?
Well, the answer is you can't. And I can't think of a better person to have on the show to tear into this very question than Terry Woychowski, President of Caresoft. Terry, welcome to the show.
[:[00:02:16] Jan Griffiths: Terry, you've had a tremendous career in the auto industry and you understand it from many different perspectives. You were the Global Vice President of Program Management Quality and Vehicle Launch for General Motors for many years. You were the Chief Engineer for full size SUV and truck. And then, if that wasn't enough, you were also the Vice Chair of SAIC, the JV, with General Motors in China.
Then, you moved into the tier one space, because often I find that OEM people don't understand the Tier One space, but you do. You spent time at American Axle, and then like me, you refuse to retire because you absolutely love this industry and you want to see it transform, and you wanna keep as much of it in Detroit as we possibly can. And so, here we are today. You've just come off the stage from the SAA event, and you said—your closing comments—it's all about leadership.
[:[00:03:20] Jan Griffiths: Why?
[:Things have to change. The auto industry is changing in radically diverse ways and extremely fast. Change is the arena of leadership. That's what leadership is. It's about change. If things aren't changing, quite frankly, I don't think you're leading. You may be managing day to day, just keeping the ball rolling, but leadership says there's a better way. There's something we need, and it doesn't look like this. It's gonna look like that.
And then, the ability to inspire, to motivate, and to resource a team to say, "Let's move in this direction." And to have people put their hearts and souls into a new way that's leadership and that's what's necessary.
So, change is the arena of leadership and we won't be able to face the challenges that the industry faces without some pretty significant changes in our leadership behaviors.
[:And I remember putting together a draft and sitting down with the CEO and saying, "This is what I think we need to do based on this, this, and this. What do you think?"
I remember him looking at me and he said, " Oh, you wanna change things?" And he was quite surprised. And I'm looking at him like, "Isn't that my job?" But he didn't see it that way.
I think that there is a lot of complacency in the industry, we like to feel comfortable. Human beings like to be comfortable. We have leaders in this system that got there because they behaved a certain way and they followed the processes, and they followed the rules, and they're comfortable and they don't wanna rock the boat. But you're right, we need people who can say, "This is where we're going." To use your words earlier, "This is the mission. Come with me on this mission. This is why this mission is important." That's leadership. I need everybody to go this way with me. Are you with me? Yes or no? People who are with me, it's gonna be tough and there's gonna be good times and bad times, and we're gonna be breaking things. We're gonna be arguing and fighting, but we're all gonna be in this together and it's gonna be great at the end of the day. Do you wanna come with me or not?
And some people might say, "You know what? That's not for me. I just wanna just be in a cube and do my thing." Okay, no problem. And others are like, "Yes, let's do this." Why don't we have more leaders like that, Terry, in the auto industry?
[:There's some scary parts that come with it, 'cause I don't know. I know if I do this and this, I'll get this. I don't know if I do in this and this is what'll happen. And so, it's risky. And unfortunately, when people find themselves in leadership positions, it's typically because they were really good at their last job. And the skills and the talents that they needed to be successful in their last job got recognized.
There was an opening and I said, "Well, boy, she was really good at this. She was the go-to person." Everybody would ask, " There's the next. That should be the next leader." And so, you get recognized for that. The problem is, the skills that you need to be a successful leader aren't the same skills that were required when you were an individual contributor and doing your job.
[:[00:07:25] Terry Woychowski: It was certain skills that made you very successful and you were the go-to person. "Oh now, we need a new supervisor." You're the new supervisor, so you become it. And there were some Italian mathematicians that did a study and in their study it was about the success of choosing leaders. The success of choosing supervisors and managers.
And their analysis said 50%. 50% of the people that we choose to take these positions are successful in them. Well, when your output can be summarized at 50%, you can be replaced with a coin. Head or tail.
I wrote an article about it, one of my leadership blogs, and the title of it was, A Monkey With A Dart Could Do Better Than We Do in Choosing Leaders. And I think the reason is because of this: we choose the leader who's very good at their job and they're natural, and so we put them there. But the skill that they need to be successful as a leader of people, we don't train them, we don't equip them.
We just say they were good at their job, put 'em in here, and somehow they're going to matriculate up, they're gonna become a great leader. Maybe yes, maybe no. But we don't focus their leadership, their training, the mentoring, what it needs to be successful at this job, and it's different than your previous job.
