MEL #038 | From Paratrooper to Engine Innovator through Physics-first Thinking and Clear Communication with Dr. Terrence Alger

ALGER (00:00)

If you really want to make a name for yourself and be a leader early in the industry, you’ve got to look for those problems where the herd is going one direction, and you can go in a different direction that is backed by the physics of what’s going on.

ADAMS (00:40)

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Terry Alger, Vice President for Applied Research and Development at UL Solutions. Terry discovered mechanical engineering at West Point, found his passion in combustion and engines during graduate work at the University of Texas, and built a career spanning hands-on lab work, automotive research, and organizational leadership. Terry views leadership as a force multiplier, allowing engineers to stay connected to complex problems that fascinate them but can’t fully take on themselves due to bandwidth, while also providing an opportunity to mentor and grow others. 

In our leadership segment, Terry gave us not one, but two great examples of the different ways engineering leaders can impact their environments. As a technology leader, Terry challenged industry orthodoxy by promoting cooled exhaust gas recirculation or EGR when lean burn was the prevailing trend, eventually influencing the direction of the automotive industry.

As an organizational leader, he identified that the best project managers were those with broad experience and responded by creating a rotational program for early career engineers, strengthening both talent development and management pipelines. Terry’s advice to aspiring engineering leaders? See yourself as a leader from day one and act accordingly. Communicate simply and directly, pair complementary strengths, study leadership deliberately, and embrace failure as part of innovation while staying humble enough to pivot when data proves you wrong.

Explore the full episode summary, including guest bio, key takeaways, transcript, and recommended resources in the show notes at http://www.drangeliqueadams.com/podcast. 

Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Dr. Terry Alger.

ADAMS (02:18)

Hi, Terry, welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

ALGER (02:21)

Hi, nice to be here.

ADAMS (02:22)

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

ALGER (02:27)

Yeah, think generally, you know, there’s one or two ways people go into engineering. You have the people that are just mechanically or chemically or something inclined and they just love it. And when you talk to them, I interview a lot of them when they are looking for jobs. it’s, you know, since I’ve been six, I’ve been taking apart my lawnmower and doing all that. And then on the other side, you have the people that were just always kind of good at school and

You go see the guidance counselor and they’re like, you ought to really think about engineering because they make decent money. I would say I am the latter, right? I was always just really good at school and for a long time I wanted to be a professor of the classics. So, you know, Latin or Greek. I took Latin in high school and I loved it. And then I found out how much they got paid and I decided that ⁓ maybe that wasn’t for me.

But in my particular case, I ended up going to the army after high school. So I went to West Point and I thought I was going to be an army officer for my whole life. So then when it came time to pick a major, I just picked something that looked cool. And that was mechanical engineering. And it turned out that I was pretty good at it. And by the time I got done with my first class in mechanical engineering, I found out that I really, really, really liked it.

and it just kind of stuck with me ever since.

ADAMS (03:44)

That’s great. And you said you kind of happened upon it and turned out that you really liked it and then you continued on and went to graduate school. Can you talk a little bit about your decisions to continue on an advanced degree?

ALGER (03:56)

Yeah, so I was a, you know, like I said, I went to military academy and so I spent five years in the army as a paratrooper, as an airborne engineer, as a matter of fact, and I loved blowing things up. I mean, that was probably, you know, if you can have a dream job for me, just making things explode is, I would say it’s a dream job. And then when,

When my wife and I talked and we decided that maybe, you know, spending 20 years in the military was not what we wanted to do for our family, I decided I was going to get out. And by that point, I had been very successful in engineering school at the military academy. And I thought I would really like to do, you know, advanced engineering for a career. So like many army officers, I got one of those recruiter guys that’s like, hey, you’re a captain, let’s go find you a job.

And so I went off and I interviewed with all these engineering firms. And what I found was that they all said, wonderful, you’re, you know, you’re a highly ranked engineer and you’re an army officer. So what we really want you to do is run a factory for us. And if I wanted to do that, I would have stayed in the army, you know, and just led soldiers instead of, know, mechanics and people working at factory. And so it became apparent to me.

after a couple of those interviews that if I wanted to do hardcore engineering, you know, research type stuff, I was going to need an advanced degree. So we looked and we did a thorough cost benefit analysis of all the available engineering schools out there. And at the time, believe it or not, Austin was a very

a low cost of living area. It certainly isn’t the case anymore. But in the late 90s, Austin was a very cost effective place to live. And the University of Texas was going to give me a bunch of fellowship money. And I had an ND, NSF and NDSEG fellowship. So from a practical standpoint, which is also common with many people that are engineers, you that looked attractive. So I went to the University of Texas and again,

