Aligning Talent with Strategy in Electronics Manufacturing with Audrey McGuckin on EMS@C-Level

What if the key to business success lies not just in market strategies but in the untapped potential of your workforce? Join me as I explore the intriguing intersection of talent and strategy with Audrey McGuckin, CEO of McGuckin Group, and a visionary in aligning talent with business goals in the electronics manufacturing services industry. 

Audrey shares her insights on starting discussions with revenue objectives to guide talent strategies, highlighting the 'six Bs' framework as crucial for aligning business outcomes with talent needs. From retaining pivotal leaders to adapting to global challenges, discover how company culture and CEO influence form the bedrock of a powerful talent strategy. 

We also tackle the evolving landscape of talent recruitment and development amidst a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S. Audrey explains innovative approaches to drawing young, diverse talent into traditionally low-margin sectors, emphasizing recognition of potential over formal qualifications. Personal stories and strategic tools, like predictive index assessments, illuminate how businesses can nurture hidden gems. 

Finally, we discuss the journey toward gender equality in leadership, showcasing the powerful benefits of diverse teams and the role of tailored development programs. 

This episode is an essential listen for those seeking to transform their business through strategic talent alignment and inclusive leadership.

EMS@C-Level is hosted by global inspection leaders Koh Young (https://www.kohyoung.com) and Global Electronics Association (https://www.electronics.org)

You can see video versions of all of the EMS@C-Level pods on our YouTube playlist.

Transcript

Philip Stoten 0:08

Hello, I'm Philip Stoughton. Welcome to EMS at Sea Level. I am lucky enough to be joined by Audrey McGuckin. Audrey, always a pleasure to talk to you. How are you? How's the holidays been?

Audrey McGuckin 0:19

Well, it's always a pleasure indeed. We had a great holiday. We go back to Scotland every year. We live in Florida, but we always go back to Scotland every year. I have twin 22-year-old girls and they would kill me if we didn't go back to Scotland.

Philip Stoten 0:38

Absolutely.

Audrey McGuckin 0:39

Yeah, and so we go there, we cook together, we do jigsaw puzzles, we go for walks. It's just really simple.

Philip Stoten 0:49

Yeah, no, it's wonderful, and it's exactly what Christmas is all about. It's about family, isn't it? And if you can combine that with a white Christmas in Scotland I don't know whether you got one this year it's pretty special. It's a pleasure for me to have your company today, but I was looking at the IPC agenda and I see on the EMS day, the EMS leadership will have the pleasure of your company the Monday before the expo opens. I wanted to start just by talking to you about that and having you explain how you're planning to put that together with respect to the keynote, where you're matching talent strategy with business strategy, and then how you're going to develop that into a workshop, because I'm really I think they're going to get a lot of value from that.

Audrey McGuckin 1:33

It's an issue that constantly comes up in my discussion with um, with ems leaders yeah, I love that question and um, you know, I think your, your listeners and viewers and and our network know that our culture at the mcduckin group is roll your sleeves up, get in there, get really practical and and help us solve the problems. So we're going to do the same at the ipc um. So that's, that's one thing. That's a golden thread for us is being really practical. The other thing that we like to start with is we never start with talent strategy.

Audrey McGuckin 2:17

If anybody wants to talk about their talent strategy, I'm often gently closing them down Not that I can do it very gently, but I'm often saying let's put that aside for a second. Let's talk about your business strategy. What's your revenue goals? What's your plan play goals? What markets are you trying to penetrate? What does your culture look like? And so we're often really digging in to say tell us the outcomes you're getting to with your business strategy. Then here's the secret sauce to with your business strategy. Then here's the secret sauce. Now we connect that with the talent strategy and we use this framing of if this, then that, if you want to grow revenue 20% year over year, what is the kind of talent?

Philip Stoten 2:59

you need.

Audrey McGuckin 2:59

If you want to enter new markets, do you need to buy a new talent? Do you need to do an acquisition? If you're in a challenging area for retaining talent, how are you going to grow your leadership capabilities? So what we're going to do at IPC is teach people how to do. If this, then that We'll give them really good examples and just help them really broaden their perspective on okay. Now I see it, and we use a really easy formula. It's called the six Bs and I'll give you some of them as a preview. One of the Bs is what talent do I need to bind?

Audrey McGuckin 3:44

Who do you have on your team that it would kill your business if you lost them right and EMS. Here's the thing we know leadership is a capability.

