How Great Leaders Build Alignment Without Slowing Down Execution

Speaker A: Speed is dangerous. Velocity. That means speed and direction. I've been in the aerospace and defense business my entire career, as you said, from the beginning, flying in the military and then through my. My civilian professional career. So literally 35 years. But we are in a massive growth mode in aerospace defense.

Speaker B: What were the first things that you thought you needed to accomplish when you came in as CEO?

Speaker A: I go into what I call a listen and learn mode. The real magic in scaling a business is doing it profitably. I can't teach values. I can teach performance. When people really understand the importance of what they're doing and how they fit right. I don't care if it's a warehouse, you know, supervisor, quality inspector, whatever. It takes time to make them understand how important it is. The things they do and the really, really great leaders remind them of that and they take it to heart and they're really good at their jobs.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Leadership Launchpad, where we talk about actionable insights for leaders in aerospace, manufacturing, defense, and the rest of the hard tech ecosystem. My name is Matt Geertsen, host of this podcast and the founder of bilt, where we are training the next generation of hard tech leaders how to build high performing teams. My guest today is Ian Walsh, the CEO of FDH Aero. For those who aren't aware, FDH is a trusted provider of supply chain solutions for aerospace and defense companies all across the world, with operations, I believe in 14 countries. Ian was. Ian became the CEO back in the beginning of 2025 and has been leading the company through a time of high growth and high change. Luckily, he has spent essentially his entire career in aerospace. Ian started his career as a Marine Cobra attack helicopter pilot, flying missions in places such as Somalia and Bosnia. Since leaving the military, Ian has essentially just stayed in aerospace and worked for many of the major players like Bell Helicopters, Texatron as two examples, before becoming the CEO of F in February of 2025. Ian, welcome my friend. It is so great to have you on the show.

Speaker A: Hey, thanks Matt. Appreciate being here.

Speaker B: I'm really excited for the beginning of this conversation because I think, you know, especially given your position within the aerospace market, I'd love to start with kind of just getting a sense of where aerospace is today because you have kind of a unique position from the supplier's perspective. So what's changing? What's driving those changes within the industry right now?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, the aerospace. I've been in the aerospace and defense business my entire career. As you said, from the beginning, flying in the military, uh, and then through my, my civilian professional career. And so literally 35 years. I can compare it to some other industries, but I will, I would argue that it's always dynamic, it's always moving forward. It's a relatively large industry, but when you've been in it for a long time, it's actually very small. You get to see the same people, you watch them climb in their careers in different companies and the economics of it are also very dynamic. It's a very fast paced evolution. When you look at, you know, and I've seen it from all sides, the thing I'm, I'm the most proud of is I started, as you said, on the OEM side making the actual helicopters or business jets Textron for 20 years, then into the highly engineered components business, providing so as tier one, tier two supplier to the OEMs. And now on the last kind of phase, if you will, is the distribution side for electronic and hardware components around the world for all different military, defense, commercial, you name it. So you know, your question is about what's the state of the industry, how's it looking? Every business, every industry has a cycle and it could be a uh, five year up, five year down. But we are in a massive growth mode in aerospace defense for all different reasons. Yeah, the commercial air market is rebounding post Covid. There's been still pent up demand for people to move and travel. That's coming back. So the Boeings and airbuses of the world, Bombardiers are just continuing to scale operations even overseas in places like China where they're building commercial jets. The business jet market was incredibly strong during COVID because everybody was shifting from commercial to private aviation. The heel market has also been strong. And what's really cool is to see the vertical lift evtol, which I've actually been involved since the day at Bell Helicopter and working with Robinson Helicopter and thinking about putting helipads in every rooftop and getting people to move, you know, come vertically and then you add defense modernization, you add um, defense sustainment, manned, unmanned, teaming, large, small, add drones to that complexity. The weapons, space, sensors, it's just, it's all part of it. And it continues to move and shake. It's not like one up is one down. It's just continually kind of unilaterally growing. And that's done wonders certainly for our business and for the rest of the, the industry.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, yeah. And you took over the company. Kind of in the middle of that you became CEO just as, because as you said, it's, you can't turn around. And I mean, it's amazing when you think about the overall economy and where different jobs are shifting. I can't turn around without seeing more job openings in this industry. There's just so much happening given all that change. And kind of when you took over, I would love to know from your perspective, how did you establish yourself? What were the first things that you thought you needed to accomplish when you came, uh, in as CEO? So you came in to a new company during a time of tremendous change. So how did you think about that transition?

