How the Bad Leadership Cycle in Engineering is Burning Out Engineers and Stifling Innovation

Are you familiar with the bad leadership cycle in engineering?

Well, it's creating huge issues throughout the industry and nobody's talking about which is why I'm gonna use this episode to explain what it is, how it's impacting your career, and what you can do about it.

Stay tuned.

Balancing Technical Skills and People Skills in Engineering

I want to share my thoughts on something that's been bothering me in engineering. This bad leadership cycle in engineering, and I'll explain what that is in a minute. 

My name is Doug Howard and I'm a leadership coach for engineers. I specialize in helping engineers create more impact throughout your organization by showing you how to master the science of people skills and leveraging influence and relationships.

At the end of the day, your impact as an engineer is not just limited by your technical skills and technical knowledge. It's really limited by your ability to understand people and motivate people and influence their decisions to work in your favor. Because the higher you climb in your career, the more likely it is that you're gonna report to someone who is not an engineer, and you're gonna need them to buy into your ideas, and you're gonna need them to believe in you and understand you, and you have to communicate your stuff in a way that compels them and resonates with them.

This topic of the bad leadership cycle in engineering, this is why I left engineering behind.

I saw it at my company, I saw it at other companies. I saw it with friends and colleagues, the companies they work for. There's a very lack of leadership in engineering, in all industries of engineering. 

The Bad Leadership Cycle in Engineering - the Domino Effect

I left because I think this is a huge problem that's really piling up. It's having a lot of domino effects, this lack of leadership. What I mean by that is, we are burning out our engineers, instead of nurturing young engineers to grow and giving them the skills and the support and the confidence they need to develop their skills and fine tune their craft and grow into senior engineers that make a bigger contribution to the company. Instead, a lot of leaders are blaming the younger engineers for the problem.

We're expecting them to just figure these things out on their own. We don't understand why they can't figure it out, so we blame them and instead of fixing the problem, we end up micromanaging them or we end up absorbing the work for them. I'll just do it myself cause it's easier to do it.

This is enabling the problem to continue. This lack of leadership just continuing down this spiral, it's leading people to quit. It's leading people to burn out. That's just one example of this. 

The other parts are there's some really toxic bosses out there who, don't support their team and don't give 'em the time of day. A direct report brings an issue to their boss, expecting them to help them and fix them and support them and figure out, how to solve it. Hey, I need this and the boss in order to be found. I don't have time for this. Let's stick to doing things the way we always have.

I call this the bad leadership cycle because it's hard to quantify, but the general idea is, an engineer gets promoted because they're a top performing engineer. So they get promoted into a team lead role or a manager role, or a supervisor role, and they don't get any of the proper training they need to lead and manage people.

It's a problem because, going from engineer to manager, that is not a promotion. That is a career switch. That is a transition. That is a career pivot because it's a completely different skills for being successful as a leader versus the skills it takes to be successful as an engineer. 

Ultimately, it all boils down to understanding people and creating trust. How do you build that trust? How do you make the other person feel empowered?

Engineers are burning out, quitting, and career pivoting 

Now, I'm gonna come back to that in a second, but I just wanna talk about this bad leadership cycle. 

People are quitting, engineers are burning out. This is creating high turnover and it's costing companies money. It's costing managers more time as well. Think about the cost of onboarding a new person.

Engineers are leaving the industry is the bottom line, because of a lack of leadership. Engineers instead of, growing and developing and evolving in their careers, we're pushing them away, because there's a lack of leadership. We're spending more time trying to put band-aids on problems versus actually fixing the problems and building our teams. There's turnover. 

Innovation is getting stifled because there's no continuity in these companies. The best ideas aren't getting heard. The best ideas aren't getting nurtured. The best ideas aren't getting to market. The best solutions aren't getting to market.

A lot of companies are doing this.

They're basically driving their talent out. They're, forcing them to measure things that don't matter. I'm an executive. Here's these KPIs that I think matter. So I need you to increase your numbers in this area.

But that's not what really makes a difference. What makes a difference is, focusing on our people and focusing on taking care of our people and making them feel heard and understood and respected, and treating them as people, which is an oversimplification, but a lot of companies aren't doing this, and they're missing the mark. My philosophy is if you value people over profit, the profit will take care of itself.

