Culture is defined by what your organization is willing to tolerate. In the engineering profession, it can be tempting to let otherwise high-performing individuals get away with bad workplace behavior. The reality is that drama, bullying, poor communication, and general interpersonal carelessness almost always gets in the way of the larger team reaching its true […]
Behavior Is Performance: What Engineering Leaders Miss Read More »
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” ~John F. Kennedy This is what I wrote on the board on my first day in the office, after erasing the detailed instructions to the team from the previous departed leader, whose
Seeing Your Team’s Full Potential — Leadership Turnaround Story Read More »
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~Viktor E. Frankl We’ve all had our moments. The feeling of an overwhelming physical and emotional burden, the feeling of being forced to act more quickly than we
How Leaders Manage Emotional Reactions Under Pressure Read More »
I recall often a saying from my Army years: “You can delegate authority, but you cannot delegate responsibility.” Failure to delegate properly can lead to very challenging situations that bottleneck resources, increase risks to the org, and require a painful amount of resources to recover from. One common question among engineering leaders: “When delegating, how
How to Delegate as an Engineering Leader: A Practical Framework Read More »
When I was coming up through the ranks and making a name for myself, it was quite common to hear more senior folks ragging on millennials for being lazy, entitled, short-sighted, having a poor work ethic—the list goes on. I looked around at my peer group, who were working 50-70+ hours a week, held multiple
Leading Gen Z Engineers | Why It’s an Opportunity, Not a Problem Read More »
The book “Atomic Habits” came highly recommended from multiple sources—and I finally took the chance to read through it. One of the anecdotes in the book that stood out to me explained a real scenario in which a photography professor broke his class up into two groups. Group one would be graded on how many
Why Repetition Beats Perfection in Leadership Development Read More »
I’ve seen a common pattern in engineers and engineering leaders, when up against team or people challenges which require new skillsets that they haven’t quite nurtured yet. Naturally, with an underdeveloped interpersonal toolkit, even well-intentioned engineering leaders are prone to lean further into their hard-skill technical background to fill these soft-skill gaps, often making matters
Why Engineering Leaders Shouldn’t Be the Team Hero Read More »
Every strength has multiple facets that can be expressed through either healthy, or unhealthy behaviors. Both the healthy and unhealthy expressions are two sides of the same coin–you cannot focus on surgically and completely removing your faults without suppressing your strengths, minimizing key elements of what make you who you are. While settling into a
Leadership Strengths Have a Dark Side | How to Dial Them In Read More »
The other day I saw a LinkedIn post on “Executive Presence.” Some of the tips alluded to intimidating others with strange prolonged eye contact, not being the first to look away, avoiding apologizing at all costs, claiming matter-of-fact statements without room for others to disagree—it seemed to me like a collection of mistakes that junior
Executive Presence for Engineers: Ditch the Power Games Read More »
A while back, during a 1:1 with a direct report, he suggested that it was time to cut one of his team members loose for under-performance. The under-performing individual in question had been with the company for multiple years, had acceptable performance reviews, even above-market pay raises and a recent promotion. So what was going
Accountability Conversations Every Engineering Manager Needs Read More »
