Ashley Metcalf: Reflections on Leadership from Manufacturing to Executive Education

This episode features Dr. Ashley Metcalf, Director of Executive Education at Ohio University's College of Business. Dr. Metcalf shares their journey from growing up with entrepreneurial parents and a military background, to working as a night shift supervisor in coffee manufacturing. They discuss how this experience shaped their leadership skills and inspired them to pursue an MBA and PhD in Operations Management. Dr. Metcalf also provides insights into the College's executive education programs and certificates in operations and supply chain management. 

For more information about the Ohio University MSM Program, click this link!

Check out the Robert D. Walter Center for Strategic Leadership program here.

OnBrand Podcast Studios produced this episode. Special thanks to Audio Engineer Alex Winnenberg, Producer Nick Winnenberg, and Marketing Specialist Cori Stokes.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:13

Welcome to the Leader Lounge podcast through the Robert D. Walter Center for Strategic Leadership here at the College of Business at Ohio University. I'm your host, Dr. Amy Taylor Bianco, and director of the Ohio University Master's of Science in Management program and professor of management. And I'm here with recent graduate of the MSM program, Nick Winnenberg, and our guest, Dr. Ashley Metcalf. who is an operations professor and she is the director of executive education for the College of Business here at Ohio University. Ashley, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_00: 0:48

Great, thank you so much for having me on your podcast today.

SPEAKER_01: 0:52

Oh, it's so much fun to have you. I thought we'd start maybe with a little bit of just like your leadership journey, like anything you kind of learned from growing up or anything like that that brought you on your journey. I know you have like, really cool, interesting kind of family background that gave you a little bit of business, business experience and thought, and just love to hear a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16

Sure. So I have amazing parents. They own a small business in South Carolina running a bus company, Capital Tours, and I grew up with entrepreneurial parents. So I was very much involved with everything it took to run a company, even if, you know, something breaks down in the middle of the night or your bus washer can't come in. So it's 3 a.m. and you're cleaning buses. You know, I've been I've seen that, you know, growing up with with my wonderful parents. And as I am now an adult and I graduated high school and graduated college, I went straight out of my undergraduate degree in chemical engineering into a manufacturing supervisor role for Kraft Foods. So I worked night shift manufacturing at the Maxwell House coffee plant in Jacksonville, Florida. And that really kicked off leadership for me personally. But I tried to pull from what I learned from my parents, of course, along the way. learned a lot working night shift manufacturing. For those of you who have done it for years, I really commend you for embracing the schedule and just the manufacturing environment. So a lot of challenges that come with working in that environment, not just the schedule, but high volume, high paced, high pressure manufacturing. And if you're the one in charge, you're the one making the decisions when things break down and they don't go the way you expected and the schedule's messed up and the labeler quits working. And so you're making decisions very quickly And you have to not only consider the decision as it relates to operations, but the decision as it relates to all people involved. So I learned a lot about people and processes, and it really set the foundation for me to go back to school in business and operations management. And that led me to eventually Ohio University, where I have been an MBA director, a department chair, and now the director of Executive Education for the College of Business.

SPEAKER_01: 3:39

Incredible. So I want to go back just to a minute. So back on your upbringing, because I think it's really important, especially for the students and aspiring folks to listen and just to kind of hear. So you also had really cool kind of military background from, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:58

So do you want to just give us just a little bit there? I'm happy to talk about that. So I was not personally in the military, but my dad is a retired F-16 pilot. So he did a tour 20 years in our Air Force Air National Guard. And I remember as a kid, you know, going to air shows and watching F-16s and being around fighter pilots and what a great culture and experience to make you appreciate the value of our military personnel. My dad was deployed, if you remember way back to the 1990s, Desert Storm, he was deployed during that and i was i was young i was in second grade but i still vividly remember it and it was a very patriotic time i think for americans and um that sticks with me you know the oh i'm sorry of course it does um

SPEAKER_01: 5:02

I grew up, Ashley, having my sort of father figure had been a fighter pilot. And so I grew up going to air shows too, because he's kind of, he's who I did everything with. Not the same impact for me, but seeing kind of just the incredible strength of people like your dad.