Speaker A: I'll answer it in two ways, from an experienced perspective. Having been a CEO several times. First as a division CEO at Textron, reporting in our chairman, and as a chairman, president and CEO of a public aerospace defense company, and now as a CEO of a private equity owned company. What I've always found, and it goes right back to the roots of military training. And it's standard for me going into a new role, certainly as a big role as this. I go into what I call a listen and learn mode, meaning you can know or think you know everything about something. And every business is different. Every business is in a different cycle. Every team has different dynamics and strengths and weaknesses. It's super important, certainly as a CEO in a position of authority and accountability, where you want to affect change, you want positive change, you've gotta be really, really crystal clear. And you get the data, you, uh, get it from people, you get it from all their financials, you look at historics, you look at the competition and that helps you start to frame what I call pattern recognition. So for example, I'm going to use analogies that I know you fully appreciate, right? Which is like landing an airplane, right? It's taking all of your senses to do that correctly. It's sound, ears, foot movement, you name it. It's the same thing in CEO, uh, if you get out and you first of all are visible, which is the second element of coming into a role. The last thing you want to do is sit behind a desk and read spreadsheets. You want to get out and get visible with your teams, with your people, let them know who you are, how you work, what you are interested in, you don't necessarily share early on, you know, strategic stuff. You build all that over a window of time so that listen and learn is the first thing and being visible and really getting a sense of the teams. And quite frankly the question. There's two questions I always ask. I don't care if I'm on a manufacturing floor or um, I'm in the skip level, I ask, hey, what's working, what's not working and what do you need to do your jobs better? And if you ask that question enough, trust me, you're going to detect a very strong pattern. And that's really the first thing that I do going into a new role and certainly a new company. And the other thing I'll say too, man, I've seen this as a failure mode for a lot of leaders who come from great companies, right. And they naturally get promoted, they move to a different company, maybe even a different industry, but they think they have a playbook, right? Because they've learned certain tools or things and they say, well, this is great. Now I'm going to go to this new team, I'm just going to apply my playbook that fails 99% of the time. And what I tell people all the time is you have a bunch of tools, but you've got to build that playbook for your new job and for your new company. And the last thing I'll say is I spent 20 years as the fix it guy. I was kind of the transformation person, always put in the hardest positions, which I always found the most rewarding to really fix broken businesses or transform them. And then coming full circle to fdh, this really wasn't a fixed job. This was really, to your point, this was a scale growth job.

Speaker B: Sure, yeah.

Speaker A: And that's a whole different set of tools to deploy.

Speaker B: Yeah, I want to come back to that. But I did want to want to highlight that idea of the playbook that you mentioned because it's honestly something that I hear a lot in scaling companies. Probably the most common situation I see are people, uh, they pull in former Amazon leaders who have a very particular culture, a very particular set of tools. One of them being the pre meeting memo. And so often these individuals, they come in and they say, okay, this is the playbook, this is how we're going to do it. And it just falls flat for, you know, various reasons because they don't spend enough time, you know, maybe thinking about what is the situation, how do I adapt this playbook or these tools to this new situation?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: On your particular, what you just highlighted that, that different situation, I would be really interested to know what do you see as some of the major differences between like the fix it situation versus the grow and scale situation? What, what are the different challenges presented to leaders in those two states?

