[A note from Pat: Today’s post is from my friend and mentor, Christian Knutson. Christian as spent decades in engineering leadership roles around the world in the U.S. military. He writes at www.engineerleader.com.]

As you might expect, the military is a great place to get leadership lessons.  I’ve had the good fortune to serve for over two decades, leading men and women at locations around the globe.  This means I’ve had a lot of leadership lessons throughout years.  In addition to being a leader, I’m also an engineer, however, I’m more “leader” than “engineer”.  I took this route because I learned long ago from my mentors – engineer leaders themselves – that designing a road, building or airfield are important.  But what’s more important is the positive impact I can have on the lives of others through becoming an effective leader.

That was a huge blow to me one year out of college and hungry to become a top-notch civil engineer.  I’d spent four years developing my technical skills in college only to find myself thrust into the leadership role.  Instead of designing pavements I was leading a section of engineers, all of who were at least ten years older than me.  Daunting, yes.  But I quickly adjusted to my new situation and used every day as an opportunity to learn about people, about myself, and about how you lead engineers.  Instead of learning to be an engineer first, leader second, I learned to become a leader above all else and an engineer as required.

The Lessons Aren’t Hard If You’re Willing to Listen

My mentors were many and at all levels of rank.  I learned lessons from the lowest ranked Airman to the grizzled civilian plumber; from the recent college graduate engineer working on cultural resources matters to the 30-year chief engineer.  Each of them had a lesson to teach me, if only I was willing to listen.  Early on I didn’t listen so well – blame it on over-confidence and not understanding how to listen to another.  Later though, I became adept at listening and more importantly, hearing what they had to tell me.  Their wisdom, combined with that of the men I worked for throughout my military career, yielded a treasure-trove of leadership wisdom.

1. Empower your people

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”  ~ General George Smith Patton, Jr.

Empowerment is a catchy word that found a lot of traction in the early 2000’s in leadership/management books.  What it really means is two things:

1.   Pushing responsibility and authority as low as possible in your organization.  Organizations that have all responsibility/authority retained in the leader’s position only are doomed to failure.  Not only are such organizations unable to innovate and meet client expectations, the people who remain on staff are un-motivated and un-interested in the good of that organization.  Where you find an organization that has responsibility and authority invested at the lowest possible level, you find excellence.  That organization is nimble and constantly innovating to support its clients because everyone in the organization has a piece of the action.

2. Delegating to grow your staff.  Delegating isn’t just about transferring your to-do list to someone else.  It’s also about growing your staff by giving them roles, responsibility and authority for actions that may be outside their normal day-to-day purview.  When you do this, you help your staff grow.  You also give your staff members the opportunity to try new things, to build new networks of connections, and to grow their self-confidence and experience.

2. Respect people’s time

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” ~ William Penn

Your time is important and you do a lot to protect it.  After getting burned by sitting in useless meetings or being handed “science projects” by a boss in the past, you guard your calendar like the Crown Jewels.  For the very reasons you protect your time, do the same for your people.  Scheduling a staff meeting at 1pm?  Show up at 12:50pm.  Thinking how great it would be to have a detailed spreadsheet showing data of up to three separate vendors for every component in an HVAC system?  That’s a science project… stop thinking about it.  Everybody on earth, regardless his or her position in life, has exactly the same amount of time as you do.  Respect the time of your people and they’ll respond knowingly.

3. Lead the change

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have—and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”  ~ James Belasco

Change is inevitable whether from economic forces, the natural churn of personnel, or new clients.  When you see turbulence on the horizon, seize the initiative in defining the pros/cons, the impact to your personnel, the key risks, and potential mitigation strategies.  Then, most importantly, share as much as you can with your people.  Open the kimono and be transparent.  If the change is severe enough that people’s livelihood will be impacted you must take the responsibility to share with them everything possible so they can make informed decision. A former commander of mine was fond of using the phrase “bad news isn’t like a fine wine; it doesn’t get better with time.”  Funny, but true.  When you have bad news to share and can do so, share it.

4.  Know money

“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.” ~ Ayn Rand

It doesn’t matter if you’re in private or public sector; the real resource that fuels the equipment and brings your team in the front door is money.  Learn the funding systems in your organization and the people who are responsible for managing it.  If you’re in private sector, learn your company’s sales funnel process, how billable hours and cost centers are aligned, and where and how you affect each of these.  In public sector, understand the cost codes, the burn rates, and the process to be used for emergency funding requests.  In either sector, ensure you know the vernacular used by the finance-types, the annual budgeting cycle, and to request funds for equipment and training to support your people.  To that point, always have a priority list for projects, equipment and training to make your team better.  You never know when the opportunity might arise to get some funding for your people.

