Leading Women - 40W

40W * NOVEMBER 9, 2020

10 0 L E A D I N G W O M E N

elizabeth UMBERSON

sandy STOJKOVSKI

What drew you to the auto industry? It wasn't the industry that drew me, it was the company. My family and I
were living and working in Houston for a large manufacturing company that manufactured components for the
rotating jet aircraft engine and also for oil field equipment,
and in Houston, it's a big city, we had three small children.
It's just hot all the time. We decided that we wanted to live
in a smaller town and in a different place.
First automotive job: It was in 1994, and I was the purchasing manager for [ZF's] plant in Gainesville, Ga.
Big break: My big break was in 1999, when I was promoted to be the plant manager. I was the first female plant manager in the entire ZF Group. I was a little apprehensive. Being
the first at anything, you want to make sure that you do a
good job. I just wanted to make sure that we were running
that plant and that operation the best we could and that everybody was going to get credit for it and that the team felt as
responsible as I felt in accomplishing that plant's goals.
What is the major challenge you've faced in your career? Today I would say COVID. But when ZF decided to diversify, we decided that we wanted to produce a gearbox, or a
transmission, for wind turbines. The challenge was to design
and manufacture a product that we had never made before.
On top of that, we had to build a new plant in North America to
produce it, and we had to find a completely new supply base.
It was daunting.
You've been in the industry 26 years. What has been
the most important change you've seen? When we acquired TRW in 2015, that was a huge acquisition because
TRW was nearly the size of
ZF. Prior to the merger, ZF
had a completely decentralized purchasing organization. After the merger, we
decided globally that we
would have a centralized
purchasing organization
with a global commodity
structure, and it was huge
amounts of changes in process and in organization.
What work achievement are you most proud
of? Building the plant - I
was able to build a greenfield site to produce the wind turbine gearboxes in Gainesville. That was quite a significant accomplishment, and not
everybody gets to build a plant in their career. The whole
TRW acquisition and merger, not everybody also gets to do
in their career.
What do you struggle with? I think I struggle the most
with the status quo. We tend to have a mindset that because something has been that way or because something
is hard to change, that we should just accept the status
quo. Some changes are hard just because there's a lot of
steps to do to take those. I get frustrated when people
aren't willing to take on that task. Sometimes it's really
hard to make movement on those.
Describe your leadership style. When I was 30 years
old, I tended to think that it was faster and easier to just do
things myself. As I increased in responsibility, I realized
that I'm actually short-circuiting my people, and also I'm
short-circuiting myself; I'm not getting as much out of it as
I could if I developed people and really give them responsibility and show them how to take on more responsibility
and do more themselves. As a leader, I always try to make
sure people have very clear direction, they know the goal
or the result that we're trying to get to. It's important that
people feel invested in the result.
What have you learned from the COVID-19 crisis? I
don't think of myself as a particularly rigid person, but I really think I was more rigid before COVID. Now with our
virtual meetings, people are not as rigid, and they're more
flexible. I haven't seen a difference in the result.
Is there anything you wish you had done differently in
your career? I don't think so. Part of the reason I've only
been with two companies is because I got new roles.
Sometimes the new roles were not a promotion; they were
a horizontal move for me, but it still fit. It gave me knowledge in something I was interested in.
What should be done to encourage women to enter
the auto industry? I think exposure to kids at the middle
school and at the high school level. When I was the plant
manager, or when I was working at one plant site, we
would always have apprentices, or we would have career
day. All of those give us opportunities that kids can see
what it means to work in automotive. Creating a dialogue
or a game to help them understand what that is is always
fun, and they always have a much better understanding.
- Alexa St. John

What drew you to the auto industry? I believe the auto industry
is actually the best industry in the world. First of all, not only do its
products really affect nearly everyone in the world, but it's just got
these fantastic and complex problems. Being born and raised in
southeast Michigan, the automotive industry and University of
Michigan were the two things really running through my veins. With
a great example of my dad, who worked in the auto industry as well,
and as an engineer also, I was inspired to go into
engineering and had an eye towards going into
the automotive industry from a pretty early age.
First automotive job: I was 18 and a summer
intern at Ford Motor Co. in brake development
in 1992. At that time, brake development was
housed in the middle of the Dearborn proving
ground. So definitely not a sterile office environment whatsoever. I do remember one of my
colleagues decided to kind of test my mettle.
We went out on the track in a development
Mustang and he would do these 80-to-0 stops
over and over again. I learned the purpose of
this was to see if I would get sick, if I would
throw up. I didn't, so I guess I passed the test.
That was my first auto job.
Big break: My big break happened at the
transition point between what I look at as the
first 15 years of my career, which were holding
a variety of functional roles, and then the transition to leading businesses, which I've done
for the majority of the last 10 years. To get that
big break of leading businesses, I actually made it myself. I quit
what was a good-paying job in the middle of the 2009 recession
and started my own company. I became the founder and overall
head of a strategic consulting company that I built from scratch.
Very quickly, it was acquired by AVL and I ran it for them for four
years.
This was a big break, not only because it meant I was now running a business, instead of only functional roles, but also because
what the team did together was pretty cool. We were able to pre-

 Vice President, Head of Materials Management
| ZF North America | Livonia, Mich. | Age: 60
| Education: B.B.A., operations management, Texas
A&M University

