MEL #006 | Engineering with Heart with Nikki Maginn

MAGINN: As an individual contributor, as a director, I have held that same boundary of what behaviors I will and will not tolerate. And every time I do it, I see an immediate shift in the people around me. And it was really amazing to actually see culture shift based off of one interaction, one tiny thing, one person speaking up can really speak volumes. One action can absolutely change a company.

ADAMS: In this episode, I speak with Nikki McGinn, Director of Program Management at DEMATIC and founder of Inside Out Engineering. Nikki shares her journey into engineering, highlighting her passion for physics and the influence of her family background. She had a pilot’s license before she had a driver’s license and her grandmother was an actual Rosie the Riveter. She discusses the challenges she faced in securing a job in nuclear engineering post-Fukushima and how she navigated her career through project management and leadership roles.

Nikki emphasizes the importance emotional intelligence has had on her success and how that inspired her to create Inside Out Engineering, which aims to equip engineers with essential interpersonal skills. You can learn more about Inside Out Engineering in the show notes. In our leadership segment, she shares a powerful experience where she stood up for her values in a corporate setting, illustrating the impact one voice can have in shaping company culture.

Finally, she offers valuable advice for aspiring engineering leaders to embrace their uniqueness and authenticity. Without further delay, here is my conversation with Nikki Maginn.

Hi, Nikki. Welcome to the Mastering Engineering Leadership Podcast. 

MAGINN: Thank you. I am thrilled to be here.

ADAMS: Well, I’m thrilled to have you. Can you start by telling us how you got into engineering as a career path?

MAGINN: Yes. So this is probably not a traditional engineering story. So when I was a kid, my parents raised us on this mantra. If you want to be happy for a day, take a nap. If you want to be happy for a week, take a vacation. But if you want to be happy for life, live in service. Now, My family grew up, you know, I grew up in aviation. Everybody was an airline pilot. I could legally fly a plane before I could drive a car. 

ADAMS: Wow. 

MAGINN: Right. Thank you. Very cool. And it was an amazing experience. But I was so much more interested in like how the plane worked than flying it. And I also really love to talk to people. So the idea of like being in a confined space and not getting to talk to the passengers was just simply not for me. So I was I was also very fortunate to have the most incredible grandmother. So my Grammy was a Rosie the Riveter. designed, yeah, very cool. She designed aircraft carriers during World War II. She went to college when women didn’t go to college. So she was always this just very passionate woman that always did what she wanted to do. It didn’t matter if it didn’t exist or she was the only woman in the room. She was just gonna do it. And she was also the happiest person I ever knew.

And so was like, okay, Grammy must’ve been doing something right. So I was sitting in my physics class because I really just fell in love with physics. when I kind of struggled with math, which is interesting to say as an engineer, because typically, right, people think that we’re super good at math. I am not, I really struggled with it until I found a why. So physics gave me a why.

Why I was finding X, why I was solving these equations. So I was really good at physics and I had finished my physics homework in class. And so was reading a science fiction book. Are you familiar with Dan Brown, Angels and Demons? 

ADAMS: Yes. 

MAGINN: Okay. So I was reading about antimatter and particle physics and I was like, my gosh, I wish this was real because you can solve the world’s energy problems with just one annihilation. And I was like, that would be awesome.

And my physics teacher came up to me and he was like, hey, Nikki, I know that you’re done with the homework, but the other kids don’t. So maybe just pretend to. Keep studying. Yeah, to keep doing that, doing the work. Okay. I was like, okay, fine. So I start like flipping through my physics textbook and lo and behold, there’s a whole chapter on anti-matter. And I was like, this, this is real. This isn’t fiction. And it just completely consumed me.

I got my hands on like every particle physics book I could get from the like high school library. And I just really fell in love with it. So when I was going to college, when I came to UT, I wasn’t sure which specific engineering discipline was going to take me there. And I was very fortunate that I was sitting next to a very good friend of mine in our EF 151 class. And I told him, you know, why I wanted to be an engineer. And he was like, you want to be nuclear if you want to do particle physics stuff. And I was like, sold. that’s it for me. So yeah, that’s what brought me to engineering. 