[:[00:08:44] Terry Woychowski: This happens to you two or three or four times to where you're getting bigger and bigger assignments. When more and more leadership responsibility, the question comes, are you maturing as a leader? Are you growing? Are you a more effective leader now than you were there? Because, oh, by the way, your responsibilities are bigger now. So bigger shoulders. Bigger load. Are you ready to bear up under it? And things start getting very personal. Your career is on the line. Your paycheck is on the line. Not many of us come to work with the idea. "Oh, I'm gonna take some big risks today."
[:[00:09:16] Terry Woychowski: Not in the engineering world, right?
[:[00:09:18] Terry Woychowski: The failure, the effect of us doing things wrong is severe. If we design something or we engineer something and it's wrong, the effect can be fatal. It can be illegal, it can be poor quality, it can be all kinds of bad things.
And so, we put processes in place to protect that and we use factors of safety and we wear belts and suspenders and we harden our process. So we never make mistakes. And the same thing happens when you become a leader. The last thing you wanna do is make a mistake. So you'll study a situation ad nauseum, and you will ask experts and you'll pay consultants, and you'll do this and this and this so that you won't make a mistake.
A leader has to set out and say, "Well, we're losing sight of the shore. We're going that way. Come with me." And I think this is good. And oh, by the way, as we say, "Oh, if we have to make a few adjustments," We'll make 'em. Be agile. But let's go, this is an exciting trip.
[:[00:10:11] Terry Woychowski: Yeah.
[:[00:10:59] Terry Woychowski: It's a great question. I'll answer a little bit generically. Every company would have its own culture and uniquenesses and each leader is a individual. So, the answer would probably vary person to person, but some things that I've seen, kind of in general, is one of the reasons that they're able to move at the speed that they're do, which is one of their strategic advantages.
Their VDP is about half of a traditional OEM, and there's a couple things there, but one is the front end in simply deciding what you're going to do. And so we spend a lot of time running different studies, and should it be here, should we sell in this region or this region? What options should it have? And we just study the thing ad nauseum, and partly because we don't want to make a mistake. And we also have this feeling that we kind of have to invent everything in-house, right? We're very self-sufficient, and we don't trust much on the outside of our walls.
I would say, very different in China is that part of the speed of their VDP is they make a decision very quickly—this is what we're going to do. And I don't see a lot of hubris. I don't see a lot of ego, that says, " You know, we've gotta do it our way, and it's gotta be this, and has to have our thumbprint on it."
And they sometimes say, "Okay, they've done this. They're looking at a benchmark, they're looking at somebody and they did this. That company has some very smart people. Let's do that." Others will look — and let's be specific. Let's say take a Tesla that have done many innovative things. Others look at some of the innovative things they do, and they say, "Well, that won't work." Okay, well, we're looking at it. It's there. And for these reasons, it's not a good idea. And so we're gonna study it, and we're gonna look at it from this perspective, and this, and this, and does it fit, and all these things.
Where the Chinese seem to seem more like—they're doing it. They got some really smart people. They've made this decision. We're gonna do it.
[:[00:12:56] Terry Woychowski: And then they simply trump that by saying, " And we're gonna do it better." Because they put all the R&D and they iterate. We have the advantage of looking at it now, and we can see, we can polish it like this, we can do it like this, and we can make it even better and even faster and even cheaper and improve upon it.
So I think if you can park the ego at the door, and say, "Can I learn? Who can I learn from and can I just leapfrog from that, as opposed to reinventing everything myself?" If you have to reinvent the entire car yourself, it's gonna take a long time.
[:BorgWarner, in my mind, has always been a very progressive company and still is. And the leader of that business said—we're just starting to talk about concurrent engineering back then in the eighties — so they said, "No, we're gonna do it. We're gonna use a concurrent engineering process for this particular torque converter that we're going to quote to an OEM." So they physically put us together. I represented purchasing and supply chain.
There was, believe it or not, we had a maintenance guy off the shop floor, we had a product design engineer, and we had a manufacturing engineer. And I think we had one or two other people. It was the eighties, I can't remember exactly, but we physically co-located together. And people were like, "What? What are you doing?" And we're like, "Oh, we're the concurrent engineering team."
But we had two tasks: one was to concurrently engineer this product, but it was also to look at the process and redefine the processes that went along with it. And we all went to training. We went to the old, Boothroyd and Dewhurst, DFM/DFA. I'm bringing back memories, I can see by the look on your face.
