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Engineering Leadership Communication (with Russell Ford)
39 Plays14 days ago
In this episode, Jill Fennell speaks to Russell Ford, Chairman and CEO of StandardAero and Georgia Tech alumnus, about the importance of communication in leadership. Using Mister Ford's Top Ten Rules for Technical Leadership as a framework, the two discuss strategies for effectively communicating and growing in leadership roles as an engineer.
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Show Notes and Timestamps:
- 00:43 Introductions and Guest introductions
- 01:21 Communication’s importance in leadership
- 03:14 Evolving views on communication upon entering leadership roles
- 06:48 Helpful communication habits and tools
- 08:29 Introduction to Russ Ford’s Top Ten Rules for Technical Leadership
- 10:48 The rules as they relate to technical communication
- 17:25 The Rule of Engagement
- 20:18 The Rule of Focus
- 22:41 The Rule of Time Management
- 29:14 The Rule of Responsibility
- 34:13 Tips for Developing leadership habits early
- 37:12 Common mistakes early career engineers make
- 39:12 One Rule that resonates most
- 43:03 One thing you wish every engineer understood about communication and leadership
- 43:27 Thanks and outro
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Click here for the full list of Russ Ford's Top 10 Rules for Technical Leadership.
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Episode edited by Lee Hibbard.
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Transcript
Introduction to Season Three
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to season three of Communication Mechanics. I'm Jill Fennell, Web Chair in Communication Skills at the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. And this season is all about communication across professional growth.
00:00:24
Speaker
How engineers build skills to navigate job fairs, public speaking, leadership, internship, and providing useful feedback. Let's get started.
Meet Russell Ford
00:00:43
Speaker
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're exploring the intersection of technical leadership and communication. What does it mean to lead effectively as an engineer and how does communication shape that journey?
00:00:55
Speaker
Our guest is Russell Ford, a seasoned engineering executive and Georgia Tech mechanical engineering alumnus with over 35 years of experience leading large global teams in energy, technology, and infrastructure.
00:01:08
Speaker
He's passionate about technical leadership, decision making, and mentoring the next generation of engineers. Welcome, Russell. Thank you, Jill. It's pleasure to be here.
00:01:19
Speaker
Thank you for being here.
Why Communication is Key in Leadership
00:01:21
Speaker
Let's jump right on in You've led high-performing technical teams throughout your career. When did you first realize that communication was central to leadership?
00:01:31
Speaker
first thing you have to understand coming out of a technical or an engineering curriculum is that communication is generally not something that you spend a lot of time getting instructed on.
00:01:44
Speaker
The reason being, you spend so much time focused on the theory and the math behind thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, you know all are necessary underpinnings for the design of complicated products like jet engines, that there's little time left for development of other skills.
00:02:03
Speaker
So right out of school ah from Georgia Tech, I went to work for a company called Bell Helicopter ah designing control systems for helicopters.
00:02:14
Speaker
And it became apparent to me pretty quickly that the engineering team had developed new designs based on advanced material science that were really significant.
00:02:26
Speaker
However, there were wide gaps between the design and the understanding of the cost of the design with Finance Group and the manufacturing process involved to build and test these designs.
00:02:40
Speaker
Communication was the missing bridge. So as a result, some of the best designs never actually make it into production simply because nobody can translate the value of that design into language that matters to the rest of the organization.
00:02:58
Speaker
So my lesson learned there was if you want to be able to influence others, you have to be able to explain why something matters to them through their own eyes.
Explaining the 'Why' in Leadership
00:03:12
Speaker
Absolutely. Did your views on communication evolve as you moved into leadership roles? Yeah, there's no question that, you know, some of the things I learned, it's it's different from being an individual contributor versus leading other people.
00:03:29
Speaker
And there two major elements that I've learned over the years. First is when you're leading people, You don't just tell them what to do and stop. You have to give them the rest of the story. You have to tell them the why. It's not just the what, it's the why.
00:03:46
Speaker
And then you allow them to figure out the how. If a group understands what they're trying to accomplish and where they're going and why, then they can improvise along the way when you run into inevitable roadblocks and you can still keep moving.
