MEL #042 | From Lab Fellow to Tech Advocate through Stakeholder Alignment with Dr. Zach Sims

SIMS (00:00)

Listening is not just an active thing in the moment. It’s a follow on thing as well, where you start to really take what you heard and ingest it, digest it and start to execute on how you create impact out of their needs.

ADAMS (00:37)

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Zach Sims, with Small Business Consulting Corporate. He is a technical director of Laboratory Capability Integration and Transition with Air Force Global Strike Command. Zach followed an early inspiration from his engineer father, studied physics, then pivoted to applied materials and energy engineering. He worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, completed a PhD through the University of Tennessee’s Bredesen Center, became a Lawrence Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and moved into joint faculty at the University of Tennessee.

He now serves as a technology and stakeholder advocate linking Air Force needs with national lab capabilities. In our leadership segment, Zach talks about how while at the University of Tennessee, he organized idea days to match Tennessee Valley Authority program leaders with university researchers. He aligned two very different stakeholder groups by setting a clear objective, curating the right presenters, enforcing audience appropriate depth, and giving direct feedback to ensure outcomes.

Zach’s advice to engineering leaders. Grow by taking progressively larger risks and building the resilience to recover from mistakes. Tailor your story to the audience, deliberately practice your communication skills, and use listening and reflection to convert stakeholder needs into actionable steps. Explore the full episode summary, including guest bio, key takeaways, transcript, and recommended resources in the show notes at drangeliqueadams.com slash podcast.

Without further delay, here is my conversation with Dr. Zach Sims.

ADAMS (02:03)

Hi, Zach, welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

SIMS (02:05)

Hi, it’s great to be here excited to be a part of your podcast.

ADAMS (02:08)

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

SIMS (02:14)

I think I go all the way back to you kind of always follow or start following in your parents’ And so my dad was an engineer and I saw what he did and enjoyed seeing the work that he did. And that led me to think about science as a career. And so I dove into physics as an undergrad. And when I got out of undergrad, I realized I really didn’t want to spend my time making less than a gram crystals that take weeks to make and then sometimes fail.

that that was not necessarily how I desired to spend my career. So I took a couple of years after undergrad, before grad school and transitioned to material science and engineering or energy science and engineering. And that really led me to realize that sitting more towards that applied side of science, that engineering side, really thinking about how to apply the basic fundamental pieces of science into actually creating something that works was the exciting part of science and engineering to me. And so

I dove into engineering there and have not really looked back after that period of time. So it’s been almost a decade now since, or over a decade since leaving undergrad and about six years since leaving my PhD.

ADAMS (03:18)

Okay, and what had you decide to go on to get a PhD?

SIMS (03:21)

I think I realized after getting my bachelor’s and the career change over to engineering that to achieve the heights that I wanted in my career, I would need a PhD. At the time I was pretty set on being a national lab staff and more or less to do so you have to have that PhD as a base level of entry into the field. And so I decided I’d go back and get that PhD and

Ended up going back to UTK where I got my undergrad. That was unanticipated, but sometimes when you meet the person who’s going to be your wife, you make some changes to to adjust. But overall I don’t regret or think any differently of my PhD than I did when I started it. It was one of the best decisions ever.

ADAMS (04:01)

Yeah, I’m chuckling because I ended up down here due to a spouse as well. My husband and I, went to Penn State together at grad school. I finished a year ahead of him. And I was up in Pittsburgh working for the Alcoa Research ⁓ Center. And he got a job at Oak Ridge National Lab down here.

And so that’s how we ended up down here. And we’ve been here for about 20 years. Fortunately, at the time, Alcoa had operations here, so they transferred me and it all worked out well. But yes, I had no intentions. I mean, of course, I knew where the state of Tennessee was, but it was not on my radar at all. we’ve enjoyed our time here in Knoxville. And so you did end up going to a national lab. And so can you just talk a little bit about that experience and then what you’ve been up to since that time?