ADAMS: And when you, so that got you to nuclear engineering and did you find that it was everything you had hoped for in terms of wanting to both pursue this intellectual interest, but also what I love about one of the things you said was really wanting to be around other people and to be able to talk to people. And that’s also not a typical thing that, that’s not a typical thing that people perceive engineers to want. I know lots of engineers who are really outgoing and like to talk to people, but they don’t typically think that about us. But I’m just curious if the nuclear engineering program ended up being what you had hoped. 

MAGINN: Yes, actually, it was everything I hoped and more. Not only did I get to pursue the things that I was interested in and just honestly dive into this field that I didn’t even know existed until I got to school.

What was really fun about the nuclear program at the time is how like teamwork, how teamwork focused it was. So we did lots of labs together. We did a lot of projects together. Throughout my entire collegiate career, even when I was like in my early, you know, everybody takes the same statics dynamics classes, I had always had this great group of friends and we were always studying together. We were always problem-solving together. So I was very fortunate that 

because of my social skills and my network, I always had this group of people that I could collaborate and bounce ideas off of. So I never really felt that sense of like isolation that I know a lot of engineers typically feel in an engineering school. So it definitely, one was allowing me to continue to pursue my interests and my passion, but also created an environment where I was 

allowed and encouraged to work with my teammates and work with my classmates. And it just made it lot more fun to go to class.

ADAMS: Now you graduated in 2013. So you’ve been out in the workforce for a little over 10 years now. Can you just tell us a little bit about what your career has been like? What have you been up to?

MAGINN:  Yeah. So nuclear is one of those very niche engineering degrees. And when I graduated, it was right after Fukushima. yeah. So we weren’t really looking for nuclear engineers at the time. So I really struggled to get a job. Believe it or not, I kept a spreadsheet and I got 199 rejections from all over the world because I was like determined. I was like, no, fine. If I’m not going to get a job in the U.S., like other countries love nuclear. Let me try there. No. so it was rough. After my first few months out of school, I was like, this is not the world that was promised to me. so I started just kind of applying for any and every engineering job that existed. And again, what was interesting is if I applied for like a mechanical job, people would look at my resume and say, you’re a nuclear engineer, like you’re overqualified. And I was like, no, no, no, I’m just a really good problem solver that just knows a lot about radiation. so.

Fortunately, I ended up applying for an engineering sales position, just literally clicking anything that said engineering on it. And this company called Domatic, a material handling and logistics company, called me back and was really interested because I was not only a female engineer, but I was also a student athlete. So I had these social skills and they were like, hey, we love this kind of personality type. Let’s see if we can get you in front of customers. And I was like, sure, that sounds fun.

So at the beginning, they were like, hey, I know you’re new to material handling. Why don’t you just manage one project, get to know our technology for a while, and then we’ll move you into sales. Well, because I love to talk to people and I love to solve problems. And I’m also one of those weird people that just really loves to organize things. I’m very, very type A. so project management kind of came very naturally to me. So what was one project ended up turning into 30. 

It was, it was very fun. And what was really exciting is I was sparking a lot of joy with my coworkers because they’re engineers and they loved doing the engineering. I’m an engineer, but I loved like communicating and problem solving with people. so we were able to really balance each other, right? Lean into our strengths.

