MEL #031 | From Engineering Problems to Human-Centered Leadership through Systems Thinking with Dr. Dennis Burianek

BURIANEK (00:00)

Leadership is making decisions with a deficit of information.

I can’t write an algorithm, I can’t write an equation, which is what a lot of engineers want to do, write the equation, but you don’t always have all the answers.

ADAMS (00:35)

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Dennis Burianek Director of Business Transformation at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Dennis grew up in Seattle, fascinated by planes, spacecraft, and his older brother’s career in aerospace engineering. That early interest led him to study at MIT, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in aerospace engineering before joining MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he has spent his entire career solving complex national security challenges.

His career evolved from hands-on technical roles to cross-functional program management and senior leadership. In our leadership segment, Dennis shared a high-stakes scenario leading a spacecraft project where a hardware failure forced rapid high-pressure decision-making. He balanced technical rigor with leadership judgment, emphasizing the need to uncover root causes, resist premature solutions, and communicate clearly with stakeholders while managing team stress and maintaining morale. His key advice to aspiring engineering leaders.

Be curious and experiment with leadership in and outside of work. Don’t assume introverts can’t lead. Leadership is learned, not inherited, and there are many styles. He encourages engineers to read, reflect, and explore leadership frameworks to discover their own path. You can learn more about Dennis and access his recommended resources in our show notes and at drangeliqueadams.com/podcast.

Without further delay, here is my conversation with Dr. Dennis Burianek.

ADAMS (01:54)

Hi, Dennis. Welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

BURIANEK (01:57)

Hey, Angelique thanks for having me on. Happy to be here today.

ADAMS (01:59)

Great. Can you start by telling us how you got into engineering as a career path?

BURIANEK (02:05)

Sure. mean, I really started with a kid. I loved airplanes. I love spacecraft. I grew up in the Seattle area, which is where Boeing’s located. So that was in the news a lot. I have an older brother who was sort of a mentor or a guidepost for me, who was also an aerospace engineer. And, know, he, I got to see what he was doing and it was interesting. So I always enjoyed building things, taking them apart, figuring out how they worked, right. Which is kind of the core of engineering.

And so when I went to college, was pretty, I didn’t necessarily know what kind of engineering I was going to go into, but I knew I wanted to do some sort of engineering and building of things.

ADAMS (02:40)

And then you decided to go to MIT and you stuck around for a while. So you got your master’s, bachelor’s, PhD. And then of course, you and I met when you decided to go back later on to get your executive MBA. we’ll get to that later. But yeah, talk a little bit about your experience at MIT.

BURIANEK (02:56)

Sure. So I got to MIT in the early 90s, right? So really, the sort of the start of the peak of the boom of the computer era. And I actually had two things that I was really interested in. Aerospace and everything from what I grew up watching as a child. But I was really also fascinated with computers, right? And programming. And I had done some programming, and I’d done some work with them. And I really had a hard time picking between computer science

I’m an aerospace engineering. And at the end of the day, and I like to tell people was almost a coin flip. Like I just went back to what I loved. Like I just was fascinated with space. You know, at one point in my life, I thought, maybe I’d be an astronaut or maybe I’d be a pilot. And then I grew tall and that, that takes you right out of some of those professions, but I can work in them still and I can build them. And what I really have enjoyed throughout my career and even from the beginning as aerospace is that it’s a complex system.

things have to fit together and work together right. If my engine’s operating perfectly, but my control surfaces aren’t, it’s still a bad flight. So I was really drawn to that complexity of how things had to work together in order for the whole system to work properly. So.

ADAMS (04:01)

And how did you decide to continue undergraduate school?