Just like how I kind of fell into engineering, I fell into automotive, right? I knew I liked fire and I wanted to make things explode. On the other side, I was an older student, so I was in my very late 20s and my wife and I wanted to start a family. So she had no patience for the whole, it’s gonna take you seven years to get a PhD thing. So basically I went from professor to professor.

asking what the fastest they would let me graduate was. And I was very fortunate to run into Professor Ron Matthews, who just said, I don’t care how long it takes you just as long as you do a good job. okay, that’s good enough for me. He worked on internal combustion engines. And again, very fortunate. Once I started working on them, I really loved it. You know, if you like fire,

and you like complex things, an internal combustion engine is probably the most complex combination of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, ⁓ chemical kind of combustion things. You’ve got sprays, you’ve got opening parts, you’ve got the reciprocating piston, and it’s all happening in milliseconds. So it’s a really interesting problem to try to attack. And I loved it.

I’ve been passionate about the topic ever since. So I have very, very fortunate accidents out there.

ADAMS (07:19)

Yeah, that’s a great career trajectory. it, so it has me curious, you talked about how you sort of fallen into these different situations and it turns out that you end up loving it. You fall in love with it. You find, you you, find ways to be passionate about it. And I’m curious if it is truly luck or if, if there’s maybe something about you and your personality where you say, you know, I’m, you know, I’m going to find a way to kind of make this work for me.

and find ways to enjoy this because I committed to it and I’m gonna do it. And maybe the flip side is to say, if that’s not the case, then maybe can you give us an example of something that you were doing and you were like, this actually really sucks and I wanna get out of this.

ALGER (07:59)

Yeah, yeah, that’s good question. there is a bit of my personality, right? So like many engineering types, I can be a little obsessive about certain things. And I would always tell people, it’s not the particular technology that interests me. It’s a problem to solve, and I want to solve this problem. And the harder the problem,

And the more people that have tried to do good at it and didn’t, the more I want to do it. Right. So I’m, you know, it’s a combination of that, the kind of competitiveness that takes you a place like West Point combined with just the love of solving hard problems. and so, yeah, I think there’s probably many areas that if I had selected them, I would be telling you, you know, it turns out that, studying the film cooling on turbine blades was something that just,

Who would have known that I love that? And right. Yeah, but but so there is a little bit of that but I will also tell you that there are things that you know, you look at it and and

You get into it and you decide, you know what? I just do not have any feel for this. I, you know, I can’t, I can’t get into it. I haven’t. But my first position was not amazing. I showed up there. it was not at a great time when the company was in some financial challenges. They, they, they had just had a layoff. So I rolled in and, ⁓ they said, well, you’re in this advanced.

product development area. We’re not really sure what to do with a guy with a PhD in direct injected engines, but everybody knows people with PhDs model things. So here, here’s a workstation, here’s some CFD software. Why don’t you see what you can do and model the engine? Well, it turns out that the one thing that I really don’t like doing is working on models. And so I tried, I tried for six months and you know, I

I started to learn the software. got to the point where could run the models and I was trying to build some things. But at the end of that period, I can remember going to my supervisor’s office and saying, I hate this. It’s boring. I sit here in front of the computer. My eyes hurt at the end of the day. I want to be in the lab. I taught myself to do machine work during graduate school, weld, things like that. I want to do that. I don’t want to…

in front of a computer and stare at it, you know, and just hope that the model turns out right in seven days or two weeks or whatever. And so that is one example where I felt like I gave it a good try, but I really could not get involved in the day-to-day exercise of CFD. Now, I will tell you that since then, at my previous position and my current one, you know, at UL Solutions,

I supervise and work with the modeling teams. And I’ve come to enjoy the problem solving part of the modeling, right? Hey, what equations are we going to try to work on here? How are we going to develop this chemistry? How are we going to validate this model? But I still will tell you that if it involves Linux or writing code or any of that, I just don’t want to have anything to do with it. I’m very bad at that. So yeah.

ADAMS (10:56)

Yeah, and I think that’s, I mean, I think it’s, it’s helpful to kind of have this self-awareness about like, really like problem solving. I really like challenges and then there’s certain things I don’t like and, you’re okay with that, right? And you find a way, you know, you either get yourself out of it. If you have to directly do the work, try to, try to get yourself out of it. Or if you’re leading people who are doing it, of course, find a way to appreciate them and their work and what it needs to do to get the results the organization is trying to get without having to love being the one behind the screen. So.

ALGER (11:22)

really think that’s important. So when you talk about, know, whether you’re a leader or even just an individual contributor, you know, not everyone is great at everything. I think sometimes as engineers, you know, and I’ll just generalize, generally speaking, you know, lot of most engineers always been one of the smartest people around, right? You always got great grades, everyone, you’re the only guy who understood calculus, the only lady who understood physics, right?