So I fell in love with project management did that for a few years and then I started moving into supply chain, operations itself. So I ran a warehouse in a month a day office, down in Mexico, Mexico, excuse me. And, then moved to Grand Rapids, ran a shipping up there for a while. and then I kind of moved back into the business and I’ve always had these roles that I lovingly refer to as kind of translator roles. So. as an engineer, right, I have a very technical mind, but because I have social skills, I can communicate with non-engineers and help them understand, right, the technical challenges without living in the details. So I kind of moved into several iterations of this role, really all throughout the company, just being that bridge, that translator between different technical teams and executives. I’ve pretty much been reporting to a vice president since I was 23. always kind of being in that, that type role. And it’s been very fun. I’ve gotten to experience a lot that a young person typically doesn’t. and I also was very fortunate because I was at a company that was growing really rapidly. So it also afforded me a lot of positions that were, aren’t typically options at bigger established companies. so then I kind of moved into, to more and more leadership roles and there were, there was a lot of, you know, managed by influence and then managed by actual direct line. But what’s been fun is even the managed by influence skills really translate better. They make me a better direct line manager because of my influencing skills. But then I did get to do two whole years in nuclear. I finally, yeah, was a dream come true. So what was cool about DEMATIC is I was working in new product development and standardizing, optimizing the way we approach things.

And, you know, I had my experience in supply chain. So I got the call from really my dream job on paper. I was the director of engineering operations for a nuclear startup. So in that, you know, that couple of years, I got to negotiate a fuel contract. I got to go visit Westinghouse and actually see them assemble fuel rods. I got to work with, you know, the United Kingdom government. It was honestly, one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had. And then Dometic called me a couple of years ago and they were like, hey, any chance you would come back and lead the program management team to kind of do more new product development. So that’s where I am today. 

ADAMS: That sounds like such a fun and diverse career trajectory. And I love how you’ve been pretty clear that It’s been the two sides of the coin in terms of the analytical skills and the social and relating and people skills have really afforded you this opportunity to have all of these really unique career opportunities what has been your pathway to really developing and honing those skills? 

MAGINN: Ooh, I love this question. And I’m very passionate about this, as you know. But for my listeners, I started a emotional intelligence training program for the University of Tennessee. So I’m very, very passionate about it.

So for me, I think of it, again, back anchoring in my engineering analytical brain, I do see the world in patterns. And I can apply that to people too. I see patterns in human behavior. And it was something I even noticed when I was a kid. I could predict what was going to happen in my family dynamics or in a classroom setting. I even got, I don’t know if you guys or any of other engineers out there also do this, but I can predict what’s gonna happen in a movie.

I don’t like to go to theaters. just do it at home because I’m like, know what’s coming next. So there was very much just like this innate ability to recognize patterns, but I did continue to cultivate it. because I’m an engineer, I’m very curious about things. I want to know why my brain works the way it worked. So I started pursuing a lot of development activities like Tony Robbins events.

I know anybody that grew up in the 90s or earlier is very familiar with Tony Robbins. So very like personal development, very like getting into your conscious subconscious and very action oriented. I’m also very fortunate that I have some incredible friends and family that are therapists and social workers. So I was introduced to an incredible emotions researcher, Brene Brown. So I’ve just consumed her work.

And her work brought me to people like Simon Sinek and Adam Grant, just to name a few. And all of those kind of different researchers and organizational psychologists just consuming all of that literature and trainings that they put on really helped me develop my skill set. And then again, the engineer in me is like, I want to test this. want to play. I want to use these tools in my real life. And so I’m very fortunate that I can constantly bring the things that I’m learning in a book into my real life. So I have a lot of like practical use of the things that I learn in books. So it’s really helped me hone these skills and get really good at it.

ADAMS:  Well, first I have to chuckle about Tony Robbins because I mean, I’m older than you, but I know Tony Robbins and I went to a Tony Robbins event back when he was still wearing the suspenders and the red. yeah. So. He used to have this specific uniform that he would wear during his events. Anyway, but like you, that was something that just drew me to understanding how people work and how to be successful and things like that. Talk a little bit more about the Inside Out engineering project that you’ve developed. 

MAGINN: Thank you. Inside Out engineering is emotional intelligence for engineers.