[:[00:14:53] Jan Griffiths: I think I do too. I do too. Yeah. But I went through that training and we did all the right things. We brought in the mold makers, we brought in the steel suppliers, way, way early on in the process before the designs had been finalized. We did everything the way that you would think that we should be doing it. Now, this was the early eighties. It might've been 84, 85, right? It was a long time ago.
up on a shelf. Here we are in:We do not know how to really concurrently engineer product. I very focused on the supply base, obviously, because of my background. But bringing suppliers in early, 'cause that means you gotta select them early, and nobody wants to do that because God forbid we might miss two pennies if you go to supplier B instead of supplier A.
Why Terry? We know that 80% of the cost of the product is hooked in at the design phase. We know what to do, why have we not been able to do that?
[:[00:16:15] Jan Griffiths: Yes, it's hard.
[:They have solved this problem in a more efficient way than you have. So we're looking for efficiencies — the cause of why are you inefficient. After you've done this enough time, just start seeing some real trends, specifications.
You have specifications that aren't competitive compared to these guys. You're engineering to this standard or this performance specification, whatever it is, and they're doing to this. And so, you're driving cost into your product that they're not. And if you're competing on the MSRP, you're at a deficit.
We're a victim of our own specifications. Those specifications come about from a myriad of reasons. Oftentimes, it's, "Oh, we had a problem." And so, we put some boilerplate around it. We increased our factor of safety or whatever we did, 'cause " irreversible corrective action" is magic words. "Oh, I've taken irreversible corrective action." That means it'll never happen again, boss.
[:[00:17:30] Terry Woychowski: We're smarter, we're stronger. It'll never happen again. Okay, good. You can come back tomorrow. Keep going. Another reason why designs are inefficient is a lack of integration. Whenever I see a bracket, my radar lights up a bit, and this is back from our DFA/DFM training. But that's, I think, that's what primed the pump. But I see a bracket, and to me, it says, "Okay, I have two parts that need to work together, and they don't." So now I get to pay a third engineer to make a bracket, and someone to buy some bolts, and I have to pay somebody to put the brackets on and to drive these bolts and all this because these pieces need to work—and they don't. So we come in with this third part. That's because it's not well integrated. And I'm sure that part's a fine part, and that part's a fine part. But you two need to work together, and you didn't. And therefore I need to patch you up.
It always reminds me of what the Psalmist wrote, "I praise you 'cause I'm beautifully and wonderfully made." If he was an engineer, he'd say, "I'll praise you 'cause I'm beautifully and wonderfully integrated."
We are integrated like crazy. I have a bicep and I have a tendon and have a bone. But if you look, that muscle, it's muscle for sure. And this tendon's tendon for sure. But if you look at between them, they start to fuzzy up. And right in the middle, you can't tell, is that a bone or a tendon? And then when the tendon comes into the bone, it just sort of starts to fuse and becomes crystallized and calcified, and it gets real blurry.
So it's very distinct, and yet it blurs at the interface. No bolts, no rivets. What an incredible design. And the fact of the matter is, as a customer, I don't care if I have that a bicep or a tendon or a bone. I want coffee. I just want motion.
[:[00:19:08] Terry Woychowski: I want force in motion, right? This is what I want, and I want it to work seamlessly. And our customers, they want the products to work seamlessly. Nobody wants to buy bracket. So, do you really wanna buy a bracket?
[:[00:19:18] Terry Woychowski: We call that non-value add. And so when we can call out non-value add, what's left is valuable, and that's what we're after. It's hard work to integrate because we like to organize ourselves into like fashions. So that we can drive a common standard.
We like to call it global common standard practice. So, when I do break drums, I do break drums. And this is how I do break drums. And this is how I know this is our break drum. And we're the smartest people in the world, and we know how to make break drums better than anybody else in the world knows how. And so, this is how we'll make break drums.
And then somebody else will make calipers, and somebody else will make wheels and somebody else. And would you be surprised that they don't even talk to each other? I have a friend, Kirk Steudle. Kirk was the Director of the Department of Transportation in Michigan.
[:[00:20:06] Terry Woychowski: So he's responsible for all our roads. Fantastic. Good friend. We served together on the Board of Directors of Engineering Society of Detroit. And when we were talking, he said something that amazed me. He spent his whole career making roads in the state of Michigan. And in that time, he never once spoke to a tire engineer. Never once. His whole reason for being is a tire. It's an four patches the size of your palm.
[:[00:20:35] Terry Woychowski: And your life depends on it. He talked to plenty of construction people. He talked to asphalt people. He talked to all this things to build a road but didn't integrate with the user of the thing.
I've been to some OEMs who integrate well, and I'm always amazed because I see long engineering tables. And I mean long picnic tables that go a hundred yards. And people with a couple screens and a keyboard. But I never see anybody sitting there working without two or three people talking over their shoulders with a whiteboard.