 CEO, Vitesco Technologies North America | Vitesco
Technologies | Auburn Hills, Mich. | Age: 47 | Education:
B.S., mechanical engineering, MBA and M.S., industrial
manufacturing systems engineering, University of Michigan

rekha WUNNAVA

 Global Director, Automotive Design and Build IT | Ford
Motor Co. | Dearborn, Mich. | Age: 50 | Education: Bachelor's
in commerce, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India
What drew you to the auto industry? I started in the auto industry by accident. I used to work in the IT software and services
industry, and it was through one of those consulting engagements
that I came to Ford. Once I spent a couple of years here, it was just
the sheer joy and passion associated with the Ford brand - family,
trust, loyalty; those are the things that kept me here. All that based
on the foundation of the mission of driving human progress
through the freedom of movement. It just
gives you that greater purpose to be part of
something that's bigger than me.
First automotive job: I came in through a
consulting organization in 2000. I joined as
a permanent employee in 2003. Across both
of those jobs, the first role I had was in enterprise architecture within the IT organization.
Big break: I had the opportunity to work
directly with Marcy Klevorn, who was our
chief information officer at the time, to create and shape the vision for Ford IT in terms
of what we wanted to become, how we
wanted to work and the culture transformation that needed to occur across our global
IT organization. It was a great opportunity
to have an end-to-end view of the entire organization.
What is the major challenge you've
faced in your career? The fascinating thing about the auto industry is that technology is shaping our future. It's causing disruption
and driving the future of our industry. It requires traditional IT organizations to work in partnership with the functional leaders to
redefine their business models. What ends up happening, it creates a good kind of tension because the functional leaders need to
accept and allow and get used to the fact that their IT partners will
help shape their organization. For the IT organization, it requires
us to step up a notch and look beyond technology at what are the
real-world business applications that these technologies can create? It gets challenging when you have to do something that has
not been the norm of how organizations have worked for many decades.
You've been in the industry 20 years. What has been the
most important change you've seen? The culture. I've seen us

dict, 10 years ago, the kind of technologies that are actually in demand today, through our strategic consulting and model-based
approach. It was not only my big break, but it was also something
I'm pretty proud of.
What is the major challenge you've faced in your career? I've
faced a lot of challenges. You could say a big change in leadership,
or a big drop in sales, serious quality challenges and maybe now
even looking at it as going through the coronavirus pandemic
amidst a planned spin off as a brand-new CEO for the region.
These are all pretty big challenges that I've faced. I think the key is
really about using these as opportunities to grow and learn. The
key to the challenges is framing them properly and becoming
stronger because of them. Actually, in my office is a frame that I
use to remind me to know that the frame you set is the picture you
get. It's empty, because the point is that you know whatever is going on, you need to frame it in your own way.
You've been in the industry 24 years. What
has been the most important change you've
seen? Back when I started, we were starting to
put computers on every desk and we were really starting to change from physical and paper-based things into more digitized tools and
processes. But for sure now we've really expanded so much beyond that with AI and VR
and all the systems tools and things that we use.
Digitization is the most significant change that
has happened over my career.
What work achievement are you most
proud of? More recently, I'm very proud of the
experience I've had joining Continental (parent company of Vitesco Technologies) from the
outside. I immediately was launched into a position based out of Germany for a couple years.
This was a significant step up in size of team
and size of business that I was running. I'm really happy with the results that we've achieved
and, importantly, how much the team, under
my leadership, grew.
Tell us about your family. I'm married; we have two boys who
are both teenagers. I'm really fortunate that my husband and our
two boys even enabled us to go live in Germany for a couple years.
What's your favorite weekend activity? I love to be physically
active as much as possible, whether it be sports or exercise. I love
to play golf. I'm actually also very involved in karate, I'm a second-degree black belt now. I love to work out and take long walks.
- Jack Walsworth

evolve from having been a very hierarchical culture where people
with more stripes were the ones speaking at meetings and making
the decisions and those who were in subordinate roles looked up
to the senior leaders as the voices to be heard. That very much
used to be how Ford was in the past. The big shift I've seen the past
few years is our drive toward becoming a more empowered organization where you drive autonomy to the edge of the organization. It's a realization that we need to work in more agile ways.
Describe your leadership style. I'm inclusive; that's the first word
that comes to mind. I'm always looking for input from my entire team,
and my team's globally distributed from Australia to Dearborn. It's very
important to me. Personally, I've lived and worked in four countries:
India, the U.K., the U.S. and China. That sense for global inclusion is
very strong because I know how, for instance, the U.S. is perceived in
other parts of the world - that that's where the
headquarters is, and that's where they make
the decisions. I want to make it a point to make
sure I'm inclusive and empowering and give
them the autonomy to do the work the way
they see fit, with my role being to remove any
obstacles that get in their way and create a buffer between them and the senior executives so
they have the air cover to do their work. I'm
most comfortable when I'm surrounded by a
group of people and we have real, candid conversations. Communication is key.
What should be done to encourage
women to enter the auto industry? Technology is driving where we're going and
how we're going to evolve. My encouragement to young women seeking a tech career
is to really pursue that because it's disrupting every industry, including automotive.
One of the things I heard from a recent
group of summer interns was that they had no idea the cool technology work we were doing right here in Michigan in the auto industry. I think we need to get the word out there for people to see
what this industry's becoming.
What's the best part of your day? In the morning, when my
husband, Raj, and I are in the house. We have two golden retrievers,
Amigo and Leo. Just being able to sit down with a cup of tea, the two
dogs and us brings a lot of peace. It's a great way to start the day.
What's your favorite weekend activity? I'm a simple person.
I'm a warm weather person. I like to be outside, even if it's something like grilling or hanging out with the dogs. I try to find ways to
at least virtually connect with my friends and family. I'm also a
Bollywood fan, so a good Bollywood movie and a glass of wine is
something I find to be very relaxing.
- Michael Martinez

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