00:04:02
Speaker
Otherwise, if they don't know the why, they just know the what, then they come to a full stop when they run into a roadblock and they wait for someone to tell them what to do next, which takes too much time.
Effective Communication Techniques
00:04:15
Speaker
So that's the first thing is, you know, you have to tell them the what and the why when you communicate with people so that they can course correct. The second thing is I've learned that you have to never forget that you need to communicate to people face to face if at all possible.
00:04:31
Speaker
You can read things from a face to face interaction like body posture and voice inflection, eye movement, you know, things that give clues if you're resonating with a person's understanding.
00:04:47
Speaker
You can never get those through an email or an indirect interaction. So two important things. Make sure yeah when you're communicating to people, they need to know the what and the why. And second is communicate with people face to face if you really want to ensure understanding and make sure they're resonating with what you're trying to communicate.
00:05:07
Speaker
Those are great points. To the first one, it really sounds like when you communicate well, you empower others to do their best. Whereas if you don't communicate well, then they're kind of stuck being reactive or reactionary only.
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right. So you're never going to have it, you know, as you move through business, ah you're never going to have complete information about what it is you're trying to accomplish. You're going to learn things along the way because projects, you know big projects you work on,
00:05:38
Speaker
Not everything takes 10 minutes. There are projects you'll work on for years. And during that amount of time, you will collect information along the way. And you can't wait for that perfect information.
00:05:50
Speaker
So you need to be able to course correct along the way. And the only way that people, a group of people can course correct is if they know why they're doing something, not just the what they're trying to accomplish.
00:06:05
Speaker
I feel like that's a really tough lesson to learn sometimes, especially as maybe you know a Georgia Tech student where you want to make the perfect deliverable before you hand it over to someone. But that's not always the most effective mode to work within.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. It just takes too much time. We call it the the syndrome is wait and debate. And you don't want to get caught in the wait and debate syndrome. You want to take as much information as you can get quickly, make a good decision, move forward, and then course correct as more information becomes available. That will allow you to to move much faster as an organization.
00:06:47
Speaker
What kind of communication habits or tools helped you across your career trajectory? You know, as I think about communicating to people and, you know, it's no different if you're communicating to 30 people or you're communicating to 30,000 people, the fundamentals are still the same. And there's there's at least three things that I've learned there.
00:07:10
Speaker
The first is when you're trying to communicate with folks, try to use layman's terms to ensure understanding. This is particularly challenging for engineers.
00:07:21
Speaker
because you're talking many times about technical subjects. Not everyone just intuitively understands entropy and enthalpy, and you're not going to have a chance to explain that to them.
00:07:34
Speaker
So you have to use layman's terms to make sure that people understand quickly. ah The second thing I've learned is it's always helpful to speak in bullet points if you can, because people remember bullet points.
00:07:49
Speaker
They don't remember paragraphs. And then the third thing I've learned is if at all possible, when you're trying to explain something, if you can wrap it in a story or an analogy, what I found is that people resonate with stories because typically it touches an experience that they've had.
00:08:11
Speaker
And if you can resonate with someone around an experience, they're more likely to remember that than they will some great fact. So those three things, use layman terms, speak in bullet points, and try to use stories and analogies to identify with people's experiences.
Top 10 Rules for Technical Leadership
00:08:29
Speaker
You've created what we call Russ Ford's top 10 rules for technical leadership. Do you want to introduce this list a bit for us? Yeah, ah appreciate that. um You know, years ago, I started writing down, I had a little piece of paper that I that i kept in my notebook, that whenever I had what I consider to be ah a critical lesson learned, um or a common thread or theme, I just jot that down. and you know, after some years, I had created three or four or five of those critical lessons learned. You you don't have one of these every day.
00:09:05
Speaker
But, you know, over a period of time, you will see some trends that that become critical lessons learned. So, you know, I was encouraged a couple of years ago to take that piece of paper out of my notebook that had, you know, ruffled corners and coffee stains on it and everything else and and actually write it down and think about it in a concise way.