SIMS (04:41)

So I between my undergrad and grad school, I spent two years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as a post baccalaureate tech scientist. So basically I was doing technical work for a couple different groups. The first one correlated electron materials and then a at the time deposition and science group, which is now the alloy behavior and design group. And that led me to realize that I enjoy the

collegial atmosphere of a national lab. I thought that it was a great opportunity to do world-class science, but to be a little closer to the application side with industrial partnerships and the DOE mission to further sustainable energy at the time and green energy at the time. then after getting my PhD, my PhD was done through the Bredesen Center. So the four years I was in my PhD, I also was at the laboratory, almost the bulk of the time.

So I’ve spent very little time actually on campus at UT outside of classwork. I was at the lab. So I still consider that more lab exposure than I do university exposure. And then after that, I spent three years, nearly three years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Lawrence Fellow, which is a named postdoc position where you come in as a distinguished fellow and you build your own project, build your own team and execute a programmatic research effort.

that you design as a part of your application to the program. And through all of that, I deeply enjoyed my time at the lab and I would never go back and if I had the chance to do it all again, I would still be doing it. But after all that was said and done, I wanted to try my hand at being more of a mentor because I found that I deeply enjoyed the mentorship part when students did come in or I had younger post-docs who I was able to mentor and lead.

So I started looking for academic positions inside of universities. And I got lucky and secured a position at the University of Tennessee, back where I graduated, my alma mater as joint faculty. So I still got to be at the lab two days, three days out of the week, doing research at the laboratory while also being faculty at the university and working on mentoring and growing the next generation of scientists in a more direct way than I would have the opportunity at the lab. And so.

Overall, my time at the lab is remembered fondly, the one thing I would probably wish I had done more is mentor people and bring in more interns, bring in more students to get that kind of exposure that I had and what helped me realize that science was something I wanted to be a part of my career throughout the length of my career.

ADAMS (07:06)

Okay, and then tell us a little bit about what you’re up to right now.

SIMS (07:08)

That’s a great question. So I got to, I got about a year and a half into my time at the University of Tennessee. And I realized that I think my skills while I was good at mentoring and I was good at research, I think my skills and communication, team building, and effective stakeholder engagement would be better used as a science advocate or a tech advocate and innovation advocate. And so I started looking for jobs in that space to try and

explore that area a little bit more and see what that career trajectory could look like. lucky enough, a couple months after I started looking for jobs and exploring, a job came up where I get to work with the Air Force through major commands, the Air Force Global Strike Command, and we can talk a little bit more about what they do later if we would like to. But working with the Air Force to help them identify technologies or research programs or areas of

research at the national labs that can help them solve their capability gaps and then creating the synergy and the connections and tying the knots between the need at the major commands, which are larger groups or larger bases inside a collection of bases inside the Air Force that allow for a singular mission. so, and then tying those capability gaps with work at the national labs and how do we make

that national lab work suit and meet a need for global strike, or if there’s not already work there, but commercial isn’t ready to provide a need for global strike, how do we now start to identify the programs and the experts that can start to create that knowledge and that technology to then transition out to the commercial entities at the end of the day? But that’s what I do. The job title is quite a long one, so we won’t bore you with it. But functionally, get to interface with the laboratory on a day-to-day basis.

work with the major commands to bring their needs to bear for the lab or for the Air Force.

ADAMS (08:55)

Yeah, that is a fascinating, there’s a couple of things I wanna dig a little bit deeper on related to this, you’re the first one to kind of talk about this bridge between different entities. But you said that you realized that your strong skills in communication and stakeholder engagement led you to kind of.

pursue opportunities like the one you have now. And I am curious where those skills came from. How did you develop them? Or are you just naturally inclined towards those sorts of skills? Because they’re certainly not necessarily the foundations of a PhD research program or something like that, or at least not talked about it in that way. So can you just talk a little bit about how you developed those specific skills?

SIMS (09:36)

I think that’s an excellent question. And I want to start with sharing something that my wife always tells. My wife has a high school art teacher. Her name is Melinda. And she has plenty of talented students who come through her classroom. But she has a saying that’s one of her class mantras. And it’s, hustle beats talent when talent doesn’t hustle. And it’s the idea that you can be as talented as you want. You can be the very best naturally at something. But if you don’t put in the effort, you will stagnate. And that for me was where I came into

my career early on, realized that I was good at these things. I was good at communicating. I was good at breaking down problems for people and helping them understand how a technology could help them or how a scientist might be able to help them with their problem. But I was only so good at the time. And I just kept practicing and kept doing that repetition. And it sounds so trite, but when

you’re in undergrad or when you’re in grad school, you get all of the technical texts and all of the technical support you need. You’re reading, you know, textbooks by the absolute giants of the field. But what you aren’t taught is how to write a great email or how to have difficult conversations with people about complex subjects like funding or what the next step in their career is or how to really have empathy for somebody who’s struggling with understanding a concept.

