How to Succeed as a Leader: Panel Discussion Transcript

The 5 day long SAE Engineering Management Academy has been held twice a year since Dec 2013. The academy hosts a panel discussion on the 3rd day in the afternoon of this 5-day session. For the 13th edition of SAE’s Engineering Management Academy held in May 2019, the panelists were:

Jay Hutchins - Director Human Resources, Faurecia

Mike Lee - Vice President, Global Commercial Excellence, SRG Global

Michael Schulte - Director Product Engineering - American Axle & Manufacturing

Raul Soto - Director/Vice President Human Resources

Moderator for panel discussion & Lead Coach for the SAE Academy: Atul Kalia

The following is a transcript of the panel discussion from the SAE Engineering Management Academy held in May 2019 capturing Q&A about what it takes to succeed as a leader.

Atul Kalia: Thank you everyone for joining us today! Our panelists today have an exceptional breadth and diversity of experience. Spanning experience across various industries: automotive as well as non-automotive, various geographical locations: Europe, North America, South America and variety of functional areas: HR, purchasing, sales and engineering. So, we are very excited and look forward to many great insights. I'll start off with requesting you to share one piece of good advice for entry to mid-level engineering managers.

Jay Hutchins: I would mention two things to really be successful with your team. One, you have to trust your team. You have to get to know them, and you have to let go of control and learn to achieve things through others. That's what is going to set you apart as a manager in your organization. You can't do the job of you're old role. When you learn how to delegate to your team you accelerate your growth as a manager.

Second, understand that managing people is an individual task. To quote, the football coach, Herm Edwards, “I'm not going to treat you all the same, but I'm going to treat you all fairly”. Managing a team is very much that. Each person has different strengths and weaknesses and needs something different from the leader - different development plan, different coaching style. So you have to adapt your style as a manager. It's not a one-size fit all approach. You really have to acknowledge the differences in your team and be able to address those differences with them on a regular, one on one basis.

Mike Lee: I would like to build on what Jay said. I learned the first lesson he mentioned about trusting your team within the first couple of weeks of my first managerial position. I remember saying to the person that reported to me, here is what we're going to do first. Then we will do this and here's what I want you to do with this. He stopped and looked at me and said, “You know, I've done this before?”. I realized, yeah, you're absolutely right. And that was that. It was just that little quick interaction that made me realize that I needed to know my team and then trust them. The second point Jay mentioned about people being different. Everyone has his or her own triggers or incentives. It's about understanding what those priorities are. In a previous job I had a really good sales team. However, the team members were totally different. One of the salespersons, would go to the corner and sulk for a while if you challenged him in a public forum. But there was another who responded really well if I challenged him in public forum. He might get mad initially. But eventually he would respond and perform better. Your goal as a manager is to know them as individuals and understand what drives them.

Michael Schulte: Well, I'm actually going to answer what appears to be a different question, but I actually think it's a relevant question.   I really want to talk about what it takes to be a good leader. And I want to turn that advice into what it takes to be a good manager. There's a quote. “You lose your way if you lose your why”. You really need to know what your mission is. What are you trying to do? You’ve got to know what your vision is. What do you want to happen? And you really need to be sure in your values. If those aren't there, you're not going to be able to be a robust leader. However, this has some consequences. It will drive you into conflict where your mission, your vision or values collide with other people's priorities. So you really can't be afraid of conflict. It's got to be the right conflict. If your mindset turns into a win-win in every situation, you will avoid conflict and you will see conflict as something bad. And it starts to corrode your mission, your values, your vision.

Raul Soto: One lesson I learned as a newbie in management role was; Don't be afraid to be challenged. Don't be afraid to feel that somebody is going to be pushing you. You don't know what you don't know. So be able to reach out to the folks that might have a better solution than you. So don't feel like you've got to be the doer or the primary person. You've got to be the consolidator. You've got to be the leader. At one of my previous employers we leveraged a mentor up program. It wasn't so much about having all the expertise flow from the top to the bottom. You know, the mentoring can actually come up from the bottom to the top. It gave us a very unique opportunity to provide feedback to the president. We were able to communicate to him, look here's some stuff that you guys were getting right, And here's some stuff, that boy, you've just missed the boat. Leaders that want to grow the organization are going to listen.