Audrey McGuckin 3:55

You get business from OEMs on. Everybody's got the same machines, the same portfolio in terms of locations. The thing that's different is the leaders, right. And so how do you bind those leaders that are helping you get share of wallet with the OEMs? How do you buy talent if you're entering a new market? It takes you too long. And then how do you build leadership capability, leaders that can lead with empathy, right and yeah, that can.

Audrey McGuckin 4:31

That can often be a a tricky one, and particularly in ems. Right, or? We're known for really rolling our sleeves up. Getting things done drives for results, and yet we're really rolling our sleeves up. Getting things done drives for results, and yet the world we live in is more complex. We have the fight in California. We had the hurricanes in Florida. We have a war in the Ukraine that's still going on. We're talking to leaders who can't go back to the Ukraine. We have mass skill shootings in the US. There's lots of things happening in the world. Your employees are experiencing that, and if you can't be with empathy and walk in their shoes, they're out of there.

Philip Stoten 5:15

Yeah, yeah, it's a big problem and it's really interesting. When you talk so much about leadership as I've spent my time in this industry over decades, as you have, you kind of get to know, you kind of almost create personas in your mind of the different large EMS companies you think, okay, that's a, you know, that's a flex style of business or that's a style of business or that's a Jabil style of business and it comes from having that culture at the very top of the business. How critical to the whole talent strategy is that kind of kernel of culture at the very beginning of an organization that's kind of permeating through. Do you have to look carefully at that to understand how you create a talent strategy and and sometimes you have to adjust that in some careful and diplomatic way?

Audrey McGuckin 6:11

ah, yes, of course you do. And here's here's what we say um, you know, I worked in asia for quite a number of years and and I worked with um, the president there, tp ewan, who was an incredible leader, and I was trying to push some talent work through and he said, audrey, the fish rots from the head. Unless you're going to go to the top of the house, you're going to struggle. So what do we mean by that? The CEO is is the CEO of the culture. The CEO is the CEO of the leadership style. The CEO is the CEO of alignment, and it really all starts at the top of the house.

Audrey McGuckin 6:51

Now, they don't do all of the work, but I give you an example when we did a lot of work with Kimball and the CEO there was Don Sharan God rest his soul who's now passed away, and the CEO there was Don Sharan God rest his soul who's now passed away, but he was somebody that really cared about the culture. He came to us and said, audrey, we're 500 million, we want to grow our business to a billion, but I really care about my people and I have to go to church on a Sunday. What did he mean by that? He meant I'm not prepared to compromise on my values and my integrity, even though I need to double my business, and I can tell you that permeated throughout the organization.

Philip Stoten 7:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I grow my business without exploiting my team? And that's actually a great starting point just to lay that foundational stone at the very beginning of the dialogue with you. So you understand that when people come to you and they're looking for help and you have a reputation, so you're kind of the go-to person on that. Is it normally leadership that they're thinking about first of all, or is it talent in the in the factory floor? Is it operational excellence? What are, where are the pain points that they're looking to initially resolve?

Audrey McGuckin 8:14

what we find is, when the ceo comes to us, they they typically have either had an event in their business or they've just came out of order direct meeting, or they have a renewed strategy and they'll come to us and say we want to grow from $2 billion to $10 billion and we know that we don't have the people and talent to do it. They're really smart CEOs and they know that it's not a single solution. They know that it's not a just can you help me with hiding? We don't do hiding. What we do is we help them navigate from this to that. And so they don't come with a single solution. Ask they come with. This is what we're trying to do in our business. Can you come?

Philip Stoten 9:03

yeah, yeah yeah, can you help us along that journey? Can you navigate through the, through the talent issues, and can you help us get to where you, where we want to get to? That makes that makes sense. Um, so you're, you're, you'll present this stuff and then you'll, you'll kind of workshop it with the, with the attendees at the ipc meeting. How, how do those workshops? I can imagine how those workshops would operate within an organization, because you're really digging down and you're getting people to bare their souls and tell you everything and figure out the good and the bad experiences they've had in the past. How are you going to do that with a group that are largely competitors and perhaps a little bit more, a little bit more guarded in what they're prepared to talk about and also maybe worried that they'll steal each other's talent?

