"Forget everything you knew about what you did in a traditional business" - Dave Kehr of Schaeffler

Dr. Josh Elmore (00:00) Welcome to the Land and Lead podcast, where we explore the real stories behind leadership transitions, the setbacks, strategies, wins, and moments of growth, all aimed at helping other leaders land well and lead effectively. I'm your host, Dr. Josh Elmore of Court Street Consulting. The Land and Lead podcast is supported by my advisory work at Court Street Consulting. I work with new presidents, executives with expanded mandates, and leaders facing complex change to help them think clearly, learn in real time, and make consequential decisions. If you're navigating complexity where the stakes feel high and the path isn't obvious, that's the work that I do. Today we're speaking with Dave Kehr, a senior engineering and business leader with more than 20 years of experience driving innovation across drivetrain and mobility technologies. Dave currently serves as global lead for a humanoid virtual startup at Schaeffler where he is focused on advancing next generation solutions through the integration of automation, digitization, and mobility. Since joining Schaeffler in 2002, Dave has held progressively senior roles spanning Valvetrain e-mobility, project management, and global business leadership, including business unit leader for Valve Train systems and manufacturing unit leader for e-mobility. His career includes international leadership experience in and a strong technical foundation built through engineering and OEM-facing roles. Dave holds an MBA and a BS in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University is based in Troy, Michigan. Welcome to the show, Dave. Dave Kehr (01:29) Thanks for having me. Dr. Josh Elmore (01:30) Certainly. Excited to chat and can you share a bit about your background and your journey through roles at Schaeffler? Dave Kehr (01:37) Yeah, my journey started almost 25 years ago at Schaeffler. So I started an engineering role, a customer facing engineering role. One of the opportunities that brought me to Schaeffler was the ability to go abroad. So ⁓ right when I was being recruited Schaeffler, it was called INA at the time, which is one of our brands. But ⁓ we've since merged with several companies and now INA has become the Schaeffler, which is the family name of the business. When I was getting recruited, I had the opportunity to accept to come over to Germany as the first part of my career at Schaeffler. So that was really interesting because the first part of my Schaeffler, spent the first couple of years in Schaeffler, Germany and not in Schaeffler USA, which I was where I was originally employed. So right away started with an international assignment, which was really interesting. It was on a North American based project that was going to be developed, industrialized and then switched over to our North America operations and technical teams. So it was an interesting start see how the headquarters was running things and then also working with my new colleagues, which were in the region in the US. Dr. Josh Elmore (02:43) Hmm. And so what year was that when you went to Germany? Dave Kehr (02:47) That would have been, I got hired into Schaeffler at the end of 2002. And then I went straight away, let's say January 3rd, 2003 over to Germany. And so after, after my assignment there, I came back in the U S out of the Troy tech center here, just outside of Detroit for about 10 years. I held other engineering roles, but then eventually became an engineering manager. And then in 2015, I had the opportunity to come back to Germany in a more senior role. So I took over a engineering responsibility for a certain product line that then had global responsibilities, but I was sitting in headquarters. So I did that for a few years. I had a chance to go into a German plant and work for a year. So I did that and then wandered back to the States at the end of 2019 and went into a manufacturing role. So I had an opportunity in my career to have a pause and say, where do I want to get more experience? And I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go into manufacturing. So that was something I had at the very, very beginning of my career coming out of college, but hadn't gotten back to, and it was something that I wanted to get back to. So I did two years in our Wooster, Ohio facility in manufacturing, and then had the opportunity, again, to go back to Germany after two years being in Wooster for another senior role. So always it seems increasing responsibilities when I headed back to Germany and was responsible for a global business unit in our engine and transmission division. And I did that for about three years and then have been back in the US about a year and prior to coming back, I accepted a role as this global lead in what we call an internal startup, an incubator if you will, for one of our new growth areas, which is humanoids. Dr. Josh Elmore (04:27) Hmm. And so a lot of kind of through the ranks as you go back between the US and Germany and you're in this new role. How long have you been in this new role? Dave Kehr (04:37) Just over one year, so it's not too long. Dr. Josh Elmore (04:38) Okay. Thinking about kind of the organization, Schaeffler itself, can you tell us more about Schaeffler and the situation when you entered the president role in humanoid robotics? Dave Kehr (04:50) Yes, so Schaeffler ⁓ has four main divisions. There's a couple automotive divisions, an industrial division and an aftermarket