For Ford's Mach-E brand manager, passion leads the way

Lisa Teed never has focused on the fact that she is a woman in the auto industry. “Honestly, I always thought of myself as gender neutral,” she says. 
 
That confidence was instilled by her family, during her early years growing up in rural Ohio. “My father worked for NASA — he truly was a rocket scientist,” says Teed. “I was one of six sisters, and my mom and dad raised us to do anything we wanted to do. There was no gender thing in our family. We learned how to do everything: changing the oil on the car, mowing the lawn, changing a flat tire. We were raised in an environment where we were treated as doers.”
 
Teed definitely has been a doer in her 27 years at Ford Motor Co.— a career she capped this year as brand marketing manager for the Mustang Mach-E, the headline-making new electric crossover. 
 
“The Mach-E is the most significant event of my career,” she says. “The Mustang — the Pony — is such an icon, such a huge brand in the American auto industry … to take something with such brand equity, a crown jewel, and say we’re going to make something new, has been such a challenge.”
 
Teed started working with Ford on the supplier side; after college, she took a job with a market research firm that worked with the automaker. “That’s where I fell in love with looking at what people think, and how they make decisions,” she says. “We did qualitative and quantitative research.” And because of the nature of research work, she says, “I knew where the company was going before anyone else.” 
 
The proximity to Ford corporate eventually led to a job at the automaker. After “entry-level jobs where I learned about how to produce a vehicle,” she says, she moved to fleet operations. 
 
“It was the biggest experience of my career,” she says. “It was the heat of the recession, there was no money anywhere, and we were tasked with building the next generation of police interceptors.” 
 
Teed traveled around the country, spending hours with law enforcement personnel to figure out what they needed in a vehicle. “We really designed it collaboratively,” she says. “That’s why it’s a huge success, because we listened, and we built it for them.” The current Ford Police Interceptor Utility has an 80 percent share of the market.
 
After re-creating the Interceptor, Teed moved to work on another big project, the transformation of the Lincoln brand. She says none of this would have been possible without her family support. 
 
She remembers being pregnant, and then being a new mom, and feeling the pressures of working a strict 9-to-5 day with few breaks. “It was a time when women had to make tough choices,” she says. “I was fortunate to have my mom and a phenomenal husband to support me and help with the kids. Without them, I would have had to put my career second.” 
 
Teed served on task forces in the 1990s, looking for ways to make that path easier for women. She was one of the first women at Ford allowed to work some hours off premises. “Since then, a lot has changed, giving women and men much more flexibility in having jobs but also being able to take care of their families,” she says. “That gives everyone the ability to do the right thing.”
 
Her top advice for anyone interested in a career in the industry: “You must get an MBA,” Teed says. “I feel so strongly about this. I think no matter what product or service you are working on, you need basic business acumen with the financials, the management, the communications. It doesn’t matter what you’re creating or selling, it all has to make sense. Even engineers need to know the business basics.”
 
Perhaps most importantly, though, she recommends finding a job that you want to do. “If you have a passion for what you do, it doesn’t feel like work because it was your passion that led you along,” she says. She says she trusted her passion to get where she is today. “If I’d been planning it, I could never have come up with a career path like this,” she says.