And if you look and if you listen, you realize, oh, that's the manufacturing guy there. And that's the engineer. And see that one with the build bewildered look? It's the purchasing agent. He doesn't even know what these guys are doing, but he needs to make some sense of this. And they're working together as a small team to tackle this.
And you wonder, "Well, why are they so innovative?" It's like, you are seeing it right here. And you know they're solving tough problems. A simple thing like installing a wiring harness in a vehicle, that's a tough job. If you work on a line and you install a wiring harness, my hat's off to you. That is a tough job, especially in these EVs, 'cause some of these things, I refer to 'em as a copper anaconda.
As you're wrestling this huge heavy cable, you have to go from the underhood compartment into the vehicle. And so there are some where you have to fish it through a little hole. And then you have to seat a seal and a plug and then have to secure it.
But I see where one of the Teslas, there is a connector on both sides of the controller, and the controller nests inside the front of dash and you just snap it in on this side, and the other one, you just snap it in on that side. And there's a connection on both sides of this thing. Well, that's clever. How much labor did you take out? How much effort? How did you improve your throughput? How did you improve your quality?
But you did. And so, we are a victim of our process, and we don't put enough emphasis or enough value in our process because our process dictates what we do and how we do it.
But it's sort of like, well, that's relegated to some process folks, program management folks. You know, it is what it is. But the truth of matter is, it is of paramount importance—your process, 'cause it's gonna dictate what you do, how you do it, and the time it takes you to do it, and ultimately, the cost.
And it is a leadership issue, at the end of the day, to say, "I own the process in this company." At least I own the fact that we have a process. We may have a dozen people whose job is to massage it and document it and look for kaizen opportunities, right? And those types of things.
We don't go about this well, and as we organize ourselves in functional areas because it's the function that we're focused on, but that's not what the customer wants. They want the complete product, they want an integrated product, and an efficient product. They want it to be affordable, and they don't want to simply pay for your bureaucracy or waste that comes from your internal processes.
[:But do you think that there's a different style of leadership required at different phases of the product? For example, during the design phase, during the very early, early, early phases when you're maybe really playing with ideas, maybe working with startup companies. Do you think that's a different kind of leadership? Because that's more of the Musk, fail fast, forward, go fast, break things, kind of mentality. That's not a great mentality to have when the vehicle is launched and you're in full-on, full-scale production.
Do you think those are different kinds of leaders, or how do you see that?
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.
[:Well, the reason you have two is 'cause you have a body group. And when a body group makes a body, there's a floor. There always have been. Always will be. You gotta have a place to put your feet and that's a battery, and boy, Freddy Kilowatt lives in there. We're not letting them out.
So I'm gonna give you that as a little vault. When I present that battery to you, it's gonna be safe. Now you can bolt the two together and we have a car. And they're at a position where I said, "No, I'm not gonna buy two piece of metal. I want one piece of metal." So you make the top of the battery the floor of the car. Well, there'll be all kinds of people to say why you can't do that?
[:[00:25:44] Terry Woychowski: Because it won't be stable. There's a hundred reasons why. But there is a reason to say, "Yeah, we'll figure that out. We can do that." And they do. And so, the vehicle's more efficient. A whole big piece of metal is gone. All the mass, all the cost, just isn't there.
The vehicle's got a 14% efficiency improvement by that one move. So, upfront, that's that moonshot kind of thing. Let's do this. There's gotta be a better way to do this. Let's figure it out.
The thing about Tesla, you see—and then I think a lot of the Chinese as well—is almost a reckless, abandoned to continually change and continually improve, even when it's in serial production. When I was at GM and others, it was like — change was seen as the enemy of quality.
[:[00:26:31] Terry Woychowski: Because when you change something.
[:[00:26:33] Terry Woychowski: There's risk. There can be quality escape points you didn't comprehend or didn't see, and something can happen. There's nothing better than doing the same thing. Time in, time out, right? Time in, time out. I do this job eight hours a day, five days a week, the same way every time. It's a real good way to guarantee quality.
That's why a lot of times I laugh when the J.D. Power Best in Class Quality comes out—the vehicle you're about to go out of production because you've been making it for so long, and it's been hands off, you haven't been tampering with it, and they just makes the thing. And it's extremely good quality. Where a lot of the startups and a lot of the Chinese, they said, "That's a better idea than this."