Atul Kalia: Thank you very much! The other question that came up earlier this week relates to time management. When there are a lot of tasks to do, what tips can you share that you have used and found effective to prioritize tasks?

 Raul Soto: How do you eat that elephant? One bite at a time. You've got to be able to be focused. One of things that I've done with my direct reports is, let's look at your top three issues and two of which are going to be functional specific, and then one I really want to focus on what you're doing to change your persona.

Michael Schulte: I have made it a habit to regularly - weekly or every other week, review the work related goals that I have. I mean, you can include personal goals if you want. I look at that as I prepare for the week. What are the goals? The biggest issue with some managers can be that they don't communicate as deadlines start getting missed. It’s okay if something drops down in priority and is late as long as that's a purposeful decision based on logic and is properly communicated. Also it’s crucial to meet the new established deadline and to ensure this doesn't turn into an everlasting slippage or why nothing ever gets done because we're so busy. Most difficult for most managers is figuring out what to delegate. That's a key skill that you’ve got to learn. You don't have to do everything. Not to mention that some tasks are simply not worth doing. Sorry. Sorry that you called, and that you are looking for someone to do your job. I'm not doing it.

Mike Lee: I actually like meetings because it helps me to prioritize. When I can look at my calendar and say I don't need to do that. I don't need to do that. Oh, I need to do this this. That helps to keep me focused.

Jay Hutchins: Eisenhower Matrix is one tool I have used. It’s a 2x2 matrix. Low urgency. Hi urgency. Low importance. High importance. Eliminate the low urgency low importance tasks from your calendar. Take care of the urgent and important immediately. Make sure important but not urgent tasks are not ignored. Then decide which ones of the urgent but not important tasks deserve your attention. Make sure your teams objectives are aligned to the organization.

To elaborate on the idea of delegation, it's not just about delegating tasks. What you have to understand is that there are levels of delegation. There could be a task that is as simple as, go gather this information for me and then bring it back. That's the first level delegation. That means that person's not going to make a single decision. Then there's the highest level of delegation, which is I'm going to give this to you, and you don't have to tell me another thing about it.  If I say, here's the project. You don't have to tell me another thing about it, and they're not ready to do that. What happens? They freak out. They're full of frustration. They don't know how to start the project. They may be too embarrassed to ask. So, making sure that when you're delegating, you're talking to them about what they need to do. I might start you with go gather this information. The next one might be go gather this information give me your recommendations, then we're going to talk about it. The next one might be, give me a recommendation. I might just approve and say yes, go ahead. And by the end, I might say, okay, now you're going to go manage that project from now on. You don't have to report out to me because I trust you. You know how to manage that project. So those levels, of delegation are really important. It's not just throwing it to somebody and say, OK, go do this. They've got to understand the whole scope of the project. What the deliverables are what their role is in the decision-making process and what they need to check with you on. So making sure that you follow that is really important in that delegation step. Being an effective delegator is going to free up time for you to manage your team and is going to increase the skill set of your team to be able to do more and more stuff. My goal with my team is that by the time I had you on my team for two years. This team needs to run itself. If you can't do that, you're not doing a good job delegating that stuff out and coaching and developing the team.

Atul Kalia: Thank you! The next question is perhaps a little bit tougher. Certainly, the follow up to this question may be even tougher. We discussed self-awareness during the Engineering Management academy and we used DiSC as an enabler for self-awareness. To know your strengths, know your weaknesses. Know your behavioral styles. Know others’ styles and build upon that.   Also, we read a lot about EQ/EI these days. I would like to hear about your personal experience. (1) What do you think about self-awareness - emotional intelligence or EQ, and it's importance? Or do you think it's not a practical notion? Is it just a buzzword? (2) We come across many leaders and, I'm sure you've seen such leaders in different organizations and different employers, who are not self-aware at all and yet they are doing very well professionally. They are a senior or executive level leader. So that's the tough part of the question - how do you reconcile with this? Success despite lack of self-awareness?

Jay Hutchins: There are 3 things that I really try to focus on for myself, and I look for in others. One is a strong sense of humility, the idea that you don't have all the answers. Also, being able to accept that in general, and being willing to listen. Two, is curiosity. That you're always curious and open to learning new things and three that you have some learning agility so that you can learn those things and then apply to the situation that you're in. So for me, those are kind of the three things that I'm really looking for and trying to practice myself.