00:09:26
Speaker
So that's what I did. And and I compiled a you know short list, a top 10 list of things that I've learned over the last decade. 30 plus years in the industry. And, you know, when share them with people, you'd be surprised how they resonate with folks that that would say, you know, I never thought about that, but that's actually true.
00:09:44
Speaker
And so these these things have become guiding principles for me and for others as you work through typical business challenges. Thank you so much. I'm going to provide the PDF as a link in our podcast description. I'm not gonna give the definitions of each one right now, but I'm gonna quickly let our audience know what each 10 are. So these are formatted as rule of, and the 10 are choice, decisions, focus, time management, engagement, balance, speed, negotiation, patience, and responsibility.
00:10:19
Speaker
Was it difficult cut off 10? cut off at ten Yes, but if you really think about it carefully, um a lot of experiences that you have can actually roll underneath one of these 10, right? So your list may be very long, but when you look at it and consider the experiences that you've had, many of them stem from some root cause. And so, you know, I was able to kind of narrow it down to 10.
00:10:48
Speaker
ah Let's talk about these rules as they relate to communication, technical communication and technical leadership.
Communication and Decision-Making Under Pressure
00:10:55
Speaker
So the rule of choice, ah which is business is all about choices, make good ones that you will be happy with later, you don't get a do over years later.
00:11:07
Speaker
And the rule of speed, speed clarifies decision making. What role does communication play in decision making under pressure? These two are important rules because what I've learned is an organization's speed is gated primarily by its ability to make decisions.
00:11:30
Speaker
And when you're under stress and pressure, which is common in a business setting, decisions tend to slow down because the results of a bad decision are intensified or magnified if you're under stress and pressure for some reason.
00:11:46
Speaker
It's really important that you help people understand the two or three most important things, bullet points. This will help clarify decision making and consequently it will allow you to speed up.
00:12:03
Speaker
So that's why you know the rule of choice and speed are closely coupled and it's all about trying to get people focused on priorities so that decision making can happen.
00:12:16
Speaker
That's great. It sounds like that that focus or concentration on what's important is really valid here.
Fostering Decision-Making Autonomy
00:12:22
Speaker
It makes me think about how when we have our students do either a team or a work charter on a project, we make them start with the purpose. Like, what is the purpose of this project?
00:12:32
Speaker
So that if scope creep starts to happen, you have somewhere to go back to and focus whenever things can get a little little dicey, a little last minute. Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:12:43
Speaker
Focus is important because, you know law of entropy dictates that things tend to t tend to move towards disorder. Well, it happens in organization, their decision-making process as well.
00:12:57
Speaker
So it's important to establish key priority and you can't give people a list of 25 or 50 things to work on because they won't get any of them done.
00:13:08
Speaker
right there's There's kind of the you know what I call the rule of threes. People can remember about two or three things at any given time, and they can really make progress on those two or three.
00:13:20
Speaker
But if you give them 25 things to work on, they won't get any of them done. So it's really important, you know this idea of focus. And then the follow-on to that is how do you encourage people to make decisions?
00:13:36
Speaker
How do you create the environment to make decisions? Because many organizations, they have cultures that actually discourage this. So it's not only about encouraging people to make decisions, you have to give them the right environment that encourages that as well.
00:13:53
Speaker
So what I've learned is that first thing you want to do is you want to give people autonomy. When you teach people to just sit with a notebook pad and make notes of what you're saying, that's not good.
00:14:08
Speaker
You want to encourage independent thought, and the way you do that is you give people autonomy and authority. And one of the ways you do that is just how you communicate with them. So you don't say things like, I wouldn't do it that way, or why are you doing that, or make sure I see everything first, or that was dumb, why'd you do that?
00:14:31
Speaker
You don't use communication phrases like that. You say things like, what do you think we should do? Or, you know, what's been your experience in this area?
00:14:43
Speaker
And don't wait for me to make all the decisions. Move forward with the information you have. Make a good decision and we can course correct later.
00:14:55
Speaker
You know, there's a um there's a rule that I call Patton's rule, and this was a comment that General George Patton made during the Second World War. um He said a lot of very interesting things. One of them was, he said, never forget that a good plan vigorously executed now is better than a perfect plan executed later.