SPEAKER_00: 5:25

So thank you for sharing that. I'm also blessed to be married to a veteran. So my husband is a Navy veteran and he is actually finishing his 20 years this year in 2024. So I've seen his Navy deployments and his time as a Navy officer and the challenges associated with that style of leadership in the military. So while I haven't experienced it personally as a military personnel, I do certainly support and appreciate the the challenges that our veterans go through

SPEAKER_02: 5:58

and i think there's a lot to save the military families too it's a sacrifice for the whole family everyone is fighting that fight and even if you're not the one that's actively on the lines you are still supporting from the home front and that's such a major impact so thank you for your service i mean i feel like everyone associated the military puts in service

SPEAKER_01: 6:15

yeah thank you thank you so incredibly much and

SPEAKER_02: 6:20

uh

SPEAKER_01: 6:20

Yeah, and I think it really speaks to our students. We have a lot of veterans in our Masters of Science and Management program who we absolutely love from so far, four different branches of the military. So it's just really cool to see and to see like their leadership training that they had before they even knew they were getting leadership training and they come in like, how do I translate this? Like, oh, that's easy. You already did the hard stuff. So let's move into a little bit your background. I know right out of, was it right out of your engineering degree before your MBA, I think, or when you, I'm not sure, but when you were at Kraft Foods and I want to hear just a little bit about like the coffee production, how you got thrown into that and what that was like. So

SPEAKER_00: 7:08

when I was graduating undergrad, I was a chemical engineering major and I my my husband was in the navy so his his initial uh duty station was in mayport florida which is right next to jacksonville uh florida so i was looking for a job any job and i was you know frantically looking for what are some opportunities i could find in the local area and actually one of my engineering professors at the time said that you should check out the Kraft Foods facility, the Maxwell House plant. And they happened to be hiring right when I was looking. So it was, I got very lucky to have that opportunity. And I interviewed and got the job and they wanted me to start right away, but I had to graduate first and it was a very chaotic. So I graduated on a, Saturday and I started that job in Jacksonville on Monday. So it was a very quick turnaround as a recent graduate and I you know, I was a night shift supervisor, so I was running the night crew of both cleaning personnel, so sanitation crew, and manufacturing crew, and my plant manager, the boss at the time, would tell me, you know, they gave me about two weeks of training, and then he said, as things happen during the night, just make a decision and we will talk about it in the morning of whether or not it was the right decision. But he basically ended with, don't call me in the middle of the night unless somebody gets hurt. So that was the rule. And when you're 22 years old and you're starting fresh out of college and you don't have a lot of experience and you're thrown into that environment, in hindsight, I think all the time, why in the world did they hire me for that job? As I think about it, I really learned a lot in having not just the decision-making authority, but having an entire crew of people who had worked at that plant for some of them decades. I was now supposed to be their leader, but I was young and I didn't know the plant and I didn't know the operations. That was really foundational for me. in understanding operations and manufacturing and just that whole environment, but also understanding people and different generations and the difference in union and management and navigating those rules. It was certainly foundational for me. We have all kinds of crazy stories of equipment breakdowns and people that didn't show up and inventory you couldn't find. You have to figure it out. When you're on night shift, there's no one around to ask, so you have to trust your team and figure it out the best way you can. Additional complications with coffee specifically, because once you roast coffee and grind it, you only have about eight hours to get it in a can. Like it's got to be sealed up or you have to dump it, right? Because it can only have so much oxygen exposure. So even if you have nitrogen in the lines and you try to keep it out of oxygen, you have a time limitation. So you've got... you know, high volume manufacturing and time pressure on top of that. So when something breaks down, you have to really make quick decisions on how do I make sure the product can still be canned or can still be salvaged before that time limit is up. So it added an element of pressure, you know, when you know you have those constraints in place working on night shift.

SPEAKER_02: 11:08

I was going to say an element of panic, but you can say pressure. I guess it's both the same word.

SPEAKER_00: 11:13

For sure, panic. I was lucky, though, because on Night Shift, at least when I worked there, we had three production lines, but we only ran two on Night Shift. And so we had an extra line, but it's not as simple as saying we have an extra line because if you want to change lines, there's a lot that has to happen to change from one production line to moving things over to another production line. And so as equipment would break down or things would happen in the middle of the night, you have to work with your maintenance crew. Like how quickly can you fix this filler versus how much time would it take me to change over to that? other line, and you're constantly weighing the math in your head about, you know, which one will take longer, which one will, you know, which one's the bigger risk. So it's a lot of risk management on the fly and, and using and incorporating that into your decision making.

SPEAKER_01: 12:12

I want to hear, so you said something once about the coffee room. And the way coffee is, I don't know, the way it becomes a powder, I thought this was

SPEAKER_00: 12:21

fascinating. Amy and I were talking the other day about just the environment of working in coffee manufacturing. And I did not know this until I worked in coffee manufacturing, but the roasting room where you actually roast green coffee beans to roasted coffee beans, you have these giant, really massive roasters that are used for roasting coffee. And when you roast coffee beans, the longer you roast them, the more caffeine comes out. So coffee beans that are roasted for longer durations actually have less caffeine in them than like a lighter roast coffee. And so the more you roast them, the more caffeine comes out. And caffeine, as I learned, is like this white powder. It's like a fine white powder and it will coat the equipment and it will actually create stalactites that kind of hang from the ceiling so once a year they'd send a crew through and kind of clean the ceilings to make sure you get all the buildup of caffeine off and you'd have to wear the giant respirators and that sort of thing to protect yourself but i mention it because when you're on night shift if you're sleepy all you had to do was walk through the roasting room And you would kind of, you'd kind of breathe it in.