I think we have all seen managers who maybe classified as competent jerks, right? They're really good at something. But there are a lot of casualties along the way. They are walking over people. There may be a little bit toxic in the organization. That really requires an interjection from the manager to sit down with that employee and say, We need to talk about some behaviors. Yes, you're great subject matter expert. Yes, you're really good at getting the technical parts of your job done, but your behavior in this organization is (a) hurting your career. (b) It's causing too much collateral damage inside the organization. And if it doesn't get corrected, you're not going anywhere in this company. Uh, you're going to have problems managing your activities. When you see those behaviors, you have to address those behaviors quickly and decisively with those people to say this is what you're doing well, this is what you're not doing well, and this has to be corrected and it's not a negotiable thing. You can't behave this way in the meeting. You can't treat people this way. It's got to be addressed because those kind of people would be very toxic in an organization, and especially when they're leading others, because the people below them in the organization look at that and say, Oh, I need to act like that If I want to be successful in this organization, that's how you get to that level is you step on people and nothing is going to kill a culture inside the organization faster than that type of behavior. But you really have to make sure that you're addressing it. If you see it in your teams, you need to ask others for feedback on your people, work with them in a different way because they might show you the best them when they're in front of you in meetings and whatever, and they might be doing something else when they're in meetings with other people or in one on one interaction. So gather as much information as you can from the people that they interact with to identify areas where they need to grow and develop.

Michael Schulte: Emotional intelligence is important. It's difficult for some people, engineers probably more so than others. I want to draw the line there a little bit bigger. It ties into DiSC for understanding personalities, to learn how to motivate people and to really use it as a management tool. So awareness of the different types of styles and personality traits is key on it’s own. But the next step to actually apply that purposefully to your team and know exactly where they stand.

There could be a reverse emotional intelligence problem where someone is very aware of the personal and professional shortcomings of their team and is approaching them in a certain way to change their behavior. However, the team is completely oblivious to the shortcomings. They don't realize they have a deficiency personally and professionally, and they are misinterpreting the leader’s purposeful approach to coach and teach them as ignoring their feelings. That can be a very explosive situation. Here the leader has got to dig really deep and make the folks on the team aware of this challenge.

Mike Lee: Part of self-awareness is about sharing with your team what you know about yourself. They're trying to figure out how to work with you too. Just like you're trying to figure out how to work with them. The more they know about you and about managing you the better off they will be. You need information from them and you have discussions with them. Your sharing will make them more cognizant of the way that you receive information. So I'm usually pretty open with my team. I can say hey, according to Myers Briggs I am an INTJ. And everybody's like, you're not INTJ. I am actually quite introverted in the way I like to receive information. So if you're telling me lots of things and I'm not saying anything, that's okay. I'm just trying to learn, trying to understand and gathering inputs. This is the way that I process information. I like to share with them the things that I know about myself and the things that I'm good at, things that I don't think that I'm good at. Sometimes they disagree, and they'll tell me that. I realized that power came from showing your vulnerabilities and your team accepts that and they understand that and it gives them the license to show their vulnerabilities too.

Attendee #1: For me, it's trying to identify the different behaviors because I am new to this DiSC evaluation. So I am wondering Michael, did you have your team take the DiSC evaluation? So you could relate to them better or did you kind of like base it off of your observation only.

Michael Schulte: That's a great point. I actually had this discussion in my staff meeting just before I got here about getting everybody to take the DiSC. But DiSC is just “a” tool. It doesn't have to be “the” tool. You do need to develop an eye for human nature and to train your senses. You do need to ask for feedback. How you are perceived by others. You do need to spot how people react to you. It's just taking a step back and assessing, did he just back out of talking all together, or is he really interested in what just happened? I do very much recommend DiSC. It's eye opening for some people, maybe intuitive for some and for others it is not . You know it’s a great tool too, because it shows you how the other big four quadrants are and how to deal with them. From your perspective, you can start associating your people with those big quadrants and start to make sense of that.