Audrey McGuckin 9:50

exactly yes, and you know, one of the things we'll do is we we like to what we call create some psychological safety. Look, we're all in the same industry, we're all fighting for the same people. Yeah, let's coalesce together and let's see how we can do that. And you know the practical ways we'll do that is they'll be in small tables and we'll say what's the biggest challenge you're facing? Let's talk about it, and then let's use the power in the room. Yeah, but then we'll be given some what I would call external expertise, but actually the largely the answers in the room.

Navigating Talent and AI in Business

Philip Stoten 10:38

Yeah, no, absolutely, and I think it will be really organic and they're all American or they're pretty much all US leadership or US leadership of much larger global businesses. They've all got the same issues. In the US there's a lot of talk about a manufacturing renaissance that's being driven by government strategy, by incentives, could be pushed even harder by the time you get to California, by issues related to tariffs. With the new Trump presidency there's a real feeling that without the recruitment of good talent, any kind of manufacturing renaissance could stall. So it's an absolutely critical element to their business. How do you see that big picture of talent and how do you see the industry's ability to not just find the right leaders but find enough people to actually power any growth in the industry?

Audrey McGuckin 11:38

Yeah, and we know some of the challenges. The EMS is not the most attractive space. Nobody actually probably chooses to go on EMS. They fall into it.

Audrey McGuckin 11:51

It's tough to be in a low-margin business, and so we also know that we have retirement and we have age challenges coming up. So how are we going to attract a younger generation? And I will tell you that the younger generation are attracted to organizations where there's development opportunities, there's flexibility and they can be treated on a customized way. And that's really hard. And so one of the things we work with a lot of our clients on is we cannot create a 30, 60, 90 day plan.

Audrey McGuckin 12:30

If you want to do that, you need to find somebody else, because pipeline takes longer to build, and so you have to say where are the critical jobs? Right? Is it test, test engineering? Is it manufacturing engineering? Is it the the business unit manager? Is it the program manager? Let's look at the jobs and then let's create the flow, but but let's do it over a 12, 24, 36 month period, because that's the only way you're going to win um and you know all of and all of our listeners know that I spent 25 years in J-Bowl and J-Bowl worked on that for 25 years.

Audrey McGuckin 13:13

Yeah. They spent a lot of time doing it, and patience is not something that we're known for in EMS, because we want to move fast.

Philip Stoten 13:22

Every quarterly result matters.

Audrey McGuckin 13:24

Yeah, yes, and yet this talent issue takes patience, tenacity. You have to stand your ground and you have to invest.

Philip Stoten 13:36

Yeah, and when I look at the talent landscape in the US particularly and I think what we're suffering from is an erosion of talent that's happened over decades as jobs have gone to Asia and people have not just left their jobs but actually left the industry and gone and done other things and I know a certain amount of that happened kind of post COVID as well it makes me wonder when we're looking at recruiting talent, should we just be looking at the talent pool that's there, or should we be thinking about how do we expand that talent pool? Should we be hiring baristas and training them how to be manufacturing engineers? Should we be hiring people that are at the checkout of the supermarket and try and figure out how they can help us get new products onto the line? Those kind of things? Are we missing opportunities in the talent, in the potential talent pool that's actually there?

Audrey McGuckin 14:36

Yeah, and I think we are, and I think you raise a great point, phil, and you I remember. I remember very early in in the, the Jabil days, when we were looking at the, the talent work we were doing, and Bill Morian, um, who was the the, the owner and CEO at the time, said I don't put a lot of credence on degrees and qualifications. I put a lot of credence on degrees and qualifications. I put a lot of credence on values.

Audrey McGuckin 15:06

I put a lot of credence on characteristics and I think I might have told my personal story, but if you'll give me a minute, you know I left school at 16. I went to work in a factory and for a number of different reasons to pay things in the family home and to feed us during the strike and then, a couple of years later, I ended up getting a job in Jabil.

Audrey McGuckin 15:32

They hired me to make the coffee and answer the phone, but then, and 10 years later they offered to put me through a four-year business degree. I did my master's. They then moved to the US, then they moved me to Asia, and so that's an example of your question. Do I hire a barista and train them?

Philip Stoten 15:56

Yes, yeah.

Audrey McGuckin 15:58

If they've got the right values, if they've got the right street, if they've got the right, give a, they've got the right street. And if they've got the right, give a shit.

