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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Highlights:

Highlights:

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Each person you bring on board arrives with their own unique experiences that influence their mindsets, behaviors, and expectations. Sometimes those are good. Sometimes they aren’t.

The bad experiences people bring with them are a version of career baggage. Similar to relationship baggage, it’s a barrier for them to connect with the role and their colleagues to the highest of their abilities.

Maybe their previous experiences were at firms where different disciplines didn’t communicate with each other. Maybe quality control was overlooked. Or maybe finger-pointing was the norm.

These habits can be corrected, but you need to identify them quickly, verbalize acceptable processes often, and lead by example always.

It’s your job as the leader to set the tone. And you’d better be the first one to live up to it.

Side note: not all new hires will be able to adjust to your organization’s culture. Ideally, you’d filter out those who aren’t likely to adapt during the recruiting process.

But some will slip through. Stick to the process: set the tone, and reinforce expectations. Provide clear and candid feedback, and if they aren’t able to meet expectations, it’s time to cut ties.

That’s part of setting the tone. It’s a difficult part, but as a leader, it’s vital to the rest of your team that you do.

Todd Graves (founder of Raising Cane’s) on the real purpose of a headquarters office:

“We’re not a corporate office. We are a restaurant support office. We’re here to support the people who are serving our customers.”

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Elad Gil (entrepreneur) on the competency of leaders:

“As a founder and CEO, you do not need to be excellent at everything or enjoy everything. Rather, you need to build the competency within the company so that the company collectively is excellent at these other functions.”

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David Von Drehle (author) on incremental improvement:

“For people trying to thrive in uncertainty, iterative and incremental development is a consolation. It says, don’t try to solve everything. Stop demanding answers to every question about your life and career. Look instead for a small step forward. Just answer the next question. Find the next step. And take it.”

It can be difficult to tell people no. But oftentimes, necessary. Like many things in life, however, how you handle it can be more important than the actual no itself.

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

Collin