00:15:19
Speaker
And in the world of business, speed matters, and you're never going to have the perfect plan. So again a good plan Vigorously executed now is better than a perfect plan executed later.
00:15:31
Speaker
And I think that's, ah you know, that talks to the whole idea of communication and speed within a business and the impact that it has. I feel like that's similar something my dissertation director told me whenever I was writing my dissertation, which is perfection can be the enemy of the good. And sometimes you just need to get it done.
00:15:53
Speaker
that That's right. You know, there's there's nothing wrong with perfection. And believe me, I live in a world of perfection because... when When you're running a company that assembles and tests jet engines, you can lose a lot of things at 30,000 feet on an airplane and still land it safely.
00:16:11
Speaker
The engine isn't one of them. ah we We live in a world of perfection, but There's this, again, this idea of don't wait.
00:16:22
Speaker
You can move in the general direction. You can get traction. You can get momentum. And then as additional information becomes available, you quickly course correct and you will get to the perfect destination a lot faster.
00:16:38
Speaker
I feel like this conversation that we're having right now really relates to the next question that I was going to ask, which is how do you build trust in a team so choices and responses can happen quickly? Do you have anything else you'd like to add on this topic?
00:16:50
Speaker
ah Yeah, no, it's it's mostly about the culture, as I talked about earlier, which is you have to encourage people through your words that you use, the phrases you use, the environment, which allows them to have autonomy.
00:17:04
Speaker
and ah and you let them execute and and you encourage them. You say, don't wait. You're closest to the issue. You know the information. Don't wait for me.
00:17:15
Speaker
Move forward. You can catch me up later. And that's the way that I interact with all of my leaders. Let's talk about the rule of engagement, which is to have a championship team, the coach has to call the plays in person, not with an email.
The Impact of Face-to-Face Engagement
00:17:34
Speaker
This rule seems directly tied to communication. How does direct engagement shape team culture? No, this is something that has changed dramatically just in the last couple of decades with technology.
00:17:48
Speaker
i You know, wasn't that long ago when people didn't have cell phones, they didn't have texting, you were carrying around MCI calling card with pay phones if you wanted to talk to someone.
00:18:01
Speaker
And the advent of technology technology, not only the the bandwidth and the capability, but the speed at which things happen, has encouraged people to not take the time to go interact face to face like I talked about earlier.
00:18:19
Speaker
And that's a very slippery slope because um you need to engage with people face to face. And you know like like this rule you know says, you don't want to be a person that just sits alone and is somewhere in an office or a cube and tries to lead a team of people through emails.
00:18:40
Speaker
It's just not the same. You have to take time to go see people face to face in their own environment. And when you do that, you're more likely to create better understanding.
00:18:55
Speaker
And you're more likely to create action now on their part instead of later. You know, believe me, if I get 200 emails a day, it takes me a while to work through those.
00:19:06
Speaker
But if someone comes and talks to me face to face, I know exactly what they need and I'm more likely to go do something about it right now. versus an email that I may not get to for a couple of weeks.
00:19:19
Speaker
And that's the reason that as a leader, I spend 200 days a year on an airplane going somewhere. i don't summon people to me as a leader.
00:19:31
Speaker
I go to them. I go where they work. I look at what they're doing. I'm interested in what they're doing. i can ask questions about what they're doing that are much more meaningful if I'm standing right there next to them and we're looking at something together as opposed to trying to interact with someone through you know through email or text.
00:19:51
Speaker
um there are times when email and text are are good. If you need some information transmitted quickly, if you need some information, you're dealing with someone in a different time zone overnight, um things like that are fine.
00:20:06
Speaker
But by and large, when you're leading a group of people, you have to be present with them physically if you really want to drive understanding and action.
Purposeful Direction in Business and Career
00:20:17
Speaker
Your rule of focus is perhaps my favorite. It is don't confuse activity with accomplishment. Run the business on purpose. This is simple, but it's key.
00:20:30
Speaker
And you'd be surprised how often people get in complicated situations like every day and in the business world, you have many forces that are being applied towards you.
00:20:41
Speaker
You have many things coming at you that are you know looking for decisions and resolution. And if you're not careful, the business will choose its own course, like um like currents in an ocean.