You’re used to being the expert in the kind of the know it all. And what you have to appreciate is that you’re not the best at everything. You’re never good. There’s always someone better than you at something. And in fact, there’s many people that are better at you than a lot of things. And if you can find that situation where you can pair up with someone whose weaknesses are your strengths and strengths are your weaknesses, then you can do amazing things.

You know, my last company, I had a very good friend of mine that we are, personality-wise, we’re very complimentary, but in terms of skill sets, we’re like 180 opposites. And the two of us together, you know, we did some really wonderful work together, right? We have a bunch of patents together, a bunch of papers, we’ve won awards together that I would have never been able to have done.

without his assistance. And I don’t think he would have been able to do it without working with me. you know, and then as a leader, I think you want to look for those combinations and try to pair your team members up that complement each other like that. I think that’s super important. And that was, I learned that in the army, right? You come in, you know, some hotshot lieutenant right out of West Point, think you know it all.

And some private who struggles with fractions can do so many of the soldier tasks so much better than you. It’s a very humbling experience. And it just really teaches you to pay attention to the people around you, take advantage of their strengths, and use it to complement your own weaknesses.

if I’m interested in a career in engineering, eventually you want to get into management. And the reason I say that, if you have any talent in it at all, it’s like a force multiplier, right? So when I was younger, I thought I was going be an army officer and just kind of be the leader that way. Got into engineering, was an individual contributor for a period of time.

But it rapidly became apparent to me that I had so many things that were interesting to me that I would never be able to work on them all at once. I’d never be able to, like, you know, as an example from the engine world, I love abnormal combustion. That’s just such an interesting problem. Why did that cycle have rapid knock and disastrous results? And this exact same cycle that looks very similar have this completely opposite result. Who understands that? So that was an interesting problem.

improving the efficiency of the gasoline engine through cooled EGR I love to work on that. Hey, what about this other problem we have over here? We can’t repeat our fuel economy results and we don’t even understand how to monitor these vehicles appropriately. And I couldn’t do them all. And so when I thought, well, how am I going to do this? I eventually wound up with, well, I have to manage my own team so that I can, you know, maybe it’s not.

100 % as fun as doing everything yourself, right? As an engineer, I want to be able to say I did this and I did that, you know, but the trade-off is I can only work on one thing at a time because I’m a person, you know, and so if I want to be able to work on more than one thing at a time because I’m interested in all of them and I want to learn about them and I, you know, I want our company to be successful, I’m going to have to have a team and I’m going to have to manage them and they’re going to have to do the

the work and I’ll just help where I can. And so that’s when I decided to get into management. That is the real value, the value that you can personally get as an engineer in being in management is you can multiply your own.

opportunities by a lot by your team. And now that I’ve been in it for a while, I also find that I really, really, really enjoy finding talented young engineers and helping them maximize their potential. And I’m not that confident to know that I’m actually maximizing their potential, but I at least enjoy thinking that I’m helping them move along the way.

ADAMS (15:52)

all right Terry what leadership examples are we gonna talk about today

ALGER (15:56)

there’s a lot of examples we could talk about.

there’s leading in engineering like bossing a bunch of people around. And then there’s being an engineering leader where you’re a leader in the industry or a technical leader or someone who sets a direction for the technology path that the industry is going in.

And when we had an opportunity, and again, it could have been luck or it could have just been, you know, whatever, right place, right time. I was presented with a challenge.

Here’s a project, it’s not working. We think it should work. We don’t know why it isn’t. Fix it. I got into it. I could see that the way that the people at Southwest, when I had just started working there, they had framed the problem in a certain way. And the way they were looking at it was diesel companies don’t like the after treatment requirements that they’re getting. And gasoline engines have really low emissions. Can we make a gasoline diesel?

Can we make a ⁓ large bore, low speed, high torque equivalent to the four cylinder John Deere 5440 or something? So we got into it, but because my background was in automotive, I looked at those results and I saw, well, if we just plot this up a little bit differently and look at percent load, engine is way more efficient than a gasoline engine.

You know, and the areas where it struggles to compete against the diesel, you don’t have to worry about with the gasoline engine. So why aren’t we promoting this and selling it to the gasoline companies?

I decided that if I wanted to work on gasoline engines, cause Southwest was really known for their diesel engine work at the time, then it was going to be up to me to go figure out a way to, create a program where I could work on gasoline engines. Now at the time, I don’t, It was all about lean boost. So,

all the consultancies, all the research arms of the automotive companies were saying that the future was lean burn gasoline with lean burn after treatment and heavily turbocharging it. But I think if you look at the physics of what’s going on and what was happening, it should have been very apparent to everybody that that was not going to be a great solution. You’re going to have all the after treatment challenges of a diesel, but with the drawbacks of a gasoline engine.

