ERIE, Pa. — At SpaceX, where he is vice president of production, overseeing the assembly of Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft, Wes Salandro starts each workday with a walk.
“Every morning, before I read my emails, I spend an hour on the shop floor,” he said. “I talk with the members of my team in their environment.
“There are thousands of parts on a rocket, all designed and installed by different people. I need everyone on the team to feel comfortable giving me feedback.”
Salandro earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Penn State Behrend in 2009. He returned in May to give the keynote speech at the Richard J. Fasenmyer Engineering Design Conference, a showcase for more than 300 student projects.
“The start of your career is a low-risk time to stretch,” he said. “Volunteer for the new project, the new tool, the new challenge.”
Before joining SpaceX, Salandro worked at Vector Launch and at Lucid Motors, an electric-vehicle startup. He began his career at BMW, working in South Carolina and then in Oxford, in the United Kingdom, where he eventually managed 350 employees as an assembly-production group leader.
“I’ve had more than 10 different roles in six-and-a-half years,” he said. "I view change as an opportunity to make an impact. If your project gets canceled or delayed or your scope gets increased, or decreased, or you change teams, or you change departments, you can focus on that change, or you can focus on the opportunity it brings to you.”
It helps to have consistent core values, Salandro said. He frames his work around three values: integrity, accountability and respect.
His job at SpaceX is to build rockets. But he’s also trying to build culture.
“At every all-hands meeting we have, we start with a slide about culture,” he said. “It’s that important. Culture drives behavior, and behavior produces results.
“Culture is what leads when you aren’t around,” he said. “In industry, the leaders are ultimately responsible for setting the culture. But it’s up to everyone, including the newest engineers, to buy in, and to maintain that culture, and to grow it, rather than erode it.”