Speaker A: I think there again, I'll give you two different kind of perspectives. If you're trying to fix or transform a Business or you're trying to scale or grow the business. You always have financial measures that you're targeting and trying to hit. It's not like, well, I'm fixing a business, so, you know, we're not really going to set targets. You absolutely set targets. There are different variables to contend with, whether you're rebuilding a management team or an engineering team or a product, uh, development team, because you just don't have it. I'll give you an example. When I was running command, one of the things I was most proud of with the team, this was during COVID where the services were trying to. This was when the heat of the battle were trying to develop unmanned systems, cargo unmanned systems. Well, our pedigree at command, we built SH2 command, the K Max helicopter. And it was during COVID so we actually couldn't get together. But I was on the phone with a whole bunch of engineers and I said, guys, we've got to design from scratch a medium lift cargo uav. And there was silence on the phone and I said, what's going on? And they said, sir, the last time we designed a helicopter was 50 years ago. Ah, right. So think about that challenge, right? All of that talent has either retired or moved on, whatever. So we had to rebuild, right. Our product development skill set. So that's just an example. The second part of it in, in terms of scaling a company, yes. There are different challenges when you're, you know, there's, I would say the fixed and variable pieces of a business. You want to make sure that your fixed piece, meaning I, uh, don't care if it's buildings and grounds. It's, you know, gosh, it could be all of your, your systems and stuff like that. It, whatever core functions, you want to make sure those are set and can go from, say, a billion to 2 billion. Because the real magic in scaling a business is doing it profitably. And so if you're going to grow and you have to add salespeople, for example, which is unnatural if you're going to grow. Right. Well, that's a variable kind of cost. And so you want to bring salespeople in and you expect those people to deliver higher revenue, but you want to leverage that fixed base. So you really get this really double kind of acceleration, if you will, just on the top line, but also on the bottom line. Some people scale and they think, oh God, I'm m analyst, fixed costs, and I'm just going to throw it. And then what happens is they get into trouble because then if you're not Careful, you're not watching. You could be in a down cycle and now you've got to shed a lot of fixed cost and that is hard to do.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I just think growth is, is really a function of fixing variable costs. Knowing both. It's also, like I said, common denominator is empowering your teams to help figure out how to grow. It's not necessarily my idea. It could be geography. It could be from a certain product perspective. You know, you can grow in a thousand different directions. Sometimes you got to be really smart about it and how you do it.

Speaker B: Yeah. On that point of empowerment, I'd really love. You know, this was kind of a question I was going to ask later on, but I think, I think it fits in this spot. From your point of view, looking at, ah, lower levels of the company and that empowerment, what are you looking for from, you know, kind of, let's say mid level and below down to like frontline leaders? What are the things that you're needing from them so that you can empower them so that the company can grow as quickly as it needs to in this changing environment?

Speaker A: I think what I, what I try to always. Well, one thing I try to drive from the top down is called organizational alignment. Now what do I mean by that? Uh, yeah, when you get into the ranks and file of a company, doesn't matter what you're doing. Certainly as a CEO, I always test for organizational alignment. Do you know, and this is a function of what either I've communicated through the ranks and cascaded down, or they're business division leaders or business unit leaders, general managers, whatever. But do you know where we're trying to go and do you know how fast we have to go to get there? Right. And if somebody can't answer that question within their own domain, then I have another conversation with the leadership to say, how do you get somebody to be empowered when they don't know what direction to go and how fast to go? And people say, you're talking about speed and you'll appreciate this. As an aviator, I never use the word speed. Speed is dangerous. Velocity. M, that means speed and direction.

Speaker B: I like it.