So it’s really a program that helps students just find their voice and learn how to regulate themselves. So one of the challenges that most, I’ve seen the most out of engineering students is you go from this academic system that really focuses on the individual, right? You’re individually successful. So you’re, you you get an individual grade. Well, you go into the corporate world and you’re not really doing it alone anymore, right? Like you’re not dealing with engineers anymore. And all of a sudden, you don’t necessarily know how to communicate with them, or it doesn’t make sense why you can say something very technical and it just goes right over them. And then maybe they’ll come back at you and say, hey, I need you to do this design. And you’re like, well, that defies the laws of physics. And they’re like, that’s OK. You’ll figure it out. So sometimes it can be really challenging for us as we enter the workforce.

I am very fortunate to have a couple of great mentees at the University of Tennessee, female engineering students. And we’ve kind of developed this relationship mentorship program and it really blossomed into emotional intelligence training because we wanted to offer it to more students. So what we do in the classes is we really focus on, know, we approach the information the way an engineer likes to think, right? Give me the data, help me understand the science behind what you’re talking about.

So we talk about, what is neurodiversity? Why is my brain different than your brain? What does it mean to have a different brain? What does it mean that I can like build neuroplasticity? You know, how does that help me be better as an engineer? And then we talk about what is that, you know, the traditional fight, flight, freeze, fawn responses, right? So as an engineer, the most important thing we can be is creative. And if we are in a survival state, it makes it very hard for us to think through really innovative and creative solutions, right? There’s parts of our brain that actually shut off. So my course is really focused on helping engineers understand how their brain works, how they see the world, build that muscle of self-awareness so that they can continue to like apply their engineering skills of problem solving into their interpersonal life that really sets them up for success, you know, when they get back to the corporate, when they do enter the corporate world, or even, you know, if you continue into grad school or getting your PhD and then we end the course on building connection. Because again, right, you know, you’re not an individual anymore. You’re always going to be working with people. And one of my favorite professors at UT used to say this to us whenever we would get ready for a test. He’d say, you know, in the real world, you’re never going to be locked in a room with a pencil and a calculator and told to build a rocket ship. So you need to learn how to connect with people and ask for help.

So that’s another big pillar there is just building on the connections and helping engineers learn that it’s okay to ask for help, right? You don’t have to have all the answers by yourself. That’s the beauty of being an engineer is you know how to ask for help and you know your strengths and you know other people’s strengths. 

ADAMS: Yeah, there’s two things that you said that really resonated with me. One, and I completely share this point of view, which is to say that there’s really important skills that we as engineers need to learn that maybe we don’t get in the normal ABET accreditation. But these social skills, it’s not like we can’t learn them, right? We can learn different, we can understand differential equations, we can learn stuff, but maybe the way that sort of the general public kind of presents these ideas and concepts just don’t resonate with our learning style. They don’t resonate with the way that we see the world. And so, oftentimes some of the rooms I sit in, I know business leaders can get frustrated with their But part of me in the back of my mind, I’m thinking maybe it’s you. Like maybe it’s you and the way you’re teaching it. Maybe it’s not us. And so I really appreciate that you, made the effort to say, I want to present this in a way that I think will be more digestible more understandable and more readily accepted by the types of folks that are like me. And since you are an engineer and you’ve been through it, you understand just some of the challenges that we may have and some of the things that might make us skeptical. So as you said, you bring in the research on the neuroscience behind some of these things to kind of lower that barrier to acceptance, which I think is really important. And then the second thing that really resonated with me is I just think it’s a great example of leadership on your part to say, this is something that has really helped me become a successful career professional with an engineering background. And I want to take the lead on bringing it to other people so that they can become more successful. thank you. Thank you for your leadership on that. 

MAGINN: Thank you. That means so much to me.

ADAMS: Okay, Nikki, what leadership situation are we going to be talking about today? 

MAGINN: So we are going to be talking about a time when Nikki was an individual contributor. So I did not, I was a program manager at the time, but I didn’t necessarily officially have direct reports at the time. So I was leading by influence. So I was also pretty young in this situation as well. It was, you know, I in my early twenties.

