“That’s pretty good leadership insight from an engineer.” Although my colleague wrongly reduced all engineers to some cast of non-leaders, I was more offended by this person’s idea that leadership insight has any right or wrong source. In fact, a curious person can and should derive leadership lessons from everywhere. Books of all types, experiences of all kind, and people from all walks of life make great teachers. I personally try to make a habit of learning this way. From an engineer‽ Provoked, I rattled off a series of leadership lessons I thought he could learn from an engineer. He quickly withdrew his comment and then said I should share them.
At the risk of being too technical, I now present a few Engineering Leadership Lessons:
[1] Concrete things take time. Things that must endure and things we will rely on are far more complex and take a lot more time to prepare than you can imagine. Take a concrete foundation, for example: we see the concrete itself in its final form and many of us can envision the concrete trucks pumping their contents into place. Few people know that most of the effort for these massive structures goes into excavating the site, placing the forms, and tying the steel reinforcement bars together, all BEFORE the first concrete truck arrives. The resulting monolith of concrete hides all this preparation and complexity, if it even exists above ground at all. The engineering leader asks if are you putting enough time into preparing for your complex endeavors? Are you paying as much attention to the hidden but foundational aspects of your organization? If not, like concrete, it may be a mistake that requires a lot of work (and possibly a jackhammer) to correct.
[2] Strength can be a weakness. At its core, engineers ensure built objects will be strong enough to do their job. Some things, like the Brooklyn Bridge, are so strong and well-built that they do their job longer than expected. But strength can be a weakness too. In earthquake country, bridges must also be designed to move and absorb the shaking energy. The technical term for this is ductility but, in short, it means flexibility that allows a structure to move a little. Engineers focused on using strength alone to withstand earthquake forces can end up with strong but rigid structures that fight movement. This can lead to cracks and failures when the unexpected strikes. The engineering leader asks if you are building enough flexibility into your organization to absorb the unexpected? Are you trying to solve problems with more money and stronger controls when empowering your team to flex a little may be a better approach? If not, your rigid teams, even if strong, may be where you crack.
[3] Tension and Compression have their place. If you consider the amazing structures in the world, you will not be surprised to know they are complex, but deliberate, things. Thousands and millions of elements working in different ways, but in concert, to perform as designed. Among the many elements, some are pulled in tension while others are squeezed in compression. The large suspension cables on great bridges are under immense tension while the solid foundations beneath are compressed by the weight of all that is above them. These forces drive engineers to select materials and designs that properly account for tension and compression. The engineering leader asks if you are properly employing the forces of tension and compression in your organization? Do you fear tension between people or do you allow it to hold up your great work? Are you compressing the right timelines and appropriately? If not, you may be missing an opportunity to use tactics more deliberately to suite the needs of your people and organization.
[4] Materials, and people, do not always react to things in the same way. Engineers know that two different materials will react differently to the same load or force. The technical term for the reaction is known as strain. One material may stretch more (showing more strain) and a stiffer materials will show less strain, even as they both carry the same load. Materials are selected for certain uses according to their ability to be either flexible or stiff. This may seem like common sense but the same concept is often lost on managers of different people and teams. The engineering leader asks if you consider the different ways people in your organization react to similar workloads? Do you over-strain the few flexible people you have when your larger organization needs to adapt and change priorities quickly? Do you properly employ your stiff, iron-willed people in roles where you need to maintain tighter control? If not, a different workload distribution or workforce mode more appropriate to your needs.
[5] You can, and should, plan for failure. Design calculations and planning are the most painstaking part of engineering. Each use of a structure is considered and each individual piece is sized to do a job safely over its lifetime. But not all pieces are created equal. One design tenant known as “strong column, weak beam” requires engineers to ensure, should the worst happen, that the beams holding a floor fail before the columns holding the beams. This acknowledges that much more depends on columns than beams. The floors should ideally sag and bend long before a column breaks because this order of events allows people to take action to prevent collapse, or escape a building if not. The engineering leader asks if you are planning and prioritizing parts of your organization to fail first so that critical pieces survive? Do you know the signs of failure in weak-by-design pieces so you can use them as leading indicators to take action? If not, your first indication of failure may be in a critical team that many people depend on.
[6] Risk is inherent, and dependent on internal and external factors. Engineers forecast various external forces, like wind, snow, earthquake, and occupancy, and then design materials and internal elements to withstand those forces. A lot of academic work goes into understanding the external forces and internal material capacities, but significant variable and unknown factors persist. As a result, safety buffers are included to protect against these unknown and variable factors. These buffers account for not only the external and internal variables, but also for a declared timeframe since longer-use structures are more likely to see extraordinary. It is one of the most overt and quantified examples of risk management around. The engineering leader asks if your risk management plan is in place and rigorous? Does it account for internal and external factors? If your plans are long term, are you considering long-term risks? If not, you may have more unknown and variable factors to consider than you know.
[7] Beware of the edge you think you can see. Many organizations and societies think that any problem can be solved through data and analysis. Traffic flow or taxes or staffing are just equations to be optimized. This is known as convergent thinking. Engineering is generally convergent: understand the forces and design a structure to meet the need, with some buffer. One reason many old structures serve for so long is because lacking modern analysis tools they were built with large buffers. The problem today is that convergent thinking is wielded for profit. We think we can save costs and safely engineer with less buffer, getting closer to the edge without (hopefully) going over. But as this edge appears clearer on paper, we are losing real extra capacity that historically absorbed impacts from growth, exceptional events, and other unknowns we could not foresee. Convergent thinking misleads us because complex structures, organizations, and societies have so many variables and unknowns that a buffer from the edge is always wise. The engineering leader asks if you are relying too heavily on data and convergent thinking to solve complex problems? Are you (over) confident that you have considered all future unknowns and variables? If so, you may be closer to going over the edge than you realize.
[8] Transform, don’t deform, your organization. When a material like steel carries weight, it stretches slightly. When the weight is removed, it returns to its original shape. For larger weight, either more steel is needed to carry it, or the existing steel will yield, over-stretch and deform. Even if the weight is removed, that deformation becomes permanent and the original shape is never recovered. In a way, organizations behave similarly. When an organization sees increased workload it can stretch slightly to meet the need. When the workload gets large enough, these organizations must change. They transform to add capacity but many also deform by adding new irrecoverable executives or offices. This is a bureaucratic yield or deformation. When the workload is reduced, these deformations, these gained executives or new offices, often still remain. The engineering leader asks if you seek to add the right working capacity when your organization must change to avoid over-stretching? Do you recognize that new executive positions and new offices are deformation which are hard to eliminate if headcount must be reduced in the future? If not, you are permanently deforming your organization and missing an opportunity to transform it into the shape it needs to succeed.~
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