MEL #022 | From Following the Rules to Redefining Them through Principled Leadership with Sharon Goh

GOH (00:00)

The leadership skill was not doing what I was told, but doing what I thought was right. And I think as a leader, we’re taught and we reinforce this idea about being a principled leader. So that you can make the right decisions, even though management says that they’re not the right decision.

ADAMS (00:44)

In this episode, I speak with Sharon Goh, Senior Director of Supply Chain Execution at Spinnaker SCA, a consultancy that builds agile supply chains to meet the demands of a complex, ever-changing world. Sharon’s path to engineering was guided by curiosity and serendipity, from wanting to be a journalist to choosing mechanical engineering to avoid programming. She built a successful career in supply chain, robotics, and product management, taking bold pivots, including working in South Korea and leading robotics teams at Amazon.

In our leadership segment, Sharon talks about how she effectively challenges organizational norms. Faced with rigid hiring constraints, Sharon defied traditional HR protocols to hire high-performing, non-degree technical workers. By listening to her operational peers and backing her decisions with data, she created a new hiring model that delivered results and is still used today. Sharon encourages engineers to embrace experimentation, take career risks, and lean into their uniqueness. She champions building meaningful networks and stresses the importance of showing up authentically, even in environments that may expect conformity. Without further delay, here is my conversation with Sharon Goh.

ADAMS (01:56)

Hi Sharon, welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

GOH (01:59)

Angelique, thank you for having me. This is gonna be so much fun.

ADAMS (02:02)

I’m excited to have you here. Can you start by telling us how you got into engineering as a career path?

GOH (02:08)

Um, I will be very honest with you and your students. did not choose engineering for pure engineering. I chose it because it was adjacent to Star Trek and I wanted to just do things with Star Trek. I, I also, when I, when I was deciding where to go to school, I had a, I had got accepted at the school of journalism at UGA and I had gotten accepted at Georgia Tech and I really wanted to be a journalist. And my dad.

I found out later paid off one of my chemistry teachers to have a talk with me and convinced me to go to Georgia Tech. Yeah. Wow. I know he’s so sneaky. So I, I, I will say that I kind of fell into engineering and I’m glad I did it. My chemistry teacher was pretty much like, do you want to pay now and party later or party now and pay later? And I was like, yeah. Okay. I’ll, pay now and work really hard. And then I’ll know, have a good career after that. No offense to you GA’ers, just saying that that’s kind of what happened to me. So, I, so what happened then was I, mechanical engineering fell into my lap too. I did not really choose it because of what it was. I chose it because there was no computer science classes that I had to take at the time. I know that’s so bad, but I took CS when I was in high school and I sucked at it and I knew I was going to be bad at it. So I wanted to do engineering, but not programming. So what ended up happening was I took a lot of tangential classes around computer science. So I learned how to read code, but I wasn’t one of the people that was going to be creating code. And I knew that about myself moving into this. I will also say that my first job out of college am 

My whole career has been in supply chain and warehousing and I pivoted into robotics towards the middle of my career in that same place. But I also fell into that too. I went to a career fair and I just put my name into a pile and I thought this company was based in New York City, which I wanted to get out of Georgia. And they ended up being in Atlanta with the name of Manhattan Associates, which was Manhattan Beach, California, not New York.

So everything about the beginning of my career was not something where I was like, yes, I want to do this. was a very much like, the universe was like, you’re going to be in supply chain consulting. You’re going to be an engineer. And so it’s, I’m actually kind of grateful for it in a way. I fell into something that I actually am, I’m pretty good at. then with robotics added on, it just became something I completely love doing. And I’ve, I’ve been doing it ever since. So.

ADAMS (04:37)

Well, I love that story. And I do think that a lot of people think they have to have this master plan. But I find that so many of us and so many of the people that I’ve interviewed have had at least some part of their journey be this sort of happenstance. Opportunities came my way, and I took them. And so it sounds like you are among good company in not necessarily having this well-defined plan.

But you were open to taking some of these different opportunities, maybe even sight unseen in some cases. So what do you think was about you that you were to say, yes, sure, why not? Why not try this? Why not try this?

GOH (05:21)

That’s a great question. I think my mom always told me to never pass up a good opportunity, and it just kind of stuck in my head. So I got a lot bolder, I’d say, especially after grad school. Going to MIT taught me a lot about myself and gave me the leadership frameworks that I still use today. And one of the things that I took away from that was that your career doesn’t have to be fixed. You can experiment with your career.