And I, you know, I’ve kind of talked a little bit about my skillset as being very organized and very, you know, very good at project management. So I was afforded lot of opportunities to be invited into rooms to help facilitate conversations. So I was invited into what was called STRAP, our strategic annual planning. So in corporate America, we do this kind of like three to five year look ahead. So my job in this room was to facilitate the workshop ask, you know, leading questions, make sure I’m gathering all of the, you know, the notes and the inputs that people are doing, are giving us, and then kind of format it in a condensed way to kind of recap the day the next morning so that we can keep moving throughout the workshop. So in this room, again, I am the lowest on the proverbial totem pole, but my boss is sitting right next to me. She’s the director of program management at the time, so the role I have now.

She was in the room next to me and the rest of the room was vice presidents and senior vice presidents. And so we’re in this room and we’re talking about how we had rolled out this standard and we were kind of struggling to get people to adhere to it. And there was a specific person that spoke up and said, well, at my previous company, we did something called the wall of shame and we would publicly shame people. We would put their name, their picture, what they did wrong on a wall, so everybody knew not to do that thing. Now, in the moment, like, I definitely went white as a sheet. I grabbed my boss’s hands. Like, we just held each other for a second. We’re like, no. So not the space we need to be in. So, you know, they went about the day. They went through the rest of the meeting. And so my boss and I sat down afterwards and we looked at each other and we’re like, we can’t, we can’t do that. We simply cannot. And so we decided, you know what? Here’s how we’re gonna refap, reform this, reframe it. And we said, we’re gonna actually do a celebration, right? We’re gonna celebrate people that are doing things well. So we’re gonna focus on the good, right? Again, a neuroscience thing. If you focus on the positive, you’re gonna see a lot more of that.

And when you focus on the negative, you see people in a lot of fear. So you end up not getting a lot of innovation out of people because they’re so afraid to make a mistake. So I work on my presentation and I come back in the next day and I present it to these, again, vice presidents and senior vice presidents and HR is also in the room. And before I went in there, I looked at my boss and I was like, this might be the end of my employment here. Like I was…very prepared to lose my job over this because I was so uncomfortable with what they were doing. And so I presented this slide and I said, you know, here’s what we heard from you guys yesterday. Moving forward, we’re going to have a celebration wall. We’re going to talk about what people are doing well. And this gentleman raised his hand. goes, and he, that’s not what I said. And I was like, you know what? I heard what you said, but ethically, I can’t allow that to continue and perpetuated this organization.

And then I moved on and I just kept talking. No one said a word. No one, like I just kept moving on and we just went about the day. So, you know, a couple hours go by and we have our first break. And what was the most shocking thing to me is how many of those same vice presidents that didn’t speak up in the room walked up to me afterwards and said, thank you. Thank you so much for doing that. And all I could think was I am 25 years old. I am a program manager, you are a vice president. Help me understand this. But what was really interesting is, you know, I did that as an individual contributor, but then I’ve done it since as a director, I have held that same boundary of what behaviors I will and will not tolerate. And every time I do it, I see an immediate shift in the people around me. And it was really amazing to actually see culture shift based off of one interaction, one tiny thing, one person speaking up can really speak volumes. And sometimes you don’t know who else is afraid in that room. We’re all human. And even if you’re a vice president, even if you have a big fancy title, sometimes you’re afraid. And I think leadership is a little bit speaking up for the truth, but also even if you’re afraid, you do it anyways. You do what’s right, even if it’s hard and even if it’s scary.

ADAMS: Yeah, that’s a great example. when you started, you talked about how you had really come to grips with, this might be the end of the line for me here. And I do think that it’s important, but it’s a sign of you really understanding your own personal values, which I think a lot of people are not really in touch with that. so they can kind of just sit in a room and think, maybe I didn’t like that. But it doesn’t resonate maybe as deeply as it did with you in this instance because you knew, this is absolutely not something that I would find acceptable and therefore I’m willing to stand up for it in a pretty significant way. And I’m curious how you think about getting in touch with your values. Is it something that you are explicitly doing, like journaling about it or writing about it or if it’s just something that just sort of happens Can you talk a little bit about how you stay in touch with your personal values? 