Jay Hutchins: One of the things that I've done with my team is conduct regular one on one’s with them where we talk about objectives. Development action and career advice are also covered in these one on ones. One of the things that I always ask them in each one of our one on one is: what to stop, continue or change. What am I doing that I need to stop doing with you? That I need to, you know, keep doing. That I need to change the way I am doing with you. Giving them license to give you feedback on how you're leading them. and when you're doing a regular one on one and you are building, that relationship and you're sharing in their development and then asking them to share in your development that's really empowering for them. For them to say, you know, I really like it when you do this. I don't like it when you do that. It causes me to be reactive or to pull back. As you’re building that relationship and you get that feedback. And then you listen to that feedback and act on it. You're really going to build a lot of trust in that team with that individual, and it's really going to help you manage them more effectively than before

Raul Soto: I've always used that mantra - listen, learn, lead. You've got to listen first, Then I got to learn how to adapt that to both my behavior and how I can support you as an individual or as a leader. I keep reminding people it's not a fire and forget. This is a feedback loop of what we've got to keep doing. Got to keep reinforcing it day in, day out. I guarantee you if my boss comes back to me and said, Raul, I remember you asked me about this, and I'm going to help you with that, it builds instant credibility because he listened, he connected the dots, and now it's impacting me positively on a daily basis and certainly on beyond.

Michael Schulte: That's a key item. I quickly want to build on that. You have to keep repeating direction and what we need over and over. It's human nature. People don't hear you the first time. They don't hear. The same applies to you. You have to be aware and you have to keep repeating, repeating, repeating, especially values, direction. Whatever matters - keep repeating and repeating.

Jay Hutchins: This idea of nudging them a lot. It’ll get the behavior you want. Our president, tells us the same stories over and over and over and over. After three years, you finally get it in your head like, “This is important to him!” He really wants us to do this thing because I've heard this story 14 times the last three years and that reiteration that consistency of message, that constant nudging them back to the behavior you want is important.

Mike Lee: Many companies have processes built around this. HR processes and tools. However, not all companies do. Even big and well-established companies don't always have those tools in place. Don't wait for your HR team to lead you through that process. When you need help, I guarantee you that your HR business partner will help you. When you say I think I'm missing this can you help me with this process, they're going to be there. My HR business partner is someone I reach out to all the time.

Raul Soto: I have been involved in Personnel Development Committees. But then I discovered that you are only as good as some of the functional leaders that were a part of that committee.  There were some leader who were all in, had bought into the cause and were fully committed to it. There were others who were just there kind of checking the box. You could tell and as such the quality of the engagement suffered. So you can have a structure and process, but you're only as good as the people that are engaged in it. And so that's why I keep coming back to you. Don't be afraid to challenge it. You should be courageous. You should be able to be say, look, you want me to be successful with things I need to do then you need to help me with that.

Attendee #2: My question is about when your company has annual objectives like cost reduction of 2% or 5% or something. How do you rally the team, to take on that goal or objective? Because down in the working level they think that's a big challenge! I have to go get customer approval; I already know the customer's not going to approve it. How do you take that on and challenge your team?

Raul Soto: My lesson learned while I was at Allied signal, is the mantra “act on fact”. So gather your facts. Know your numbers. You know your numbers so that you can then have a constructive conversation saying this is how I can effectively impact this goal or objective, etc. Because if you don't have that, then you're not prepared for engagement.

Jay Hutchins: When you have things like that, what's the value proposition? So getting the team to really look deep at the value that you're offering to the customer. What's the value chain of that product? What's the competitive landscape? What are the best practices in the industry? So a lot of times, you can coach and persuade the customer to do something, because guess what? Their competitors are doing it. We're implementing this with other customers like you and it saves X. All of a sudden because they're all about benchmarking, trying to be the best in class in the cost category could appeal to them. Also not just looking at it from a technical piece, but going to the why. If you look at how apple approaches these things, it's the why the how? The What? You have to start with the why first. Then you can get to the how and the what. If you can capture that why. Why is this a good idea to do for you as a customer. What value is it going to bring you? That's a much more compelling argument.

Mike Lee: What kind of group do you manage?

Attendee #2: Engineering group for product development.

Mike Lee: Okay, so what's the most exciting thing that the group does? What assignments?

Attendee #2: Launching new products.

Mike Lee: And after you launch those new products, do you celebrate?

Attendee #2: Yeah.

