Profile in Leadership: Rodney Rodavich

In his role as vice president (VP) of Global Health and Safety (H&S), Rodney Rodavich is dedicated to ensuring the safety of both employees and customers within our TE facilities and plants, fostering an environment where anyone entering a site can feel safe. With a decade of experience at TE, Rodney has held prior positions in Operations, offering him diverse insights into the safety of employees, customers, and suppliers. Rodney is passionate about helping others, engaging with employees, and mentoring those who want to advance their careers at TE.

Describe your role, your responsibilities, and what your favorite part about your job is.

I am the VP of Global Health and Safety, which is a team of more than 350 people who are dedicated to ensuring the safety of our employees. My role encompasses safeguarding our employees and customers across our facilities and plants. I am responsible for creating an environment where anyone entering a TE facility can feel safe.

Ensuring safety means taking concrete actions and implementing measures to protect the well-being and security of individuals within a workplace. This commitment involves creating a work environment that minimizes or eliminates potential hazards, promotes health and wellbeing, complies with relevant safety regulations, and engages all employees to be committed to safety in their workplace, for themselves and others.

We prioritize employee safety through a four-pillar management system. The first pillar establishes policies and standards for each facility. The second pillar involves auditing our facilities to ensure compliance and addressing any challenges collaboratively. The third pillar focuses on company-wide risk assessment and mitigation. The fourth pillar covers talent capabilities and communication, ensuring employee training on safety. Together, these pillars drive positive safety outcomes.

My favorite part about my job is interacting with the incredible employees across the company. Some so many individuals are passionate about what they do and take pride in their work. Seeing employees committed to keeping others safe is a wonderful thing.

Talk about your career journey, highlighting your recent position leading Operations for the Transportation Solutions segment and how your background has prepared you to serve in your role today.

I have spent much of my career in the automotive industry. I started my career at General Motors, working across various sites and in different manufacturing environments, including casting, stamping, molding, and plating. I then moved into procurement and spent much time working in supplier facilities, focusing on safety. Since joining TE, I have held numerous positions in Operations, which have provided me with insights into diverse safety aspects concerning suppliers, customers, and employees that I use today. 

I most recently led Operations for the Transportation Solutions segment, where I worked with many talented people, all of whom were driving safety in the segment. There’s much flux in our industry, and many changes are occurring as we shift to electric vehicles. This means our facilities are also changing, and a big part of my role was to ensure the safety of our employees. Working in a large and complex environment allowed me to learn new things, which I have been able to leverage as I transitioned into my current role.

How do you implement your strategy at TE with so many employees worldwide?

The key to implementing a strategy is first to ensure you have a strong team, then engage with your team, listen to their input, learn from them, apply those key learnings to your strategy, and take calculated risks on what the future will bring. For me, the most important thing is listening to the insights of my team and learning from them, given the abundance of talent in TE. I am also always clear on my future vision to ensure it matches my team.

What about the strategy map excites you most and how does your role and team help TE implement our strategy and achieve our purpose?

Our purpose statement on our strategy map continues to excite me. The “safer” element of our purpose reminds me of what I am supposed to do every day and how important the H&S roles are to our company.  Each day, my team upholds our values in the work we do. Everything we do is done with honesty, and if something is not working right then we fix it, demonstrating our value of integrity. We have made accountability a big part of our daily processes, as it was not always there before. We demonstrate inclusion by keeping all employees informed on the development of our strategy to ensure they understand how we will move toward the future. Innovation is incredibly important to my team because when a difficult issue arises in one of our facilities, we must innovate to resolve that issue. Our value of teamwork is exemplified every day, as we would not succeed if we worked individually.

What actions does your team take to establish a culture of safety and support TE’s commitment to achieving a zero-injury mindset while continuously improving our health and safety performance?

Everything we do on a daily basis supports this. We work on implementing the right policies and procedures to guide employees to be safe each day and evaluate our sites regularly to ensure those policies and procedures are being followed. As certain needs or issues arise at our facilities, we ensure employees have what they need to stay safe, such as training or best practices. Our extended H&S team acts as the experts for our sites, and when employees have questions, we provide them with a roadmap on how to manage H&S within their site.

What about the strategy map excites you most, and how does your role and team help TE implement our strategy and achieve our purpose?

Our purpose statement on our strategy map continues to excite me. The “safer” element of our purpose reminds me of what I am supposed to do every day and how important the H&S roles are to our company.  Each day, my team upholds our values in the work we do. Everything we do is done with honesty, and if something is not working right, then we fix it, demonstrating our value of integrity. We have made accountability a big part of our daily processes, as it was not always there. We demonstrate inclusion by keeping all employees informed on the development of our strategy to ensure they understand how we will move toward the future. Innovation is incredibly important to my team because when a difficult issue arises in one of our facilities, we must innovate to resolve that issue. Our value of teamwork is exemplified every day, as we would not succeed if we worked individually.

What actions does your team take to establish a culture of safety and support TE’s commitment to achieving a zero-injury mindset while continuously improving our health and safety performance?

Everything we do on a daily basis supports this. We work on implementing the right policies and procedures to guide employees to be safe each day and evaluate our sites regularly to ensure those policies and procedures are being followed. As certain needs or issues arise at our facilities, we ensure employees there have what they need to stay safe, such as training or best practices. Our extended H&S team acts as the experts for our sites, and when employees have questions, we provide them with a roadmap for managing H&S within their sites.

What can employees do to improve safety across TE?

Observe and speak up. Safety is very much like ethics, and you would never accept something below standard for ethics. We want every employee to speak up if they see an unsafe condition or unsafe act. Employees should continue to speak up until their safety concern is addressed.

How would you describe your leadership style?

I am an open communicator and enjoy engaging with my team. I do not micromanage my team because I want my team members to think outside of the box to deliver results. I like establishing a path for my team and encouraging them to march forward without inhibiting their creativity or innovative mindset. I am focused on the outcomes I know my team can achieve.

What is one project or TE initiative that you are currently most excited about?

I am excited about the Safety Plus 5S initiative we are rolling out. This initiative strongly focuses on our plants and takes cleanliness and orderliness seriously. Through this initiative, we will monitor our plants to make sure things are not out of place and observe and fix things that may cause hazards or potential risks to our employees and their safety. By partnering with our manufacturing and TEOA teams on this, I believe we can make a big impact on employee safety.  

What recent industry trend excites you, and what is the potential application for TE?

I have always been passionate about vehicles and cars and am very excited about electric vehicles (EVs). Much of the EV industry is on a journey that closely aligns with our purpose statement of creating a safer, sustainable, productive, and connected future. I am also interested in the autonomous aspect of vehicles, especially the advanced driver assist system (ADAS), which allows cars to stop when something unexpectedly goes in front of the car.