division. And of course, there's always with any large M&I, there's always a look into what is next, what is in the future. And in Schaeffler, they'd quite a clever thing and split this out into a fifth division where they would collect these new growth areas. And so this fifth division came about only in the last couple of years. And now they're rounding it out with different areas like hydrogen, like battery development, a growth area. So it's where we can incubate these different areas. They're running at different speeds. Some are running really fast. Some are just in the advanced development side. And so it's a good place then to have the attention and the shortcut to the high level management where you can make quick decisions, strategic decisions much, quicker than you could if it's sitting in one of our existing business areas. Dr. Josh Elmore (05:44) Hmm. And so, okay, you have kind of four historical divisions, a fifth now, which is an incubator for growth spaces. You mentioned kind of, hydro, robotics, you're in the robotics. Dave Kehr (05:57) Defense, I should have mentioned defense. So defense is now in that area. the popular topic these days. Dr. Josh Elmore (06:03) Give us kind of a picture of what it looks like to be in an incubator in in Schaeffler. Dave Kehr (06:09) Yeah, when I started, my new boss told me he was the CEO at the time or COO at the time. He said, forget everything you knew about what you did in a traditional business. He's like, you need to change and you need to change fast, especially in this humanoid area, which as an industry, it's accelerating. It was already fast when I got into it. I think, I think he was just encouraged me to think differently. And it's not really that you forget everything, you know, because a lot of what I did brought me to, to, to this position. And a lot of what I did making connections, networking, understanding the headquarters and working in global positions really helps this. it's really area that goes much faster and you need to think much more visionary than I used to in an existing organization that was more or less running along. It's still developing, for example, sitting in the automotive industry is run much different than, say this humanoid or this physical AI sphere. Dr. Josh Elmore (07:01) And so was this business unit or the robotics, was this stood up as you entered the role? Was it existing before? Dave Kehr (07:11) It was not existing before. We had done things with robotics before in different areas of the company. And so that's the great thing about Schaeffler. It's such a diverse company. We're across many different industries and pretty much we're involved with anything that has to do with motion. So we have a branding called the Motion Technology Company. And it really is from very small bearings to large bearings to fully e-drive systems to internal combustion projects to steer by wire. We do a lot that has to do with motion. And so that is it's helpful to have this company behind you and then jump into the startup, which then was bringing these things actually together that may have been sitting in part in different areas of our company. Dr. Josh Elmore (07:54) And so you've led in the broader organization before, right, through progressive roles, and now you're in this kind of startup role. What does leadership look like in comparison? What's the difference between those two? Dave Kehr (08:08) Yeah, I think if I compare the two, so I would call the comparison or take the comparison to my global business unit. There is a cadence throughout the year with how we do things internally, internal milestones, and it's much more structured. It's slower and it doesn't mean that it's slow. It's just slower than what I'm used to now. And when you come into a new area and you're blazing trails, for example, then there's no pattern for you to fall back on and say, it's this time of year. this means this milestone is coming. You have to generate that you have to dictate that and you have to do it in a relatively quick fashion. And it doesn't mean you're not going to make mistakes. doesn't mean that you're going to say, Hey, we went down this path. This doesn't make sense. Let's backtrack and take another path. And you can't be afraid to do that. This is what I've learned and you can't have a lot of hesitation. For sure. You should think about things. But you can't just hesitate and not make decisions and hope things work out. There you have to be quite proactive and use your best judgment, whether that's relying on experience and sometimes it's just pure gut feel. Dr. Josh Elmore (09:14) Hmm. And you mentioned this idea of having a direct line to top leadership, ⁓ which is not kind of the normal way of working ⁓ in the traditional organization, but in the startup environment, it's helpful. How is it helpful to kind of have that, ⁓ you it sounds like you're moving fast and you need to devise your milestones and you might kind of iterate. ⁓ How has that facilitated your ability to work quickly? Dave Kehr (09:21) Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's decision making. So if we need decisions and when I say decisions, it mainly is related to where we're going to install capital. It's around customer quotes and customer activity. So that requires a bit of a due diligence on where we're placing our capital investments. So that is maybe the fastest because of that due diligence and all of our other regions, this tends to run a little bit slower on purpose because there's a lot of