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At Chrysler/Jeep, Marietta Cleveland is steadily moving up
Having experience working in the plant makes you a better engineer when you get to corporate,” she says. Today she’s manager of aero/thermal test ops
 When Marietta Cleveland started as a manager in a Chrysler auto plant in 1982, she was a young African American woman from Detroit supervising thirty skilled white tradesmen in the farming community of Belvidere, IL. She was the first black woman manager to walk into that completely foreign environment.
“Some of the plant workers had problems working with me because I was a female, but not because of my race,” she says. And worst of all from their point of view, she was right out of college. She didn’t “come up through the ranks” like other supervisors who had begun in the trades.
Learning on both sides
“Sometimes I found myself feeling that I was the sacrificial lamb,” Cleveland says. “We learn from our experiences, though: there was growth on both our parts. I was a better person afterwards, and I hope that after the experience they had with me they were better for it. That’s the attitude I took.
“There were days I didn’t enjoy it, but for the most part I did, interacting with not just the skilled trades but production also.”
Manager of test ops
Today Cleveland is manager of scientific labs; aero/thermal test operations for the product engineering division of Chrysler Group LLC, managing a department of fifty-one employees. She took over the job last year.
Her group does climatic testing in state-of-the-art facilities to support development and validation of vehicles’ aerodynamics, thermal and wiper- and battery-related functions in real-world conditions. They also work on vehicle instrumentation and test procedures for more effective product development.
“We have environment chambers here where we create wind, rain and snow,” Cleveland explains. “Mechanics prep the vehicles for the tests, and I work with engineering staff.
“We test the external environment: different grades you’re driving on; different environmental conditions like heat in Arizona. How does the vehicle respond in extreme temperatures? How is the fuel economy impacted in 70-mph wind?”
As a manager, Cleveland is the liaison with peers, subordinates and union officials. Strategic planning is important, as well as charting improvements to the overall operation and measuring cost and productivity. “I manage by walking around, maintaining relationships,” she says.
Turning jobs fast and early
Her team faces a lot of deadlines with the launching of new vehicles. “We don’t want to waste the engineers’ time. Rather than thinking ‘on time’ we have to figure out how to turn jobs around fast and early and get the vehicle back in the engineers’ hands.”
Growing up in autos
Cleveland grew up in Mount Clemens, MI, a community outside Detroit. Her widowed mother worked on a Chrysler assembly line; her brothers worked at both GM and Ford.
In high school she enjoyed math and science and did co-ops at GM her junior and senior years. She got her BSEE from the University of Michigan in 1986, and has just finished her MBA at Oakland University (Rochester Hills, MI).
When she was a senior at U Mich a Chrysler campus recruiter noticed she “knew the automotive language.” The company made her an offer, and she’s been there ever since.
Starting in manufacturing
Her first eleven years were in the manufacturing arena, “a fast-paced environment where the result of your efforts is visible and tangible: at the end of the day you produced a thousand vehicles. Engineering is different. It involves the earlier stages of the vehicle: planning, development, validating the cost.”
She began as a skilled trades supervisor from 1986 to 1989. Then she moved to the company’s Warren, MI truck assembly plant where she led and coordinated skilled trades maintenance activities for five years.
Next came a stint as launch/facility manager at another plant, allocating plant capital funding to specified projects. After that she led the plant’s paint shop in quality and process improvement.
The move to product engineering
In 1997 she moved from manufacturing to product engineering. “In the past manufacturing was a seven-day operation plus holidays. That was hard, although my husband is a big help and I had my kids, now fourteen and ten, up and moving since they were two months old!
“Grad school added another dimension to my career decisions,” she says, and that was when she opted for the five-day week. She started as a product engineer in Chrysler’s scientific labs’ materials engineering group, collaborating with automotive paint suppliers on coating systems for exterior add-on components.
She moved to supervisor in the instrumentation service in 2001, managing a team of engineers and technicians responsible for preventive maintenance at power train test facilities.
In 2003 Cleveland became supervisor of the electromagnetic compatibility lab, which developed electronic instruments and systems to support engineering and manufacturing validation testing. Last year she took over her current job as manager of aero/thermal test operations.
She wouldn’t change a thing
Outside of work Cleveland is active in the women’s ministry at her church and is part of an evangelism team. She also volunteers at her children’s schools.
Looking back over her career, she wouldn’t change a thing about it. “Having experience working in the plant makes you a better engineer here at corporate. I advise people to expose themselves to many jobs early in their careers to have a broader view of the company.”
And when you get there, “Reach back and help others. You don’t need years of experience to help someone else. Always act as you’d like to be treated,” says
Marietta Cleveland.
D/C
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