And so those soft skills, I believe, are what a lot of scientists do lack because they spend so much time on the technical growth areas, learning how to be the very best at taking SEM images or identifying microstructures inside of an SEM. But they never learn how to communicate persuasive ideas to somebody. How do I convince somebody that what I would like to do to solve their problem is the right thing to do or is at least a good idea to try?

Because maybe, you that’s part of science as well, is recognizing that you’re not gonna be right all the time, but you might have a good idea every now and then. And it’s worth communicating and learning how to express to somebody that you have a good idea. And how do you couch that in a way that they’ll understand and that meets their need. It’s also about understanding your stakeholders. But to boil all that down, it was just practice. It was recognizing where I had opportunities to get out of my comfort zone.

and communicate in ways I never had before. So a good example is when I was in grad school, there was an opportunity to help a state representative write a law that formed the Tennessee Energy Policy Council. And that was an advisory council to the governor and lieutenant governor to help them understand emergent needs in the energy space. But I had never written a law before. I had never communicated with local stakeholders. I’d never talked to other lawmakers before. So I didn’t know how to navigate

their needs and their wants and the way that they like to interpret the world and the lensing that they had. So I had to learn and I failed a few times. I got back, tried emails that were basically, please go away. I don’t want to talk to you anymore. But I kept at it and I kept trying. And eventually I learned how to navigate that lingo and how to talk to individuals in that space and talk to them in a way that engaged them instead of cause them to immediately switch off. So.

I would say the best thing you can do is just practice. If you don’t know how to send good emails, read some articles about sending emails and then execute those practices instead of just falling back into your old habits. And at the end of the day, think about what worked, what didn’t, how do you grow a little bit more? What are the areas you’re still lacking? Because if you just keep doing what you’re doing and you assume that it’s working because you’re good at it,

eventually that’s going to fail and you’re going to realize that it was working because I was in the right place at the right time, but I haven’t put in the skills and the work to keep progressing.

ADAMS (13:13)

just reinforcing what you said.

There’s sort of a feedback loop being open to feedback loop, being open to trying, and then actually assessing did this work, did this not work, and what do I want to do differently, what do want to keep doing. I mean, think that’s really important, as you said. And then the other thing that really stuck in my mind was the perseverance idea, right? You said, look, I didn’t know how to do this. I stumbled a few times and maybe even got some negative feedback that might have been a little hard to take. But I just kept going, and I kept going. And it has really paid dividends for you.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was just this role, right? So maybe you can talk a little bit about how you found this role. Again, just reminding everyone, you’re in a role where you’re working in an organization and part of it is to interface with other organizations and help them, collaborate a little bit better and more strongly,

So it’s just really interesting I think for my listeners to hear how you found that role and then just how you decided to get in this type of thing. Cause I could envision lots of people finding it fascinating to be able to see like two different sides of the innovation and being able to help be that bridge. So can you just talk a little bit about that?

SIMS (14:22)

Sure, I’ll be frank. How I found out about it was I started looking for roles in this space and I signed up for LinkedIn premium. This is going to sound like a pitch, but I signed up for LinkedIn premium. You know, I paid for the few months of it that I needed and I used their job filter search to key in my criteria, which was tech transfer, advocacy, stakeholder engagement, a few key terms. And then I described to their AI what I

what job I was looking for and it just kept pushing me jobs that were very close, but not exactly what I was hoping for. And this job came across my desk and it had functionally everything I wanted. It gave me the opportunity to stay in Knoxville. That was pretty high on the list. It gave me the opportunity to move outside, just doing stuff in the laboratory. It gave me the opportunity to really flex those skills and stakeholder engagement. And so I saw it and I applied for it. And what I will say,

when I applied for it is, for young engineers, I think there’s this idea that if my resume is good enough for one thing, with minor changes, it might be good enough for something else. Make sure that when you’re submitting your resumes to a job, you take all the time necessary. If it’s a job you really want and you think you’re well qualified for, to adjust your resume, your cover letter, your CV, if it asks for it, or your research statement if you’re applying to a job.

