Positronic GM Jay Sandidge on Leading With a Drummer's Rhythm

Before he was leading one of Springfield’s major global manufacturers, Jay Sandidge sought out a decidedly different kind of rhythm. He spent years playing drums, including a two-year stint in Nashville as a hired touring musician, and he still performs today. Most recently, he channeled his talent into a six-decade musical mashup for Positronic’s 60th anniversary celebration this year. For Sandidge, music never really existed separate from business—it informed it. “Drums are very mathematical,” he says. “I don’t see those two things as unrelated.”

That analytical instinct—part numbers, part nuance—has been a common thread through Sandidge’s career, which has taken him from outside sales to global marketing, from leading Asia Pacific sales and living in Singapore with his family to becoming general manager nearly three years ago. But his resume is only one piece of the story.

Sandidge developed what he calls a “globally minded” outlook early on, and it’s easy to see why. He was born in Belgium to missionary parents, raised across multiple U.S. cities and later shaped by experiences as an exchange student in Costa Rica and living in Singapore with his wife and two children. That global influence shows up in the way Sandidge leads even today.

He talks less about managing across cultures than respecting them: switching effortlessly from inches to millimeters or Fahrenheit to Celsius in international meetings, small but significant gestures he sees as signals of mutual respect. “One thing I would call pretty universal is people want to be respected,” Sandidge says. “The dignity of the individual is very highly regarded in most cultures.”

That principle anchors his leadership philosophy as much as any business metric. It also helps explain why, despite overseeing a global operation, Sandidge doesn’t necessarily embrace the traditional executive archetype. He’s known within Positronic for sharing “embarrassing” self-deprecating stories during monthly company-wide meetings, a ritual he started with the intention of making leadership feel more human.

With that in mind, his description of himself is somewhat unexpected. “I’m pretty introverted, actually,” Sandidge shares. “Sometimes I just have to come home and veg out because I’m so exhausted from being ‘on’ all the time.”

There’s a distinct humility threaded through his story, including the fact that he’s left and returned to Positronic more than once. One of those departures was to pursue a music career in Nashville. He credits not burning bridges as another defining throughline of his career. And still one more may be an openness to unlikely connections. Skills Sandidge picked up as a “starving artist”—like software programming to supplement notoriously unpredictable musician income—later helped him build a global pricing system still foundational to the company today. What might look like random threads, he explains, have converged over time. “Some of these seemingly disjointed things I’ve done over my lifetime have kind of all started to coalesce and come full circle.”

That might be the best way to understand Sandidge himself: not a traditional manufacturing executive, but someone whose leadership is shaped by accumulated rhythms. Music, math, travel, faith, relationships. Even his approach to company culture reflects that blend. For Positronic’s anniversary celebration, he’s assembling a house band, flying in colleagues from across the globe and turning an employee event into something more like a shared performance.

It’s a fitting metaphor for how he sees leadership. Timing matters. Listening matters. Every player has a part. And for a drummer running a global company, that makes perfect sense.

Timeline

1997: Graduated summa cum laude from Drury University with a double major in biology and Spanish
2000: Started as inside sales administrator at Positronic
2003: Moved to Nashville to pursue music
2005: Returned to Positronic as district sales manager
2010: Left Positronic for a company in Joplin as regional sales manager
2012: Returned to Positronic as director of marketing
2018: Moved to Singapore as director of sales, Asia Pacific for Positronic
2020: Returned to USA and resumed previous role as director of marketing
2023: Became general manager of Positronic