And I truly believe that. 

What's driving me nuts about this bad leadership cycle is, this is a bigger scale here, but the world has big problems right now. There is no shortage of problems to be solved in the world and we need the world's best brains solving them. But instead of attracting them to the market and taking care of them and rewarding them, we're burning them out. 

We're putting the thumb down on engineers and essentially we're pissing them off, we're getting them burnt out. They're drained, they're hating their jobs. No wonder why, we're not making progress on any of these things because people are just playing revolving doors, working for different companies.

I went through this myself. For those of you who don't know me, I was a director of engineering before that, a manager and a team lead and a supervisor. Originally I was an individual contributing engineer structural engineer, background, civil. The first four to five years of my career were really stagnant, because I was fighting against this stuff. 

I saw solutions to the company's problems, but nobody wanted to hear it. Nobody wanted to gimme the time of day. We don't have time for this. Let's stick to doing things the way we've always done them. Have you heard that before? Let me know the comments if you heard that. 

Let's just do things the way we've always done them before and it would just frustrate me so much. 

Transition from Engineer to Manager - Communication Challenges

Eventually I got into a leadership role, then it was a different animal. It was communicating to executives, getting them to understand what the real problems were because they're so far removed. 

I wanted to blame my boss. I wanted to blame the leader. I wanted to blame the executive. I wanted to blame the company. But honestly, Once I got into a management role, what I realized was, the real problem was with me. 

I was just like most engineers at this point in my career. I was very confident in my logic, confident in, I'm right and I was confident in the other person needs to conform to my standard. People need to do this the way I see it, or people need to do it my way. Falling on my sword here. I was like that. And I couldn't really empathize or relate to other departments that weren't technical. I couldn't relate to their perspectives. When they would bring the voice of the customer to the table for argument's sake, or when the manufacturer would bring up problems, I would just look at it like they need to work around us. We're the engineers. 

When I realized how this was limiting my ability to make impact in the company, because I wasn't able to sell my ideas to executives or to other departments to get their buy-in. When I realized how this was basically roadblocking me and creating issues, I took a look in the mirror. What am I doing wrong? Why aren't they seeing things the way I see it? To me, it seems like this is a no-brainer, this idea, this proposal. Or, if I'm seeing why something wouldn't work for the business, I'm pointing out the flaws in this. To me it seemed like so obvious, but other people didn't see it.

Where I'm going with this is it forced me to look in the mirror and just realize, okay, if I want them to buy into my ideas, if I want to create more impact, then I need to figure out how to communicate in a way that's gonna get through to them.

I need to figure out how to understand where they're coming from. I need to figure out how to get them to want to, like my ideas, how to want to hear me out, how to want to support me. That was the eyeopener for me, that led me down a different path for how I viewed what skills I needed to be developing to grow as a leader.

Before that, I always looked at it like technical skills were most important. I needed to be an expert of the technical field that I was being a leader in, which was for me, structural engineering, a little bit of overlap in software. 

But this helped me realize no, I need to understand all types of people. I need to understand the marketing team so that we're getting what we need, from other departments. I need to understand the sales team. I need to understand the project management team. I need to understand R&D. I need to understand the executive team. I need to understand other fields of engineering. We had a mechanical engineering unit and the software division and IT. We had all different competing interests too. When there was a big initiative, everyone's playing tug of war to get what they need, and for their team. That doesn't work because then no one wins.

Engineering Leaders Need Self Awareness and Self Control

I challenged myself to figure out what is the most efficient way to relate to other people and communicate in a way that gains their buy-in? 

It all boils down to first self-control and self-awareness. Having the ability to take a look in the mirror and kind of recognize what are my tendencies? What are my triggers? What are the things that make me automatically not listen to this person? Cause we all have these things. If you see someone as not credible, then honestly, you're biased. You're not gonna be able to listen to them with an open mind, and you're not gonna be willing to hear their ideas.

You kinda have to recognize your own biases first before you can lead other people and influence other people. So you have to learn how to lead yourself. That starts by just self-awareness and recognizing how does my brain think? What are the things that I pay attention to and what are the things that I'm not good at? 