And it’s the cost of a diesel, right? Where the gasoline engine is a much more commoditized engine, needs to be less expensive. And so if you look at it that way, you say, well, that’s not a really good idea. Why don’t we try something different? Why don’t we try this cool DGR route? And at the time, that was not popular, right? I can remember going to visit the car companies and

being mocked, right? You know, you know, this is stupid. The your competitors were in here last week and they told us you were going to talk about this and they told us all the reasons why you wrong and all this stuff. And I go to conferences and talk about it. And the initial response was always, that’ll never work. Or we tried it, you know, 20 years ago or whatever. But the physics was right. You know, and and I guess the

that what it really boils down to is if you really want to, if you really want to make a name for yourself and be a leader early in the industry, you got to look for those problems where the herd is going one direction and you can go in a different direction that is backed by physics. you have to be confident. You have to check your work. You have to understand the problem that you’re looking at, but

if you can do that, if you can go in another direction, you know, and it took a couple of years for us to get that going, right? And I was fortunate to work at a company that had the patience and the wherewithal to just allow me to work on something for a year or two before it really took off. But by the time it did, you know, by the time we ended up at that situation, we had every car company, every major car company in the world in our program.

all of their tier one suppliers, the technology got adopted. It’s being sold right now in hybrid vehicles. at the time it was a struggle and it was a risky move because everybody in the industry knew that you wanted to go with this other direction. But we stuck out on our own and it really paid off,

we had a very profitable run for many, years basically selling that technology to the car companies that we worked with. So yeah, it’s a great thing.

ADAMS (20:16)

Yeah, I think that’s a great example of what you say. You can really strike out as a technical leader, a leader of innovation or a leader of technology when you can zig when everybody else is zags. But you have both the confidence, but the data, the physics, the science, the real fundamentals behind you. But as you say, it still doesn’t make it easy. It doesn’t make it easy to go to the conferences and be mocked.

Even though you said you had the support of your organization, I’m sure there were times when you had to sort of like, remember why we’re doing this people? Like, stick with me here, we’re getting some traction. So I’m curious how you actually handled those moments of when maybe others are doubting you and you’re having to reinforce your own commitment within yourself, but then also reinforcing the commitment of your organization and getting on board people who don’t see your vision yet.

ALGER (21:05)

So a few things. Number one, I guess I’ve just been blessed or cursed with an abundance of confidence. So not to, think, the point where it’s harmful, I think if you are rigorous in your pursuing the scientific method, when you get good results, question them. Make sure that you can be confident in your results.

The last thing you want to do, and this is a real life example, is to get an amazing fuel economy result, go tell everybody about it, and then find out that the calibration on your fuel flow meter was wrong. you know, you don’t want that to happen. So that’s the first thing is you just do, you have to have some faith in yourself. The other thing you have to do is to be able to explain yourself in a way that makes sense to people. And that doesn’t always mean

using the most equations or the biggest words or the longest sentences with the most adjectives, right? Sometimes, you you want to learn how to express yourself very simply. And again, I was fortunate. I spent my college years in the military academy learning the military method of communication, which ideally is very simple and direct.

Right? No passive voice. You know, I did this, that happened there. Right? So that you can learn to communicate clearly. Because when you understand the physics of the problem and you can communicate that to the people around you, eventually you break through if you’re correct. Now the other thing is you have to be

have the humility to understand that you could be wrong. Right. And when you are wrong and people pointed out to you, the correct response is to, you know, thank them for the feedback and go back and change your mind. Right. Not, stick to it out of stubbornness or pride and say, look, you know, I’m going to make them, I’m going to make it right. No matter what the, you know, Navier-Stokes equations say. Right. So, you know, I think this is a combination of all three.

But you’re going to have setbacks. mean, engineering is about that. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough or you’re not pushing the boundaries, especially if you want to be an innovator. You know, I used to have to talk to the younger people that work for me, especially when you’re supposed to be in an innovation part of the organization. you know, we would try things and we put a lot of effort into it and everyone worked very hard and honestly do a good job and it just wouldn’t work. Right. And

You know, there’s nothing wrong with just saying, look, you sometimes you don’t hit a home run every time you get up at bat, right? In fact, the guys that make hundreds of millions of dollars in the MLB only get a hit about once every three times they swing the bat, right? So, you know, you’ve got to be willing to accept that failure and just kind of regroup and move on and know when to give up, right? On an idea that’s not working.

or to pivot or find another solution. So yeah, there’s a lot of instances that we had things that we thought were great ideas and just never did pan out.