Speaker A: Right. So I'm all about going fast. But you've got to know which direction you're going. And if you don't know which direction you're going, then you're about a whole bunch of people running around bumping into each other. The second thing I look for through the empowerment is to say we've done a lot of this work at FDH where we Decentralized, a lot of decision making. You know, most liberal organizations are centrally positioned. Uh, those are good for certain reasons in certain industries or certain types of companies. I've always been in organizations, divisions that thrive more from a decentralized model. Smaller corporate footprint, stronger division or business unit footprint. Because a. You're global. Those decisions need to be made every day at that level. Can you imagine if they're trying to come up through me and we have a, what's called a delegation of authority so that the guardrails that we put, which is a best practice is to say, look, I'm all about empowerment and letting people make decisions and oh, by the way, to fail, fail fast, recover, figure it out, move on. But you also have to put some guardrails because I don't need some lower level person signing up for a 25 year lease in the building or signing up a contract that hasn't been checked by legal or doesn't have the right terms and conditions. Right, that's equal and those kinds of things. That's when you get the secret sauce of how kind of a corporate center and the divisions work together. So you can really push a lot of decision making. And they know the guardrails by which they have to operate in. And then the last thing I always try to test for is the accountability factor, which is to say like, do you feel accountable if that goes wrong? And if, if somebody says, well it's, it's somebody else's responsibility or accountability. I'm like, well, that's interesting. So who's actually fundamentally accountable if it goes right or it goes wrong? That's important to test for sometimes as well. Sometimes there's shared accountability. I get that. But bottom line, especially if you're, if you're project management and coming from the military and program management world, I love it when I see actions and deliverables with multiple names on them. I say, well, so who's the one person accountable? Oh, what do you mean? Yeah, well, we're all involved. No, that's a great, that's a team. Who's the person accountable if it succeeds or fails? Oh, that's Joe. All right, we're gonna put Joe's name on there. That's the only name I wanna see.

Speaker B: Yep, I just finished reading, uh, Gene Krantz's book about his time in, uh, Apollo, in the Apollo program and the whole space program. And that clear message that he brought up later in the book is the reason why, uh, despite tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, you know, hundreds of companies working on the space program back in the 60s. The reason it was able to accomplish what it did and move as quickly as it did was because they were willing to pick a person who was responsible for this project and then give them the resources. Give them the resources to do it. Which is, which is amazing. I think I would love to kind of take a second to dive into kind of each of those three elements, because that is amazing. That decentralization is amazing. When you have those three things that you mentioned of. You have the alignment, the guard radles, and the accountability. I'd, um, love to take a second to kind of double tap on each of those, starting with alignment. What are some of the strategies, whether you use them now or that you've used in your career, that are effective at ensuring alignment between people within a company?

Speaker A: Well, uh, I'll start with communications, which Heather is exceptional at, and the team is very good. And Honestly, it's some CEOs teams are over communicators. Under communicators. I think like anything else, there's a right balance. So I spend a lot of time making sure through my communications, whether that's an all employee email that I write myself, that I send out every two weeks.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: To quarterly all hands meetings where everybody can dial in around the world and they can watch it on their own time, where I talk about the state of the company, talk about certain metrics or performance, maybe I highlight a certain function, talk about, you know, wins and losses, but they give, they get a real feel for the parent. How are we doing as a collective whole? Are we winning or are we losing? And then back to, hey, ah, this is where we're trying to go, right? And then measuring and giving them kind of, you know, milestones along the way is really important. Then depending on, again, where you are in the organization, what part of the organization. I always look for the same level of communications with the general managers as I did, you know, when I was general manager for many years, which is. That's like running your own little company. I don't care if you have 20 people or 500 people or a thousand people and they want to see you. My first P and L was Lycoming Engines. It was a UAW workshop and there's a lot of story there. But again, very proud to say that they'd add another union contract. And I think it was like eight years and nine months. It was all this bad blood. And I said to the union who used to pride themselves on, uh, not being informed and therefore, if I'm not informed. You must be doing something wrong against me. And I said, there's an easy way to solve that. Guess what, chairman of the union, you are now on my leadership team.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You're now going to sit in the office with the rest of my directs and you're going to have as much information as they have and you want to watch the barriers break down automatically and then we start collaborating on shared objectives and they have a say and a voice in it. So that's the first part is just the communication and oh, by the way, with technology, I mean, when I was at Bell, we didn't have. We just got email. There's no cell phone, there was no Internet. Right. It was just coming online. And I'm not, you know, heavy on the social media. Heather keeps me honest on this. But, you know, podcasts and other things, I just think there's even better ways to keep the organization aligned relative to what's going on at all levels.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's really reminded me especially I love kind of how you mentioned the, uh, all company email and the all hands, because I think generally a lot of people, a lot of organizations push back on those, those mass kind of events, especially in places like a startup. But I always go back to have. Have you read, um, General Stanley McChrystal's team of teams?