SPEAKER_02: 13:41

You get a contact high of coffee. I'm in, sign me up. That's how I should start every morning. Just walk through the coffee roasting room, just go to work. That'd be fantastic.

SPEAKER_00: 13:50

Yeah. So, you know, what an environment to work in, you know, when you're, especially when you're young to be in a night shift manufacturing setting, it's, it's intense for sure. That's incredible.

SPEAKER_01: 14:05

And you were, you were well, first of all, I just love the coffee's a white powder. That's just fascinating. And then the coffee room, I want one, I want to be able to go there. Like I just, I want one, I think everyone needs one. So, but then I wanted to say, so I think your, your operations experience, like your, your experience from your PhD, your management really helped you in creating the operations and supply chain certificate with our team. So that's one of the certificates in our Master's of Science in Management. It is really cool focusing on a lot of these things. Can you just tell us real quick what the main topics are in that certificate?

SPEAKER_00: 14:45

Yeah. So one thing that I love about the operations and supply chain certificate is it kind of takes you through the key highlights of what we need to focus on as modern day operations folks. And so one of the classes that you take is a Lean Six Sigma class. which is a biased personal favorite of mine because I also teach that class. But it's all about learning how to improve your work, improve your company, and do it in a very data-driven way. So it's a very real applied practical course about improvement. And then there's a class related to both operations and project management, which are key components to, of course, managing your operations. And there's a supply chain risk class, which I think is just so important these days, particularly coming out of COVID, when we had this strong focus on supply chain breakdowns and supply chain risk. And so part of that class is learning to not only identify your risk and potential risk, but mitigation strategies around that supply chain risk. So it's a nice series of classes that really set some foundations for folks who are interested in either learning about operations or just kind of upskilling their existing operations knowledge.

SPEAKER_01: 16:13

That's great. We see a lot of our students take it with, you probably see this with either human resource management, because it's these combinations are these unique combinations, right, to put together that you just don't get, or personal selling, or going into the data analytics side more. This is a phenomenal certificate with phenomenal folks. And I think that that kind of brought you or brings us into talking a little bit more about executive education at the College of Business. I'd love to hear kind of what's going on, what you're doing now, and what you can tell us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 16:49

So executive education is really exciting here at the college. We've been doing executive education programming for over 20 years. We have some long-term partners out of the Netherlands and out of Brazil that we've been running leadership development, professional development programs for decades, right, really. And the nice thing about those programs is it's all about, well, for our Dutch programs, it's all about taking new employees, technical people, future IT consultants that are fresh out of college, and then upskilling them to being junior consultants. So teaching them soft skills, how to communicate, how to pitch a business idea, how to work in a team and deal with different personalities, how to have challenging conversations, how to navigate feedback from a client, that sort of thing. So we teach them a lot of those soft skills components that are really vital to being consultants. And so we're essentially an onboarding partner for that organization, training all of their new employees. With our Brazilian programs, it's more about leadership development and learning different functional areas of business. So we offer executive education in a variety of ways from the College of Business And what's really exciting this year is we're actually growing exec ed. So I'm excited to have a wonderful team of support that allows us to grow programming. And we're launching what's called the intelligence series and executive education. So our first workshop is on AI, artificial intelligence. So it's called AI for the busy professional. And the idea is how can you get give working people who are busy working professionals some AI skills that they can implement right away. So it's a day here on campus in Athens, Ohio, where you can bring your laptop and learn how to implement some of these AI tools and then go to work tomorrow and use them right away. So we want it to be very applied and very experiential, and that's a true for the AI intelligence, artificial intelligence workshop, as well as our sales intelligence, financial intelligence, leadership intelligence. We're rolling out a series of these workshops that are intended for working professionals to upskill in a particular area and have really applied learning that they can take with them and use right away.

SPEAKER_01: 19:36

Such great opportunities, my gosh. And to be like that early technical employee, which you can relate to because you were, right, all the way up to more advanced in your career, which you could relate to now, like coming back for executive education, you know, and kind of leadership development at a later point. So I love how it's sort of open to everybody at all levels and some really great organizations and people coming. Fantastic. Well, what did I miss? What did we what what did we not hit that you want to talk about? So we'll just take a pause for a second. Like what?