00:20:56
Speaker
They will push you a certain way, unless you happen to have an engine and a rudder that you can steer a particular direction. And so this is the idea of don't let the business happen.
00:21:10
Speaker
You have to actually move the business ah in a direction purposefully. So think ahead of time, what is it you're trying to accomplish?
00:21:21
Speaker
And then you can align all of your activities towards that priority. And you don't just allow the business to wander aimlessly.
00:21:33
Speaker
you know People do this with their careers also, I've seen, is they don't sit down and think five years, 10 years, 15 years, Where do I want to be?
00:21:44
Speaker
And what skill sets do I need to develop in order to get to that position? And they just, you know, get focused on what they're doing. They try and do a good job and they hope that somehow the right opportunity will be presented to them that will lead them in the direction that they ultimately want to go.
00:22:04
Speaker
Well, that rarely happens. And if you know if if I took every position that was offered to me over the last 35 years, I would have gone probably 14 different directions.
00:22:15
Speaker
So it's important, not only in business, but also in your professional career, that you you purposefully make decisions about where you're going to spend your time so that it will get you to the position you're trying to get to. And don't leave that up to chance because chance will not get you where you want to go.
00:22:40
Speaker
Let's discuss your rule of time management, which is spend most of your time and attention on the few people who are willing to lead change, even though they are the ones who rarely ask for it, because they will accomplish more than all the others combined.
Encouraging Positive Team Behavior
00:22:58
Speaker
I feel like time management is probably one of the biggest growing pains that students have to go through during their education. And in the Woodrow School, we do a lot of team-based ah assignments because when you're an engineer, you're going to work in teams.
00:23:16
Speaker
So how did this rule of time management come about? You know, a long time ago when I was in engineering school, the the idea of working in teams well was not really, there was no focus on that.
00:23:31
Speaker
It wasn't until I actually, you know, moved into the business world where I realized that you don't really do anything yourself. Pretty much everything you do is with other people in a team, so team dynamics are in fact quite important, and you need to understand how to ah influence people. People like to be, they they like to see progress. They like to be successful.
00:23:58
Speaker
It's important if you want to encourage people to make progress and focus on the right things that you give them that feedback. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, you only always give Pollyannish, you know, feedback, everything's great.
00:24:16
Speaker
But what happens naturally is you tend not to do that. You tend to focus on the things that are not going well. And you just by default, you give all your time and attention to where the problems are in the business.
00:24:32
Speaker
And you have to consciously remind yourself, hey, there's a lot of stuff that's going right. in the business and if i want those things to continue to go right i need to encourage that behavior otherwise it'll go away and it's the right things that have made you successful not the wrong things so you have to just make sure that you have established venues to recognize people for doing the right things in the right order.
00:25:05
Speaker
And you know, a little competition never hurts there. One of the things that that we do, I know in my company, is we have an established ah Lean and Six Sigma program for cont continuous improvement, like many companies do.
00:25:19
Speaker
and And so one of the things that that we've done is we've established a competition for that. So each quarter, all the different divisions bring forward what they think their best continuous improvement project was that they've completed.
00:25:34
Speaker
And then there's a competition and we select a winner. And then at the end of the year, we bring all the the winners together and we choose the the company level award, which which I get to present to people.
00:25:49
Speaker
And they get, you know, there's big trophy that everybody's name gets inscribed on for a permanent history. It's like the Stanley Cup or the BorgWarner trophy at Indy.
00:26:01
Speaker
Once you win that award, Your team and your name gets permanently inscribed on this and you get to keep that big trophy at your site for the next year.
00:26:12
Speaker
And then following that, you have the opportunity to win it again or it moves to another site. And you'd be surprised how a little bit of competition like that really energizes people to go win that that award because it's a public recognition of things you have done to change the business in a positive way.
00:26:35
Speaker
So that's what you're trying to encourage is you're trying to encourage those people that are the change agents to step forward. And this is one way to do it. Absolutely. In our courses, we often have our students do peer evaluations of each other whenever they work in teams.