Philip Stoten 16:05

Yes, yeah, baristas yeah, no, it's a fascinating story and you know kudos kudos to you, but kudos for the person that recognized that talent in you. That's a really difficult thing, isn't it? How do you look within your business and you know the barista that you order coffee from every morning and recognize those diamonds in the rough and figure out how can I bring them into my business, how can I test them to make sure that what I recognize is there? And then how can I develop that time? And you know exactly why you're saying it's a 12-month-plus process, because that's not something that happens overnight.

Audrey McGuckin 16:45

Yeah, but there's some science that we can use right and there's some ways that we can do it. We can use very simple tools like predictive index. I've used that for kids. It's in 52 different languages and what it helps us do is look at the profile of an individual. It also looks at the profile of an individual. It also looks at the cognitive capacity, because we could have a barista that's got a high cognitive capacity.

Audrey McGuckin 17:10

We could also have a phd at harvard that doesn't know how to join the dots, and so how do you test for that coming in? And then how do you test for it scientifically with your existing population, and then how do you monitor it and watch for it along the way? And you have to be willing to do that. Forbes Alexander was the person that hired me, and J-Bo and Bill Peters, who we know and love, had a very good knack of doing that good knack of doing that right. And so, yeah, combination of data, and it's a combination of watching, observing and just being open to what might be possible yeah, yeah, and you do recognize people that have just have that innate instinct to pick the right people.

Philip Stoten 17:58

And you know it's the secret to success for so many companies and so many individuals is having that team around them that they can trust and understand their culture, and just somehow that culture is communicated in a not you know, it's not posters on the wall, it's not anything like that, it's just lived and breathed through the whole organization. It's not anything like that, it's just lived and breathed through the whole organization. One of the issues that's constantly coming up over the last year and I'm sure it's going to come up more this year, is the use of AI the use of AI in recruitment, the use of AI in trading, the use of AI in manufacturing generally. How is that touching what you do and how are you helping people guard against overtrusting AI, guard against ignoring AI? How are you helping your clients to negotiate with AI and negotiate that landscape?

Audrey McGuckin 19:03

Yeah, so you know, AI is huge in so many businesses and it's becoming more and more ingrained in the HR space, which is the great thing, it can be used for hiring, it can be used for figuring out development needs, it can be used in compensation and benefit.

Audrey McGuckin 19:22

It can be used in so many areas, and we encourage organizations to invest in how it can be used for them. But here's the thing about what we do. What we do is we teach leaders about the thing that AI can't do. We teach leaders about the human skills and the human elements, because AI will take over so many things that we can't even imagine yet. But here's what it can't do it can't take over the humanistic skills, and so we're working with executive teams. We just got back from Taiwan. We were working with an executive team in Taiwan, and what we were working with them on is the leadership capabilities that are in short supply but high demand. What do I mean by that? Empathy, kindness, vulnerability, courageous leadership. Ai can't do those things.

Philip Stoten 20:21

No, absolutely not.

Audrey McGuckin 20:22

Right, and so what we see is organizations that can really leverage AI yes, great, but let's focus on the things that AI can't do as well, because that's going to be your, because everybody will figure out AI and they'll get trained on it and there'll be systems and then we'll all have the same. We won't have the same leaders.

Philip Stoten 20:43

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I completely agree with you, and I think the other thing that I find fascinating about AI is that if you're going to use AI, don't rely on it to be the expert. You be the expert and use it as your co-pilot to interrogate the huge amount of data that's really hard for an individual to use. But also think about that data, because if you just let it loose on training data that has not been successful, it will learn from that. It's like you've got twin girls. I've got three kids. You realize that what they're exposed to impacts massively on their view on life and what they learn, and the same is true of AI. It's like an errant child that's just learned way too much from some of the right people and some of the wrong people. So there are challenges there.

Philip Stoten 21:36

The last question I wanted to, or the last topic I wanted to tackle with you just briefly, is the topic of diversity, gender equality in the industry. We're still a very as people have said to me in the past, we're a very male, pale and stale industry. Sometimes we do see some changes in that. We see some massively talented female leaders in the industry, but to my mind, we're not seeing enough of them? Are you in a position where people ask you to help with the diversity and their leadership team? Another quick fix is I'm always surprised that people don't choose more female advisors to their board, because it seems like a really fast way to kind of load some female talent into the industry. Are there ways of kind of improving that landscape?

