Hey, it’s Collin. Welcome to Engineering Echelons, a newsletter full of ideas and insights to help engineers excel at management.

Here’s what I’ve got for you this week.

• New and noteworthy news

• A management perspective to consider

• Leadership insights to delve into

• And more…

First time reading? You can subscribe here.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Noteworthy Headlines

2025 Building products market overview (FMI)

Highlights:

• Forecasting through 2029, windows/doors and plumbing show the largest percentage of spending on new construction; roofing, HVAC, and floor indicate the largest percentage of spending on renovation.

US construction activity further concentrates in a handful of states (ENR)

Highlights:

• More than half of US construction activity remains clustered in 10 states.

Jacobs to acquire remaining stake in PA Consulting for $1.6B (Reuters)

Highlights:

• Jacobs had acquired a majority stake in PA Consulting in March 2021.

• This deal will be paid in 80% cash and 20% stock and is expected to close by the end of Jacobs’ fiscal 2026 second quarter.

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Management Perspective

Managers are the central conduit of communication in organizations who link the high-level strategy executives with boots on the ground employees.

Bridging those worlds can be a challenge. Here’s how you can do it effectively.

Communicating Up

Understand that business leaders make decisions that impact the entire organization. In order to make good decisions, leaders need solid data from the front lines. It’s your job to provide the data upwards that influences these decisions.

The guiding principle here is “grounding leadership in reality”.

Some information you should be frequently communicating up include:

• Staffing bottlenecks

• Technical hurdles and deficiencies

• Quality shortcomings

• Staff morale

• Recruiting issues

• Client satisfaction

• Project level updates (risks, budgets, etc.)

Communicating Down

Employees doing the work can become so absorbed in executing and delivering projects that they may lose sight of the bigger picture. It’s your job to broaden their perspective so they can understand how their work fits into the overall project, program, and organizational goals.

The guiding principle here is “translating strategy into action”.

Some information you should be sharing constantly with employees doing the work include:

• What leadership is looking at

• Why they are looking at that

• The organization’s purpose

• Business financials

• Risk and operational philosophies

• Client service expectations

• Professionalism that reflects company priorities

• Leadership opportunities and career pathways

• Goals for growth

Final Thoughts

Part of the burden of middle management is that you are required to have a dynamic mindset where you are switching between different perspectives (top down/bottom up, macro/micro, big picture/fine details, strategy/tactics) constantly in order to be effective at the role.

Leaders: if you have managers who report to you who also have staff who report up to them, reinforce the importance of what they do how they need to keep communication flowing.

Side note: this is only looking at the up/down communication needs of an organization. There is also a sideways communication component where managers talk with peers in different departments. This is an added complexity in the life of a manager.

Extra side note: I’d include most business leadership needs to act to some degree as a “middle manager” communicating up and down the line. Managers report up to directors; directors report up to executives; executives report up to the board; and the board reports up to the business owners. Therefore, managers, directors, executives, and the board all have a constituent above and below them in the organization that they need to collect, translate, and transmit information to and from.

Management Insights

Joe Coulombe (founder of Trader Joe’s) on employee retention:

“[We had a] practice of giving every full-time employee an interview every six months. At Stanford, I’d been taught that employees never organize because of money: they organize because of un-listened to grievances. We set up a program under which each employee (including some part-timers) was interviewed, not by the immediate superior, the store manager, but by the manager’s superior. The principal purpose of this program was to vent grievances and address them where possible. And I think this program was as important as pay in keeping employees with us.”

—

Adam Grant (organizational psychologist and professor) on challenging opinions:

“Although I’m terrified of hurting other people’s feelings, when it comes to challenging their thoughts, I have no fear. In fact, when I argue with someone, it’s not a display of disrespect—it’s a sign of respect. It means I value their views enough to contest them. If their opinions didn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t bother. I know I have chemistry with someone when we find it delightful to prove each other wrong.”

—

Nassim Taleb (author, professor, and statistician) on learning through work:

“The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.”

Management Resource

The 30 best pieces of company building advice we heard in 2025 (First Round Review)

First Round has compiled perspectives from business leaders and entrepreneurs across the business spectrum (startups to established behemoths) about strategy, operations, recruiting, retention, and so on.

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Get in Touch

Did something strike a chord? Tell me about it.

Or…

• Let me know if you’ve found something worth sharing.

• Let me know what challenges you’re having as a manager.

• Let me know what challenges you see other managers having.

Send me an email at [email protected]

Looking forward to hearing from you. See you next time.

Collin

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