And don’t be afraid of that, right? Like pivoting is scary, but sometimes it’s necessary and it actually gives you better things. And even if you have to start back from the bottom and work your way up, you will learn so much about yourself and what you really want and things like that. So when I left MIT, I took a job in Seoul, South Korea. I’d never been there before. I am not Korean. I don’t speak the language. They were gonna, I was gonna be an expat.

for as long as they needed me. And I was also pivoting into a completely different job, right? I was going from robotics, technical support and implementation management to product management, which is very different. It goes from execution to strategy. And I did it in a different country. think I, like, people just pivot into different jobs. Like I pivoted to different jobs, different languages and different countries and different cultures all at the same time.

And I would say it was like the best experience I’ve ever had. And if you ever have a chance to work outside of the United States, do it. Take that opportunity because you will learn so much and expand your world. I think my English actually got better because I had to work with translators every day. I had an earpiece in my ear and I would have a woman’s voice speaking to me in English while a Korean man was talking to me about

ADAMS (07:05)

Wow!

GOH (07:07)

high, you know, like technical schematics around integration design for software for, you know, for like, for products that I was designing. And, and I had to be so clear and we take that for granted as Americans and we’ll like run our words around, we’ll use big idioms. They don’t work over there and you have to learn how to be so clear and precise. And I had to do that in my writing too, cause they would also translate my writing.

So both sides, my speaking and my writing, feel got better because of translators, right? I learned from them. And I think that just helped me immensely when I got back to the United States on the way that I chose my words and how I was able to just get to the point very quickly and not have to be too verbose, especially when you’re working with lot of like software developers, they just want to cut to the chase and get to it, you know? anyways.

ADAMS (08:00)

So you mentioned about pivoting and not being afraid to pivot and the audience will have a link to your LinkedIn profile. So they’re going to see that you’ve made many moves throughout your career and done a lot of really interesting things. And I’m curious how you approach this new role. Like, do you have in your mind any kind of framework or approach you say, okay, I’m going to a new place or a new job or a new something. Like how to share an approach new.

GOH (08:27)

Yeah, that’s a great question. I, when I got back from Korea, I got a job at a startup called GoPuff and they do a convenience store delivery sub hour delivery, right? I’d never been in that market before at all. And it was gig economy work. So think like we pay the drivers just like you would pay an Uber driver, right? To deliver something to your door. I had no idea how that world worked. I knew how it worked within the warehouses that we had but I had no idea how we did the drivers. So what I do is I go in with, I’m gonna learn everything I can. And again, I’m gonna start at the bottom. And even though I have a director title or a VP title, these guys know more than me and I am going to put myself into their shoes. And so what I did was I actually moved my desk and I sat with the drivers team. And I actually like, you know, I…I made friends with a lot of them, but then I also said, guys, I want to be your intern. And I had like a little post-it note and I like stuck it to one of the cubicles and I was like, this is my desk. I’m going to learn from you. I’m going to learn how you do driver marketing. I want to learn how you do driver ops. I’m going to know how you do pricing. Like there are so many nuances to hiring and retaining and paying drivers that I just had no idea how complicated it was. And it wasn’t until I got to sit with them and they would give me like Excel manual Excel work to do that I really started learning and understanding the complexities. And I really think it’s that whole getting out of your ivory tower, just because you have a fancy title, doesn’t mean you can’t just sit with a team for a week and learn what they do and really learn it, not just say you did it. So like one of the other things that at Amazon that I love is they put you on the phones. when you get, so like somebody calls about a customer service issue, you have to answer that phone call. And I think that that’s really important to you. So again, you get close to the customer.

And as engineers, think it’s really, it’s, sometimes it’s easier for you to get onto the manufacturing floor or the production floor, but don’t forget to keep on going because they, think that, that, that what I’ve also, what I also would say is trust, but verify, I did a lot of people would tell me something, but then I’d go to the floor and it’d be completely different. Right. And so I think that is a lot of what. When I, when I go into a new company, which, like I said, like you said, my resume, like I’m a one year, one company, one year at another company, one year at another company. That’s what I do is I just kind of, I just take the first three to five months and I just learn. I learn as much as possible. And then you can start adding value because you’re not just spouting stuff that you’re making up. You were actually there. You’re like, no, I witnessed it. I know it doesn’t work like that. This is how it really works. And people then you gain respect and trust from that as well.