00:26:52
Speaker
And something that I try to emphasize is that, of course, you want to give critiques where there are critiques, let people know where they can grow. But it's just as important to retain good talent. So praise people when they deserve it. Make sure that they feel seen and that they want to continue working with you in the future.
00:27:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's behavioral science. If you want to get a certain behavior that's happening, if you encourage it, then you're more likely to get that behavior to continue.
00:27:23
Speaker
And the behavior you're trying to to focus on here is a behavior of improvement, and change for positive. So I think ah just the whole idea, like I said, that the natural tendency is to just focus on all the stuff that's going wrong and, and you know, everything is bad news all the time.
00:27:44
Speaker
Look, you're going to have things that go wrong and you're going to have to deal with them. But there's an equal number of things that are going right in the business. And if you want to encourage that behavior to continue, then you have to find venues or you have to create venues to recognize people.
00:28:01
Speaker
And it doesn't take much to, you know, to go say thank you to someone or, you know, what I found really sticks with people. pick up a pen and a piece of paper and write a thank you note to someone.
00:28:13
Speaker
I have found people, this is something nobody ever does anymore, right? You just send an email and and it's done. I've had people come back to me 10 years later and show me a note that I hand wrote to them 10 years earlier, thanking them for something, and they kept that note.
00:28:32
Speaker
Unbelievable how powerful it can be just to take time to thank someone like that. Absolutely. The human element matters. I mean, here you are very successful in the world of both engineering and business, which we sometimes think is so separate from humanities and and human elements. But these are both really quintessentially human because you're dealing with human problems and other humans to make solutions.
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right. Look, but human behavior, behavioral science applies whether you're an accountant or an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer. You know, people still have the same fundamental operating wiring.
00:29:14
Speaker
Let's discuss one more rule, the rule of responsibility. You write, never pursue money or title in your job. Instead, pursue increased responsibility, then money and title will find you.
Seeking Responsibility Over Titles
00:29:28
Speaker
My question is, how can engineers communicate their value and readiness for greater responsibility without focusing on these titles or accolades? Yeah, people tend to focus on on title and money, right? and and a lot of times this goes back to the random walk through your career.
00:29:48
Speaker
And a lot of people will just take a job because it's a little more money or because they get a bigger title. But yet that job really isn't leading them where they want to go.
00:30:00
Speaker
Prime example of that, early in my career, I was given ah two job offers within a big company I was working for. At the time, the company was AT&T.
00:30:12
Speaker
And one of the jobs was to work on a marketing system that AT&T held that was proprietary to AT&T. Had a lot of information in a big database, and they would use it for developing programs.
00:30:26
Speaker
It was a nice job as a promotion. It was in the headquarters building and, you know, it was ah glamorous and glitzy. And I had another job offer which within AT&T, which was to go out into the field and manage a call center.
00:30:40
Speaker
And that was not quite as glamorous and glitzy, but I was going to be managing a dozen people. And I chose to go do the call center role. And I had a lot of my friends look to me and said, wow, why wouldn't you go do the headquarters job and you know sit in the nice office and deal with all the senior executives?
00:31:01
Speaker
And I said, because the skill set that I'm going to get managing a dozen people is a skill set that is transferable to any industry out there.
00:31:14
Speaker
If I learn the marketing system and all the proprietary ins and outs that AT&T uses, who is that good to other than AT&T? And the answer is no one.
00:31:25
Speaker
So even though it seemed like you know it was the higher paying job, it wasn't leading me in the direction that I ultimately wanted to go, which was I knew that I wanted to lead a large organization.
00:31:39
Speaker
And in order to do that, people management skills would be required. So I took the job that that had the lower title and the less pay because I got a specific skill set out of that experience that I knew was important to lead me in the direction that I was going. So again,
00:31:58
Speaker
It was a conscious, purposeful decision. So you don't want to make decisions just on ah you know title or money, because you'll get lots of opportunities along the way to do that.
00:32:11
Speaker
You really want to think carefully about what is the level of responsibility that I'm going to be given in a different job. And if you pursue responsibility and you do it well, then the money in the title will come find you.
00:32:27
Speaker
So it's important that you consciously think about this. Now, as you're trying to move through your career, one of the things that that I found to be very powerful is...