BURIANEK (04:04)

Well, that’s a pretty interesting story, Angelique. So having an older brother in the field, I knew that at some point throughout your career, you were going to have to get a master’s degree. So I was finishing up my bachelor’s degree. And I knew, again, to have most people in the field, you had to go on for further education. And I got the opportunity through a research fellowship at MIT to kind of continue straight on to my master’s degree. And I actually had every intention of

finishing up there, packing up, moving back home to Seattle and going to work for Boeing or something like that. That was sort of what I had in mind when I started my master’s degree. And so it was a research-based master’s. So I got a little bit of flavor for doing research and taking some of the advanced courses. The other part of going directly is I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to go do, right? Aerospace in the mid-90s, there wasn’t a lot of options. You had the big primes, Raytheon, Lockheed, McDonald Douglas back then, Boeing.

But there wasn’t a lot of exposure to ⁓ sort of the smaller firms or more of the startup like firms like you have today. So it really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So it made sense to stay at MIT, finish up, get my master’s degree, and then hopefully, you know, take some more classes and get a better understanding of what it is that I really wanted to do. As I was doing my master’s degree, two things happened. One is,

My thesis advisor suggested that I take the PhD qualifying exam, which is like a big exam that covers everything you’ve ever known. I think you probably had to go through one of those, very stressful. And he’s like, look, if you ever want to go back and get a PhD, you should do this now. I know you don’t want to, but do it now because you’re better prepared now than you ever will be. I listened to him and I did it. And then right after that, after I successfully finished that, my thesis advisor got a grant.

for continuing the work I was doing. And he said, you you’re doing the work already. I want to offer you the right of first refusal. So I had to really sit down and think, do I really want to stay into a PhD? And I really wasn’t sure. I wrestled with this decision for a long time, trying to figure out, like, you know, it was another three or four years, right? That’s time where you’re not earning money or earning a lot of money. But also the opportunities that might open up in terms of further research or teaching or something like that. So that was a big trade-off.

⁓ And at the end of the day, I liked the work I was doing. I liked the people I was working with. So it was a little bit of inertia, but I decided to ultimately stay and get my PhD after another three or four years at that point.

ADAMS (06:26)

Okay, and so now you have your PhD. so how were you thinking about what you wanted to do next? I’m sure academia was probably an option, industry was an option. Just talk about sort of what was available to you at the time and how you chose to go the path you went.

BURIANEK (06:41)

It’s great question. Again, it’s one of those other crossroads in life. You try to figure it out, right? You have a PhD, it certainly opens up the academic route and the ability to continue doing research nominally in the same area you did your PhD, but then the expectation is that you would grow and expand beyond that. Or move on into industry. ⁓ After, to be honest, finishing the PhD was a long slog. It was a lot of work.

⁓ And I, and while I enjoyed my research and I learned a ton about myself and I learned a ton about actually successfully doing research on your own, both the pluses and minus of it. I kind of came to the conclusion. I didn’t really want to keep doing that sort of fundamental research for my career. So I really enjoyed the teaching part and we can come back to that later. I enjoyed that part of it, but I didn’t really want to do a, have a research career. And I wanted to get back to where I really started with is I wanted to build.

airplanes and spacecraft, right. And so I had to go find a place that could do that. And again, now we’re talking the early 2000s, things are starting to shift a little bit,

as I was finishing up, I had to decide, do I want to be in the academic framework or do I want to go into industry? That’s really the two options. Or actually at that time, a lot of the big consulting firms were hiring PhDs in engineering to go out and do management consulting and they teach you all the business things you needed to know. And then you go do management consulting. They were just looking for you how to solve problems. Cause at the end of the day,

doing research for a PhD or even engineering. It’s not necessarily about whether you’re doing aerospace or mechanical or electrical. Engineering really is problem solving, right? It’s figuring out how to understand the problem, how to recognize what the real problem is, and then going back and figuring out how to break the problem down into pieces you know how to solve and then putting it all back together. To me, that’s the foundation of what engineering is.

you know, as a PhD student, did it as research. And I realized that I didn’t really want to continue doing research in the composite materials. So I decided to go into industry and I wanted to find a place where there was an important mission, right? I wasn’t in there necessarily to make big bucks or do something else. I wanted something that was going to be important for society. And then I’d have the opportunity to continue to learn and grow, right? That’s been the story of my career that continued learning and growth.