to suit who you’re talking to. I knew I was talking to people who were ex-military, retired generals in business development for aerospace contractors. I knew that these were the people I was talking to. So if I focused only on my scientific merit, my scientific chops, I wouldn’t get across the finish line. So I said, how do I change the resume that I’ve served to national labs and universities?

to be more reflective of the things that they’re going to value and use that to my advantage. I wrote a cover letter that very minimally mentioned my research successes, which I think were pretty numerous and I’m pretty proud of, and I like sharing about them, but they weren’t what that job called for. And so I fixed it and wrote a new cover letter, wrote a new resume that met the need of that job. And it took me

a day more or less to really be comfortable and refine it. But if it’s something you really want, you need to do that because every job is getting hundreds of applicants now. They’re being filtered by AI down to make sure that the applications and the wording in them even meet the basic standard of what the job is looking for. So if you want to make it past even the first hurdle, you need to spend some time on jobs you really care about and that you want to be more in line with what they would like. So that would be my advice. I got lucky on finding the job.

But in terms of getting the job, I think I adjusted myself, my story, and the way that I presented myself to be appropriate for the job instead of how I had presented in the past, which is I’m a very good scientist. Now I had to present I’m a very good tech advocate and a very good communicator and a good stakeholder engager. And I understand tech transfer. Those were the things that I had to adjust to be more reflective of than.

I’m just very good at turning knobs on an SEM. I’m very good at getting funding through the door for a program. I’m very good at understanding complex scientific problems, because that’s not what was needed.

ADAMS (17:30)

Yeah, I love what you’re saying here, because oftentimes I will meet people who maybe want to go for a role that is a little bit different than the role that they’re in. And the default is kind of two mistakes that people go. They either just do the tiny tweak like you kind of started with. They’ll do like a couple minor adjustments and think that’ll be it. Or, and I tend to see this second one more often.

They think they need to go and get a certificate in the thing that they want to jump over to. And what I try to advise them to do is what you just said. First, before you try to go get another certificate, why don’t you really dig into this job description and really tailor your entire message top to bottom, both on paper, but also I’m sure when you interviewed for this role, you also had to really be tight and on point.

and making sure that they could picture you in this role, regardless of other credentials you may have. And so I just really appreciate you talking about that. It does take time and effort, but that level of customization to bring yourself in complete alignment with the job description and it sounds like you were doing some…

some thinking about, what are these people like who are likely to hire me or likely to interview me? What are they actually like? How do they think? How do they communicate with each other? You even got down to that level in changing your application materials. And so you’re the same person, of course. You have the same credentials, but you were able to make that transition and it is so hugely important. And now, as you say,

with AI and with all these other things, it’s not optional, is the word I was looking for. So this is not optional. You absolutely have to do that. On the other hand, now we have AI that might be a tool that you can actually use to help you with some of this work as well, but it will not compensate for your own judgment in thinking about, you know, what do I know about these stakeholders and how can I bring myself

into a positive light through their eyes. So just that empathy piece I thought was really important.

SIMS (19:42)

I’d like to expand on something.

I don’t want anybody to take away from that hearing, misrepresent what your past is or lie about things you’ve done. Instead, figure out what you have done and the experiences you’ve built over your career, no matter how long, whether it’s just undergrad and some research, you’ve still had opportunities that are different than those of somebody else. So figure out the things that you can put at the forefront of your experience and your career engagement.

no matter how young, that make you a good fit. Instead of thinking, well, I’m just not a good fit, spend some time, you might not be, but spend some time thinking about what experiences you have that would make you a better fit. And if at end of the day you think, well, I’m just not a good fit for this, that’s okay. But don’t misrepresent the things you’ve done. But also don’t sell yourself short on the things you have done. Because I’m sure you can find some things that fit well in there. And I’ll also echo that if a job doesn’t call out for a specific certificate,

they’re probably not gonna care about it on your resume. So they won’t be looking for it they may not even know what it is.

