Inside an Engineer’s Head

Engineers and Star Trek

For the past fifty plus years, Paramount’s Star Trek franchise has been a favorite with technical people. After all, the various incarnations of Star Trek all have a key character who is an engineer. These engineers pull amazing, semi-scientific rabbits out of their hats and save the day with improbable, pseudo-technical feats of intelligence blended with courageous, even daring leadership.

But more than any other character, tech heads gravitate to Mr. Spock and the other Vulcans that populate the franchise. As extra-terrestrials, Vulcans are race of completely dispassionate, logical, and rational beings who suppress their raging emotional sentiments to pursue specific and coherent goals and objectives. Spock is all task—he cares (or so he says) not a whit about relationships. In one of the original series’ famous quotes, Spock says,

“I fail to comprehend your indignation, sir. I have simply made the logical deduction that you are a liar.”

Back In the Real World

Now, think about your last meeting. Did you expect everyone to behave rationally, to tell the truth, to make their points and raise issues logically and reasonably? Of course you did! And of course you were disappointed. You were disappointed because Vulcans are television make-believe.

Human beings don’t behave that way very often. The only human beings who fail to react to the moment-by-moment activities around them with emotional responses are people who have severe brain injuries—and such people also suffer from severely degraded problem-solving capability and other cognitive flaws.

You may resist your emotional side because you may perceive it as weakness. Reacting emotionally can undermine you professionally. Most of us have had the distinctly unsettling experience of reacting to something that was said in a meeting with a cruel or nasty retort, or perhaps an angry outburst. After the ugly episode has passed, you may find yourself asking “Why did I do that? It was foolish and counter-productive, but the comment just jumped out of my brain into my mouth.”

What Your Brain Is Doing

To understand this better, we need to know a few things about how the human brain functions.

First, when you speak, several areas in the brain have to work in concert. Ultimately, your brain thinks the thoughts and controls the physical mechanisms of speech (breath, lips, tongue). Using neurological scanning techniques, scientists have mapped the sequence of action in various brain centers when you speak.

Research suggests that even when speech is fairly deliberate, the mechanical control centers of the brain fire before the cognitive elements of the brain are activated. It’s actually true: you usually speak before you think.

Thinking Before Speaking Causes Problems

Ultimately, our most fundamental responses, such as the fight-or-flight response that keeps us alive in unpredictable situations, are found in an ancient part of our brain, a part that closely resembles the entire brain of a reptile. Neurophysiologists call this the “R-complex.” It is also believed to be the most primitive evolutionary part of the brain, and it includes the motor function areas—areas that control the first actions of speaking.

The fight-or-flight response is mediated, or over-ridden, by the intellectual capabilities of the human brain most of the time. But when we feel threatened or endangered, your inner-alligator rises up and before the conscious elements of thought can intervene, you blurt out an insult, an attack, or something insensitive or inflammatory.

This is more likely to happen when stress and the associated stakes of the game are high. When things really matter and the pressure is on, the inner-alligator strikes out and damages your long-term working relationship with someone else. The offended party may then find that his or her inner-alligator also strikes out. If neither one of you responds with flight rather than fight, we can only hope that cooler heads will prevail. But both Rob and Mike have observed these situations in business settings, and in a few cases they moved to the edge of violent confrontation.

Engineers and technical people, expecting logical and detached behavior, often trigger their own or their team’s inner alligators. Driven by simple and clear-cut task considerations, an inner alligator may rise to the top and crush a relationship with someone or possibly even everyone within earshot..

The Takeaway

We are humans, not Vulcans, and while emotions may undermine us, they provide important data about situations, ourselves, and our teams. Attending to our own emotions and those of our team is part of the never-ending balance of tasks and relationship that is leadership.

To learn more, get the book that tells you how to achieve great things as a leader during the coming years: Tech Leadership 4.0

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