At the beginning of August there will be a new head of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association (CVMA) for the first time in more than a quarter century.
Brian Kingston will be taking over the reins of the association from Mark Nantais, who not only led the association for 26 years, but also served the association for 36 years.
Both of these milestones are an anomaly in today’s society but my experience of Mark as co-worker, employee, and CEO peer is of an individual with a significant amount of loyalty and integrity.
I had the privilege of working with Mark for 7 years and then for Mark for 11 years at the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association in two locations from 1987 until 2005, when I left the CVMA to head up the Global Automakers of Canada (GAC).
It took a while for Mark and I to sort out our relationship as the heads of the two trade associations representing all of the automotive OEMs in Canada.
In some ways it was a relationship that he and I navigated until he retired in April.
While we could be thick as thieves on various automotive policy issues, we could also be at opposite sides of certain policy issues as well.
For me, at least, it was never personal, I knew that Mark had a job to do for his members, just as I had a job to do for my members.
Mark is a very private man and even though I have known the guy for 30 years I never really felt like I got to know him.
That said we were always there for one another for support when we got older and family members started to depart from our lives and through other key life events like significant surgeries and relationship breakdowns.
Both the CVMA and the GAC are small offices and you get to know your co-workers more as extended family than simply other people that you work with.
Mark was always the patriarch at the CVMA arranging Christmas dinners and summer potlucks at his house as a way of getting to know staff on a more informal level and expressing his personal gratitude for his staff.
Sometimes he thought of himself as the patriarch of the entire industry… but I digress!
However, after 36 years in the industry he’s perhaps earned the right to feel that way.
I am sure a lot of people look at their CEO and think quietly to themselves “I could do a better job.” But speaking from personal experience that is very easy to say and very hard to do.
It is like being in opposition and saying you could govern better and make better decisions for the nation, which is very easy to do when you have nothing at stake and nothing to lose.
I had not appreciated how difficult the role was until I was in a similar role myself and even though I had more members at the GAC, I often thought that Mark had a much more difficult challenge with his three members than I had with mine.
This challenge has been more difficult in the last number of years where, increasingly CEOs at the at either of our associations are installed for 3-5 year stints at most which makes it difficult to secure adhesion to the association, as the priority for most new CEOs — rightly so — is to get to know the operations and especially the dealer network, meaning that their focus is very company-oriented out of the gate as opposed to industry/association oriented.
Like the change in government, a new CEO requires a significant amount of briefing on the operations and the issues at hand and while much of this is done internally by company staff there is a perspective that in some ways only an industry association can bring to the issues.
That perspective is very much augmented by a person such as Mark who had over three decades of experience in the industry and who has been at the forefront or in the line of fire for innumerable issues that the industry has dealt with over that time.
Reflectively, Mark’s tenure in the industry is about one third of the time the industry has been a mainstay of Canadian society. You garner a lot of knowledge on a lot of subjects during that period of time.
However, I am sure Mark at times felt like I do, that you can never know enough to properly do your job. You know a little bit about a lot of things but not a whole lot about any one thing.
Like the change in government, a new CEO requires a significant amount of briefing on the operations and the issues at hand, and while much of this is done internally by company staff there is a perspective that in some ways only an industry association can bring to the issues.
I think that is the nature of the association world which can make a lot of people uncomfortable if you are the type of person that has to have a deep understanding of the issues before setting a direction and moving forward.
That might sound very flippant, but the reality is that especially with the speed at which the world and the automotive industry is moving right now, perfect information is not possible and you need collaborative and consultative leadership to try and secure the best and most accurate information that you can and then act on that.
There will never be enough information, and you will never know enough but at the end of the day you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable and forge ahead.
Thus the role Mark assumed for more than a quarter century is a very humbling one.
Members rightly have high expectations of the key sector trade association that they belong to.
In addition, the industry and the automobile are becoming more and more complex as are the issues, and this only underscores the feeling of “never knowing enough” which can be very humbling unless you actually appreciate that the knowledge that you have is still significantly more than most others, and that is what a long tenure in the industry — whether it be automotive or any other industry will provide.
The COVID-19 virus has hit the automotive industry particularly hard and a number of companies made the tough decision to rationalize operations as part of the challenge of coping with this crisis.
While this is understandable, it also means that a lot of colleagues have left the industry without proper recognition of their contributions, not only to their companies but to the industry as whole.
While Mark made his decision to leave the industry prior to the main pandemic outbreak earlier this spring, it still has meant that Mark’s more than three decades in the industry have not been recognized.
Mark has left some big shoes to fill at the CVMA but we’ll look forward to meeting and working with Brian Kingston come August.
Congratulations on the new role, Brian.