⁓ And I ended up at a place that I hadn’t really even heard about before, which is a federally funded research and development center where we build prototypes. And so I’d have the opportunity to take what I learned about problem solving. I take what I learned about my specific area of my PhD, but I’d be able to continue to grow and go beyond that. So that’s how I ended up picking sort of where I wanted to start my career here at Lincoln Laboratory.

ADAMS (09:18)

And so now you’ve been with Lincoln Laboratory for, I think your entire career, if I’m not mistaken. I have, yeah. can you talk just a little bit about your career trajectory? You started out technical, but now you’re in a leadership position. So just talk a little bit about that.

BURIANEK (09:33)

Sure. You know, it’s really been an evolution, right? And it ties back to what I mentioned a few minutes ago about having completed my PhD and understanding and liking what I’ve done in the research, but was ready to learn and do something new. Right? So the laboratory offered me that. And I started at what they call a technical staff level. So I was a staff researcher. I was in charge of maybe some small projects, maybe one or two people underneath me. But I was really focused on still doing more of that sort of research element or solving problems.

Lincoln Laboratory has a very unique position in that we’re not academia, we’re not commercial, and we’re not the government. We kind of sit in the middle of lot of those things. And so we get some really interesting problems. And our real focus is to solve those really hard problems. So it’s a very large mission focused. We are part of MIT, the university, so we have that ties back to academia. Most of our work is for our government customers and really solving the pressing national security problems of the day.

But I started out my career really doing some of those individual projects, still in the lab a lot, still taking data, still doing research. And over time, I realized, ⁓ and my bosses realized, that I had some skills at looking at cross-functional things, looking at systems as a whole. So I started to get more into systems engineering and program management, which are parts of engineering that are looking at how things all fit together.

⁓ both technically and then programmatically, how do I get it done in the time and budget that I have allotted? So I started to work more of those projects at a higher level. Still as a technical staff, still sort of keeping my technical roots, but doing more of the program management. And that’s what really led me into more formal management roles. Having done that for a while and demonstrated some competent success, I was able to then go and

take on a more formal management role involving managing people and managing, as well as managing technical projects.

ADAMS (11:23)

So one of the key words that you mentioned there was cross-functional. And so I’d love to talk a little bit about when you’re a technical person and you start to work cross-functionally, even technically, you do start to get into different types of people with different sort of ways of thinking, ways of solving problems. I if you are all engineers, but I imagine as you start working in more cross-functional teams, you start getting some adjacent skill sets with you. So can you just talk a little bit about

It sounds like it was something that maybe you had a knack for, and I’m not sure if it was something that you naturally had a knack for or if you found yourself learning or studying about how to be successful managing cross-functional projects. Can you talk a little bit about that?

BURIANEK (12:05)

Sure, right. You know, with anything learning, there’s different ways you can learn it, you know, in a classroom, from a book, and then experiential. So a lot of my learning in this area is experiential, which means I was trying to do it. I didn’t do it right. I had to learn from that and correct my mistakes and then go try something again next time. I also started reading more books and articles and papers about leadership and management and understanding that I enlisted mentors.

from both inside and outside the organization for how did you deal with this kind of situation? This kind of thing happened. What are some techniques you can use? And it wasn’t that I wanted them to solve the problem for me, but I wanted them to help me understand how to think about it how to do it differently. Because not everything can be broken down into an equation, right? When you’re dealing with people and personalities and different skills, right? It requires you to bring some different perspective. The other thing I started to do is be more aware of

different people interact in different situations, right? Different people would respond the same prompt in different ways. And it’s like, okay, well, how are they gonna respond? So how would, if I’m going to talk to Angelique about this, I might present it in a certain way. But if I’m going be talking to Jane about this, I might do something else. so there’s that way of just starting to recognize through experience and then, and then, you know, picking up learning and taking classes or seminars along the way.