00:32:41
Speaker
You know, the most valuable team member for me over the years has been someone that comes to me and says, hey, is there something you're working on that I can take off your plate?
00:32:54
Speaker
Nobody ever asks you that. All people do is they come to you and they put stuff on your plate for you to, you know problems for you to solve for them. It's rare that someone comes to you and says, is there something I can take off your plate?
00:33:08
Speaker
And if you say that to your manager, that's different from saying, hey, teach me your job. because they will see that as a burden.
00:33:19
Speaker
But if you say, is there something I can take off your plate? They'll see that as a help. And by the way, they will be transitioning something to you that will expand your level of responsibility.
00:33:35
Speaker
and it'll be necessary for them to help you figure out how to do that. So indirectly, ah you'll get benefit ah by doing this and you'll expand your scope of knowledge and they will be tied to helping you be successful.
00:33:51
Speaker
So I think that's one of the recommendations I was i would have is ah is you're seeking to expand your level of responsibility go to your manager, your leader, and offer, is there something I can take off your plate?
00:34:04
Speaker
Think about all the things you're working on. Is there something that I can take off your plate? And the answer will always be yes. Speaking of skills and habits, many of our listeners are engineering students or recent grads.
00:34:18
Speaker
How can they start developing leadership habits early?
Concise Communication for Engineers
00:34:22
Speaker
I think the most important thing for engineers to learn how to do is to learn how to communicate important elements concisely.
00:34:34
Speaker
The reason for that is because fundamentally there are reasons that people pursue engineering and technical degrees. And the reason, like my own experience, is that these are people that are fundamentally curious about how things work and why things work the way that they do.
00:34:56
Speaker
And once you study it and you understand the the theory and the mathematics behind it, You want everybody else to understand it too, like you do, because it's really cool when you understand why something works that's not intuitively obvious, like a gyroscope, right? we used to play with these as a kid.
00:35:16
Speaker
How in the world does this this thing stand up straight? And when you understand that, you want to explain that to other people. The problem is not everybody wants to understand it the way that you do.
00:35:27
Speaker
So you have to be concise in how you communicate things to people. And this becomes problematic in a business, whether you're communicating up or down.
00:35:38
Speaker
You have to understand the tolerance and the appetite that people have for all of the details. And there are some people that will want the details and you should be prepared to give it to them, but you want to draw that question.
00:35:54
Speaker
Don't just automatically assume that everybody wants the entire owner's manual here. You have to you know tell them the important stuff and then see if they want to go deeper. that's That is the hardest lesson for engineers to learn because you want to explain why things work because it's really interesting.
00:36:14
Speaker
That really reminds me of this one sentence that we have with the web communication program here that we really try to teach students, which is that the technical communicators job is to transfer information to their audience with the smallest cognitive load while still remaining trustworthy and actionable.
00:36:32
Speaker
And it's the audience who gets to decide what's trustworthy. what's actionable, and what cognitive load threshold they're willing to accept. And so you really have to understand your audience in order to be able to make those decisions.
00:36:46
Speaker
That's exactly right. That's a more complete description of what I'm trying to get across here, which is not everybody wants to understand how the watch works. And if you know who you're talking to and you pay attention to the signals that people will send, you know whether or not you are talking past their point of interest.
00:37:11
Speaker
Maybe this relates to the next question that I was going to ask, which is, what's a common mistake you see your early career engineers make? It's exactly that. Engineers tend to ah not pay attention to the audience and they try to explain the entire soup to nuts situation that you're dealing with here. So what you need to do is you got to think about whether you're communicating up or down in the organization. If you're communicating to your boss or you're communicating to the CEO,
00:37:43
Speaker
You've got to understand that these people have so many things that they're thinking about that their attention span is very short. So you better talk to those folks in bullets, not paragraphs, as I said before.
00:37:57
Speaker
ah So you've got to learn to be very concise. When you're talking to your team, you have to be careful that you don't over talk what it is you trying to explain to them because if you get too technical and get too broad in the communication, what happens is they won't remember And secondly, they lose focus because they forget the priority.