global coordination needed. But when we report right into the executive board, then this goes extremely fast and it needs to go fast because along with the difference of in automotive, in automotive you would get a project and it would start in one to two years out. Maybe, you know, when I started my career, it was three to four years out. So you had all these sample phases and you would learn about the samples. This doesn't happen in humanoids. We're getting source business that we have months, a couple of months to get this into production. And so it needs to go much, much faster. So the speed is enabled having this direct connection. And also for me personally as a growth, all of these executives that are sitting there have a a different history and I can learn from this. So boss currently is the CEO who used to be the CFO and has a lot of years experience in executive banking and things like this. So I get a different flavor also from him on what he's thinking about when we come to certain decision making times in our projects. So that part of it is extremely interesting. Dr. Josh Elmore (11:08) And you have a technical background, right? Moving through engineering roles. How has your technical background informed the way that you're running this startup? Dave Kehr (11:18) Yeah, so I have a real luxury. We have a lot of intelligent people at Schaeffler and a lot better engineers than me. So I try, I tell people that my goal is to be technically competent. So certainly in my role, I can't be in all of the technical details, but to understand this and to maybe push in some areas. But I got an amazing team globally that are super technical. I really have some very brilliant assistant engineers in our teams. And the nice thing about Schaeffler is, you know, when we have this incubator, if we're working on bearings, I don't have to have a bearings team inside of my organization. I have access to a thousand bearing engineers that are already existing in other parts of the organization. So we can draw on that experience as well. having a technical degree, I think helps, especially when you have to make calls and say, Hey, how is this fit with your engineering judgment, especially since you never have all of the data that you wish you had. But being surrounded by brilliant engineers also is a luxury that I have at Schaeffler and there's no shortage of brilliant engineers here. Dr. Josh Elmore (12:22) Hmm. And thinking about your transition from the broader organization, you're in Germany, coming back to US, you're a year in, into a startup, different rules of the road. What strategies have helped you navigate that transition? Dave Kehr (12:37) Yeah, I tell my wife all the time that I've never been more uncomfortable, let's say with a rule because all of the other rules are somewhere related to automotive. And you kind of have a feeling for that. Maybe the technology is different. But, the strategy I employ the most is, you know, no one's going to help me with decisions. It's my decisions in the most part. Of course, I have some resources like my superior, but it's okay to be uncomfortable. It's okay that you have these feelings. But this is something that you need to get used to. And I think one of the last things or one of the latest things I'm becoming even more important or accustomed to being uncomfortable. I think part of my expat journey, so I had three different expat assignments. If you want to talk about being uncomfortable is you move, you know, you and your wife to a country she's never seen. I've only seen on a business trip and you make that leap to move to a different country with a completely different language and completely different culture set. I think this helps set me up in some ways. I'm even doing more uncomfortable things. And when I say uncomfortable, it's just things that I'm not used to or haven't had experience with. So it's not a terrible thing, but it's something where you could get paralyzed by, wow, this feels foreign, this feels new. And I think part of my journey, having these expat assignments has prepared me for that in some ways. And so I'm a big believer that your journey is just that it's a journey and it prepares you and for opportunity that comes knocking at some point and it never comes knocking exactly when you want it. It's either too early, too late for the most part and you just need to be ready. And I think I've been fortunate enough that my career has kind of set me up to be able to take over a role like this. Dr. Josh Elmore (14:17) Hmm. And so if you're thinking about kind of that, right, cross cultural experience of going into a new leadership position in a new country, different language, right? So what have you taken from those past experiences and applied here or decided that it doesn't apply here? Dave Kehr (14:35) Yeah, I think one thing that I learned is you can't go in thinking you know everything and that especially applies when you're doing something abroad. If you do it a certain way in the US, ⁓ ordinarily or customarily, that might be not the right way to do it. And there were very simple things that happened to me that taught me that experience. Even on the third expat assignment, you're still learning how to be a leader in a different cultural environment. I mean, you might get used to leading engineers or people in office, but then you start having responsibility for plants and plant managers. And that's a different complexity that you layer onto the cultural complexity. So I think you have to first listen, have