[:[00:27:11] Terry Woychowski: Do it. Do you get better range? Yeah. We need better range—do it. Does it reduce cost? Yes—do it. I mean, we gotta get the cost out of this thing. And we say, "Well, you know, we've invested this much, we've got all this sunk cost, we've got this capital. You're asking me to obsolete this capital?" And the last thing we wanna do is obsolete capital—capital intensive environment.
So we have all this inertia and antibodies to making change. And they look and just say, "Change it. Change it. Change it." You look at a Tesla and these EVs you have these huge batteries, 400-volt, 800-volt batteries—but there's also a 12-volt battery. There's a low voltage side to control this stuff.
In their first vehicles, it was a lead-acid battery—12-volt lead-acid battery, just like we've known forever. One day it was gone, and a lithium-ion 12-volt battery was sitting there. And it went from—approximate the numbers—but from 11 kilograms to one.
[:[00:27:58] Terry Woychowski: 10 kilograms gone just that fast. In a vehicle, that range is extremely important because it's one of the barriers to entry. It's one of the reasons people don't want an EV, is they're concerned about range. And so, making decisions that are gonna help range becomes paramount. Will this help range? Yeah, absolutely. And so do it.
I really think if you wanna know what's in a Tesla, you need to tear one down about every six months. Because they changed.
[:[00:28:28] Terry Woychowski: That rate. And it's just like, well, what is this? Oh, this is new. Oh my goodness. Look what they've done here. And so, that's part of that first leadership mindset approach that carries through serial production.
Now, they're still young, they still have a smaller portfolio, and we're not always comparing apples and apples. You look at some of the OEMs—they have... It's like, I tell people it's easier to put two children through college than 12, right?
So you have this portfolio, all these vehicles, and you have to send them all to college. It's one thing, you say, "Well, I got this one, and I'm just gonna fix it up." And we say, "okay, well that's a little easier to do." So, they're all coming from a different place.
But at the end of the day, the philosophy of what are we gonna do? How are we gonna do it? The risks that we're willing to take. I think that's what sets us apart. There's so many that—we're just risk averse.
[:[00:29:26] Terry Woychowski: From my perspective, some elements, I would say, the foundation of my leadership haven't changed at all. I believe that leadership is based on a hunger — a hunger for things to be better than they are. A vision that this would be better. And I think a leader needs to be hungry. If you're not hungry and not making things change, you're not leading.
And so, there's gotta be that hunger to say, "Yeah, we're here. But this isn't good enough. This won't last. It should be like this." That hunger's been an element of my leadership and wherever I've been that's been true.
I've also believed that a leader needs to be honable, which is a word we don't use very often, but if you have a knife and if you want your knife to remain keen, sharp, dangerous, effective, it has to be drug against a hone. It has to be continually honed. It's anthropomorphic to think that the blade has feelings, but if it did, blade doesn't wanna be drug against a hone—that would hurt, that scrapes, that burns. But a leader needs to be honable. So, you need to be willing to be drug across the hone, and you need to be willing to learn. Always. There's always something to learn and to get better.
Do you wanna be sharp? Yeah. Do you wanna be effective? Yeah. Do you want to be dangerous? Yeah. Then be willing to be drug against the hone, 'cause it hurts, but you have to pay that to be a good leader. And I think I've been drug across the hone oftentimes, regardless.
And then you need to be honorable. At the end of the day, your word needs to be your bond. You have to. If you say you're going to do this, I think you owe to who you've said it to. You owe it to yourself. You need to be honorable.
And so that hasn't changed. What has changed is —part of being a leader is understanding the, I'll say, the chemistry or the—maybe we call it the culture—of your leadership environment and how well you fit in. And can you be effective within that?
The BorgWarner leadership structure and chemistry was such, to say, "Let's go do this." But if you could have gone to another company, it might have been very different. And I can say going from General Motors, there was a certain persona, there was a certain characteristic in how do I get along with my peers, and how can I be effective in helping move this organization forward? And that's very different than American Axle. Very different. And that's very different than Link. That's very different than being an entrepreneurial startup like Kason.
[:[00:31:55] Terry Woychowski: There I had processes and had discipline. In here? It's like, holy cow. There's an idea, let's go try this.
[:[00:32:02] Terry Woychowski: It's like, holy cow. The ability to be a little bit of a chameleon, and say, " Can you adapt to that environment?" That's probably how my leadership has changed as much, 'cause you do have to change and throttle how you behave depending on what's acceptable around here, what's effective around here.
For two years in my career at GM, I was part of a prisoner exchange. The engineers and the manufacturing guys didn't get along. Almost by nature. The engineers' guy said, "You guys are lazy. You just wanna be able to throw the parts away from six feet away and have 'em stick. Well, it doesn't work that way."