ADAMS (13:24)

Yeah, I like the way you describe that sort of, you know, picking up on experiences and what you hinted at was this idea of pattern recognition. mean, I think that oftentimes, engineers will feel like this, what we’d call soft skills or professional skills are sometimes inaccessible to them because they taught, we use sometimes these vague and abstract words about, you know, like empathy and all this other kind of stuff. But to me, it often boils down to pattern recognition. If you can just sort of pay attention,

to people and certain behaviors and see what’s going on and learn the different cause and effect of those things. You can be in really good shape. And so at least for me, that was a way that became accessible to me. And now I often try to provide that as another way for people to view some of these really important leadership skills that you need to have. Oftentimes, it can be boiled down into pattern recognition. people are like, oh, OK, I can do that.

BURIANEK (14:18)

That’s an excellent point, is. It’s, yeah. Engineers are good at solving problems and oftentimes it’s recognizing patterns, right? And it’s no different when you’re dealing with people and different things. It’s just, you can’t express it with a number or an equation.

ADAMS (14:30)

Right, exactly. And then you continue to go on into higher leadership roles. some point, you decide to go back and get an executive MBA. So can you talk a little bit about maybe that decision and what that has allowed you to continue to do as you, as you said, been really keen to continue to learn and grow in your career?

BURIANEK (14:49)

And I’ll start with, when I first took a formal management role, meaning I was not only managing technical things, I was managing people as well. My boss at the time, the man who promoted me, when he pulled me in and told me that what he was gonna do, and we were doing some reorganization, so I was involved in, I was part of that. He said, look, your first and most important thing right now is the care, development, and mentoring of your staff. It’s not about necessarily your technical excellence anymore.

How are you building and developing those that are working for you? And how are you teaching them what you know because you’re not necessarily doing the day-to-day work anymore? And I took that seriously. So in my management roles, that’s something that I try to emphasize strongly, which is how do I take care of my team? How do I help them? Because they’re the ones on the ground doing the work a lot of times. And that took some time to get used to. When you’re used to in there doing all writing equations and running MATLAB and running finite elements,

Right. They’re the ones doing it now. So how do I ask them the questions that they need so they can get to where I want? And how do I listen to them? Because they’re in it and they may know more than I do and can teach, I can learn from them. that was sort of this first start of what I was doing. Really the decision to go back to Sloan and get my MBA was a few years in the making. as I mentioned, I had started leading programs and leading technology development. Part of our mission here at the laboratory is

building prototypes and filling them. And I did a series of these of increasing complexity, both in terms of size and technical complexity, as well as the number of different people that are involved. And after I’d done that a few times, again, I’ll go back to what I talked about with my PhD. I’d been doing that work. I learned a lot and I certainly could keep doing it, but I wanted something new. And I wasn’t quite sure what that was going to be. And it was a conversation with a supervisor and

asking them about this and they were like, well, I guess, you you will have you lead another one of these big programs, maybe a little bit bigger. And I’m like, okay, I could do that. I’m good at it. Right. You know, certainly, that’s that’s one path. But I started thinking, what else could there be? And I’ve tried to figure out what what I would like to do. And I ran into a friend of mine here at the laboratory, a man named Bill Kindred, who was also he was at the time he had just started at the Sloan School. And he was telling me about I was like, that sounds interesting.

Right. And as I looked into it more and more, I realized I could really learn a lot here. Right. It’s something that I think it’s probably not a problem to say that, you early on, especially in engineering, we look at some of the things like the management and the social scientists and like, I don’t need that stuff. I’ve got equations and numbers and they’re all I need. And I was a little bit like that. My first, I call it my first trip to MIT. As I grew and realized that there were some things that I didn’t know.