to see what is going on, and you have to find allies. You need to find people that, a couple of people that you can go to and say, these people set me straight and you can spar with them or bounce things off from like, this doesn't seem to be right for me. Is this something cultural? Is this something Schaeffler related or is this nothing to do with it? And maybe I'm onto something here. So I think there's a couple of different ways that I eventually developed. There's no roadmap to do all this. You can read a lot of books. You can go to cultural training, which Schaeffler provided. This was great. And it also helped my wife and I, because you have to not only adapt at work, you have to live there outside of work, right, and especially for your spouse who is there that this can be challenging. So, Schaeffler prepared me the best they could but I don't think that you can really be completely prepared you just need to go through it. Dr. Josh Elmore (16:03) Yeah, and thinking about kind of ⁓ all of those experiences of going through it, you're a year into the new kind of startup in robotics. What are some wins and setbacks and how did they manifest? Dave Kehr (16:16) Yeah, I think, you know, I truly and we will face this at some point, but we haven't had too many setbacks. To be honest, we set some goals and we far exceeded those goals. think if you put a number to it, it was 500 % of one of the goals we set for us in the first year last year. So it's also taught me that you need to be even more ambitious with our goals because it wasn't purposely done to be conservative, but you need to set ambitious goals and they should be reachable at the end of the day, but they still should be ambitious. As far as wins, I think having success in getting into customers that we were targeting and some of that happened relatively quick and some of that has just happened in recent months and it's always finding a way to get into these customers who also running fast and have a lot on their plates and everybody doesn't want to hear from a company knocking on their door and saying, this is how we can help you. They're in the middle of trying to figure this out themselves. So just a little bit of persistence from our team, finding different ways to get in and at these customers. and then last week I had the opportunity to be in Hannover. They have a huge, it's called Hannover Messe, a huge industrial fair there. And we won the highest level of innovation award for one of the products that we developed in the last year for humanoid. And I would say that is one of the biggest wins that we've had recently and so recently was just last week. Dr. Josh Elmore (17:43) Congrats. Yeah, I think I saw that video on LinkedIn of you doing a quick interview there. Dave Kehr (17:47) Yeah. Yeah, no, it was really excited the Hannover fair, seeing just a customer engagement and now having Schaeffler be part of this discussion. When you when you look at the reports, when you have people coming up to you, it really kind of switched from from us knocking on people's doors to still having to do that to a certain degree. But now having people approach us and wanting to work with us, I think it's a testament to the entire team and the work and effort they put in the last year. Dr. Josh Elmore (18:13) And I guess that must be kind of a shift in gears as well, where in the past kind of, leading business units from the broader kind of parent organization, where you're a known quantity and the kind of relationships that you've built with customers is deep, versus from a startup, we're working in humanoid robotics very specifically, and then reaching out to those folks, having to kind of, lead in that way, that kind of outreach, for more customer facing as it relates to the market and education. How's that going? Dave Kehr (18:48) Yeah, it's really been quite the journey, a bit of a roller coaster. you're right, Schaeffler has 110, 115,000 employees worldwide, about 25 billion euro in sales. And we show up at little startups that when I say little, a lot of them are valued at a pretty high number, but there's 100 people there, there's 50 people there. And so it really, we had to tailor our approach on how we approach them because you can imagine that this much smaller startup then has this big M&I that shows up and wants to do business with them and says, hey, we think we can help you. You can imagine that there is some skepticism in that. So, every company has, or every startup that we approach has their own culture and it's just identifying these. And in some cases, these are much, much different cultures than what we dealt with our automotive OEM partners. It doesn't mean they're bad or good, it's just different. Dr. Josh Elmore (19:43) Yeah. And do you have to update the way that you relate as kind of a peer in that way, right? Because technically kind of their startup founders, you're an internal startup founder, or do you find yourself relating differently now as a leader kind of taking on that founder identity? Dave Kehr (19:58) I think we understand them a bit more. mean, if you're not in the start of business, what they're up against, what they're doing, and they're fighting for survival every day. They have a runway of money where they are funded. And when that runs out, it's out, or they have to find more. And to find more, they're going to have to make sure they have the right product. So I think it's understanding them a bit more. And also trying to, when we understand them a bit more, how can we take