I had just taken over a department at Southwest Research Institute. So at the time it was like 50 people. And we were trying to grow and trying to understand what we would need to do to get bigger, right? And mostly we were focused on innovation and.

doing projects for customers that were research oriented or innovation oriented. And what we were finding is that we just didn’t have enough people that…

could go out and work independently and run a project. It’s a very difficult thing to do. Engineers don’t really understand what it means, especially in the consultancy world. If you’re leading a project, you’ve got to go communicate your results to the customers, you’ve got to work with the laboratory to get the testing done, you’ve got to write the report, you’ve got to manage the budget, you’ve got to do all this stuff. Not to mention the fact that we’re talking about an engine system which has

electrical, mechanical, chemical, all these different parts going on with it. So we had a brainstorming session with some of the leaders in the team and we thought about, what’s our perfect engineer?

and what we came up with was it’s not the person from the best school. It’s not the person with the best grades. What we found was the people that are best project leaders, our best, you know, mid-level to upper, lower senior level engineers were the people that had a variety of experiences. So, you know, we sat down and we said, well, we like, you know,

these people on our team, these are top people, what do they all have in common? And what they ended up having in common was that they had worked on a whole bunch of different projects. So had some engineers, they got onto a project and it was a long-term project and they kind of worked their way through that project and they knew all about that one thing. But when you exposed them to something different, they didn’t have that background. Then you had other people that were like the jack of all trades that had worked on a whole bunch of different projects.

Then when it came time to take over a program, they had this wealth of experience to say, you know, I’ve seen that failure before, or, you know, we went down this path once, we’re not going to do this again, or I know who to talk to over here to get this done. And so when we decided that the result, what we wanted was this kind of jack of all trades engineers, we sat down and we said, okay, how are we going to establish this program?

and, and I had, a manager underneath me and I, you know, I basically challenged him, okay, you know what you go and you think about what it’s going to take to do this and come back to me with a plan and tell me how we’re going to do it. And so he went and came back and we established a rotational program inside our department where we committed to hiring a certain number of entry level engineers every year. And.

more or less putting them on a two-year rotational program where we would have them spend six months in different disciplines throughout our area. So engine controls, performance development, vehicle testing, batteries, electric motors and drive line, all of that, right, rotate around. And at the end of those two years, then they’d be able to pick what area they felt the best about in, but we’d have at least that well-rounded individual.

Right? And they were all entry level straight out of college. Our goal was to hire them as a cohort and have them have some, you know, companionship camaraderie kind of stick together. And then the other thing it did for us is we could we could name a younger manager to lead that group that would allow them to develop as a manager. Right. So they didn’t have P &L responsibility.

So they weren’t on the hook for a revenue target or a profit target. They didn’t have a whole bunch of customers breathing down their neck. Their only job was to manage these, you know, six to eight entry level engineers, help develop them, teach them about what it means to be an engineer, how to incorporate them into the company culture, you know, things like that. So that was a neat little

example of how we found a problem. As a leader, you don’t want to go solve all your company’s problems. You want to challenge the people that work for you to solve them. It gives them a wonderful opportunity to develop and to feel a sense of accomplishment. You get a lot better buy-in and it prepares them for, you know, bigger responsibilities down the road. And so, so I was thinking about using that as as a, as an example of, of some.

ADAMS (28:30)

Yeah, that’s a great example. So when you identified that you have this ideal engineer archetype and you want to create situations to actually build those internally through this rotational program, I’m curious if you were met with any resistance anywhere else in the organization. Okay, go ahead. So tell me a little bit about that and how you overcame those obstacles.

ALGER (28:51)

Yeah, so well, the first thing was is that we, know, it hadn’t been done at our company. And what we wanted to do was to do it at the or at the next level up from my level. So, you know, I went to my boss and said, hey, you know, this would be a lot better if we did it at a higher level. They could rotate around and.

you know, it’d be more effective that way. And so, you know, the first thing you get is from my peers, the, it wasn’t my idea, so it’s not a good one. And then, you know, because we all had profit and loss responsibility, you know, they were like, well, am I gonna give you some of my revenue? How’s that gonna work, right? So that was a challenge. And then it became,

well i don’t want my bad i i hire a person and they’re really good and i don’t want you to potentially end up with them there my person you know so there’s a lot of internal competition i will say unfortunately i did not ever solve that problem what we ended up doing was just saying okay fine if if you all don’t want to do it we’re we’re going to do it internally so we brought it back down to the level that i could control and and we did in

You know, I think if you ask the engineers that went through the program, they all enjoyed it. We were able to have at least one or two successful managers developed out of it, you know, from the management side. And, you know, when I left, it was still going. I don’t know if they’re still doing it or not at the company. But I think at the time, it was seen as a successful example of a rotational program.