And so I started looking at the Sloan program and recognizing that, you know, this could, this could be sort of that learning and expansion and growth that I was looking for. But it also could be a lot of fun working with people, getting to see them. As you mentioned earlier, I’ve spent most of my career at one place. So I haven’t had a lot of those exposure that people that have moved around different companies. And so I saw the executive MBA as a way to meet new people, to learn some new things.

What I learned and it was all of that was that a lot of the things that I had felt or tried or experimented with, there’s people that have done research on this. And there’s studies that show why this is what it isn’t. And so one of the things I really loved about Sloan was that they could put some construct and frameworks about what I sort of already felt but didn’t know how to explain as an engineer. So that was really exciting to me to be able to speak in those and be able to relate what I’d done to what I

had experienced in my career. And I think often about, you know, a lot of folks, we refer to them as the younger MBAs or the ones that do their MBA in their late 20s and early 30s. I was in my mid 40s when I did the MBA. And, you know, I certainly could have done the work back then, but I don’t think it would have been nearly as ⁓ enlightening because I had 20 years or 15, 20 years of experience underneath me that I could then relate to what they were teaching me in the classroom and in reverse as well.

ADAMS (18:44)

Yeah, I had the same experience one about it being really eye opening because I had at that time I had spent my entire career at one place as well. Yeah. And so was like, wow, like this is this is really interesting. But then also, and I will often get students asking me, should I go get an MBA, you know, immediately following engineering? And my advice is, you know, if you if you can, unless you know you want to go into management consulting, which may be something

BURIANEK (19:09)

Are you okay?

ADAMS (19:09)

Yeah, if you don’t, is perfectly if you don’t, you know, get a little work experience underneath your belts first, I think it will give you much more context to what you’re actually seeing in the MBA And if you somebody else to pay for it, that’s another better. right. Even better. Exactly. All right.

BURIANEK (19:22)

He’s a-

ADAMS (19:38)

All right, Dennis, can you give us an example of how you use leadership skills in your work?

BURIANEK (19:43)

sure, that’s a great question. Right. So really, and people asked me have asked me, when, when do you use the skills you got in your MBA? And I said, only every day, right? It’s all the stuff that I’ve learned there. And I’ve learned through my experiences that I apply every day. So you’re thinking of specific examples. You know, there’s, there’s a lot of them I could pull from, from both my time as an engineer, both of the time as a leader and up, but I’ll pull on one where we were working on a technical project. And we were in the final phases of

of the project and we had something go wrong. And at this point, you’re like, what do I do? Right? And this is where you’re using both your technical and your leadership, right? You’ve got a team underneath you, they’re trying to figure it out. They’re all hard at work trying to understand what went wrong, right? There’s probably some tendency for people saying, well, it wasn’t my fault. And you got to kind of get past that. at that point, in a problem investigation, it’s not as whether who’s fault it is, it’s

What am I going to do about it? What do we understand what it is? And then what are we going to do about it so we can move forward? In this case, we were launching a spacecraft. And so there was a date. We had to be on a rocket. It was leaving Earth, and we had to make it. So there was a lot of stress around there. So some of it is just taking those deep breaths and really tying back to those engineering principles that I mentioned earlier, which is how do I break down this problem in order to figure out what’s going on? And then so there’s the technical pieces. So we started going through. started

unwrapping what we had done, tried to figure it out, and we started to look at some of the root causes. And we found a part that had failed that would explain what was going on. And a lot of the folks, especially the engineers, great, we figured it out. Let’s just fix that and move forward. And this is where the leadership came in, which is taking a look and recognizing that the first answer isn’t always the only or best answer.

Right? So it’s convincing people to do it. And especially when you’re in a project like that and you’re under a time crunch, like there’s a real tendency to move forward. But I can tell you from my experience that if you move forward too quickly and you really didn’t get to the bottom line and it happens again, that ends up being much more impactful than fixing it the first time. You know, I had a mentor of mine at one point that said, you know, for some reason we never have time to do it right the first time, but we always have time to do it over.