some of that into our organization? And so really, we're trying to do the best of two worlds. We're trying to run fast like a startup, but also can rely on the rest of our company when it comes to technical expertise, for example, when it comes to manufacturing, to be able to industrialize some of these products. So, and when we combine both of those, sounds great, but you just multiply the interfaces. And then with these interfaces, you have the opportunities to slow things down. And so that's where we're challenged every day. How do we maintain the speed and also leverage all of the expertise we have inside of Schaeffler? Dr. Josh Elmore (20:57) Hmm. Yeah, and that's where the startup comes into play. Dave Kehr (21:01) Yeah, I'm full believer that this is the exact right way to do this. ⁓ To sit in one of the other divisions, they are working on different challenges. They have different processes that are absolutely needed. And to split this out makes perfect sense now, and especially having lived it for a little over a year. I fully believe this is a good way to do this. And we've seen other presentations now where they're starting to present this, not necessarily using Schaeffler as a model but explaining that these larger companies are tier one suppliers. You know, if they have these kinds of incubators and separate themselves out, this is probably the way to go. Dr. Josh Elmore (21:38) Yeah, right. Leading not only from a technology perspective, but also from a model perspective of showing the way. Dave Kehr (21:46) It's really been interesting. And I don't want to say that we've done everything right, but we've done enough things right to put us in a good position. And we just took stock the other week and a couple of us were talking about, you one year ago, if we had thought we would been in this position that we're in now, and it was through a lot of hard work, it wasn't just luck. We would have been over the moon, you know, just excited to be in this position. So, we're very appreciative of where we are right now. Dr. Josh Elmore (22:11) And you're right, thinking about that year long and where you are right now, in the 1980s, John Gabarro ran a few studies focused on GMs and presidents as they pursued new roles and wrote the results up in the book, The Dynamics of Taking Charge. Gabarro explained that an executive has fully taken charge when they have mastered the new assignment in sufficient depth to be managing the organization as efficiently as the resources, constraints, and the manager's own ability allow. Thinking about this definition, 100 % is having fully taken charge in your new assignment, what percent would you say you are at now? Dave Kehr (22:46) I would say 70, 75 and probably might seem a little bit low, but we're still building. When we started last year, we had zero inside of this team and now globally we have 80. So it's grown, it's gonna continue to grow. We have honestly more work than we know what to do with, which is a luxury problem. There's some days where I feel it's controlling me and other days where I feel like we have a handle on it and it's okay because we're doing things differently we're doing in a new area and we're continuing to grow so I would give myself a 70 or 75 percent. Dr. Josh Elmore (23:22) Wow, yeah. Being a new model to your point around kind of showing the way, I imagine having to build from zero is a journey to your point in and of itself and 80 employees. Do you have kind stable state where you're headed or is it kind of still just being drawn out and it's like, what does this turn into? And that's an exploration in and of itself. Dave Kehr (23:46) Yeah, I think there's some parts of it that's still in exploration. We're developing legal entities to try and ring fence some of these different areas. Because if you don't do something like this, you're still bound by all of the governance criteria that the rest of the company works with. there's some things that still needs to be explored, and we're running quickly to do that. And I think the rest is, you know, the more or less that the main teams are there. And it's just a matter of how do we structure ourselves. And one of the biggest challenges is we want to have common design platforms globally so that, you know, if we're working on part A for our North American customer, that the Chinese also know, our Chinese colleagues know that, you know, we have this part A and so we're not repeating all of the lessons learned, you know, rather than the Chinese colleagues saying, we have a part A that we just got a request for and they start from zero. How do you exchange that knowledge quickly? And then that's one of the main challenges that we have. Again, it's the speed topic, but we can't go so fast that we're not bringing each other up to speed and up to date on what's going on. It doesn't mean they need to know all of the details, but what we want is that it clicks, if they have a request for a part they haven't worked on, that they know, I heard this in one of our global exchanges that so-and-so in the US and Europe, it doesn't matter where, has worked on something similar in that they make this connection. Dr. Josh Elmore (25:07) Hmm this you mentioned this idea of a global exchange. Can you tell us more about that? Dave Kehr (25:11) Yeah, so right now we have a couple of different global exchanges. It starts maybe a couple of times a year that I get my direct reports all together somewhere in the world. And so, for example, we will head off to China in July. And