Speaker A: No. I've heard of it. It's on my to do.

Speaker B: It's a absolutely fantastic book. But one of the major takeaways I had kind of on this topic was he was specifically talking about meetings. But I think you can generalize it to communication is that you have to make sure that they're occurring, the communication is occurring at a cadence that matches the cadence of change. And I think it's when those two are mismatched is when they become superfluous or just or non effective. Because if there's not change happening, then why are you communicating? But conversely, if the change is happening more rapidly than the communication is happening, then the communication is just as irrelevant because all the decisions are made outside of that communication or meeting.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's absolutely fair point. And that's why I said early on there's a balance that you have to strike relative to what's the rate of change or transformation or what's the bend the curve scenario that you're trying to achieve. How aggressive is it? And you also want to make sure, and this is also because I think it's relevant, is that what's also changed is that people are more remote Working more remote, you're not in the office. All those intangibles that you would see and walk in each other's offices or bump each into each other, a chat or whatever, lunch, it. That's all gone in many respects. So it's up to leaders to really think about how that works best when you're. And not that we're not together. We are, but there's a lot that's happening virtually.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The second point you mentioned when it comes to distributing ownership was setting guardrails and making sure those guardrails are in place. How. Because yeah, I think this is 100% the way that things go wrong. Especially if you're a new manager. You try to delegate something to someone who doesn't have the skills necessary to execute, they don't execute well. And so then you decide that delegation doesn't work and you. And all comes back to you not setting the right guardrails or the right expectations. So how, how do you make sure the right guard rails are set for different individuals when, when you're pushing work down to, you know, decisions out.

Speaker A: Yeah, I, I spend a lot of time and um, when I, and I, I frame it like this. I teach, coach, train, enable and support. Right. As a leader, certainly at corporate, my team has heard this from me. It's my own mantra. But I've seen it like there's two types of people at corporate. I'm using corporate as kind of the center, if you will. But there's those who wake up every day and feel like the business has worked for me. And there's those in the corporate that wake up and say I work for the businesses.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And that's the way I think of it. And so our job as leaders, managers with the experience, because that's what we bring. Right. Is that you can really help the businesses generically think about what are the tools, training that they need. Because to your point, when I talk about guardrails, there's nothing more awesome then an employee through a conversation. I don't care who they are, sales, engineering, whatever. And they say, you mean I'm allowed to do that? I can go do that? Well, yeah. You didn't know that. You mean I can just go and benchmark that or go over here and do.

Speaker B: Yeah, you can, you can just do things. Right.