Right? So, so you’re thinking about that. So it’s really those leadership skills. And then it becomes sort of a persuasion and talking people say, have you asked this, asking the questions, have I understood this? And what we found in this case, as we started to look deeper into it, that there might’ve been some other things that didn’t show up as failures, but they might’ve been on the edge, right? So we had to start looking at what that was and then what we ended up finding. then, can you found that and people like, okay, let’s forward.

you’re like, okay, are these things related? And in this case, we found something that was systematic through how we had manufactured some part of the technology. And this is where again, that engineering judgment is where you have to go decide, do I fix it? Because when you’re dealing with spacecraft and spacecraft hardware, sometimes touching it could be the worst thing to do, right? Sometimes leave it alone is probably better. So you have to make these decisions. And I always like to do a couple things, right? There’s the standard, weigh the pros and the cons and you write them in. That doesn’t tell you the answer.

I can’t write an algorithm, I can’t write an equation, which is a lot of engineers want to write the equation, but you don’t always have all the answers. So you’re have to make part of the leadership is making decisions with a deficit of information, which you might want to do. The second part of it is making sure you have really understood everything that’s going on and looking for those commonalities that you might want to fix. And then when you’re making these decisions, I’ve got the pros and the cons and said, okay, what do I do of

I do A, what happens if B. So try to think ahead, trying to skip ahead one or two or three levels. And this is where, you know, the systems engineering and the project management and the leadership all kind of come together, which is if I do A, then this is what happens. I do B. And so, you know, I tend to be pretty conservative as a lot of engineers are in terms of this. I’m like, okay, I want to do the thing that allows me the most flexibility in case I really didn’t get it right, right? Cause sometimes you don’t get it right. And then it becomes,

convincing everyone else and getting everyone off on the same page because at the end of the day, you’re a team and you have to work together. So in the particular case I was mentioning before, we failed a component, we figured out exactly first of all what caused the proximal cause or the immediate tactical failure, then we had to start thinking about, in this case, we had a situation where we could easily, it had to do with some sort of cabling.

In spacecraft, it always is the cable. I don’t know what it is, but it’s always the cable. We had a problem with the cabling and 90 % of them we could pretty easily act so we could fix the problem. There were a couple of them that were buried deep in the package that would have been substantial surgery to go in and get them and fix them. So then we had to use our judgment and say, do we fix them both or do we take the risk? And so again, here’s where the leadership comes in, where in the pros and cons. But in this case, given that it’s risks and unknowns,

It’s communicating with all the stakeholders, both internally our leadership, but also with the customer that we were working for and saying, Hey, here’s where we are. Here’s the situation. Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t. We’re going to fix these ones here, but these other ones, we feel that there’s more risk to the hardware. If I go in and fix them, we don’t know that there’s a problem now. It doesn’t show up. So sometimes, you know, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So those are all those engineering decisions. So along the way, how do we use leadership? Well, it’s, getting people to understand and make sure we’re.

really leading them to answer all the right questions. Did we really find the problem? And then it’s walking the team through the decision process and making sure that you have all the information you can get, recognizing that you can’t be perfect, right? Oftentimes as engineers, our goal is to be perfect. We can solve the equation. We can put the problem together and leadership and management, it’s very rarely that ⁓ part. And that’s where it really comes in where you’re trying to figure out how do I make this decision with incomplete information?

And then how do I communicate it to others so they understand exactly what I’m doing? There can be a tendency from some people to not want to tell all the things that are happening to all the details. I’m the opposite, right? I try to say, look, this is what I know and what I don’t. And then let people work with that. Because I think that builds trust and honesty between yourself, your team, and your customer.