ADAMS (11:08)

Yeah, absolutely. I love that approach. I mean, you know, getting down into the details, getting into the weeds with the people actually doing the work. That’s a very MIT thing that we talk, we learn, you and I studied together. That’s a very MIT thing that they talk about. And so of course, the primary benefit is that you really learn the business and you really learn how things work. I could imagine that a secondary benefit, and you kind of touched on it, but I could imagine the secondary benefit is this this idea of being respected as a leader, only for your decisions and your recommendations because you actually know what’s going on, but the idea that you spent time with people down on the floor. saw them as, I don’t know, worthy of spending time with, important enough to spend time with, and to really get to know them as people and their work. I could imagine that that would have… a secondary benefit of positioning you as really a valued leader.

GOH (12:03)

So big, you’re right on. And I would say like a great example of that is during the pandemic, that same grocery delivery company, we stayed open because we were an essential business and we were traveling even through the pandemic because we needed.

We wanted them to see our faces, the people that were like filling the boxes, getting you the toilet paper, getting you the milk that nobody else had. We had it and they were working their butts off. And I wanted to support them as much as possible and like listen to their problems, see if I could escalate anything to help them. I essentially pivoted from robotics into operations because of the pandemic. And I think it taught me a lot of that and that humbleness that comes with it. And being with the people, I would just follow people around and I would actually help them like fulfill  orders and things like that as well. And it’s amazing the things that you learn. I think the humanity of it is big, right? I heard things about HR issues that I had never heard before, right? And then I could, not that I had the power to change some of those HR decisions, but I could empathize with them. And then also that would impact my decisions maybe around like how we did shift work right, for a lot of these people because there’s childcare issues or healthcare issues or things like that. So you’re right. And the humanity is a big deal. And that’s what I do a lot in the things I do with robotics. It’s not just hardcore technical robotics. I do a lot with operations and what they call now robotic operations because there are still people who operate the robots and you’ve still got to understand what they need to be successful in this new environment.

And a lot of people don’t they forget about it. They just think it’s all about the technology They don’t they don’t remember that there’s there’s managers. There’s there’s people picking. There’s people putting away into these robots There’s maintenance people like the the plumbers I guess of the industry get get messed and I want to make sure that we we We make them successful in anything they can do.

ADAMS (14:06)

All right, Sharon, can you give us an example of when you had to use leadership skills?

GOH (14:10)

Oh, yes. And I’ll give you one where I would say the leadership skill was not doing what I was told, but doing what I thought was right. And I think as a leader, we’re taught and we reinforce this hot idea about being a principled leader. And I think that’s where this comes into play, right? So that you can make the right decisions, even though management says that they’re not the right decision. So, I worked at Amazon Robotics and I was managing a very large technical support team. We manage all the robots globally. if when you guys order something through an Amazon website, it will actually be picked off of a robot that my team has touched in some way or other in the day when we deployed them. So these robots will go down.

They’ll stop working, they won’t hit rate, and they will call my technical support team. And that’s what we do is we triage a lot of these. So what was happening was I could not find enough people to man my team. And hiring is a big part of engineering leadership. You want to hire the right people. You want to hire people who want to work in the job you’re in. And you want to hire people who… I always try to hire people who are smarter than me so that they can just upskill the team constantly.

But it was really hard because the job description that I was given was very rigid and it said that they had to have a college degree, preferably a graduate degree in some kind of robotics or computer science. And I’m looking at this skillset and I’m doing like a comparison between what I need on the floor and what they’re asking for and it doesn’t fit, right? So.

I started just going to my network of all of the warehouses in the Amazon network, which is huge. And so I was talking to senior operations managers or senior, you know, like there’s any kind of operations person I could get to. And I’d be like, guys, who, who would you want to answer the call? Right.

Who would you want? you want like, give me a list of like what the criteria would be and you would just listen to them and interview them. And then I would say, do you know anybody that’s like this? And I would just talk to them about it. And then I finally found there were these like small teams of people that each warehouse had and they were people that were like packers, pickers. They packed up the boxes or they did stuff on the floor, but they had technical skills. So I found this one woman who actually got had two years at Purdue, taught herself how to run on AWS, taught herself how to code and actually like coded all these things for that specific warehouse to run their operations more smoothly. And so I interviewed her, was like, she’s great. She understands operations, she knows technology, she can bridge the gap. And that’s exactly what you need in technical support, the empathy and the technology skills.

And I interviewed her. I brought her to Boston. It was her first interview in an office ever. It was amazing, right? Because she started off as a seasonal packer, right? She started at Christmas packing and then she was part-time. Then they put her full-time and then they found out she had technical skills, right? So she’s been also an hourly worker her whole life. This was her first salary job. She moved from Indiana, rural Indiana to Boston. I hired her in a heartbeat.

But what happened was that she didn’t graduate with a college degree. I actually took her college degree off of her resume so I could get her through the process. And when we were about to offer her the job, my boss called me into his office and said, she’s great, but wait a second. Where’d she go to school? And I was like, well, she didn’t graduate. This is what happened. And he’s like, you can’t do that. And I was like, well, I just did. I did it.

And she’s, she’s awesome. And you liked her and so did everybody else. The loop was unanimous on her. So we ended up hiring her and I got called into the COO’s office after she got hired and I got my hand slapped by him as well. So what happened though is that she rocked it. She was with us for a year. Another Amazon team stole her away because she was so good. And then she introduced me to other people in her network that were in the same situation. I ended up hiring them.

and bringing them to Boston as well. And that model, and I just spoke to, I hired a guy who managed the team for the last five years after I left. And he says that we are still using that same model that I put together today. And I pretty much like, I knew that it was the right thing to do. Like we could not be successful going with what the rigidity of what I was given, right? I had to redefine it. I had to reinvent it essentially, even though the powers that be my bosses did not want to they finally conceded when they saw the good work that came out of it.

ADAMS (18:45)

Yeah, that’s a great example. I love that for so many different ways. Well, first, I love the idea of being able to advocate for and hire somebody who didn’t fit the rigid box. I mean, think there’s so many times when that happens. I mean, job description mismatches are pretty common, but in this case, it really seemed like it was overly constrained. It sounds like you probably weren’t not going to… It was actually wrong, the original job description.

And I’m curious how you, how, how did you advocate for that person, you know, in those conversations or that role or your model, as you said, because you took it from one person and now replicated it. It sounds like they’re still using it years later, but what were the conversations like with HR and the other powers that be when you’re trying to kind of change a process, even though you know, it’s, know, you, you really believe it’s going to be a better way, but it’s, you’re still changing a pretty rigid process. And so there’s some advocacy and some winning people over and getting buy-in that needs to happen. And how did you approach that?

GOH (19:45)

Yeah, that’s a good point. So I think one of the big ones was that I kept on saying, I was looking at the numbers, right? When you look at hiring numbers, right? The number of days your job wreck is open, the number of resumes you get that are not qualified, the number of interviews you get where they don’t pass muster because of one thing or another. And then you start narrowing it down. You’re like, why are these people not the right fit?

You need to constantly like, it’s like experimentation. You have to iterate on what you think you need and what you really need. And I think that that was something that I did to help change minds, especially with some place like Amazon, they’re very data-driven. So that helped me say, look, we need to think about things differently. Look at the numbers, right?

That was one. then the numbers also showed the pain that we had. Because I didn’t have enough people, our backlog just kept on growing and growing and growing. And our days to close on a support ticket was just stagnant. Like we could not figure out how to bring it in. that gave a very compelling…

Aha, like, what are we gonna do about it? How can we think about it differently? The problem is that my leadership at the time didn’t wanna think about things differently. And so that’s why I kinda had to do something a little sneaky because the channels, the traditional channels that I used were going too slow in my opinion. And I was also getting blocked a lot. And so for me,

in an environment like that, especially with all the startups I’ve been in, you gotta move fast. And I also took it into my control, right? I didn’t rely on my manager to tell me where to go or who to talk to. I used my own network. And I think that also helped, hearing the voice of the customer and saying, these are the guys who are putting these tickets in and this is what they want. This is not what they’re getting.

Look at this person that we just hired. This person is providing what we’re doing. Look at their ticket volumes. Look at their ticket close rates. Look at the feedback they’re getting from their customers. I think that was probably the most compelling part of it. You would never want that call to go to your boss, right? So he was getting a lot of those escalations over the weekends or at night, because we run 24-7.

A lot of that started going away. And that was another data point I could say like, the people that you’re hiring are solving the problems at level one or level two. They never have to go to a four or five. Look at what’s happening, right? So it’s also providing those progress reports and over, I would say over-communicating on the success and really marketing yourself on the success of it.

ADAMS (22:25)

Yeah, I think that’s really important. And far too often, I think people don’t take that last step of marketing their successes. something I tell my students. But your work does not speak for itself, not in the ways that you really need it to. And so you need to be willing to communicate those successes on behalf of not only yourself, but on behalf of the team, too, and the people. You stuck your neck out to try to hire these people that didn’t fit the mold. so communicating successes benefits everybody when you do that. And the other thing I wanted to reinforce is just, it’s consistent with what we talked about in the first segment, which is that you really talk to people. Like you collect intel, you talk to people who are directly engaged and involved in these different situations and say, what is it that you need here? What are you doing here? How are you solving the problem? What are things that other people are doing? And so you’re not only using the number data, the quantitative data, but you are also getting a lot of good qualitative information from your network that you, can imagine your network is just huge from all the different types of roles that you’ve had and all the different types of industries that you’ve worked in and that you continually rely on that. So I just wanted to reinforce that. find yourself proactively building your network or is it just something that you just sort of naturally do through the way that you work?

GOH (23:43)

I do it organically. I grow my network with people that I want to grow my network with. I think that like just getting followers for the sake of followers is not worth it. It’s not gonna be quality, right? The people that are gonna come help you in a pinch are not gonna be those people that are just like following you just for the sake of it. You wanna build relationships with a lot of these people. And I think that is something that  that I’ve found has helped me immensely in like that and not burning bridges. So I’ll tell you a quick story. The job I have right now at the supply chain consulting firm, the guy who hired me, I worked with him at my second job out of college and he remembered me and we only worked together for six months and I put out like a LinkedIn, hey, I’m looking for a new position. Here’s what I do. And he immediately contacted me on LinkedIn. And then within two months, I had a job offer. I am so grateful, one, for that network and two, that he remembered my outstanding work that I did 15 years ago. That to me is what a network should be about, right? And people who come through for you when you’re looking for something, who wanna help you, who actually…

Like my favorite phrase when I talk to somebody that I’m catching up with is, what can I do for you? How can I help you? Whether it be career or personal life or just sending you like a fun text or a funny Instagram reel, like on a Friday night, right? Like what can I do to help you? And then they do the same for me. And it just becomes that kind of a relationship rather than just very one-sided or very like on the surface.

ADAMS (25:33)

All right, Sharon, as we wrap up, what advice would you give to engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership roles?

GOH (25:39)

I think my first piece of advice, and this is for anybody who has felt that they don’t fit the mold of whatever you’re being told to be, right? Being a person in society or being an engineer and this is what you’re supposed to look like and what you’re supposed to say and the way you’re supposed to dress. Don’t worry about that stuff. Like I have never fit the mold of an engineer since I…

Since I got to Georgia Tech, since I started undergrad, I never fit that. And it’s actually given me an edge in everything I’ve done because I always look at things differently. And maybe I’m not like, you know, I’m not gonna go for drinks with all the guys at the end of the day, but I think that there’s a competence that I bring to the job that is part of not conforming to whatever society says that you’re supposed to look like, talk like, look like, whatever, to be an engineer. So find your people is what I would say. And then whatever your career you’re in, just be yourself as much as possible. It’s really hard at the beginning of your career, because you’re trying to people please, and you want to do good work. I totally get it. I’ve done it so much. But now that I’m entering this last stage of my career, I’m really reveling in the fact that I’m a weirdo and I freaking love it. It’s like the best and I will always be like this and I don’t care. It’s great. So that would be my one piece of advice. The second one is I would say take risks as much as you can. We all have different risk tolerances. I get it. I think it changes throughout your life, right? If I hadn’t gone to Korea, sight unseen, if I hadn’t taken that risk of just being thrown into a new language and culture, I don’t think I would have grown as much as I have in the last five to six years. If I hadn’t decided to go to MIT and get that graduate degree, I don’t think that I would be where I am today as well. So these were all risks I took to pivot my career. And something that one of our classmates, Anjali, taught me was that you can experiment with your career. You can be like, this sounds really cool. I interviewed a couple of people. Product management sounds like a neat thing to do, I think I’m gonna try it. And I tried it, I did it for the last four years. The beauty of it is I know what product management is and I know the things I like about product management and I know the things I don’t like about product management. And it’s beautiful because when people come to me and they’re like, hey, I have a job opportunity for this kind of position, I’m like, Nope, sorry, I don’t wanna do that. I know I don’t like that. I know I’m not the best person for it, but you know who I what I can do for you is I can introduce you to somebody who is better at it than I am. And I think that is amazing to know what you are you don’t want to do is almost better than what you do want to do. And I you have to learn by experimentation to get to that. So think like a scientist, I guess is really what it is.

ADAMS (28:35)

Excellent. Well, Sharon, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us.

GOH (28:39)

That’s great. Thank you for having me. This was a real pleasure.