Mike Lee: Right. So you have to do the same thing that you do with the most exciting thing. You celebrate just as hard. That is how you show how important the cost reduction objective is and how gratifying it can be to reach. Often, we don't match the incentives to the priorities. Not just monetary incentives but the intangible rewards we give people and the communication and the way we approach those priorities.

Raul Soto: I agree with you Mike. This celebration at the end is crucial to send the right message.

Michael Schulte: Involvement leads to ownership. Let them figure it out how to get to 2% reduction. Team has to be involved, that's the key. Too often I see someone sits in the corner, figures out this big grand scheme and hands it down. There are many reasons why that actually won’t work. In contrast, if the team is involved in creating the goal, they feel ownership. 

Attendee #3: I’m in the beginning stage of my management career. Looking back at your career, are there any things that you would want to maybe re-do or any additional advise to avoid surprises for those that are stepping in for the first time?

Jay Hutchins: Recognize it's going to be hard. If somebody would have told me it was going to be as hard, as it was, it would have helped prep me for it. I had a perception that perhaps it's really easy to manage. It's not. Leadership and management are a bit different. Leadership exists at every level of an organization. So, it's not hierarchical. What you need to be a leader are followers. So how can you influence people? How do you help motivate people? How do you help get things done in an organization through your connections? Managing is the task that happens when you have been given a group of people so understanding that leading and managing have some overlap. A bit of a Venn diagram. They are not the same and they are not mutually exclusive. Spending time to get to know people that you are going to manage. What compels them to want to do a good job? What gets them out of bed in the morning? Giving them opportunities to work in the environment that they find motivating, is really hard. However, creating a motivating environment is possible, through how you reward, how you recognize, how do you give out assignments, how you include them in the process. What kind of autonomy you give them, what kind of accountability you expect from them. What kind of entrepreneurship are they allowed to exhibit within their span of control? Those are things that can be very motivating for people. So getting to know what really motivates individuals will help you create the right environment for them to be successful.

Raul Soto: I did a stint for an employer where we designed some analytics. The leaders had all the tools to reward the team. But it wasn't until we gave them the dashboard that told them how they were rewarding who they were rewarding and what the frequency was until we were effective. In many cases, that visibility provided the insights. You would hear, “I didn't realize that I was focusing so much on this particular group versus the entirety. I can see why do I have a morale problem!”

Jay Hutchins: I just had the same conversation with my team today and the manager's survey that I do with them where they give me feedback, which is: what kind of rewards do you want to receive? What kind of recognition do you want receive? Are you the kind of person that wants to be on stage, at the managers’ conference? Or are you the kind of person that that would not like that and just want a nice note. Or an Amazon gift card? How do people want to be rewarded? What gives them that intrinsic satisfaction and that feeling of appreciation for what they have done? Take the time to get to understand that because it's not the same for every body.

Michael Schulte: Learn to ask the right questions. That's really your job. Don't do it for them. And don't ask the wrong questions. There are two messages in there. (1) Asking questions. (2) Making sure the right questions are asked, and that is very hard. It requires that you know what's going on, but it also immediately defers the ownership to your team. So you were there to ask the right questions. They will be engaged. They know it's them and while you are not doing it for them, your questions will guide them along the path. Why, question is usually one of the most important questions. But there are others too. Learn that. That is something that, I've been learning, and was not always clear to me.

Jay Hutchins: And ask why, more than once. Ask three or four times. First response is not the why. Let's get them to think through it. Get them to dig deeper, get them to really be able to go to the root cause.

Raul Soto: And I did learn from a VP of engineering when I was working with him on a project. He said he would always preface everything with, “Help me understand”.  So that it's a softer approach versus a blunt question that might make them defensive. The tendency of this approach is to allow what you want to do – which is to draw them in and enable the process of learning and fact finding.

Atul Kalia: Awesome! Jay, Mike, Michael and Raul thank you very much for your time and for your valuable insights. This is a very useful part of the 5 day Engineering Management academy for our attendees – the engineering leaders. The consistent feedback we get from attendees is that this interaction makes the academy very unique.   Thank you!

Atul is Founder and Partner at SN Group and provides (1) 1 on 1 career coaching, executive coaching and leadership coaching to Engineering, Business and Project Management Professionals (2) Leadership Development and Project Management workshops (3) Consulting in Project Management, Organization Development, New Product Development and Continuous Improvement