So, you know, I don’t really have a grading. Sometimes you’re not going to solve the problems, you know. And if you want to move forward, you know, it’s best sometimes to stick with an area that you can control and go from there.

ADAMS (30:36)

Yeah, I mean, I agree. think it’s important that people understand that, when you try to affect change, you know, there’s certain areas that you can do it smoothly, certain areas where there’s some roadblocks that you can maybe overcome, and then other areas where there’s roadblocks that are just like, you know what, I’m just going to keep spinning my wheels or, you know, hitting my head against a brick wall. in this case, you were like, well, you know, I’ll just…

I’ll change the scope or back to something I can control it. And it sounds like you still had a very successful program. So just think that’s important to say that that is a successful outcome of a change initiative, So we scope it. it’s just something that can actually get executed. Yeah.

ALGER (31:13)

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

there’s a lot of examples we could talk about.

One of the things that I did at my previous company was I usually got assigned the failing, or not every failing one, but a lot of troubled business areas. And most of the time, I would say, when you get asked to take over a business area that’s troubled as an engineer,

You know, so this was the perfect example I have is that we had a vehicle testing emissions program, right? So they had some chassis dinos and we used to do a lot of emissions work. In fact, Southwest Research Institute really was part of the big push in the late 70s, early 80s to establish the very first emission standards. We did some of the very first testing for the EPA on that. I wasn’t there then, I’m not that old, but ⁓

You know, it was very successful and we still did a lot of work on emissions stuff and fuel programs for the auto companies. But that organization had always been kind of an afterthought. You know, our primary business in that area was diesel engine emissions and certification and that was where we were very strong. And so the vehicle team was suffering. They got a relatively new guy promoted to manager there.

And the director at that time, you know, was very occupied by making sure that the diesel portion was successful and didn’t have time to deal with the vehicle team. And so, you know, the vice president of our division at the time asked me to take the vehicle team on and see what I could do. And so, you know, you get there and you look at that.

And what you can see is they’re just a group of people that are starving for someone to come in and give them a vision of what their future might be and kind of spur them on and challenge them to be better. Right? So, you know, what they had been getting was a whole lot of, just don’t mess up and, you know, just keep things rolling and everything will be fine because we’re very successful somewhere else. So you guys, you know, you’re

You’re not in any danger of being let go, but just don’t bother me. And instead, what we did is we said, hey, look, we’re going to, I come from the innovation side. Why don’t we think about innovations? Just because you test vehicles doesn’t mean you can’t be innovative. And so I challenged that manager and his team to come up with some ideas and

I would say it didn’t take long. wasn’t overnight. But at some point, they identified a pain point in the industry. And the pain point in the industry that they identified was that modern vehicles have all that adaptive learning algorithms and all of that on them. And it’s really, really hard to do high precision fuel economy measurements on them. So very, very difficult. If you want to do a series of tests over weeks or months,

and make the vehicle perform the same so that you can tell the difference between a tenth of a percent in fuel economy, that’s extremely challenging. We had some very clever people, they found a way to do it. It eventually became what we call our DEVCON vehicle test system, a really clever response from the engineering staff. And it allowed us to grow that business

until it was extremely successful. We were able then to go from being just a run of the mill test house to now a premium test house, charge more for our services. We ended up with a big backlog of testing. Any oil company or auto company that wanted to show that their product could yield a measurable decrease in fuel consumption.

a measurable decrease in fuel consumption would come to us and we could show it, even if it was small, right? Because even if it’s small, you can still take credit for that and charge more for your product. And again, that was just a matter of challenging the team, setting expectations that were high, achievable, but high, and giving them a vision and allowing them to think of what they would look like if they were successful.

and communicating that. And then as they started working on it, making sure that you’re supporting them, you know, both intellectually with brainstorming and helping out with problems, but also that emotional level of, hey, you know what, everyone has problems. Yeah, that didn’t work. Let’s just regroup. We’re going to figure out why it didn’t work. And then we’re going to move on. You know, and if you can do the two, I think, you know, you can take

previously failing teams and make them be very successful, even without changing much of the staff.

ADAMS (35:49)

All right, Terry, what advice do you have for engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership opportunities?

ALGER (35:54)

I’d say the first advice is think of yourself a leader from the first day you show up at your organization.