And the plant would look at the engineers, and say, "Listen, I'm not building a damn watch. You would need to make these things so I could have a fighting chance of building in station—quality in station and cycle. So, because we had this tension, our leaders decided, "Hey, let's get a couple engineers and get 'em in manufacturing. A couple manufacturing guys and get them in engineering. Let 'em do each other's job, and maybe they'll come out of this a little bit better."
One day, I read in my inbox that I had been moved to Pontiac East Assembly and I was gonna run a paint shop. So, I called up our VP, and I said, "Hey, just read this on the inbox." He said, "What do you mean in the inbox?" I said, "That's what I saw." " HR didn't talk to you?" "No," I said, "I'm not worried about HR. I said, " You really want me to go home." He said, "Yeah," and he explained why this was a good idea. I said, "Okay," I said, "I just want you to know I'm colorblind, and I will put red doors on a green truck and ship it all day long." It doesn't mean a thing to me. And he just paused. He said, "Don't go away." He made some calls, called back, and said, "Listen, you've got great superintendents. Trust them. Won't you go there?" I said, "Okay, well, I'll just have a measure, the colors and the intensities and plot them and we'll just do it with math."
And he said, "See? That's why we want you there. We want that kind of mindset in the plant." I got to go to the plant and work was really very difficult. 1,224 trucks a day, five days a week, three shifts. I don't think I slept a full night in two years. Well, one day, I'd asked my repairman supervisors to do something because we had a series of unfortunate events. And I said, "It's 'cause you don't have the right structure. I want you to go build this so that, we can do this." And it had to do with repairs. And every time you have to put something through repair, you're losing throughput, good sale, because you are repairing something. It was a mess. And they didn't do it.
And then they were repairing something, and they hit that with a fork truck. So now we were like two or three deeps, and it's like this. Well, and I can remember pulling them in my office—and I do remember this bit quite vividly. It was the first time ever cost at GM. I was an engineer. I was a professional.
And I remember I was so mad. I had told 'em what to do, they hadn't done it, and bad things had happened. And nothing makes me more angry than to be able to know something could happen, give direction so that I avoid it. It doesn't get followed through and the bad thing happens, and I just feel like a failure when that happens.
When I feel like a failure, I get mad at you. So, I call this guy saying, and I remember just dressing them down, "I told you, ba, ba, ba, ba," and I cussed. I know that they spun on their heels and they took off straight outta my office and I know they were going to execute exactly what I'd told them to do.
So, I sat down at my desk, and no sooner did they leave that the plant manager and the production manager walked into my office. They had been standing in the hallway and heard everything that I said.
And so, I was sitting here already feeling like a failure the way I behaved. And then, I look at them and go, they heard it. You know, my boss heard that. And they're right there, and it's like, okay, well, this has been a good career. Do I have a box I gotta start packing in?
And they came in and walked around my desk, and they gave me the most hearty hugs and pats on the back. And the comment was this: "Welcome to the plant. We wondered how long it would take you to adapt." And they were so proud of me that I'd ripped these guys, and I was like—I feel the worst I've ever felt, and you guys are congratulating me.
But see, what happened — I'll just say the culture was... and they taught me this with time: When you talk, they take it as dialogue. If you cuss, they take it as direction.
[:[00:36:19] Terry Woychowski: Leadership lesson
[:[00:36:22] Terry Woychowski: But it's what environment are you in, and how can you be effective? When you take a new job, especially as a leader, understanding the company and its financials is one thing. Understanding their product and where it is and where it's going is a whole another thing. You can figure all that out. How am I going to fit culturally? How am I gonna fit in the—what's the chemical makeup here? Will I fit? That's a whole lot harder question to answer.
[:[00:36:49] Terry Woychowski: And if you know people and have relationship, that's one thing that helps, but otherwise that's kind of a crapshoot. And that's why you see a lot of people take a new job and new company they come from.
[:[00:36:58] Terry Woychowski: And shortly after, they're moving. They're gone. And it's because they weren't effective, their leadership style wasn't effective in that particular environment.
[:[00:37:31] Terry Woychowski: The fact of the matter is, for many of the traditional OEMs, they face what I refer to as an existential threat. The threat from the changes that are happening in the industry, and the pressures that are coming from the China auto industry. And these things there, it isn't what I say threatens your existence. If you don't change, it's a fatal threat. So you must change.
And there are gaps that need to be closed. There's a technological gap. These guys are making mega castings. We don't mega cast anything, so you gotta learn that. How do I do that? But they're actually quite gifted at closing technical gaps, right? You've got R&D groups, you've got smart engineers, you've got smart people.