00:38:23
Speaker
If you remind people, look, here's the three things we're trying to do. Number one, number two, number three. Chances are they'll remember one, two, three. But if you talk for 45 minutes with lots of paragraphs and expect them to somehow fish out of all of that dialogue the three things that you want them to remember, it's unlikely that they will.
00:38:44
Speaker
So make sure that you understand your audience and you learn how to be concise and you learn how to speak in bullet points about the imperatives, not everything.
00:38:56
Speaker
At the heart of the job of an engineer is really informing decision makers. So you need to know what kind of decisions this particular audience needs to make so that you can select the right information. 100% agree.
00:39:12
Speaker
If you had to choose one rule that resonates most today, which one would it be?
Making Thoughtful Choices
00:39:17
Speaker
The one that's most important is the one at the top of the list, which is the number one, the rule of choice.
00:39:25
Speaker
And you know that rule states that um you need to make choices now that you're going to be happy with also in the future.
00:39:35
Speaker
You have to think ahead. Don't always make a choice that just seems to be the obvious choice in the moment. Because when you're making choices, many times you're setting precedent.
00:39:49
Speaker
And five years from now, you'll look back at that and say, oh, that was the wrong choice. I didn't think that through too well. So I think it's really important that as you think through choices, that you think about the long-term ramifications and imagine yourself three or four or five years down the road, and you look at that decision, is it still going to be the right decision?
00:40:16
Speaker
Now, i'll give you an example of that. We had a situation one time a few years ago in my company where there was a fire in one of our buildings. And as a result of the fire, it destroyed part of the structure of the building.
00:40:30
Speaker
And that building was going to be out of commission for about eight months, a long time before we could get all the appropriate equipment reordered and installed. Well, we had a bunch of people in that building.
00:40:42
Speaker
And those people suddenly were, you know, without work. And the immediate pressure that I got from my board and from other people is, well, why don't you just lay those people off? You're not going to need them for almost a year. So why don't you lay them off, get rid of that cost.
00:40:59
Speaker
Well, I chose not to do that. At the time, that and very short-sighted, that would have been the obvious choice. You're running a business. You're trying to make money. You don't want to carry people that you don't necessarily have work for them to do.
00:41:11
Speaker
So eliminate that cost because you have no revenue coming in to offset that cost as a result of the building closure. I chose not to do that. I chose to keep the people because the thought was, my thought was that, first of all, the skill sets that those people have are difficult to replace.
00:41:31
Speaker
It takes many months to train people to have the certifications they require to do the kind of work that was happening at that site. And by the way, we had other areas in the business that were short on people and manpower.
00:41:46
Speaker
So what we chose to do was we gave those people the option of, would you, for some period of time, would you go work at another location and maybe even do a little different role until we can get the building reopened?
00:42:01
Speaker
Well, they all chose to do that. And in retrospect, you know looking back on that five years later, that was exactly the right decision because it allowed us as a company to retain several hundred people that had unique skill sets that if we had laid them off, they would have found work in some other company and we would have not had access to them then when we needed it.
00:42:28
Speaker
So good case in point. Think ahead about choices you're making that may just seem to be the right thing in the moment But you got to think down the road, couple of years down the road, are you going to look at that and say, yeah, that was the right decision? are you going to say, no, that was pretty short sighted?
00:42:47
Speaker
Make decisions under the assumption that you're going to have to live with the result of those decisions. And if you ask yourself that question, you may, in fact, make a different decision.
00:42:59
Speaker
Wow, that's a great story. Can you give us one final piece of advice? What's one thing you wish every engineer understood about communication and leadership?
The Importance of Memorable Communication
00:43:11
Speaker
One thing above all I would say is it's not enough for people to simply understand you when you're trying to communicate something.
00:43:21
Speaker
You must communicate it in a way that they will remember it. Russ, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for sharing your 10 rules of technical leadership.
00:43:33
Speaker
I'm glad I got to connect with another Woodruff alumnus. It was great having you here. And thank you to our listeners for being here as well. Thank you, Jill. It was my pleasure. I really enjoyed the opportunity to share things with other folks.
00:43:47
Speaker
And go Jackets. Go Jackets.