SPEAKER_00: 20:13

Well, let's see. I mean, I've learned a lot coming from a technical background. I've, you know. been very historically introverted i never would have thought in a million years that i would be a professor that that this public speaking all the time and podcasts and you know all kinds of these opportunities because um the introverted me from high school would have shied away from these opportunities so i think um you know in hindsight i would recommend to people to really embrace the opportunities that come your way even if it's not something that you ever thought you'd be doing because you never know where it will lead you and it can lead you to some pretty great places.

SPEAKER_02: 20:54

Cool. So that was a fantastic answer. So what I'm going to do is I want to ask a question now that leads us into that. So Alex can flip it around. Cool. Yep. So what advice would you have for a working professional, maybe entering that technical workspace before kind of getting into it? So perfect. You just answered that backwards, right? And then my final question, at least for me and Dr. B, feel free to take this way, wherever it's kind of more personal that you started in Florida or sorry, you started in South Carolina, then moved to Florida and then moved to Ohio. So one could argue you're moving to like worse and worse locations. So like most people go the other way, right? So like why, why South to North instead of North to South?

SPEAKER_00: 21:34

That's a really funny question. I, I, You know, I grew up in South Carolina and then, like you said, lived in Florida and I never would have thought I'd be living in Ohio. I just, I never would have thought. But that's the funny thing about taking opportunities, right? So when I was working in Jacksonville, Florida and working in manufacturing, I went back to school for an MBA. So I did a part-time MBA and I actually did a night program when I was working night shifts. So I would go to classes from 6 to 9 p.m. and then I'd go to work. at night and I didn't MBA. So I was taking all of these business classes that I didn't have in undergraduate, including an operations management class. And that was my first exposure to the true learning of operations. And we had to read the book, the goal as part of that class. So that's kind of a foundational ops book for anyone who works in operations. And I read the book, the goal. And if you're familiar with it, it's about this guy that's running a plant he's having all these problems and so as I'm reading this book and it comparing it to the the active life I have in work at that moment I'm like oh my gosh this is my life this book is describing my life and so when I my husband was being deployed with the Navy and I was like well if I'm gonna get a PhD Now it's time to do it. And instead of going back to school in engineering for a PhD, I said, I really like this operations management stuff. It really clicks with me. And so I pursued a PhD in operations management out of the business school at the University of South Carolina. And from there, when you're on kind of academic job markets, they happen once a year and you never know who's hiring and you're interviewing at all these universities across the country. And so I went through that process and of my available job offers, Ohio University really stood out because when I came here for a campus visit, I'm driving in to Athens, Ohio. And you've got these beautiful brick roads on campus. And I park at the brick road. And we had found a meter. And as I'm walking up the sidewalk, there's this diner. And then we see Bagel Street Deli. And then you walk up and you see the College Green. And you're like, this place is beautiful. And then I had dinner with some of the funniest colleagues And everyone was so nice as fellow faculty. And I was like, These are really nice people. It's a really beautiful place. It was a good job offer for me coming out of a PhD program. And so I've been here for 10 years. And I actually live out in Albany, Ohio, which is even more rural than Athens, Ohio. So I live out where there's a lot of farmland and rolling hills and trees. And it's a beautiful setting to live, even though it's much colder than Florida. I love the people and I love just the quality of life.

SPEAKER_02: 24:54

And I think everyone we've ever interviewed for the podcast has said the same thing. Well, I came here for a campus visit and I thought like, what's an OU? And that was 25 years ago. And here I am with my house and my dog and my kids. And this is where we live now. Like it's, there's something about that first campus visit. Like I'm pretty sure it's orchestrated. Like everyone you actually meets an actor, everything is painted. Like there's no, it's all just too perfect. Right.

SPEAKER_00: 25:20

There's a magic to it for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 25:21

Yeah. But I think it's a great answer. Great. answer that question.

SPEAKER_01: 25:26

So great. Phenomenal answer and just great. It's really neat that Ohio here has this great kind of collection of people, right, from all over the country and the world that maybe we happened here and we thought it was beautiful. We never necessarily thought we'd stay. And then here we are. So I see you here, you know, 10 years later with your daughter and your husband and still like growing, changing, learning, building new education opportunities. for our students so that they can have that experience that you had where, hey, this is happening. I'm reading about it and I'm experiencing it at the same time. Whereas lots of students say, you know, are you talking to my boss? Like, you know, like this is what we're, this is what we're, you know, this is what we're doing. So I just want to thank you so much for being a guest and for what you do for Ohio University's college business and university. So thank you, Dr. Ashley Metcalf, Director of Education executive director sorry we'll start over thank you dr ashley metcalf director of executive education for being here on the leader lounge we want to thank the robert d walter center of strategic leadership at ohio university's college of business and finally thank you to you the audience for joining us on this listening journey

SPEAKER_00: 26:51

thank

SPEAKER_01: 26:53

you