You know what I find as the leader of an organization is there’s the formal leadership structure, managers, the supervisors, and then there’s the informal leadership structure, the influential people, the people that are setting the example for the staff. And a lot of times when I wanted to change the culture or some of the practices at my company, I wouldn’t necessarily go tell the managers, hey, you know what, I want you to go start enforcing this rule or that.

What I would do is go get what I had identified as the influential leaders among the staff and say, you know, I really need your help. We need to turn some things around. These are some behaviors that I’m seeing that I’m not liking in the staff. And I want you to help me change that. Because I remember back when I was like a young lieutenant, right? Of course you have a company commander, you live in terror of him.

and he, you know, corrects your every move. But some of the best advice and the most influential experiences I had were from some of my more senior peers, right? So a second lieutenant that had been there for another year or a first lieutenant that had been there for several years. And sometimes what they would do is take aside the younger, the junior staff and say, you know, that’s really not how we do things around here. Let me tell you how we do

And that is more powerful sometimes than anything that a manager or a supervisor is going to tell somebody. first of all, start being a leader on the first day. And if you don’t know what that looks like, what I think is one of the best examples of, and a very concise way to think about being a leader is to take a look at the Army principles of leadership. Now know I’m biased. I went to Army.

right? My very young training is from that. But I find that there’s the 11 principles of leadership from the Army. They are not military specific. Some of the language is a little bit, but I think if you go out on the internet, there are many examples and articles that you can find that will say translate these Army principles of leadership into business areas. So, you know, one of them is set the example.

And that you can do from your first day on the job. And it’s awful important when you’re a manager, right? You want to model the behaviors you want to see in other people. So if I want my staff to be punctual, I need to be punctual. If I need them to be diligent and thorough in their work, I need to show them that I am diligent and thorough in my work. If I want them to be polite and pleasant to each other, I need to be polite and pleasant to them and my peers.

Setting the example is important. Make sound and timely decisions. Many people do bad at that, especially engineers who like to think things to death. But you can do that from the very beginning. You may not have a lot of authority, but when you can make a decision, make a good one and make it in a timely manner. So there’s a lot of things you can do as an entry-level engineer, young in your career, to develop yourself into a leader.

And even if you never go into management, you can be a leader in your organization and very, very influential. So I think that’s the first thing is just assume you’re a leader from day one and act like it. The second thing to do is you really have to be deliberate about it. A lot of people talk about natural leaders, not natural leaders. And typically when they talk about natural leaders, if you really dig deep, what they end up saying is it’s a tall guy, right?

You know, there’s I don’t think there’s any such thing as a natural leader. There are some people that are more charismatic than others. There are some people that speak better in public than others. But I have had leaders that I love that were not very charismatic. I’ve had leaders that were not very good public speakers. I’ve had leaders that were not great, polished people, and they still were good leaders. And all of them were good leaders because they thought about it a lot. You know?

And so there’s a lot of books out there. I’m not going to give you an exhaustive list. actually do. And again, my military background shows I like Jocko Willink. I listen to his podcast. I’ve read his books. Extreme Ownership is one of the ones. In fact, we just had an hour long discussion with my leadership team. They all read that book and we reviewed it this morning, actually.

So, you know, never stop learning. A lot of people don’t like to read books, which I think is not great. I’ve always been a big fan of reading and you learn a lot by doing that, especially when you can read books that where people talk about their journey as a leader, right? Because everyone had leadership failures in their life, right? Where they didn’t do the right thing or they fail to set the example or they made a bad, they did something very bad, right?

And you can read about those in the books and hopefully not replicate that experiment yourself. I mean, it’s a great way to learn without having to actually burn yourself with a fire. But if you don’t like the books, there’s podcasts. He has one that he talks about. There’s abbreviated condensed articles on the internet. really, and you’ve got to find the one that works for you.

Some people gravitate towards the military style of leadership, which I think for those of you listeners that are civilians would be surprised. It is not a full metal jacket, right? It’s a much more nuanced and person-centric style of leadership. But other people, there’s a more technocratic style that can also work very well. And a lot of people respond to.

And so you just got to find the style that works for you. But again, you know, it isn’t something that’s just going to come to you naturally. And you’re just going to wake up one morning and be blessed with some otherworldly ability to motivate people. You have to be deliberate about it, study it, and then put it into practice and be merciless with yourself about what you do right and what you do wrong.

So I think that’s my real advice. I’m not a big fan of big long reading lists. I used to get those as lieutenant and I hated that. You’re like, God, I read 50 books in the next six months. yeah. ⁓

ADAMS (42:12)

Thanks

for sparing. Thanks for sparing us for the long list. Do you mind sharing a little bit about this methodology that you use with your own team about getting a book, maybe reading it together, and then kind of what do you do after that to share what you’ve learned or put things into practice? What’s your process?

