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

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Nassim Taleb has a quote about how his political beliefs change based on different scales:

Regardless of your political beliefs, Taleb’s quote strikes on an important truth: scale changes focus.

This is true in business, especially for large corporations. Skillful managers understand these different priorities and navigate them effectively.

Here’s an example of how this may be applied in a corporate setting.

At the highest level, leadership must focus on macro resource allocation, defining broad guardrails, and setting a long-term vision for the company. Getting much further into the details than this creates a bottleneck for those beneath them.

Leadership at this level acts as the bridge between corporate strategy and ground reality. They focus on balancing local department-level autonomy with cross-office consistency. By doing this, regional leadership supports shared best practices, resources, and alignment of corporate goals with local constraints.

This is on-the-ground operations where daily tactics accrue to fulfill the greater company strategy. Here, managers focus on implementing clear work processes, quality control, and staffing. Success is highly correlated with the delivery of quality work on budget and on time.

Direct management is very personal. At other levels, the management is that of groups of people. This is the most granular level where stronger individual relationships, tailored mentorship, and 1-on-1 time reign.

If you are a manager at one level and you want to move up to the next one, you need to perform an audit of your current leadership perspective and actions. Are they conducive to performing the function you’re currently in?

Then do the same for the next level up. Do you understand what it will take to be effective at that level? What do you need to learn? How will your focus need to change?

By understanding and appreciating the different mindsets required at each level, you will be able to navigate the organizational structure better, which helps your ability to be promoted.

Warren Buffett (investor) on mistakes:

“Wrong decisions are part of life. Being able to make them work anyway is one of the abilities of those who are successful.”

—

Mary Kay Ash (founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics) on making others feel important:

“Whenever I meet someone, I try to imagine him or her wearing an invisible sign that says: MAKE ME FEEL IMPORTANT! I respond to this sign immediately, and it works wonders.”

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David Ogilvy (advertising executive) on conciseness:

“The longer your memos, the less likely they are to be read by men who have the power to act on them.”

Regardless of how much authority you hold, there are times when you need to mobilize people outside your reach. This article discusses five ways to be an effective influencer in the workplace.

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

Collin