Ford CEO: Being nice doesn’t come ‘naturally’ to me

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By Maya Cantina

Ford CEO: Being nice doesn’t come ‘naturally’ to me

Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley is busy fixing the automaker’s quality problems and electric vehicle business. He’s also focused on fixing himself.

“The most important thing I always remind myself is to be kind,” Farley told Automotive News Publisher KC Crain’s at a Sept. 23 dinner honoring the 2024 Rising Stars. “It doesn’t just come to me.”

The audience laughed, but Farley said he was serious.

“You’re trying to get through the UAW strike,” Farley said, referring to last fall’s testy contract negotiations. “Try to be nice when [UAW President Shawn Fain] saying things like he said about our company. No kidding, it’s not funny. It’s important to be nice. And most of the people you deal with have some kind of baggage that they don’t express explicitly, and you have to take that into account.”

To help himself stay grounded, Farley says the only item on his desk, besides family photos, is a saying attributed to Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Despite being a source of frustration, Farley said the UAW serves as a way to help identify talent.

“We had 10 people around the table since 7:00 [a.m.] “We work together. We compare our sleep cycles. We know each other really well. It’s easy to tell who’s ready and who’s not.”

Farley says the best way to evaluate the right talent for a company is past experience.

“Does this person demonstrate emotional resilience, not just hard work, but emotional resilience to go through a very difficult transformation,” he said. “And then we need to reward people who are willing to work hard, because sometimes it’s just plain old hard work.”

That was one of many pieces of advice Farley gave during his time at Ford and Toyota. Another was to keep perspective and not get caught up in the day-to-day demands of the job.

“I think a lot of us are getting more and more responsibilities, so focused on the work that needs to be done that we don’t appreciate the time to relax and learn,” Farley said.

He cited his time as head of Ford’s European operations, from 2015-17, when he was tasked with rapidly restructuring the loss-making business.

“I remember thinking, ‘We lost $6 million today,'” Farley said. “I went into the office the next day, and it was $12 million, $18 million — every day. The pressure was enormous.”

He said then-CEO Mark Fields would often call to see how quickly he could implement changes.

“I remember being so busy with shipping every day that I never took the time to learn as much as I could,” Farley said. “Learn about the market, learn about the union perspective, because as a CEO, that can be very useful. For example, I would have spent more time with the EU regulators on CO2. That would have been much more useful to me than trying to work out a safety plan for our French plant that we had to restructure.”

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