ADAMS (25:45)

Yeah, that’s a great example. ⁓ you know, so just kind of picking apart some of the things you said to reinforce what you’ve said, you know, one is not necessary, you know, making sure that you don’t just take the surface answer, right? Is particularly in high stress situations, want to be everybody wants to be fast. And you’re like, we figured it out. And it sounds like you, you know, you have a have a systematic way of saying, OK, yeah, that looks good. But let’s at least let me at least test with certain strategic questions.

to make sure that we haven’t missed anything, moving through that and really making sure that you’re trying to find the true root cause and not just maybe the surface thing that’s immediately exposed, because then you just end up putting a bandaid on it. And then the other thing you talked about is really communicating, making sure that both internal and external stakeholders understand what’s going on, understand the status, understand the decisions that you’ve made and probably your rationale for why you’re

BURIANEK (26:15)

All right.

ADAMS (26:41)

opposing those decisions. One thing I wanted to ask you about is, I can imagine that these are pretty high stress situations. I high impact. There’s a lot of money on the line with the kind of work that you do. So can you talk a little bit about managing the emotional state of…

the team, the group, the internal and external stakeholders, is there anything that you have to do proactively to kind of make sure that that piece is also working while people are trying to really solve the problem and make recommendations.

BURIANEK (27:17)

Sure, sure. That’s a great question, right? Because at the end of the day, whether you’re leading a functional group or you’re leading a project, right? It’s the people that are working with you and for you that are going to get the job done. So it is important to really ask them like, so my style is, as I tell people, I try to be open and honest about what I’m feeling, but I’m open and honest about what I think I’ve done well, what I haven’t even right. So try to demonstrate through my own behaviors, what I’m expecting out of them. I

you know, try to have that proverbial open door policy, although that gets a little bit overused because you can have an open door policy, but still not want to hear bad news. And then I think the key is, especially when you’re working with the team, it’s working for those signs. All right. Well, it’s the same person working late every night is the same person working on the weekends, right? And then trying to split that up. you know, we’re all trying to get it together, but if it’s the same person that is pulling the graveyard shift, maybe you want to think about finding another way to do it so that you can give them the flexibility. And then

And then like I said, it’s demonstrating those leadership skills yourself. So I can tell a story that when one of my kids was born, you know, we found out that they were they were partially deaf and hard of hearing. And that was going to involve a lot of appointments and everything. And I went to my boss at the time and said, you know, I’m this is what’s going on. This is my responsibility as a parent. He was totally supportive. I said, you know, I’ll make sure that my work’s done and everyone knows what I’m doing. And he said,

that’s fine. goes, but I want you to make sure you’re demonstrating to your staff that you’re taking the time off to go do these things. Cause they’ll learn from that as well. So it’s, it’s both demonstrating and then then asking questions. How are you doing? How was your weekend? You know, you know, what’s going on? Hey, you know, I heard you, your dog was sick, right? How’s that going? Right. So it’s just, it’s just trying to take an interest in people and really showing compassion and caring. Again, it’s not necessarily always natural ⁓ for folks with

sort of from the engineering mindset, but that is, you know, one of the things I’ve found to be successful in leadership is just engaging with folks and figuring out where they are. And then over time you develop a sense of, know, when so-and-so says they’re fine, they’re probably not. And you should approach it further and look further than that.

ADAMS (29:20)

Yeah, I really appreciate what you said about role modeling the behavior that you really want to see in others. And I do think that that’s really an underutilized leadership lever. think a lot of people just sort of, you know, they’re concerned, they see their team and they don’t like the behavior. I think just a simple example, sort of like, you know, I keep having these team meetings and nobody speaks up, nobody asks questions. And it’s sort of like, what do you do when you’re in

team meetings, like are you speaking up? you asking questions? And you probably taught them or if they do ask questions, are you cutting them off at the knees? You are teaching them how to behave through your own behavior. so I appreciate that you said that. And then I think the other thing you mentioned is really just investing in getting to know your people so that you can, that’s how you can build your pattern recognition skills and be able to recognize when.