so that means we'll be together for the better part of a week. We'll have some workshops that focus on areas where we need to get ourselves organized and things like that to try and more, even more structure to what we've already done in the past year. have weekly meetings where at least my direct reports are in the same meeting. We try to keep this not too labor intensive to prepare for and not sitting in four hour meetings every week. But how can we go through this as quickly as possible? One of them is centered more on management topics. What needs to be decided? Are we waiting on anything? What's going on in your organization? including customers. And then we have another technical exchange that we put in that's every other week that invites the global team also together. And then there's different topics about what we're doing on the technology front. And intermixed with all that are technology deep dives where we have to make even more innovation. And then we ask the different regions, for example, to come in with their ideas for a particular topic and we start exchanging things. So there's several ways to do this. It never feels like it's enough. It always feels like it's a bit too slow. And I think you always need a little bit of that tension there that you never get really settled, that you think where everything's going fast enough. I can say for sure we are much faster than we were one year ago, but we'll still try to get faster, a little more clear on how we do this quickly. Dr. Josh Elmore (26:46) Yeah, well, it's a really powerful practice, though, kind of getting folks together in that iterative nature in various ways and various formats. Super important for ideating, decision making, kind of pushing things through. And speaking to that kind of what advice would you share with leaders currently entering a new high stakes role? Dave Kehr (27:06) Yeah, I think don't don't be afraid. You will be certainly excited. You will be nervous. were days early on that I thought, I make a mistake? Is this really the right job? Am I really cut out to do this job? But you have to have this belief in yourself. And I would say I've never needed it or never had to lean out of more than than what I had to do with this job and a belief that, hey, you're the right position. You're the right person for this job. Don't put too much pressure on yourself for sure. Everyone in it's my level puts some pressure on yourself. It's about pride. It's about doing a good job. It's about bringing your best for the company and for your team. But don't suffocate yourself with that pressure, which I've seen some young leaders do thinking they needed to be perfect and that the employees are always expecting that they have every single answer. And that just isn't the case. So you need to rely on your team. You need to find stakeholders outside of your team, maybe somebody going through the same thing. So I've reached out and have a couple of those conversations. That's also helpful because the higher you go in an organization, the lonelier it becomes. There's not as many people doing your job. So finding a stakeholder that you can spar with, that you can say, hey, have you ran into this before? This is really challenging me. And it's not about cheating on the final or copying other people's notes, but it's about networking and not repeating the same mistakes. Because let's be honest, if you're repeating mistakes constantly that other people have done, this is wasting time if somebody in the organization could have stopped you from maybe making that mistake. So I think those are two or three of the areas that I've focused on and probably or might be useful to someone in a similar position. Dr. Josh Elmore (28:45) Yeah, yeah, super powerful practices. Really appreciate you sharing those pieces of advice. I'm sure there's someone out there listening that's thinking, yeah, I need to some outside perspective, for instance, from the stakeholder view. Dave, thanks so much for joining us. Is there anything that you'd like to share that's coming up for you or Schaeffler? Dave Kehr (29:03) No, think hopefully if you're in this humanoid robotics area that you'll continue to hear more about us. If you do, then our job is working. We're going to push through. We have a number of partnerships. So this is something we also didn't have in the automotive side. Of course, we have OEM partners, but really defined contracted partnerships where Schaeffler is participating in this humanoid sphere. And these partnerships, especially in early adoption or early phase of this whole industry with humanoids is really important. hopefully your listeners or your viewers will see more from Schaeffler in this humanoid sphere. And that means we're doing our job. Dr. Josh Elmore (29:46) Amazing. Well, Dave, again, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing. Dave Kehr (29:50) My pleasure, thanks for having me. Dr. Josh Elmore (29:51) Certainly. The Land and Lead podcast is supported by my advisory work at Court Street Consulting. I work with new presidents, executives with expanded mandates, and leaders facing complex change to help them think clearly, learn in real time, and make consequential decisions. If you're navigating complexity, where the stakes feel high, and the path isn't obvious, that's the work that I do. Thanks for listening to the Land and Lead podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Josh Elmore. Tune in next time for more stories from leaders navigating high stakes role transitions.