ALGER (42:30)

We did an employee survey and the results were horrid. So very, very bad, right? For me, for everybody, right? We were not beloved as leaders. And I sat back and I thought about it.

And I said, okay, so, you you can go down two paths when that happens, right? You can go down the path of it’s not me, it’s them, or you can say, okay, it’s me, right? And in my team, we decided to go down the, it’s me. And so we got together and we said, okay, well, what is wrong with us? And why aren’t we, you know,

Why aren’t the people, why aren’t our team happy? What’s going on here? And I was fortunate enough, the company paid for a consultant to come talk to all the senior leaders in our organization. And when I was talking to him, I said something about, I don’t understand the Army. was the leader and it really worked well for me. he’s like, well, why don’t you get back to that? Why wouldn’t you return to what made you happy and what made you successful?

And after you get over feeling like an idiot for not thinking about that yourself, right? Sometimes you just can’t see it. You’re in the middle of the pressures of the day are on top of you. I thought, okay, well, let’s, let’s go back to basics and I’m going to go dig out. You know, the, leadership stuff I learned at West Point and, we’re going to get back to it. And so we, we, I sat down with my managers and I said, all right, guys, here’s where we’re going to commit to. We are going to make ourselves better leaders.

ADAMS (43:35)

Of course, yes. Yeah.

ALGER (43:58)

And the way we’re going to become better leaders is we’re going to set aside time every month to study some topic on leadership and talk about it. And when I, when I say talk about it, at least at that time, I meant, I want you to go write me a short little essay on this particular thing. So, in the example of the principles of leadership for the army, we took them three at a time. I had them write, what does this mean to me?

Like physically write it down. Give me three examples at our company where you see this being done well. Give me three examples where you see this being done poorly and give me three things that you’re going to do differently to put this principle into action. And that took us a long time to work through, you know, because at the time, after the first time through it became obvious that we weren’t going to do three at a time, were going do one at a

Okay. And, so then, then, you know, three weeks turns into 11 weeks or something. you know, so, but what I found was, as I went around the offices, the managers, I started seeing the list showing up on their walls. Right. And then you’d hear a discussion in the break room, where not even the managers, but two staff members would say, Hey, man, is that really setting the example there? Did you really

you is that what you really want to do with that guy? Or, you know, one of the, one of the other principles is use your people in accordance with their abilities, right? So, hey, did you really set that guy up for success or were you, were you not using him in accordance with his abilities? So you started to see that percolate down through the staff and at the same time morale started to pick up, people were happier, you know, and we started doing better on our engagement.

I think a little bit that was because everyone knew we were working on it and we actually wanted to be better. And so they started giving us the benefit of the doubt. you know, not always everything I do wasn’t interpreted in a negative light, you know, and that’s a big part of it. If your team knows that you’re trying to do right by them, then they will look at your actions. And even if they’re messed up, sometimes they’ll say, well, he meant well.

and not, yes, he’s a bad person, so I’m going to just put the most negative interpretation of whatever he said or did, right? So there’s a little bit of that. And then going forward, once we worked our way through those principles of leadership, we started reading just books on stuff. So another one of my favorites is Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I will tell you, the organization I was a part of,

we could check every one of those off. We were a gold star. We were A plus on the five dysfunctions. And so, again, you read through them, you commit to saying, all right, I can see this. And that book was a good book because it was kind of written like a parable. So it was easy to read and everyone could kind of understand it. And then we started using that as a reference point in our discussions. Like, hey, are you really?

like think about that pyramid. Are we showing an absence of commitment here? Because it kind of feels like that, you know, and why did we do that? Did you guys not discuss this before? Well, you know, I knew it was a bad idea, but I didn’t say anything. Well, okay, well, there’s your problem. You know, I expect you to speak up and we need to have constructive disagreements, right? And that’s a big theme of that book is everyone, you know, you get together as a team and you work through and then you commit, right? And so,

You know, just if you’re going to bother reading these books, then you’ve got to figure out ways to work them into your everyday discussions so that the lessons of these books become reinforced. Now, the downside is a lot of the business books are really like once you’ve read one, you’ve read 10, you know, so you’ve got to find the really good ones and then you got to know when to just kind of stop and start maybe more reinforcing the lessons of the ones that you did pick up.

And then just keep your eyes open for any new ones. So I try to read a new one every month or so. I have not yet found one that was so unique that it really motivated me to get the team to read it other than my old favorites.

ADAMS (47:58)

All right. Well, yeah, thanks for sharing your process there. And Terry, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.

ALGER (48:04)

That was great. really appreciated the opportunity to talk.