Speaker A: But, but, and this is a military piece of it coming, which is if you're asking somebody, a team to take them out and you better equip them with the tools and the training to take that mountain. Right. Because that's a, that's a recipe for disaster. You know, asking people to fulfill and giving people a lot of responsibility that aren't trained in that responsibility. And even, I'll even, uh, you know, suggest that. I've seen this failure where somebody's awesome at their job. They've been their job for a while. They're kicking butt and they're an individual contributor and now they're responsible for a team or a person. They've never been trained on how to lead a team. They don't know how to lead an effective meeting. They've been in meetings. So those basics, like that's really important. And uh, again, this is not fdh. We're well beyond all of that. But I've been in organizations where we had to start at that level. How to run an effective meeting. Right. And oh, by the way, because it's about the empowerment, because I know the last one's accountability. And again, I can tell you some funny stories, but do you know what happens to organizations that aren't performing? All the decisions go all the way up the chain.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Nobody wants to be responsible. Right. For all the failures. So what I would say was, and as soon as I would come in these kind of organizations, I'd say, okay, and I hear like, I get 10,000 emails a day, blah, blah, blah. And I, of course, I've even been in a situation where I say, look, I get more emails than anybody. So here's the deal. Those are going to stop and now you actually going to start making decisions for yourself. Well then it means I'm going to be accountable for it. You betcha. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a high performance organization you want. And then it's kind of a self selection process where somebody says, well, I don't want to be accountable. Oh, okay, well here's the standard. There's the door. We want players who want to come in, who want to own what they do and, and they want to get trained and, and you know, I, uh, Coach Saban's one of my favorite coaches and you know, I love his, his themes around like A players want to be around A players they don't want to bear out B players or C players. And B players. And C players don't like being around A players. Yeah, right.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So you really want to build a team of, of A players and that takes time. I mean it's not a. Yeah. You know, easy thing to do. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, and that, you know, transitions exactly into that last point of, of of holding people Accountable. Because it is, it is a challenge. You know, I, I do generally think that especially you, uh, know, accountability, being willing to truly be accountable can be a new concept to a lot of people that naturally our psychology is going to kind of want to avoid. The thing that I'm really interested in is how do you strike the right balance between creating a space where people feel like they can make mistakes and learn and move? Because you have to create that kind of space if you want to be able to grow while still holding people accountable, you know, because like, it's like if they make. You can make mistakes, but you just can't make too many mistakes. Kind of, you know, like, like what. How do you find that balance?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's always a hard one. And it depends on where you are in the organization and what level of risks and performance characteristics or KPIs or areas of responsibility. So the way I think of it though is this. And I'll give you a couple examples. And again, it goes back to a lot of military kind of 101 training. Yeah. So number one, if you've got a person who has the right values, Right. The right behaviors, the right mindset, the right values. Right. Who's an A player and performs, those are the people you want to retain.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. And those are, those are just stars. Then you get the person who has really bad values who can't perform. Right. And those are the people that you usually quickly exit. Where it gets really hard is when you've got somebody who's a high performer, but they really don't have the right values. They're bad leaders, they're disruptive, they don't communicate, they kind of lead through fear. And then on the opposite, you have people who just aren't performing, but they got the right values. And I always default to, look, I can't teach values. I can teach performance. Right. And I'm sure you've heard that before. And I always default to that because I see it time and time again. And it gets very interesting because especially if you're in a higher level and you've got really good numbers or you're generating a lot of income and profit, and the last thing you want to do is upset that apple cart. Right. But that's where it gets really hard to CEO because you got to look that person in the eye and say, this isn't a good fit. We're not trying to build a culture like this.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And there's long lasting impacts to that. Right. For the people underneath that person. So we have to watch for those kinds of things. And it's hard, but again, it's. It's back to what level are you at? And you asked about failing. Like, you know, I'll tell you another funny story. Pilot story. So I was at Lycoming Engines and, um, I had a little rva, little, little front, back seater, aerobatic, little fun airplane. Put a Lycoming engine in it. I m was getting back into flying after the being out for a little bit. And we were transforming the company. A lot of quality issues over the years that led to all the union issues, stuff like that. And there was this young gentleman on the line assembling engines. And the supervisor comes to me, says, hey, this guy is really messing up. He doesn't understand how serious it is when you're building aircraft engines that go in people's airplanes. I said, hmm. But I knew this guy had really good values. So my assistant used to keep a running list of people who, on a Friday afternoon after work, I say, hey, come flying with me. So I said, hey to this guy. I said, hey, Friday afternoon, meet me down at the airport. We're gonna go for a flight. He'd never been in a small airplane.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So we took off, strapped him in. You can appreciate this. So, you know, at altitude. And I just rolled the engine off and he's like, what's going on? Like, oh, my God, we just lost our engine. I start gliding down. I say, hey, put your. Make sure your straps are tight. Just hold on. It's gonna be okay. Look, if we go in the trees, whatever. I'm trying to look for a field. I can see him sweating. He's white knuckling. And I come right over the trees, I pull the power back in, I take off. I said, that's what happens when you screw up. People die.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: The next day, that guy went to work. He's. I don't know what you did to this guy, but this guy is so attention oriented right now to detail. And he proudly became the supervisor of that line. A year later, he's still there. But that's the thing. It's just, you got to teach kind of lead by example that way, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. It really reminds me, uh, a few episodes ago, I had on, uh, Hans Koenigsman, who is the VP of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX. When I was there, he's also a pilot. He a private pilot. And when we were talking about risk, you know, because that's what he lived in was, was risk. And deciding Risk. I said, how, how do you. How do you make risk assessments? How do you think about risk? And he said, well, in order to make good decisions about risk in your professional life, you need to have a familiarity with risk in your personal life, Whether that's through flying, through diving, through rock climbing, and that, that those kind of visceral experiences make it a lot easier for you to make good judgment calls when, when you're at work. That's such an amazing story of how you could create that for someone else that flipped the switch and now they just have a new mindset that. That's amazing.