If things might be going awry or you have individuals who may be taking on too much. I’m curious about, you know, so when you have external stakeholders, and I’m not exactly sure how your work happens, but I don’t know if you’re continually working with the same external stakeholders and so you’re able to build that rapport over time. Or if you might be working with a new group, I’m curious if you have any strategies about how to really build rapport with external stakeholders when maybe, you in a short period of time.

BURIANEK (30:38)

No, great question, right? Cause there’s your internal team and then there’s the people you’re working with outside, or both maybe in your same company, but maybe outside, you and then from the customer point of view. So my career is taking me on a path where I’ve worked with many different external customers and external stakeholders, just the nature of where I sat in the organization. I might be working on one technology this year, but another technology with a different set of customers next year. So I’ve had the exposure and it’s very similar with your own team. You’re trying to figure out what do they want?

with the external companies or external stakeholders, it’s important to understand what are they saying, but what are they really asking, right? And building, know, try to understand and make sure that we’re solving the problem that they really need to solve, right? So what’s the real problem to be solved? And then I think the other technique that I emphasize extensively, which is just be honest, tell them what you know, tell them what you don’t. There are bright, intelligent people that have their experiences everywhere.

and so you want to build that rapport by being upfront and honest about, about where you’re going. If you’re falling behind, let them know, here’s what we’re falling behind. Here’s what we’re doing to try to make up for that time, without trying to hide it, right? There’s, there can be a tendency to not want to reveal those things. And again, there’s certain thresholds. didn’t, I didn’t tell the customer every time someone sneezed improperly on something, but, but, know, the big ones. So I think that helps build that trust and, and, and, camaraderie with them.

because you’ve taken the time and they know you’re be honest with you.

ADAMS (32:12)

All right, Dennis, as we wrap up, what advice do you have for engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership roles?

BURIANEK (32:18)

⁓ Great question. Lots of advice. Lots, as I mentioned before, learned from experience and hopefully I can help you all learning from where I went wrong. That’s why we’re all here today. What I would say is be curious, right? Get out there and look at it. If you’re not sure or you don’t think you might want to, try to find an opportunity or talk with your boss about how can I try this out on a short little level? And it may not be in the work environment, right? It may be outside of the work environment, whether it be your church or your scout group or

your kids sport team, they’re all very different, but they’re all leadership. You know, one of the things I do outside of work is I’m part of a scout troop and I’m one of the adult leaders of a scouting America troop. And we actually had some conversations about leadership and I told the young scouts, said, leaders aren’t born, right? They’re created as something you can learn, right? So.

So think about what you want and not everyone has to lead the same way. Not everyone is as gregarious and outgoing as someone like, know, Steve Jobs or, or, or Jack Welch, all these folks you hear about, there are different ways you can lead, with different personalities. So just because you don’t think you’re that outgoing or charismatic, don’t dismiss the fact that you can still be a leader. So, so look out those opportunities to try it out, right? You might like it, you might not. You might find like I did that, Hey, this is actually something that I really enjoy. You know, I’ve done a lot of.

interesting technical work in my career, but the things I’m most proud of are the people that I’ve developed that are now having success on their own, right? So you might find different ways to get fulfillment by being a leader. The other thing I can do, I would suggest is outside the experiences, go read, right? Go pick up a copy of the Harvard Business Review, the Sloan Management Review, flip through some of the articles, see what has you, see what strikes your fancy. They may not be everything you do and not all of them are applicable and…

And they’re, but they’re just ideas. Hey, does this interest me? And that gives you some ideas of things you can try. Take a course, listen to a podcast. There’s some really great podcasts out there on leadership that you might be in that can help you find it depending on what you do. So be curious and try to learn, but most importantly, don’t dismiss the fact, well, I’m an engineer. I’m an introvert. I can’t be a leader. Cause you can be a leader in a different way. And you can be a leader with your own style. Cause not no two leaders are cut from the same cloth.

ADAMS (34:30)

Dennis, thank you so much for your insights.

BURIANEK (34:32)

Yes, you’re welcome. Glad I could help.