The World Class Leaders Show: The CEO leadership podcast for leaders who solve big problems and build better futures. · Andrea Petrone

207 - The CEO Pressure for Executives to Master High-Stakes Decisions with Brian Melka

·40 min·2 clips

Brian says the CEO’s hardest shift is decision quality: knowing which calls only the CEO can make.

1. The World Class Leaders Show episode centers on Brian Melka’s path to leading RELCO and his approach to CEO decisions under pressure. 2. Andrea Petrone hosts Brian Melka, who is the President and Chief Executive Officer of RELCO and previously held leadership roles at Kohler, Textron, and Rexnord. 3. The episode asks how a CEO learns to make high-stakes decisions, reshape culture, and lead a 9,000-person business through a carve-out. 4. Brian says he was born in a small town in Iowa, grew up in a rural farming community, and learned accountability from parents who did everything themselves. 5. He says his family did not think in terms of electricians, plumbers, or auto mechanics, because “dad did everything and my mom did everything.” 6. Brian frames leadership as a journey rather than a birthright, and says he was not aiming for a top job when he was saving money for his next bike. 7. He says his career moved through Six Sigma, HR, finance, IT, manufacturing, and heavy industrial businesses rather than a straight-line promotion path. 8. Brian identifies an early turning point in the early 2000s at Textron, where a struggling business unit had not turned a profit in nearly a decade. 9. A mentor, Ryan Weeks, told him to “walk around like you own the place,” which Brian says meant acting like decisions mattered, not acting arrogantly. 10. He says the turnaround required about 100 hours a week, long travel, and constant pivots because more than half of the decisions were probably wrong. 11. Brian says the team took that business from a long period of losses to profitability in about 18 months. 12. He says ownership is the key mental shift, because people need to believe they can do something about a problem instead of just feeling assigned to it. 13. Brian says high-pressure roles create constant stress, and that pressure can be a sign that leaders are pushing hard enough. 14. He says energy-industry leaders must control what they can control, because regulation, weather events, and competition are outside their control. 15. Brian compares leadership to American football, saying that once “the ball is hiked,” leaders must react and then focus on the highest-priority controllable actions. 16. He says RELCO is a 100-plus-year-old company focused on energy resilience, and that the business was carved out of Kohler about 18 months ago. 17. Brian says the CEO role required a culture reset for about 9,000 people, and he tied that reset to four norms: curiosity, trust, pace, and excellence. 18. He says he built a value creation plan by benchmarking competitors and then asking a top leadership team of roughly 100 people to execute the framework. 19. The episode is interview-driven, reflective, and practical, with Andrea Petrone pressing on culture, decision-making, and the difference between being a group president and a CEO. 20. Anyone leading a turnaround, merger, or industrial business would likely find this useful, while listeners wanting a light, casual business chat may skip it.

As heard by us

A steady look at CEO judgment when the answer is still forming.

Brian Melka's conversation tracks his move from president roles into the CEO seat at Relco, and the tension comes through plainly: carving out a century old company, leading 9,000 people, and making calls when the data is still thin.

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Why you'd press play

High-stakes CEO judgment, with the data still moving.

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