Speaker A: And you're exactly right, because that person was not connecting the dots between what they were physically doing and the level of risk associated with building aircraft engines. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. And I think, you know, it's because we all have our own experiences. Very often our own experiences can create these blinders where things seem like what seems obvious to us feels like it should be obvious to everyone. And those are very often the key things that make. That make the difference. And it's all about the art of being a good leader, is seeing which dots are missing for the different people on your team so that you know how to connect those dots.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And it gets back to the whole, like, you know, it's combination of organization, alignment, empowerment, like when people get. People get super motivated and some people don't. I mean, there's always a spectrum. But when people really understand the importance of what they're doing and how they fit, right. I don't care if it's a, uh, warehouse, you know, supervisor, quality inspector, whatever. It takes time to make them understand how important it is, the things they do. And the really, really great leaders remind them of that, and they take it to heart and they're really good at their jobs.

Speaker B: Yep. Yep. Awesome. Well, this has been a fantastic discussion. I'll kind of end with, you know, so for the last two years in a row, you all have won best place to work in aerospace. I'll, uh, end with kind of the question of, are you gonna win it a third time?

Speaker A: Well, first of all, I'm not going to take any credit for any of that because it's my team that. And below them, it does all of that cultural kind of work, if you will. And cultures, you know, they're not. They're, you know, there's not a single point creation. It's a function of many things that go into it. They've done a marvelous job, like I said, and my predecessor, Scott Tucker, has Done a marvelous job creating that culture. He's really good with people. And so I give him and Heather and the whole team a lot of credit for that. And it's a third party assessment. They come in, but it is very proud. I, uh, feel proud to be part of organizations being recognized for that. And I love the challenge because it's like, you know, you say, hey, if it's not broke, you know, don't fix it. Well, my job is to, is to keep that level of culture going. Right. Not disable it. That can happen. So, yeah, I am looking for a third ring. I think that would be another testament to saying, hey, and culture, you know, again, it's, it's not something that can necessarily change every day. It shouldn't change every day, but it takes time to build it. And I think we're, we're kind of plateauing right at that point in a good way where we've got a really solid high performance culture. And our, our employees love working there. And that's what comes out in the surveys. They feel they've got the right work environment, they've got career development, they got the training and tools, they can advance their careers. What they're doing is meaningful. That's why we're being recognized for that. It's really a proud recognition.

Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah. I think being I've been inside organizations that have, that have tried to get those kinds of things, I know how much work it takes. And so it's. Yeah, it's a testament to your predecessors to what you're continuing to do, what the whole team is doing there. And I can tell through this conversation that, yeah, it takes a lot to. Because I think especially in the aerospace industry where the stakes are so high, and in an aerospace industry that is changing so much, it's easy to fall into a very directive command and control. Do this, do this, do this. And it just sucks the energy out of an organization. And so it's fantastic to hear that you all are pushing in the exact opposite direction because it's, it's not only the way, the way to, you know, keep people engaged, but it's absolutely the way to win in the long term. It's been great to hear your stories. Really, really appreciate the time. Ian. It's been, this has been a great conversation.

Speaker A: No, thanks, Matt. Uh, again, we share a lot in common. You totally get it. I love talking leadership. Talk about it any day.

Speaker B: Excellent. Thank you so much.

Speaker A: Thanks, Sam.