A Man’s World?
photography by Chuck Zovko
Sherry Welsh ’85 has an edge.
After the Stuttgart experience—and many others along the way—that first sales meeting at her new company didn’t faze Sherry Welsh ’85 at all.
Last January, ArvinMeritor, a Fortune 500 supplier to the motor vehicle industry, named Welsh vice president of sales and marketing for the company’s Light Vehicle Systems group. She took the job after a 20-year career at Robert Bosch LLC that brought her honors from Automotive News as one of the 100 leading women in the North American auto industry.
Ascending in that traditionally male domain, going from junior cost accountant to senior vice president at Bosch and then to her new position, Welsh has come to the conviction that being in the minority gives her an edge.
“A lot of men in the industry have tunnel vision and focus on the one thing that is their responsibility, and that’s it,” she says, pointing to multitasking abilities as one dimension of a woman’s advantage. Whether it’s a customer with a complaint, a quality problem at the plant, or an issue with a delivery, she feels completely confident stepping into a new role. “Women do a lot of cross-functional activity, and so people start to include you more often.”
Case in point: Stuttgart. When Bosch sent her there on an assignment, the reception she received from the six German executives who were to report to her was less than enthusiastic.
“Several of them thought they should have had my job,” she recalls. “Not to mention the fact that I didn’t speak German.” But she went to work figuring out each person’s working style, learned the language, and enlisted her employees’ help. “At the end of three years, they didn’t want me to leave. They appreciated the new perspective.”
So, when she walked into her first meeting of the North American sales team at ArvinMeritor and counted only one other woman among the dozens of people in the room, it didn’t bother her at all.
Now, she’s responsible for $2.4 billion in sales, and 65 people report to her from all corners of the world, including China, Japan, Korea, India, Mexico, Europe, and South America. “They are really refreshing,” she says. “They all bring cultural nuance to our global team meetings.”
The cultural diversity can present challenges, though. For example, she has given direction to a colleague in Brazil only to discover later that the person had done nothing—or had done the exact opposite. But, as a woman, Welsh says, with innate sensitivity to communication hurdles, she’s learned to mitigate such language snafus by having the person on the other end explain the direction back to her.
“A typical male engineer would say that it’s black and white, while women usually have a little more sensitivity and want to make sure we talk in the same language. My dream was always to be a teacher,” says Welsh, whose parents steered her toward engineering. “I love helping new people who don’t have a lot of experience. As a leader in the organization, I can be a teacher now.”