There's a financial gap in many of these that has to be negotiated. And that's why I think CEOs and CFOs make as much money as they do, as they configure their way through mergers, acquisitions. The things that are necessary to make sure that the finances are there and necessary to invest in what you need to do to make it.
There's another gap. And this is the stunning one. This is the tough one. And that's a cultural gap. And if that's not closed, you're not gonna close. You're gonna stay threatened. And so, to me, that's the biggest challenge. It's the biggest challenge to the senior leaders of the companies. It's because they own the culture. A lot of times we'll look to HR.
[:[00:38:51] Terry Woychowski: And we'll look to consultants, and say, "Okay, let's re-engineer the culture in this company."
[:[00:38:57] Terry Woychowski: Don't waste your time.
[:[00:38:59] Terry Woychowski: It won't work. This is a time for that kind of bold leadership. This is a time where calm is really an incredible value for a leader. To be calm. We're facing existential threat. We know how to address this. We'll figure this out. We have what it takes.
It also is a time for some frank, it's just the truth. What's the truth of the situation? There's a saying that I saw on a poster here at work. Somebody copied something I said and put it on the wall. It is something that I say often, which is: "The greatest gift you can give any man is the truth."
[:[00:39:36] Terry Woychowski: The greatest gift you can give to a person is the truth because if you are armed with the truth, at least you can make intelligent decisions. You can better your situation, and you can move in the right direction.
It's when you don't have the truth that you're just kind of wandering. You need to be able to let people understand the truth. And a lot of people are isolated from the truth. You just come in every day, do your job. Here's my process, here's my desk, here's my office. I got to work from home for a couple years because of a virus. Now I gotta get back into the office and do that. And this is how I do this.
And that's a whole different thing than saying, "Go to the Shanghai Auto Show and go walk the floor." And come home absolutely shaken to your core and understand that there are people come to work every day, and their job is to take food off your table and put it on theirs.
That's the threat we face. We're not in this thing for a fair fight. They're in here to eat you. Don't make a mistake about it. And if we don't change, they will. And so you have to have the courage to admit that.
I think—yeah, I'm not sure—but I think there's a culture of being gentler and kinder. Everybody's happy, and I don't wanna upset people. It's like, hey, if you're facing an next essential threat, you'd better let everybody know.
And then, you have to be able to chart a course forward and point, "This is where we're going. This is what we need to do." And as you framed it earlier in the conversation, to inspire them, motivate them, make them wanna be a part of that. Next thing you know, they're almost happy that they're in this journey.
[:I was in the UK two months ago. Every other vehicle, practically, is an MG—which, of course, some people think, "I had an MG when I was 17," but it was British owned then. It's a Chinese-owned company. I mean, there are Chinese vehicles everywhere.
The first thing, first step is to admit you have a problem, right?
[:[00:41:47] Jan Griffiths: We have a problem in this industry. But then, what I'm hearing you say is we need this kind of mission-driven leadership. And then, from our conversation today, what I heard was, basically, you've covered a lot of the traits of authentic leadership, whereas: truth. Speak the truth. Speak truth to power, be comfortable in your own skin.
Treat people well, but also recognize that there is accountability. And when you have personal credibility and you make promises and commitments, you rally people around this mission. You drive that sense of accountability, which isn't a bad word. Not in a way where you berate people, I'm not talking about that—but personal commitment.
Then you've got something that will really move the needle. And then you start to change the culture and the processes, and you start to question things.
You made me think of going back to my concurrent engineering days. Do you know we tore apart every print and every specification on every print and read every specification? You know as well as I do that prints get carried over from one platform to the next.
And sometimes there's a specification on there, and I am not lying, some of these specifications were drafted before I was born. That's saying something, right?
But we just go on, don't we? We just go on. We copy 'em over and we go, "Oh yeah. Yeah."
This is what I get from you: admit there's a problem, get the right kind of motivational leadership that's mission-driven. I believe that you and I both are on this mission to change this industry. And you know what, Terry? We are gonna do it. We are absolutely gonna do it. But I am not gonna let you go from this conversation until we talk about some personal stuff.
Now, we have more in common than our love of this industry. And I did not know that until your speech earlier today. We both grew up on dairy farms in small towns. You in Bad Axe, Michigan? Me, in South Wales, in the UK.