5.  Bloom where you’re planted

“Do what you can with what you have where you are.”  ~ Theodore Roosevelt

The grass truly is greener on the other side of the fence.  It always is, so stop looking at it and get back to your own side.  The best job any person has is the one they’re in right now.  Yet so many are dissatisfied with where they work, who they work with, or who they work for.  In a 2012 study on work satisfaction by Right Management, a subsidiary of the staffing firm ManpowerGroup, only 19 percent of people polled indicated they were satisfied in their job.  What the other 81 percent fail to understand is that it isn’t their employers responsibility to make them happy.  No matter how much you hate your job it’s the one you’re in, so do all you can to make it the best that’s possible.  Over my career I’ve witnessed many who, dissatisfied with what they were doing, simply stopped performing.  They became lackadaisical in their work attitude and their performance reflected this.  Their annual reports?  Abysmal.  The result?  Further disillusionment and even worse performance.  On the other hand, I’ve witnessed people who given a position far below their capacity or outside their swim lane treated that position like it was tailor made.  They garnered the appreciation of management, had outstanding reports, and ended up right where they wanted to be.  These people bloomed where they were planted.

6. Do the work

“Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed – there’s so little competition.” ~ Elbert Hubard

The people who bloomed where they were planted did the work.  It might not have been inspiring work, but they did it anyway.  Often times the work we’re given, especially when we start our career, isn’t awe-inspiring.  It’s most often mundane and the tasks more senior engineers don’t want to do – they delegate it to us.  And that’s just it; the work is delegated to us.  Just because the work might seem beneath you, you do the work like it’s the only work to be done in the world.  Because for your career, it is the only work to be done in the world.  Often times a new or junior engineer will be given tasks to accomplish in order for leadership to gauge their ability to accept more responsibility and authority.  Screw up the simple stuff, how can you be trusted with the awe-inspiring?  If you’re further on in your engineer career, doing the work is just as important.  Sometimes there are tasks that you procrastinate on because they’re too involved, might be painful, or you’re ‘just not feeling it’.  When you feel that you’re procrastinating on something it’s not because you’re being patient.  It’s because you’re avoiding exercising your responsibility.  This is the work you must do.  So just do it.

7. Listen like it’s the first time

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

The Airman was really excited about the maintenance work he’d done on the snowplow fleet.  He was part of a team that had spent the past twenty-four hours getting our trucks ready for the impending snow and was recounting to me in extremely intricate detail how he mounted the plows and conducted the ops checks.  Nothing he told me about the process was new.  In fact, this was my third time working around snow removal operations and I understood them well enough to lead the crews that cleared the airfield and roads. What I did learn, however, was infinitely more valuable and I only learned this because I listened to this Airman like it was the first time I’d ever seen a snow plow.  I learned that this Airman was passionate about his work.  I learned that he took pride in what he did every day and was energized by the people he worked with and the organization in which he worked.  Because I listened to that Airman to the point I heard him, I picked up way more than just the fact that he knew how to mount a plow.  When we listen like it’s the first time, all the time, we give ourselves the opportunity to positively impact another person because we grant them the gift of attention.

8. Take responsibility, not just the role 

“Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility…In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility.” ~          Michael Korda

Leadership comes with more than just the title, the extra pay and the reserved parking spot.  It comes with responsibility for the people under your direction.  In simple speak, this means that we’re responsible for everything with our people, not just their work performance.  If you’re in a leadership role, do you know the names of your team member’s significant other?  How about their children?  Have you invested the time to know what’s happening in their lives?  I’m not advocating that you become friends with your subordinates. I’m advocating that you get to know about their lives because the impact you have on them at work will directly impact them in their life.  And if that impact is negative, it will affect their personal and professional life’s negatively as well.  In the military this is evident, and it was a point that I made certain to drive into the heads of my junior officer-engineers.  Outside the military this may not seem applicable, but I disagree.  A leader, regardless of what their organization is, has a responsibility to take care of her people. To look out for them as if they were part of your family, because in essence, they are.

Moving forward

If you read the list and thought that this seems intuitive then good.  At one level it is intuitive, especially if you’ve studied leadership in any capacity.  The material is simple to grasp in concept, simple to understand as you read it.  But this content is far from easy to implement in the real world.  I know, I’ve been there.  How do you respect people’s time when you’re asked, or directed, by a superior to put together some analysis and a presentation on a matter “just in case”?  How do you “bloom where you’re planted” when all of your peers appear to get selected for the hottest projects and always seem to be in the good graces of the senior partner?  How the hell are you supposed to “hear” Cindy when she’s constantly talking at you about matters that you don’t care about?  How are you supposed to take on the responsibilities of the project manager, when team members are cynical and distrust management?

The answers?  Do these 8 things.  That’s it, just do them.  Each is simple to think about and although hard to implement will yield success if applied consistently. My mentors passed these lessons to me through word and deed.  I now pass them to you.  Are you ready to receive?