And recognizing this, because usually when we meet someone who thinks differently than us, we take it as a threat. I'm talking about subconsciously here, not like we, we feel threatened, like we're gonna be attacked or anything. But, if someone brings a new way of thinking to something, that's different than your way of thinking, it's very natural for you to just automatically feel challenged by that person's idea. Why are they bringing up a contrarian idea that's not on board with my way of thinking? 

So this is just one example of what I'm getting at. We all have these triggers that kind of change us out of logical mode into emotional mode. The significance of that is that, you're no longer in the driver's seat when you're in emotional mode and you're no longer being intentional or strategic with your actions, with how you're presenting yourself to people.

It took me a long time to figure this out and realize this. As engineers, we are at our best when we're coming from a place of logic, when we're coming from a place of reason, when we're dealing with rules and facts and objective logic and things that are black and white. We're not really comfortable in dealing with emotions, and that could be our emotions or other people's emotions. If you're in an emotional conversation with someone, a direct report or something's getting heated, we get really uncomfortable with that. That fight or flight syndrome starts to kick in. I can go on and on about this, but my point is, we're not at our best when we're emotional but we all have emotional triggers that we're not aware of. 

We all have these things that kind of set us off. It could be that particular person. It could be when this particular topic is brought up. It could be when you're hangry because you didn't eat a snack earlier. Recognizing these things is the first step to leading yourself, because then you can be aware and have that initial pause of, okay, wait, I know I'm like this, I'm not gonna react to that feeling. I'm not gonna let myself be biased here. I'm gonna challenge myself to be open-minded. 

Another example is, if, you have a tendency to be a bad listener, right? You have a tendency to lose focus when you're talking to someone, then, you can intentionally, tell yourself before you're talking to someone. Okay, I know I'm bad at listening, I'm gonna try harder to listen to this person because I want to X, Y, Z. What's the reason behind why you wanna listen to this person? My point is, it's all about being intentional with your actions. 

Empathy, Influence, and Driving Impact as an Engineering Manager

The next thing I learned was, you know how to understand other people. We all have different ways of thinking, think of your brain like it's a long, if this, then that statement for how we perceive the world and how we take in information. Some people are more sensory, they'll notice the senses. They're very good at noticing details. They're very responsive to immediate things. They're very present. Other people are more imaginative, which is the complete opposite. Other people are more creative, other people are thinking about future possibilities versus the present. Someone like that doesn't notice as many details in the present. So that's why they miss things that seem obvious to you or vice versa. If you're creative and thinking about future possibilities, you're gonna be good at seeing, potential roadblocks for an idea where the other person won't be able to see that. 

These are high level examples of how people think differently, but I'm sharing this context because this is where I used to get caught up and stuck earlier in my career. I would see it as, this person doesn't get it. This person's stupid. This person doesn't understand what it takes. What it really boiled down to is, someone's gotta make the first move to understand the other person.

If you want to create more impact in your role as a leader, and if you want to advance in your career, and if you wanna have a bigger impact on your team, and if you wanna get your team to want to take on accountability for improving their performance, just think about it. 

Think about all the things you want from other people, as a leader. I need this other team to do this. I need my direct report to do that. I need my boss to do this. Don't put the action on them. Think about how you can take accountability for getting them to want to do that. Because when you blame them, now you feel like you can't control it and you become passive about it, and then you just let the problem continue.

But believe me when I say this, and a lot of engineers get skeptical on this, so I'm just gonna lay it out. Anyone can be influenced to do anything. Any single person in the world can be influenced, do anything, and it's simply a matter of understanding what motivates that person? How does that person think? What's important to them? And these are all things you can learn very systematically, there's very simple ways. Cuz at the top level, all humans are the same. We eat, sleep, and breathe, right? We need those things to live. 

At psychological level, we're all the same too. We all have these core programming language will just say, that drives our behaviors. For example we don't self-inflict pain. We avoid pain and we seek pleasure as one example. So we all have these top level things that keep us, alike.