Audrey McGuckin 22:32

I was raised in the EMS industry and I was particularly raised in Jabil and I had three or four amazing sponsors, but they were all men, so I very much appreciated that. So when we do work with women leaders, we come from this place of non-judgment. So I hear the pale, male and stale and that's okay. But what I'd rather do is come from a place of non-judgment that says look, historically we're in the engineering space. There hasn't been a lot of engineers that have been female, so the pipelines are really shoddy. Historically the EMS hasn't attracted female leaders, except for an HR or marketing. Historically we've got a lot of history that we're trying to overcome.

Philip Stoten 23:22

Yeah, absolutely.

Audrey McGuckin 23:24

Right. Historically, we've got a lot of history that we're trying to overcome. Yeah, absolutely right. But one of the things that that we know for sure is that there are two levers to getting women leaders moving through your pipeline, and it doesn't happen in 30, 60, 90 days. The first lever is involving the manager, whether that's a man or a woman, because who is it that's going to do the career development? Who is it that's going to do the coaching? Who is it that's going to create the opportunities? It's the manager. So how do we develop them? To develop women leaders. Then the other is how do we develop women leaders? And we have to do it separately.

Audrey McGuckin 24:01

We get pushed back to say, no, we're just developing women as part of our program. Well, that's bullshit, that is complete bullshit. There's many reasons that I say that. The first is, when girls go through puberty, they lose 40% of their confidence over boys and they very little get it back of their confidence over boys and they very get it back. The other thing you know, from a physical perspective, women are the, the child bearing gender. So we take time out of work. The other reason is women go through menopause. It can start as early as 35 and it can go as far as to 65. Menopause causes brain fog exhaustion, so there are physiological reasons that develop women differently and we need to build their confidence. And there's four or five areas that we specifically build their capabilities in. One is networking. Do not go to a networking event that's wine and cheese. Do not go to a networking event where you're the most senior person in the room. Do not go to a networking event where you're not prepared to ask for what you need.

Audrey McGuckin 25:12

As an example, and you see how the two levers are developing the women but developing the managers.

Philip Stoten 25:21

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and developing the ecosystem, that that they're in, um, you know, I think it's it's really fascinating, is I kind of feel like the us is.

Philip Stoten 25:31

It's one of these areas where the us has actually made more progress than than certain parts of europe, for for sure.

Philip Stoten 25:38

Um, you know, I look at german businesses and other European businesses and say, hey, you know, you've actually got even further to go, and but, but there's a strong concern about it and I think people do want to want to see those changes. Election cycle and it almost having been an issue and having I don't know tech leaders that seem quite, um, quite heavy on the testosterone side of the uh of the of the equation, there's there's there's a drift in the wrong direction, and I think we just all need to be cognizant of that and recognize that if you do have that diversity at board level, that's a diversity that reflects the consumers that your customers are serving. It's starting to reflect more and more of your customers. It certainly reflects the way consumers think about their brands as well now in terms of, you know, female-led businesses, those kind of issues, female-led investments. So I think it is just one of those issues that we just need to keep working on and keep thinking about and keep considering.

Audrey McGuckin 26:54

And here's how we like to think about it. I would prefer not to talk about DE&I. What I like to talk about is workforce optimization. Yeah, de&i. What I like to talk about is workforce optimization. What I mean by that is we know that there's tons of research that says if you have at least two women on your executive team, your innovation levels increase, your top line increases, your EBITDA increases.

Audrey McGuckin 27:18

So, rather than talking about DE&I, let's just talk about how to optimise the workforce, and one of the Bs that we talk about is balance. How are we balancing out the workforce and what does that have to look like?

Philip Stoten 27:32

Yeah, yeah, no, it's absolutely critical, absolutely, and you know that's diversity all the way through, whether it's gender, whatever it is, and you know you talked about age as well. I think that's really important. And also, you know, when you enter an organization, you're looking for people that look like you, that are in senior roles. That's probably something you didn't see a huge amount when you took a job in a factory in Scotland all those years ago, but it's certainly something that you look for. You look for role models that you can aspire to, and if they're not there, it becomes a challenge. Super excited to see you in California, super excited to chat to you after that event and to see how that's gone and to get feedback from the executives that are there. But in the meantime, audrey, thank you so much for talking to me.

Audrey McGuckin 28:23

Indeed. Thank you, phil, and it's always a pleasure.