Dec 27 2024

Executive Watch - Taylor Wylie, COO of Anodyne Electronics Manufacturing (AEM) Posted 17 hours ago ago by Admin

“Every day has hopefully my biggest failure in store… I look at failure differently from many people.” says Taylor Wylie, COO of Anodyne Electronics Manufacturing (AEM) a communication avionics manufacturer whose business is over 90% for and from helicopters. He is the first executive I recall profiling who actually likes failure. Yes, he sees failure, he says, “differently.” In fact, we will see Wylie relishes in unconventional thinking and he says that different thinking has been a key to his successful career. But what about his hopes for big failures? Notice those three little ellipses in his quote (…); they are employed so frequently, especially in political ads and movie promotions, they often go unnoticed. The words those three little dots hold the key: “with the opportunity to learn big things from that failure.” So, he embraces failure as a beneficial teacher.

Indeed, listening to Wylie talk about his failures—and successes, about his almost punishing self-drive, about the challenge of containing manufacturing costs, about his affinity for epic-fantasy books and even about an “acknowledgement” he received as a young student (an acknowledgement also won by his siblings) makes for an interesting hour’s conversation from beautiful British Columbia. So why don’t you make yourself comfortable and join us for a condensed visit.

First, that school acknowledgement that Wylie “won” like his brother and sister, was for “Most Outspoken,” which is an award that I think should be a prerequisite for a Rotor Pro profile.  He is quick to answer and speaks at a fast clip, but Wylie’s also thoughtful—for a motor-mouth. I write that with little fear because during our interview the chief operating officer of over 100 employees based in Kelowna, Canada, displayed no entitled executive pretense. In fact, he even jokes that his mother took a 4:00 a.m. job in the cold Canadian dawn at Canada Post to get some quiet and peace away from him and his siblings.
 
Servant Leader

Mom later got certified as an education specialist and served her students with a “servant’s heart,” something that Wylie says he tries to emulate as a corporate leader. “At heart, I’m a servant leader who likes to lead by example. I never ask somebody to do what I’m not willing to do. To truly lead by example, I’ve got to get out front and try something first before I ask others to follow me,” he says. When managing a large organization, he acknowledges that it is not always possible to do everything himself first. “At this level, it’s important to set a transformational vision for everyone to see,” he says. In the past two years, AEM had tremendous growth and grew revenue by 70%, so communicating transformational goals and visions can really work.

 The Three Virtues

In hiring the team that achieved such growth, Wylie refers to lessons he learned from a recommended book: The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues by Patrick Lencioni. Those three virtues come down to hiring people who are humble, hungry, and smart. Wylie says, “Smart doesn’t necessarily mean hiring people who are intellectually smart, but also hiring people who are emotionally intelligent: people who understand how their actions and words can affect others. He explains, “If someone has those three attributes, but lacks a needed skill set, I ask: Can we teach that person those skills? If the answer is yes and if we believe they will fit into our company culture, then that’s a person who’s a strong candidate.”

Ask Away

One other attribute that Wylie has cultivated for himself is curiosity. He believes it’s foundational for his success. “I love to ask a lot of questions. Asking questions is how we learn new things. One of the greatest skill sets I’ve learned is how to ask appropriate questions at the right time. At first, I learn how things have always been done, but then I love to question why is it done that way,” he says. “I respect the time and energy that people before me spent to develop the current way we do something, but then I want to see if we can incorporate what they did into a new, different way.” He concedes that sometimes the new way will be worse. “But sometimes it will be better,” he adds, “The key is to question every step along the way.”

Mentoring

While Wylie loves asking questions and says his Socratic method of management has led to some noticed successes, such as launching new products and entering new markets that increased revenue streams, these public successes are not the ones that gratify him the most. He says, “What I love most is watching people I mentor, develop their careers and move up in our business or even go somewhere else and accomplish great things while continuing their education. For me, those scenarios are easily the biggest accomplishments we have in the workplace.”

When Wylie mentors, he’s paying forward the beneficial mentorship he himself received from his mentors. The ones he notes for special mention (at the risk of not acknowledging deserving others) are: preceding AEM CEO Brian Wall: “He really taught me to be aware of my audience and tailor my talk to them by asking: Whom am I speaking to and what do they want to know?”; Dale Botting: “He gave me space to challenge myself and helped me build confidence.”; and Wylie’s entrepreneurial, salesman father, Mark: “When I was growing up, we always didn’t see eye-to-eye and it was challenging, but by the time I reached my 20s, nobody challenged and supported me more. He is great at helping me see things from another perspective.”

Career Climb

While he was being parented, Wylie was very active in most school sports (hockey, etc.) and board sports (snowboarding, wakeboarding, etc.). Yet despite his love of sport, Wylie had an overriding career goal: “I didn’t want to work outside like civil engineers do.” So, naturally the young man studied to be an electronic engineering technologist at Okanagan College, which put him indoors where he assembled and tested products at Northern Airborne Technology.

After almost two years there, he came to AEM in 2009 as an electronic technician, and worked his way up over the years to his current executive perch. One reason for that rise: “Whatever my job, whether it was even sweeping floors and doing dirty work, I always tried to find something interesting about it and latch on to that interesting aspect,” he says. “I tried to make myself useful by doing the jobs that needed doing that no one wanted to do. You don’t need a title to justify your position. One thing I’ve learned in my career is that it doesn’t matter who you’re in a room with, you can find a way to add value to that room and show your worth.”

Relief and Recreation

Of course, adding value and demonstrating his worth to AEM over years is hard work.  Wylie admits to being his own “biggest critic” and to setting “unrealistically high bars” for himself—in order to set himself up for those educational failures from which he can grow. Yet, in this self-imposed pressure cooker, he finds relief in his family with his partner Kristen and his “two amazing and active step kids.” (The family also has a four-legged member: a yellow labrador named Sadie. “She’s a big ol’ lovable dough-head,” he says.)  Their family spends time together enjoying trailer camping in the majestic West. “Ultimately, my time away from work is all about family and extended family. (That extended-family time will soon involve Wylie learning to play pickleball with his father.)

Wylie also has another relaxing escape: reading high-fantasy book series. He recommends, “For my fellow fantasy nerds, I recommend Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson and The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. I love to read biographies, history books, and epic fantasy series as a relaxing escape that can shed new light on real-life relationships and circumstances.”

AEM Strategy

One real-life circumstance from which Wylie and AEM is not escaping, but facing head-on, is a challenge that confronts most manufacturing companies in all industries: containing rising material costs and resolving supply-chain issues. The execution strategy to mitigate costs boils down to an acronym cleverly based on AEM’s company name; the strategy is Automation, Education, and Modularization. Wylie explains, “We continuously ask ourselves: What can we automate to become more efficient and reduce costs? Can we educate employees to become more productive and efficient? Can we take what’s working in one department and modulate (or standardize) that process so that it can be used by other departments?

As we’ve learned, Wylie loves asking questions to drive toward solutions—and AEM’s chief operating officer has both hands firmly on the steering wheel.

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