My father, at the start of his farming career, also farmed with horses and plows, as did your grandfather. I remember the tractor. The tractor is everything in the world of the farming community. It was a Massey Ferguson, and it was red. And I remember it today, and I spent a lot of my childhood sitting on that tractor with my dad, herding cattle. And yet, here we are, we didn't follow in those farming footsteps, did we?
[:Now, where you have cows, you have manure. That's just it. It come together.
[:[00:44:49] Terry Woychowski: But you never have manure that's more than a few hours old, because there are parasites, and there are things that are bad. And so we clean them out, we put 'em on a pile, and then later we'll go and cast it out into the fields for fertilizer.
So, it was my job. Growing up I knew, I didn't know much, but I don't wanna be a farmer, 'cause I don't like to get up early and I don't like shelving manure. So I end up in the global automotive industry, where I had to get up even earlier, and I shoveled manure my whole career.
[:[00:45:19] Terry Woychowski: You're not gonna get away from it.
[:And she said, "Yeah, this company, Borg Warner—I think you have an interview there. And it was in the purchasing department. I was an assistant at BorgWarner. But it was such a great company. It really formed me as a leader, and I will be forever grateful to them because they took a chance on me early on in my career. And they sent me to Muncie, Indiana, to work on a project, and I was 23, I think.
I thought that they had picked me because I was special and maybe smart. They really picked me because nobody else wanted to do it. Nobody else wanted to transfer this inventory—this transmission project—back to Muncie, Indiana. But I learned so much from, that and I will be forever grateful to them.
But there's so much good in this industry that you and I have seen, have touched, have felt in the legacy auto industry. But we have to continue, Terry, to do everything in our power to move this industry forward.
And I can't even begin to tell you how much of a pleasure it has been to have you on the show today—and to get inside your mind a little bit. So thank you.
[:[00:46:44] Jan Griffiths: Yeah, me too.
[:[00:46:49] Jan Griffiths: Yes.
[:And so, Caresoft has a little sliver of opportunity to get some of these insights and to help work with some of our customers to be much more competitive and to face this. And that's what I want to do. There's something to learn every day. Things are honestly changing at that rate of speed.
If you didn't learn something today, it's 'cause you didn't have your eyes open. There's something going on and that's good. And you growing up on the farm, one thing you learn is—I’ll say—some of the ethic. Ethic that you bring, like your work ethic and your word.
Did you give your word? Then you'll move heaven and earth to accomplish what you just said. The clock isn't gonna stop you. And this roadblock's not gonna stop me. I do it. I have a mission to accomplish. And you become resourceful. Okay?
Tractor broke. Oh, take it to the dealer. No, no. You can't take it to the dealer. This thing cracked. Okay, go drill a hole on the end of the crack. Go get the weld.
[:[00:47:57] Terry Woychowski: Weld it up. And if the sun is still up there, climb back up there and keep going. I have a horse ranch now, and my children all have their homes on our homestead, and my grandsons are there. And we were moving some logs the other day to put on our saw mill—big, big old logs there. They weigh thousands of pounds.
And so, we were moving them and we're done. We got the log on the mill, and it started at Sprinkle. So, I looked at my grandson—he's a scrapping, I think, 8-year-old —and I said, "Bring me that logging chain," 'cause we needed to roll up. We needed to put tools away before the rain.
And so he bent down, he picked up this chain, he picked up, and I could just see his face. And he's going, good grief, this is heavy, you know? And he put it down. And I watched for a moment —what’s gonna happen here? And I think he's kinda looking around and kind of thinking. And so, then I turned to him and I said, "Bring me that chain."
And so, he snapped to, and he got down. He grabbed, and he just mustered the strength, and he pulled that chain over. So, I grabbed it, I said, "Thank you," and I went over, we hung the chains up.
And a half hour later or so, we're together and I called him over, and I said, "Now's the lesson time." I said, "I asked you to bring me the chain."
He said, "Yes, sir."
"It's a heavy, isn't it?" He said, "Yes, sir."
I said, "Young man, you're gonna have to lift a lot of heavy things. Just 'cause it's heavy doesn't mean you're not gonna get it and not gonna do it. You're gonna cowboy up here and do what's necessary to get this thing accomplished—mission focused—and your mission is to get me that chain."
[:[00:49:24] Terry Woychowski: "I don't care if you have to bring it over, link by link. I don't care. Get it over here. Figure it out." And he says, "Yes sir." And that little young man just learned a life lesson.
[:[00:49:52] Terry Woychowski: You're welcome. You're welcome.
[:[00:49:54] Terry Woychowski: Jan, it was my pleasure. I sure appreciate it.
[:[00:49:56] Terry Woychowski: Thank you.
[:
