MEL #027 | From Generalist to Strategic Asset through Adaptability and Ownership with Ben Roehrs

ROEHRS (00:00)
You might be the smartest person in the room, but if you’re not easy to work with, you can’t communicate, then it’s all for not.

ADAMS (00:31)
In this episode, I speak with Ben Roehrs an integrated circuit design engineer for the Molecular Imaging Division of Siemens Healthineers. Ben was inspired to pursue electrical engineering by his uncle, an engineer at Boeing. His academic path included co-op experience at BMW, a self-initiated international internship in Germany, and a master’s degree that led to a technical role at Siemens Molecular Imaging. In our leadership segment, Ben talks about how he found himself in a complex international collaboration where his team risked losing credibility. Without formal authority, he stepped up to fill a leadership vacuum by improving communication, documentation, and team responsiveness, ultimately salvaging the partnership and raising team standards. Ben shares that leadership without positional authority relies on influence, emotional intelligence, and initiative.

He advises early career engineers to develop patience, refine communication, and embrace opportunities to lead by example before seeking formal titles. Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Ben Roehrs.

ADAMS (01:31)
Hi Ben, welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

ROEHRS (01:34)
Hi, thanks for having me. It’s an honor.

ADAMS (01:35)
I’m thrilled to have you here. Can you start by telling us how you chose engineering as a career path?

ROEHRS (01:40)
Certainly, I don’t think I have a particularly unique story. But let’s say midway through high school, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. And I took four years of Latin in high school and had a lot of English and emphasis on this. my mom’s brother, so one of my uncles, is an electrical engineer for Boeing and their space defense and security.

side. And growing up, we would always have a big family beach vacation. Because he’s in Missouri. I’m from the Memphis area. And so we would all converge in Florida. hearing him describe from a, say at a lower level view of a relatively abstract technology like radar systems was very intriguing to me. I’ve always been fairly detail oriented both in process, but also components. And I would say that that kind of set the hook, but I also didn’t think that I was originally like qualified. I would say I understood the math and physics requirements were going to be strong and not that I was poor at those. I just didn’t necessarily think I was great. And so it wasn’t until junior high school, I realized like, I don’t think I would like law. This is a lot of

writing and just in general isn’t what I thought it would be. However, from a technology side, I was always interested. So I think starting in junior high school physics, I kind of pivoted with, you know, I still stuck it out, finished four years of Latin, some good, it did me my engineering degree, but it certainly kind of became the trajectory midway through high school. And

I’d always been aware of being detail oriented and as I got to understand different facets of electrical engineering. like right now my position’s in integrated circuit design. So on the day to day, when we’re looking at devices and the CAD tool that’s in the micrometer scale, and not to say that you can’t have details outside of that, but that’s very much up my alley. But really the influence of my uncle and hearing about his first summer internship working on the intercept radar F-18s was just fascinating. And what he was able to talk about working on really kind of drew me in as far as the application.

ADAMS (03:58)
And can you talk a little bit about your choice to go to UT and the major that you selected and sort of how that process went for you?

ROEHRS (04:05)
So with UT, well, for one, I was able to benefit tremendously with the Mencal scholarship when that first was offered, when Mencal made a very generous donation to the university and the building was being constructed. He also started the scholarship and that

I knew I wanted to be an engineer, but I was still up in the air with either mechanical or electrical, kind of probably biased towards electrical, but that kind of set the hook early on and set me down the path because that scholarship had you declare that specific focus upfront. And with UT, of course the scholarship doesn’t help, but I looked at a few schools around West Tennessee and Mississippi. And for me, it kind of came back

to value when I saw the, my older sister went to UT first. So I was able to visit the campus several times before making my own decision. all those six hour drive from Memphis to Knoxville was never my favorite. It was still close enough to where I felt I could get home in a reasonable amount of time, but far enough to where it fostered some

experience of independence. And I knew UT had the prerogative to grow its research and stature in the, you know, top list of 25 universities. And it really came down to the value for education. I know a lot of friends, it’s like, had a very, I went to a very large high school. think I graduated with like almost 600 students in my senior class. And like over 50 of us went to UT and that was like very boring.

to the school guidance counselor and career counselor. It’s like, well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I also don’t want to go into debt and chasing a specific school. For some people, great, but I thought a state school with already what I thought was a strong engineering program would be very much a good fit for me. The fact that I could have my older sister two years ahead of me, family in the area was also really beneficial.

ADAMS (06:06)
Yeah, that’s great. mean, I think a lot of people are looking to value in education. And I agree. think UT does a really good job at that.

So tell me a little bit about, you know, once you graduated, your career and what you’ve been up to so far.

ROEHRS (06:21)
Right, so throughout my undergraduate experience, I co-opted through engineering professional practice and that was at BMW’s manufacturing site in North or South Carolina, the Greer Spartanburg area. And that was a great experience in terms of I got to see a lot of technology and witness fairly advanced manufacturing techniques, but it was also

informative and me learning that I wasn’t so interested in manufacturing as the day-to-day business. I was very interested in the products. The cars were really fun. But from that, I really came back to…

stability of the career. What I felt there is when they hired engineers, often I didn’t feel like you needed to be an engineer. You could get there with a vocational degree. And so it didn’t feel, I felt fairly expendable, let’s say. That’s not to say that they treated people as expendable, but it didn’t seem like, okay, like this is at times really hard. I kind of want to make sure I’m using what I’ve learned in school to make sure I don’t lose that knowledge and whatnot.

So that was three semesters. But while I was there, I’ve always been, I, long, long, long ago, family history has got a lot of German background. Despite, you know, taking Latin in high school, I was always interested in learning German. But one thing I noticed while at BMW Spartanburg was there were like at times over a hundred German students who would come across. And so they had a very large international student crowd.

and almost like pretty much unheard of for US students to go back to other sites. And so I remember investigating that kind of learning how does one do this? And a lot of it was like, you kind of trudge along and push this process yourself and you make connections. And one of my managers in the assembly technology group was a German guy and he had some winter and come over and kind of picked his brain and he helped me network.

to meet some different group leads in Germany. And so while I was there, I knew, okay, I really would love to do an international internship and worked at that. But I also knew it would cost a lot of money because the internship system in Germany is very regulated. All in all, the Spartanburg plant at the time would give US students a small stipend to offset the cost so they don’t like…

actively lose a lot of money and, you had to qualify with language proficiency. And so one thing I, I did while I was co-oping was I, I hired a German tutor while I was working.

I got that stipend and then kind of network set up an internship in Munich. So after finishing my co-op, I could have graduated. I think I had the credit hours to graduate, but I wasn’t ready to. And so…

I needed to be a student. So I took what I call this six-month victory lap where I worked in Munich. And while I was there, the government salary for interns was I think 670 euros a month. I paid 450 euros for my rent and that was at a BMW-owned and subsidized apartment. So Munich was a very expensive city and I wouldn’t have been able to have that experience without

the support from the factory back in Spartanburg, South Carolina. from there, I’m very much, and I was a professional practice ambassador for two years. At that point, I was like, all right, I think I’ve concluded my internship co-op experience. Now I’m ready to look for jobs. And really, I was…

I didn’t think I wanted additional education. was almost opposed to it after co-op because like that’s not practical for me and I really want to go out and apply this. Well, one thing led to another. during one of my interviews, I had the owner, founder of the company kind of say like, why aren’t you pursuing your masters? I don’t, you know, always ask this, but your resume really points you towards here and your undergraduate research.

You won’t lose an opportunity here if you pursue that, but I would encourage you to consider that. I, you know, I was open to it and I would say my work experience being in manufacturing had almost put up a hedge that a lot of the employment interest and offers were again, kind of in the manufacturing area. And so it’s like, okay, if I take this detour, pursue my masters that might

better set me up for aiming the trajectory of my career kind of back towards what I’m interested in. So it wasn’t just a casual like accidentally like, oh, like, I guess I’ll stick around and get my masters. It was, I think this should open the door for me to kind of reorient the path. And when you know, the first semester after I had gotten accepted into the grad school and picked out my major advisor,

I get an offer for an internship as a grad student at the local company Siemens Molecular Imaging. And I was, think at first I turned it down. I was like, no, I need to start school. I don’t want another internship. But my major advisor, Dr. Ben Blalock had said, well, hey, listen, I know you’re not looking for this, but one of the leads or technical leads at Siemens from the, the integrated circuit space,

He’s an adjunct professor at UT and he’s a tremendous guy to work with in terms of a world-class analog designer and has this extensive history in nuclear instrumentation, electronics and custom silicon. It would be really beneficial for you if you’re interested in that. think you should probably do this. so I think reluctantly, three weeks after turning them down, contacted my

future manager and said, you if you didn’t find anyone else, I think I changed my mind. I’m not going to lose out on my position in my graduate’s research group, my professor’s research group. And that, you know, kind of opened the door for an internship right at the start of graduate school. And that was really an incredible experience,

one thing I noticed at Siemens and the reason I wanted to come back was there wasn’t much attrition. And I really saw it as an asset that there was a tremendous domain knowledge in all these various areas. And that’s something that almost panicked me when I did get an offer to have a full-time job, because I don’t feel like I have this domain. I’m eager. I want to be here, but you know, was, was attractive to me to not be the guy on the hook. It’s like, I very much had a mentorship.

type relationship with several people who had not only their PhDs, but also a long career to draw advice from. And so that’s how I, the internships, how I learned about Siemens, I didn’t even know they were in town. But once I learned about that, that, and I experienced the work culture here, it was very much something I wanted to pursue long-term and was very fortunate that they had an opening.

ADAMS (13:19)
That’s a great career trajectory and there’s a couple of things I wanted to double click on. So first, I actually want to go back to BMW and this co-op that you did and you’re like, I want to go

And it sounded like you had to kind of create the opportunity. mean, I know that in Germany they have interns, so you didn’t necessarily have to create that part, but just sort of the bridge between where you were to get over there. So I want to learn about what made you think, yeah, I’m willing to do the work to kind of create this opportunity. then, and I’m just going to add to that, and then I’m going to invest.

in myself and in a tutor so that I can actually meet the requirements to do that. So there are a bunch of things there that are above and beyond what I think a typical undergraduate student is willing to do. And so I’m just curious about, you know, what prompted you, what motivated you to do that, and maybe even motivated you to keep going as you see some of these obstacles in front of you.

ROEHRS (14:15)
Absolutely. So, and I mean, yeah, so I have this family background, but I also had several friends who study abroad. I didn’t study abroad, but it certainly looked like they had a good time. And so I was interested in travel. I had never, never been to Europe. And so it was, you know, a very new novel prospect, but I also thought there would be something to glean both if I wanted and was it

if it was an option to continue working at BMW, would this solidify their interest in me? Would it help me stand out? Because they have a very large intern program of over 200 students each semester. How do you set yourself apart? So part of it was I wanted the competitive edge, but I also was extremely interested both in the product and how does a company that the…

the backbone of German engineering or their economy is often the automotive industry.

Like in one sense, it’s like, okay, this doesn’t seem like it’s impossible. It just seems like it’s not common. That’s not too deflating. I remember emailing the.

program coordinator before starting my assignment and asked, hey, I’ve heard that there are German students who participate. If it’s an option to have an international student roommate, I would love that experience. It’s just to live with someone different from me and try to learn from them. again, be out of my comfort zone, I think is part of the goal.

but I thought both with language and cultural understanding, is that an option? It was a shot in the dark, but it turns out that there were two German students who were in a different program that provided them housing. And I was able to have one of those guys as my roommate. And that was very beneficial to practice with a native speaker, what I was learning with my tutor, but also again, like,

networking because for them to get to the US they had to do some networking, although it’s a much more established path between the various plants in Germany and the either, mean, the US is a big draw, but like I was also, if I hadn’t have reached enough proficiency in German, I was going to their South African plant, BMW has a plant there. And so that was the next option. so

I guess it was just fun, felt like a puzzle to me.

ADAMS (16:29)
Yeah, think that’s a really good path. The way you described a path was really useful because you identified potential competitive edge, and then you decided to pursue it. And then you kind of, I think, pretty logically identified, OK, there’s a language thing here. There’s a networking thing here. There’s these couple pieces.

None of this seems impossible, so I’m just going to start working the problem. And then if I hit a stumbling block, as you said, very, very importantly, I’m going to say, who can I talk to about this? Who can potentially help me? And then you just sort of work through it in a very systematic way. And then you get what you were hoping to get. And I think that’s very useful, really, to kind of explain that, because I think so many people could see the first obstacle and just think, OK, well.

yeah, maybe there’s no way here. And you’re like, no, people are doing this. People out in world are doing this. There’s got to be a way.

Excellent. Then the other thing I wanted to talk about, you mentioned

when you decided to go to graduate school, I really like what you said about you initially turned down the internship because it didn’t quite fit with your plan, but then you had a trusted advisor suggest that you really consider it. And I love that you went back three weeks later and said, I changed my mind. Is this still an opportunity? And I’m just curious if you had any hesitancy about that because I think so many people would have not taken that step.

ROEHRS (17:48)
I don’t know whether it’s a familiarity with getting egg in my face and it’s just like that uncomfortable. I guess I definitely, it was a thought. Like I didn’t burn the bridge. very politely turned it down and I gave the reason why. I said, look, if I hadn’t have had a full year plus six months international work experience, I would be all over this. But right now, I think

like I need to focus on starting my graduate school and you know maybe what I learned this first semester or two if you still need a graduate level intern maybe you know we could look at it then but hearing from my major advisor and just again I guess part of that is and I think we’ll probably touch on this more than once is flexibility with rolling with the punches like when an opportunity opens up being

flexible and adaptable to seize that opportunity and just kind of be prepared, expect change. There are times when, especially early in my career, I would think I needed like an iron clad plan, but it never really ever, ever worked out like that for me. And so you get forced through that uncomfortable space of changing a plan despite having made it and just kind of pivoting and say, okay, that’s not a door that’s opening.

I need to look elsewhere.

ADAMS (19:06)
And it sounds like you, though, as you said, you were genuine and you also, even in your original decline, you maintained the relationship, right? You did it in a very professional way and you explained your rationale and then you got some new information and things changed for you and so it doesn’t hurt, might as well reach back out to somebody that you still have a relationship with and see if there’s still an opportunity there. So I think that’s great.

And then maybe the last thing I wanted to touch base on. when you said it, you early on in your career, you had multiple co-op experiences in manufacturing and you kind of said, I’m not sure that I really like manufacturing because it doesn’t seem like they really need my domain knowledge, I’m an engineer. I have all this expertise, but it seems like you can get pretty far in this particular environment,

You pivot, you go to graduate school, but now you get an opportunity at a company that is heavy domain knowledge and you’re sort of like, I’m not even sure that I have enough domain knowledge to really be valuable in this space. So I’m just curious,

If you identified the problem of maybe I don’t have as much domain knowledge or experience or whatever in this really highly technical company that I’m now at, how have you been approaching that as you’ve been spending time with them?

ROEHRS (20:15)
Sure. It’s a great question. So part of this is growing in comfort and confidence that I don’t have my PhD. At the time two members of my group did, but I would say I had a decently broad depth or breadth of experience. And so what felt like a liability when I first started with not having this domain knowledge established and it was kind of

every time I’d have a one-on-one with my manager, it’s like, how do I push into this area? And I realized quickly it’s going to take a career to get a career’s worth of knowledge. And so I should expect that to happen overnight. But what I can’t let that happen is let me prevent making forward progress and learning what I can depending on what we’re working on. like, so what types of projects are we working on? What phase of the project are we at? And so

I use that to both get over this, know, I don’t, am I valuable here and say, okay, I don’t have this domain knowledge, least to their level, where I do have control over is a positive attitude and an ownership attitude to where when I’m given assignments, it doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions, which is a big lesson I learned in Germany when there was a language barrier, but it means I want to take responsibility. I want to,

give everyone like no reason not to give me any assignment. And so when it, whether it’s seeing things through, but really the attitude portion of like, there are times when you don’t know what you’re doing, but if you have the same, you know, initiative and proactive nature to try to seek out problems, they’ll come to you. And when you’re easy to work with, people want to work with you. And so I remember like two or three years in,

We used to have this process into the year, like our round tables. And that’s when everyone made a slide kind of capstone-ing the main achievements as an individual you had each year. And our group was different from others in that we reviewed them with each other. And so there was this kind of like strategizing of like, okay, I know I did this, but like you also have to be in the room with

your peers when you toot your own horn. that was always an interesting experience. And I remember feeling like, yeah, what do I say? I’m the monkey wrench. I’ve just worked on anything when there’s a problem, I just go to the problem. I don’t have such a finely defined, like I only design PCBs or I only design ASICs and I, or I specialize in troubleshooting these, type of problem with our equipment and

I didn’t have such a articulated and cut out application space, but I, you know, I think it was during a one-on-one by managers said, well, think about this, you and this other guy, I kind of view is the same, you’re overlapping multiple areas of application and expertise. That’s an asset to you while you’re viewing it as like a liability because you’re not as deep.

The fact that you can do more than one thing is beneficial here because in one sense, we’re a medical device manufacturer, we’re heavily regulated by the FDA thing, and we’re a German company. Things don’t always move like a startup, let’s say. There’s sometimes some bureaucracy and our development timeline is often far longer.

due to the complexity of our systems to where it’s beneficial to do more than one thing if there is a lull in a particular development cycle. so part of it was just, yeah, getting my, wrapping my own head around, I’m more of a generalist at this point in my career, but that’s not a liability. And then from there, it was really also trying to remain, maintain self-awareness. So like, what am I best at? And for me,

I think part of that came to like the practical implementation when it comes to the IC design. When you go from a schematic theory to the layout and extraction process so that you’re modeling what’s physically implemented on an IC die, that’s where I was drawn to in terms of interest. And I had to kind of carved out that space, identify what I was good at and then tried to run with that. So I needed to be interested, but it also fell into my

you know, things I’m good at bucket, then that was a match and tried to pursue that. And that would be kind of the foundation of the role I played in my group in those early years.

ADAMS (24:51)
All right, Ben, can you give us an example of when you had to use leadership skills?

ROEHRS (24:55)
Absolutely. So this kind of case study really is what I would say the incident that kind of propelled me into more of a leadership role formally within my group. And I hope to be able to tie the right lessons to it. But so within our department, we have electrical research and development. We have a small ASIC design team.

And there are times that that’s a benefit because we’re fairly agile, but we also don’t have the resources and foundry access of other larger groups. And to develop the next generation front end detector, we needed to integrate a lot of functionality

But we found a partner who had expertise both with some of the sensors we use, but also they had backend high speed digital electronic ADCs and whatnot. And there was a unique opportunity for us to

co-develop something. so we have, this group was based in Austria and

So we have this time difference, but also we’re burning the candle from both ends when it comes to co-developing design libraries and sending them back and forth. And we both had, we had our team lead at the time. They had a similar role liaison and kind of handling the administrative, but also technical direction of the teams. On our side, what I began to perceive in our weekly meetings was a bit of

negligence on our side. And so what it felt like we were taking our partners for granted, and what started out with a lot of enthusiasm on both sides, and, you know, we hit the ground running, when it came to some of the finer details, it didn’t seem like we were holding up our side of the bargain, or development responsibilities to the same extent that we had started. And they were beginning to

be a little uncomfortable and starting to be vocal about that. And it wasn’t so much like, guys, work harder. was more, can you follow through with this communication or can we be clear here? And so what started with, let’s say less than ideal enthusiasm for carrying out this role opened an opportunity to say, okay, I want to work with this team A because

they very much are knowledgeable with the cutting edge best practices for this type of technology. I wanted to do two things with that. A, I wanted to learn myself and increase my own skillset technically, but B, I thought that this would be positive influence in steering the group culture and let’s say the own internal standards of our group to a higher level. Because we had done developments like

completely independently within our own team in the past. And no, very few engineers like love documentation, but it’s still very much necessary, especially in the medical device sector where you’ve got to have traceability and design controls and demonstrate them. But that wasn’t always up to standard and it didn’t allow for concise or

efficient design sharing. so really, me observing what felt like us dropping the plates. So.

Uh, I w it started with just initiative and a little bit of proactivity with, I would step in and volunteer and say, even where, whereas our group lead at the time would ask them like, Oh yeah, can you just send something over? Well, we’ll review it rather than us generate some content and submit it to the group for a wider review. They would ask them, yeah, just, just send that over. Like that kind of annoyed me. It’s like.

no, we need to be learning and throwing ourselves into this because we also want this to succeed. I don’t want this development to collapse because it was a bit of a risk for both companies to expose their design knowledge to each other and kind of collaborate this closely. So, you know, it wasn’t necessarily just one or two meetings, but really it kind of came to a head and their project manager said, Hey, we really need to see some changes here.

Otherwise we need to discuss what the implications are because if you want to back out of this, we can still do this together, but your team will have a smaller input and we need to assume responsibility for this. So it wasn’t so much like they got angry, but it was more if we can’t get on the same eye level view here, given the same page, then we need to change because lately this hasn’t been

running as efficiently as we had been and it doesn’t make sense. And so in talking with my manager, it was really kind of a, I slowly had assumed some of these plates that were in the air at one point that started to drop and caught those. And it was just kind of like, I don’t want to see this fail. And I guess self-awareness here is that’s not to say that I think the goal is anytime you perceive something isn’t going well is to just

force yourself and assert yourself into a situation, but it was pretty clear that they were less than thrilled. And so by taking on some of those responsibilities that kind of re gave them, let’s say confidence in the stability of the project or the development cycle and soothed those kind of project level concerns. There are plenty of learning experiences along the way, but that’s

kind of at a high level, you know, it was someone who wasn’t carry or administering a job with as much care and it opened an opportunity. And I guess I didn’t ask for permission, right? It was more like, I don’t want this to fail. What can we do differently? And so by being proactive while this is going on, it kind of gave me an on-ramp to say, okay, even if I’m not formally recognized here,

I care about the results. I don’t care about what role or what title I’ve got. I just want to see this keep going. And fortunately it did. And I would say throughout that collaboration, the strategic goal I had of, let’s say, raising our own internal standards for documentation and design controls, that also rubbed off positively. So it was very much became iron sharpening iron in the technical sense.

the rest of that collaboration was much, but fortunately became much smoother, but now we also have a trusted partner. So we knew we would be in each other’s design space, but now we know each other personality wise, we know how to work as a team. And so we left this collaboration with a strategic partner rather than just a short-term development.

ADAMS (31:27)
All right, this is a great example. if I summarize this, so you’re working in partnership with a different entity. And first of all, that was actually somewhat of an atypical arrangement, but you all are, the team you’re on and the other team, you’re working together in a partnership and you are seeing that your own team is maybe not.

fully meeting all of the expectations and delivering with the same level of intensity that the other team is. And they’re starting to notice and things need to be, things may need to change either, that the other team just assumes more responsibility or the home team steps up a little bit more. And you say, I see some areas where I’m willing to step up some more. And I think that’ll be good for both the team. And it sounds like…

you had the conversations with the leadership and everybody and they said, yeah, let’s just do it, right? And it worked out really well, The other team’s like, yeah, this is great. We’re seeing the improvement. Everybody’s happy.

can you just talk a little bit about how your own internal team perceived your actions, your activity, and then if there was anything that you needed to navigate there.

ROEHRS (32:33)
Sure. So I think, yeah, the perception was definitely common to the rest of the team, but I tried to approach it delicately to where it wasn’t, you know, like a midnight takeover. was more, let me volunteer for some of these more administrative tasks on top of what technical content that I’m responsible for. And so the two other team members were very much, they were, you know, more experienced than me, but they were very busy with the

design elements of what their portion of this front end block was doing. The team lead was really carrying out the project timeline coordination, all of the, let’s say less than glamorous side of things, but very important when you have a cross continent collaboration with investments on the line and anytime money’s involved and you have a product.

target with the timeline, you can’t just arbitrarily slip these types of deadlines. so it was, I would say with respect to the prior team lead, fortunately, my manager at the time was also, you know, a very good leader and said, let me kind of take it. have the authority for this, but I’ll handle the team lead here. Really we’re going to point him in another direction for another research opportunity.

he’ll still be involved, but really just going to redirect him here because it had started to also undermine the, let’s say morale of the team because it wasn’t a, even the burden wasn’t being distributed evenly. So we had, you know, some of us working extremely long hours and it felt like that definitely wasn’t the case elsewhere.

I would say in this case, being relieved of that responsibility didn’t seem to phase this other person. And so I really set forth from that point rather than pushing, because I think anytime you have knowledge workers with advanced degrees,

no one really responds well to being pushed along and orders dictated to, it’s more of a pull. so euphemistically referred to as herding cats, but you have to be boots on the ground and in the trenches and pull in a given direction alongside with everybody. And so that kind of set the dynamic on how we can move forward. But I didn’t have, let’s say, positional authority.

kick someone off the project, it was more I cared deeply about its success. And I knew that the other team members who were busy with their portion of the design, they weren’t slackers, they were working incredibly hard. I just didn’t want to see us as a team get mud on our face because some of the higher level coordination was lacking.

again, I’m the least senior person in the group while this is going on and I don’t have my PhD, so I’m also technically less qualified, but nonetheless, there was still a leadership role that needed to happen and seeing those opportunities, but taking them.

and being proactive, not waiting for the wheels to fall off before you step in is something I think you can work to refine in your early career.

ADAMS (35:52)
All right, Ben, as we wrap up, what advice would you give to engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership roles?

ROEHRS (35:58)
So I guess I’ll start with a caveat. And of course, you and I discussed this early in the podcast, maybe before we put it on air, but this comes from a perspective of not so long with so much depth of experience in my career, but also I don’t have tremendous positional authority. But I still think earlier in your career, there’s a tremendous opportunity for organizational impact with leadership.

that doesn’t come from positional authority. Then I used to read about that and think like, okay, well, how does this work? And the bottom line is it’s often influence. But even at BMW during my co-op, one of them, had several training classes you would take throughout the co-op. And one of them was called leading without authority. And at the time I used to kind of chuckle to myself like.

great, we’re learning how to manipulate. But it really, you that wasn’t the goal, of course, it was when you don’t have positional authority, how can you still impact something. And most of the time that centered around influence. And when you don’t have the authority, nor should you want to have to rely on the authority to accomplish something. It’s building relationships, building up your credibility. And

demonstrating responsibilities such that it’s easier for people to want to agree and establish consensus with you. Some lower level aspects of that that I think are something you can develop. Because let’s say when it comes to, if you’re interested in leadership, that wouldn’t necessarily have been at the forefront of my mind when I first started full-time and gotten out of school. was, at the time I was focused on

growing my technical domain knowledge. But in the process, there are many occasions in which leadership traits emerged and open up opportunity. So at a high level, this all falls under the advice of, if you’re interested in leadership, my first advice would be not to rush it, especially if you have a direct manager or a director above them who is an excellent strategic thinker and is

I’m very fortunate to have a management chain that’s not only great at leadership, but also developing others. And so when you have someone who can be a mentor and give that advice, oftentimes, even if there’s a positional authority role, the approach here has been not to rush it, to continue to refine those skills and be given opportunities to do that. But if you rush in right out of school,

it you might miss out on establishing a technical depth that is necessary to not only get buy in and earn rapport with your colleagues, but it could also just come across the wrong way. So at a high level, yeah, just not rushing that process, even if you’re interested into it.

But the next kind of bullet point is trying to cultivate emotional intelligence and

this, you whether that’s self-awareness, but also control of your own emotions and, you know, in response to what others say and do, there’s kind of play off each other because there are times when someone, you know, they might be having a bad day or you upset them or if someone in general has a strong personality, even they don’t even know if they’re being brash or you perceive them as brash.

the ability to, let’s say, weather the sting of criticism, or even if you perceive resistance, I think it could be very beneficial for you to lean into that and look deeply for a root cause. Because sometimes if you like stay on the surface level, it’s easy to just react when someone’s been upset at you. And let’s say,

you don’t like that. so you become an, it becomes an emotional response. There are several times, including the case study where I had one of my colleagues say, you know, kind of off the cuff, was probably a late night, you know, a portion we were doing layout on a chip. And they said, you know, you have trouble meeting deadlines. And I was kind of like, you know, I wanted to be like, what are you, that’s so like,

That’s mean. Why are you being so mean to me? But I was interested rather than, you know, reacting on an emotional level. Like, why did they say that? What was their, you know, how are they perceiving this? How am I being perceived? And the conversation went to like, hey, you know what, there are times, you’re right, I either under forecast the effort needed for something and

I don’t get it done in time. But what I’d like, what I would really, I would really appreciate if you would acknowledge that when it comes to those often why I don’t get done is because I’m giving help to others in our group. So when it comes to utilizing like the latest features of our CAD tools and, know, getting the layout for schematic and design rules checks passed, there’s like, you know,

several hundred page manual for each foundry on like what, errors can exist and how to resolve them. That is not a simple thing to just breeze through. And so I had some experience in that area and I would get pulled constantly to help colleagues navigate those. And they, I kind of explained like, you know, when I do this or this, you know, that’s an hour of my time gone and it’s, it’s unforecastable. It’s unpredictable. I don’t know how to.

plan when it happens, I just have to think of it as overhead and say, okay, this, you know, I need to get better projecting, you know, how long it takes me to do something, but that’s why. And then they said, yeah, you know, you’re, right. I’m sorry I said that. And rather than band-aiding over, I’m a big advocate for peacemaking as opposed to peacekeeping. I don’t want to patch something over on the surface and there’s still be an issue.

I’d rather weather the initial sting or storm and resolve the issue, get to a mutual understanding. So there are several times early in my career I could have just shut down. I could have reacted negatively with emotion when someone said something a bit prickly. But it’s like I don’t even plan it. It just happens to be like, OK, I’m way more composed now than I thought I would be.

build off that. And I think that that composure in the face of some adversity has been extremely helpful to stay calm and collected. And that ultimately allows you to think at a strategic level and not get sucked into a tactical mindset when it doesn’t help. As I say, the other two points would be your attitude, even if it’s like, you know, my concern early was I don’t have technical depth.

at the level of my 40 year career colleagues have, but I do have a positive attitude. I’m not overly pessimistic in the face of some challenge. I wanna work on this. I wanna learn. And part of that positive ownership attitude is proactiveness, taking the initiative to throw yourself into something. Don’t wait for a formal invitation. There are tons of times when I’d have colleagues staying late to troubleshoot some

integration, you know, as we ramped up a particular system that we were about to release. I didn’t know how the system worked, but I just tagged along. I didn’t really ask, you know, as long as I’m being helpful, no one minds that you’re there learning. And so you just, those opportunities to just, Hey, I want to learn this. And when you get those relationships to grow, you, you, you’re never going to run out of things to do. Let’s put it that way. And that’s a good place to be.

early in your career when you might not have the expertise to offer, but if you have enthusiasm and positive attitude, it definitely opens doors.

The last one would be cultivating communication skills. I had the privilege to speak at the engineering professional practice spring banquet and the keynote speaker, Kim Green, gave a wonderful quote that just like hit me in my core.

And the quote was like, if I had more time, I would have written you a shorter email when it comes to communication. Now, of course, with in the context of communication, I learned early on that having the ability to articulate to a broad audience, you know, I was an engineer in a maintenance group as a co-op at BMW. The maintenance technicians cared about different things than the engineering operations management, but

When it came to my role at Siemens, I like used to love giving a big fat technical email to my manager explaining why this problem was happening and what we were going to do. And a few times I got feedback like, can’t you just like summarize that at the top? Like that’s great that you know what you’re doing. And if I wasn’t under the pressure of the schedule crunch and whatnot, I would love to read that, but like make it more obvious for me. And I remember being like, so like,

but this is interesting and it’s cool. And, know, a little deflated before I realized like, this isn’t the time to keep it low level in it. It’s going to be greatly appreciated by your chain of command to be in your management, to be able to have the key takeaway kind of concisely summarized. And so when, when Kim let out that quote, like, yes, this hit me in the face a few times before I finally got it. And you know,

would say, here’s what matters, here’s the outcome for a longer explanation, read below, and then eventually, I just said, come talk to me if you want the technical longer explanation, but here’s what you need to know. And so I think that growing your ability to understand your audience and what they care about is very helpful as you begin to interface and with other.

other parts of your organization, your, let’s say your influence moves outside of your department and into other cross functional groups. It matters and can help you greatly to articulate to the audience at hand. So I think that, probably covers that added, I guess the, the advice there. And that’s, this is, these are things that I’ve noticed that I feel like have helped me in my career and have opened doors.

more so than, know, you might be the smartest person in the room, but if you’re not easy to work with, you can’t communicate, then it’s all for not. And so I never thought I was the smartest person in the room, but there are definitely times when I think, you know, some tact and strategy when it comes to communicating, having the attitude that people want to be around, but also awareness of your own, emotions, keeping those in check.

and how you interact with others gives you tremendous ability without positional authority to influence and move things and make an impact for your organization.

ADAMS (46:31)
I am curious how you have learned to keep composure. Because you’re right. mean, these situations, criticism or just high stress for whatever reason, they come up pretty frequently actually in one’s career. And you have rightly pointed out that being able to keep your composure is really an advantage and a skill to have. And I’m curious how you.

have developed that or if you’re continuing to cultivate that skill.

ROEHRS (46:57)
Right, I’d be far from claiming mastery of the subject, but when it’s mattered and it’s tested, I guess it comes from what is your goal on a given project? If it’s to move forward and you care about the outcome, you’re much more willing to listen. And that’s part of emotional intelligence, listening to what someone else is saying, not to,

bottle up your next response, but to understand and empathize from their perspective. And I think that understanding that that takes patience and growing that patience is really probably where I think that’s like a trait or a skill set that it’s not fun to learn and grow your patience. But I think that that is one that definitely applies here. And so when you see those situations pop up, it’s kind of like, okay,

I know the outcome if I blow up and return the favor of being prickly and kind of curt with how I say something, burning the bridge there or shutting down the conversation is gonna technically slow us down. If I can resolve this issue and get us on the same page, not only is it way more pleasant of a team dynamic to exist in, because you care about your

colleagues on a personal level, not just, can you get your job done? Thanks. Bye. That that’s, that’s at least the type of culture I like to work in where you feel like you’ve got each other’s back. And when you establish that common ground with someone, even if you feel like they said something unfairly, or even borderline unprofessionally at times, hopefully not so, but if it’s unfair, if you can work on your patients to really try to analyze or understand what’s the source of that.

Are they really just being punitive towards you or do they have a point that you need to hear even if it’s overblown and then can you respond to that graciously?

ADAMS (48:43)
Ben, thank you very much for sharing your insights with us.

ROEHRS (48:46)
Thank you, it’s been an honor.