About Bradford Spivey

My career has given me the opportunity to work alongside people at nearly every level of an organization, from skilled tradespeople and production employees to engineers, managers, and senior executives. I have been the young employee learning a trade, the technician responsible for solving problems, the engineer searching for a better solution, and the executive responsible for people, performance, and results. Those experiences have shaped how I understand leadership.

They have also taught me that recruiting good people is only the beginning. Keeping them requires something more.

My doctoral research grew from questions I had already encountered in manufacturing: What makes younger employees want to stay? How much does the relationship with their immediate leader matter? What happens when employees genuinely believe the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being?

My research examined those questions among Generation Z manufacturing employees by studying leader-member exchange, perceived organizational support, and intent to stay. The findings reinforced something I have witnessed throughout my career: leadership relationships matter. Organizational support matters. How people experience their workplace matters.

My goal is to help business leaders translate those lessons into practice. Research provides evidence, but decades spent working in trades, engineering, manufacturing, and leadership provide the context necessary to understand what that evidence looks like on a shop floor, in a maintenance department, around a conference table, or during a difficult conversation between a supervisor and an employee.