MAGINN: My gosh, this is such a good question.

That’s part of it. It’s kind of hard for me to answer simply because I have had this intense sense of justice since I was like two years old. It was something that I was I just really am born with and I’m also an oldest sibling. I have like, yeah, I very much so it just kind of is ingrained in me. Like I’m the leader. I have to do what’s right. And I have always been this very fierce protector, again, sibling. So if I see someone doing something intentionally hurtful, like it physically, it it physically manifests in my body. Like I feel it welling up inside of me and I can’t not physically take action, whether that’s like standing in front of a bully or saying something. But I didn’t really know what language, I guess. I didn’t know how to like, name a value until I had actually really gotten in touch with like Brené Brown’s work. Again, she has incredible research on your emotions and what your value systems are. So it was a lot of her work that kind of gave me the language to really define and label what I was feeling and what my value systems were. So I know since I’ve started getting into her work, I do I do journal about things. am one of those people that does write a lot. It really helps me process things. So I am an out loud processer, so I love to like talk things out with people. And I’m very fortunate, I’m married to a philosopher at heart. So someone that like, we will have these deep, meaningful conversations that really like, even when we were best friends, because we were friends a long time before we dated, he would ask me these like, earth shattering philosophical questions about my value system. And so we would talk about it. And that probably sparked it the most than getting into Brené’s work, really understanding the language behind it. But I do, I am a huge journaler. And we actually do this thing every year where we kind of reflect on the year and we say, all right, you know, here’s what I did, here’s what I loved about this past year. Here’s what I want to take with me into 2025. And celebrating like where we really stood up for ourselves and you know kind of really leaned into our values.

I have always had this like deep pull towards joy. So for me, whatever it is I’m doing, I want it to spark joy, in myself and other people. so if I had to pick like one value that I think I’ve always been really anchored in it’s seeking joy and finding joy and embodying joy. 

ADAMS: That’s great. The other thing that you mentioned, you were shocked by this and the first time it ever happened to me, I was shocked by it too, you’re sitting in a room with people who have much more influence than you do, have much more sway, have much more power and you’re the one sticking your neck out there. they don’t necessarily even, they don’t come to your aid in the room.

I do think it can be really frustrating, particularly for more junior people to find themselves in that situation. I’m just curious if you had a takeaway from that in my case probably has me be the one to say, okay, I’m gonna actually say something in the room. I’m not gonna be, in my opinion, a coward and wait till afterwards. That’s my word, not yours. But I’m gonna at least, if I agree, I’m gonna at least say it in the room.

I’m just curious if that sparked any thinking or behavior for you when that happened to you. 

MAGINN: Yeah, it really did. It was probably the most eye-opening moment for me because I’ve always been that person that speaks up, right? You know, whether it’s a good or bad thing, I have no fear of authority. So all of a sudden, it was this deep realization that

my voice matters. One action can absolutely change a company. It can change the world. can change whatever you want to change. If you speak up, you can influence and you can create change. So it was a very It was a very humbling, but yet empowering moment for me to know how much my voice really matters and how much I can really influence and affect change if I’m passionate about it.

ADAMS: Nikki, what advice would you give to engineers who want to move into leadership roles? 

MAGINN: Be yourself. The number one piece of advice I would give any anyone, but especially an engineer, is just be yourself. Your brain is so unique and so fascinating and you have such an amazing way of looking at the world and those are the people that we need in leadership. 

ADAMS: Excellent advice, Nikki. Thank you so much.

MAGINN:  Anytime.

Wow, I hope everybody has as fun listening to this as we’re having right now. 

ADAMS: Okay, I might leave that in. You want to be on my podcast? 

Listen to how fun it is!