You can use this understanding of human psychology to meet every individual where we're alike, and find common ground, and then work down to connect with the individuals that you get them to open up to you and tell them what do they want. A lot of times people are willing to tell you what they want and need and once they do, now you can use that as a tool for influencing them, for motivating them, for inspiring them to take action or convincing them to buy into your idea or elevate you or reward you with the promotion or, give you the permission to add more people to your team, whatever you need.

Instead of playing tug of war with people, think of it like gravity. How do you use gravity in your favor? It's a lot more effort to fight against gravity and roll a thousand pound ball uphill. But if you push a thousand pound ball at the top of the hill, it goes downhill on its own.

That's what influence is, it's how do you create momentum by understanding other people and getting them to do things that work in their favor and yours. You're creating a mutual win. This is a skill that doesn't come natural to most engineers. Quite frankly, and it's because of how our brains are wired.

If you're an engineering leader who wants to learn how you can develop these skills, cause these skills are all learnable. If you're an engineer who's interested in increasing your impact by learning how to master the science of people skills, then reach out to me because this is how I help engineers.

I help engineers connect the dots and basically combine IQ with EQ to increase your impact on all the people you're reaching. This, these are skills that work in every area of your life, not just at work, but also, with your wife or your husband or your kids or your friend.

Real Life Example of Influencing People

Just the other day what happened? This is a small example, but it just shows you how you can use these things when they become automatic. You can use these just to create little benefits, but I was at a networking event, an ASCE networking event.

I was going stag. My wife was at home, but she wanted me to bring her some food back. So I was banking on that. And I live out in the country, so there's not like tons of takeout options, between where I was and the hour long drive home. This place I was at a barbecue restaurant. Very nice, brisket and pulled pork and things like that.

So she wanted me to bring dinner home and it's eight o'clock, I'm leaving. I order food, and they tell me, oh no, we don't do takeout. They don't do takeout. I'm just like, okay, great. What am I supposed to do? 

So I used my people skills to get them to do takeout for me. Cause they didn't give in right away. Oh, I'll pay a little extra. No, I'm sorry. We don't do that. 

I'll tell you what I did. I appealed to the person's nobler motive. I think people are inherently good and they inherently want to do good things for each other and support each other and help each other.

So what I did was the lady that was waiting on me, I just told her, oh man, that sucks. I understand though. You got your systems and I don't wanna make you break your systems just for me. You guys are really busy tonight. It's just a shame because my wife was really looking forward to trying this food, and we live an hour away and we've been looking for some great barbecue food lately. We haven't found any restaurants by our house. She was really excited to try this place because then we were gonna probably come back again and dine in next time.

I won't get into all the human psychology there, but basically I gave her a reason to wanna help me. Oh, this could be another customer for us, or, oh, I don't want his wife to be hungry. I care about that. I can relate. I've been at home waiting for my husband to bring me food and I, that would suck if that didn't happen.

So I gave her skin in the game to reconsider and sure enough, she did. She, just used the doggy bag stuff they have to help you take leftovers home and package the food for me at no extra cost. It doesn't sound like a big win, but honestly it was just one or two extra sentences that came automatically to get that deal. 

You can use this in every area of your life. But I digress. I'm not here to tell you about how to get, takeout, negotiated. I'm here to tell you how to use these skills to increase your impact as a leader at every level of your organization, because all people can be influenced to do anything.

That goes for your boss. That goes for other teams, cross-functional teams. That goes for your team. That goes for, interviewing and networking and creating opportunities. That goes for, every area of your personal life as well. If you're an engineer that struggles with these skills, and if you realize this is holding you back from, scaling up in your role or building a better relationship with your boss, or if you realize that you're spending a lot of time, more time than you should, doing work that you shouldn't have to. Doing work for your team or, cleaning up and picking up the slack for other people. All of these things can be solved by people skills and learning how to influence and learning how to leverage influence as a tool to create efficiencies in your work and in your team's work.

But if you've been watching thank you. I appreciate time and feel free to connect with me too, even if you're not looking to improve these skills. I'd be happy to hear from you and just kinda hear, what are you struggling with as an engineering leader, or a tech leader, what are the biggest problems that are holding you back from being effective in your role?

If you just topics you want as well, reach out to me and let me know if there's topics you want me to cover.

All right thanks for watching and I'll see you soon. 

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