Power, Pumps & Progress: How Women Are Redefining Manufacturing

Hanna Gerbstedt is an accomplished engineering director with over a decade of experience in the manufacturing industry. She leads a global team, blending strategic vision and multicultural insights. A passionate advocate for inclusivity and working parents, Hanna is dedicated to fostering growth and knowledge sharing within her team. 

In an insightful interaction with Global Woman Leader Magazine, Hanna shares her insights on how, as a woman leader in engineering, she integrates market intelligence into strategic decision-making; she emphasizes the balance between legacy products and innovation, and fosters growth opportunities for women in STEM. 

How do you, as a woman leader in engineering, integrate market intelligence into strategic decision-making while ensuring your team remains ahead of industry trends? 

We (my team and I) are always close to our customers and for this year specifically have set ourselves goals to proactively talk to our customers. This way we will be closer to what’s happening in their industries, on site, what technical needs and challenges they face – to come up with ideas how we could support and what product developments or enhancements might be required. The market intelligence can sometimes be too far away from real-life technical challenges, so I believe we have to do both, look at major market trends but also daily life issues in our industries. We have to ensure that we know what our customers need and are willing to pay for. You can have the best technical solution - if no one is willing to buy it, it's not worth anything. 

We are closely collaborating with our strategic business management team and innovation and technology team to bring up technology trends we see and talk through our product landscape in terms of where could this find a suitable application. We give them insights into what questions might become relevant and together we derive the most promising pathways to focus our resources. It’s a constant team effort between all engaged internal parties to really either predict correctly or fail fast with something we thought might make sense (and then didn’t). If you don’t try, there is no chance you succeed.  

How do you navigate this dynamic while fostering an inclusive environment where diverse perspectives contribute to both sustaining existing portfolios and driving transformative developments? 

You have to have a clear strategy. Otherwise, you will just quickly get lost, especially in todays every (and quickly) changing world. If you stay true to your strategy, it is easy to find the right paths and keep your team focused on relevant development opportunities, not being sidetracked by attractive business for today that has no place in tomorrow’s world.  

If you know which of your products are in which lifecycle state, you can tailor your efforts around this in engineering too. A mature product that we just want to keep selling, you will not try and do something radically new to. You will reserve that kind of creativity for new products or enhancements that make sense to current products. It is important to sometimes disconnect from emotional bond to long-loved heritage products, look at market reality and discus what type of effort such product still requires. This is sometimes minimal (at least from original equipment perspective) or even fully move it into the aftermarket team, where this type of business is much better handled.  

I personally believe that diverse and personal perspectives, like someone’s network in the industry or interests only loosely related to work will bring you ideas for your business. If you are open enough to listen and channel those ideas the right way, it’s amazing what impact this can have on the team.  

How have you leveraged inclusive leadership to foster collaboration and innovation across regions, and what strategies have helped you challenge traditional biases in global engineering teams? 

With every team, during every face-to-face team meeting, I focus for the first day on themselves as people. Whether it’s through a workshop, some team building exercises or a personality evaluation, we will first spend time on ourselves and reflect. This way, we know better who we are, to then go out to our team and help, mentor, assess, guide and lead.  

The intercultural peace is not easy to spot in small interactions and I’ve made it a habit to sprinkle in this type of information when I see it being relevant (e.g. a new team being built that consists of people in US and Spain). We discuss cultural differences, listen to everyone’s opinion, and it’s very interesting how perceptive everyone is to this topic, if just asked about it. I typically refer to Erin Meyer’s book “The Cultural Map” because it’s just a very good starting point for almost every combination of cultures and every situation.  

It is indeed difficult to deal with the inherently low percentage of women in an engineering team. While this being only one of the many aspects of diversity, it is a very obvious one. I fundamentally believe that if you create a team culture that respects inclusion, you will end up making lives better for everyone on the team, no matter the gender, if you have small kids at home or elderly parents or friends you want to care for. Making this normal to talk about and role modeling are two very impactful ways to achieve this in my experience.  

Have you observed any unique leadership approaches that women bring to product design strategies? 

I think women are good at listening and can then be very decisive and stay true to their course. When the next good opportunity comes, they will stick to what everyone agreed on and push forward, with grit and persuasion, even for years at a time, to finally ensure good results.  

How do you foster an environment that supports the growth of women engineers? How do you empower the next gen of women in STEM for leadership roles in industrial manufacturing? 

It is indeed difficult to foster this in the current generation. We’re hiring engineers that have already completed university – so the only way to reach female engineers early is through internships and make them feel valued and heard, so that they stay with us once they finish university.  

Personally, I believe we all have a role to play in our society to overcome biases that we imprint on children. Whether you have children on your own or not is not even important – you can always do your part in NOT telling a girl that “she’s so pretty” but rather compliment her on her math skills. It’s the very small things in daily life that eventually will form the next generation of engineers – hopefully a more diverse one.  

In my team I have comparably low percentage of women and it’s truly a challenge to change this without forcing it. At a certain point, I have to admit that clear rules about how you can hire are required to substantially change the percentage of women on the team. Currently I’m not yet convinced I need to be that dramatic as my team is growing their inclusive team culture and we do have a lot of dads on the team, too. I would like for them to feel comfortable to take care of their kids or elderly parents, get away from inherited beliefs in terms of care work split and thus have a better personal life overall.  

At some point, I believe mentoring is a good idea to enhance other female leader’s careers, ensure they don’t make the same mistakes or least have someone to talk to about it, and encourage them to never give up.  

What key transformations do you foresee in industrial pumps and flow control solutions? How is women leaders’ role evolving in shaping the future of engineering and product innovation? 

I personally believe we will all have to understand what AI and Machine Learning can really do for us, where is the biggest value, and then ensure we participate. From a market perspective, it will be interesting to see the energy transition and resources evolve through geopolitical circumstances. This will dictate boundary conditions for many industries and we need to stay close to what’s happening and be able to react quickly. We can’t really afford to turn around a big organization over decades any longer if we still want to be in business in 10 years from now.  

I think women overall have a lot to give and I’m personally quite appalled to see what’s happening in some of the most forward thinking countries in the world these days, in terms of trying to make women or other groups seem small, without value. This is dangerous and just not very smart. I’m still in this for the long run and I believe that female energy in a traditionally male dominated industry will lead to new ways of thinking and creativity for technical solutions.