ADAMS (20:54)

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

SIMS (20:58)

Sure, think there are, you I kind of started thinking about it and we heard about it in the first part. My career has kind of had maybe three or four compartments already in life. And so I wanted to think about which compartment would be most relatable to people maybe listening to this as young engineering leaders. And I think talking about how to organize a good team or organize an event effectively came across to me first. And so the…

When I was still at the University of Tennessee as faculty there, I got the opportunity to organize an event that we called TVA Idea Days. And that event was focused around the idea of bringing Tennessee Valley authority to UT to interface with some of our scientists and some of our professors who have work in areas relevant to TVA, but that TVA doesn’t know about yet. And that onus

to me is so important because we have these large organizations that are trying to seek solutions to their problems, but they don’t necessarily have direct access or even direct knowledge about the things that are going on that might be valuable to them. So I worked to bring in TVA and we brought in, I want to say about 15 to 20 individuals from TVA, all the way from their vice president for enterprise and research at the time, Joe Hoagland.

all the way down to some program managers across different areas of need. And in collaboration with that, we put them in connection through presentations and otherwise with professors at the university. And the point of leadership that I think that I want to point out here is again, going back to understanding who you’re talking to and stakeholders and making sure that both sides have an understanding because when you’re leading

you do at times have to bring disparate groups together who have, again, different lingoes or different jargons or have a different level of understanding. And so on the TVA side, I went over and I asked, tell me what level of technology you need to understand about. Do you want to get down to talking about electrons or do you want to talk about mostly a near-end use application of this probably rather basic technology at the time?

and we landed on somewhere in the middle, something moving towards application, but what are the problems that are remaining? But they didn’t want to talk about the deep science of solar panels and how they work, which is fine, right? You have this basic understanding. So I took that knowledge and I went back to our professors that we had invited and our faculty members. And I said, here is how I would like you to tailor your presentations. I gave them the time, the amount, and I told them this is the level.

engagement or this is the level of scientific knowledge and merit that we would like to have communicated and here’s how we would like that presented. And most of them received it well. Some said they would like to, you know, go into a little bit more detail and I said, please resist that urge because you’re hoping at the end of this to have a follow on conversation with TVA about how you can help them. If you spend 15 of your 20 minutes talking about deep science, you will lose them in the first five and they won’t tune back in for the last five.

And so we work together to bring those differing areas of communication or arenas of communication because you’re a faculty member at the university. I’m sure you’ve met many engineering and scientific faculty. They have a way that they give presentations 90 % of the time. And we had to break that down and bring in a different kind of presentation for them. so, and then as a final salvo of that leadership and bringing that all together,

making sure we were communicating across those platforms. I reviewed all of the presentations, gave feedback, and I took the time to be honest about my feedback and to be real about, we need to change this or we need to add this element or have you considered this? And then on the TVA side, I made sure that when we brought in people from the TVA side, that I had conversations with them afterwards, after the event, to say, if we do this again, what would you like to see? What could be better next time?

Because maybe we don’t invite TVA back, but maybe we invite the Army Research Lab back, or maybe we invite Volkswagen back, or some other big group in our area. And we need to understand how we could have reduced that conversation back down to the level that was right, and how we could interface with them better. And so I think of that event, around that I’ll also say building a good team of the people that support you in your institution was also valuable. I pulled in…

a small team, was five of us working together to execute this event and it couldn’t have gone off without them. You you can put in so much effort, but I don’t know how to get catering brought in. I don’t know how to reserve rooms as well. I don’t know how to bring in the department heads to chat about the big institutional-wide items that are going on at the university. So I brought in people who could support those different areas and who had that skill to bring in those people.

And I augmented my own in that way. And I think that when you build teams effectively like that, and when you advocate effectively, and then you bring stakeholders together and bring the communication to a shared understanding, you can execute a great event. And at the end of the day, I was sitting down with one of the executives from TVA and he just said, this was great. I was very happy to be here and this was a great spend of our time. Even if we don’t.

end up with anything else. Our program managers are going leave with a better understanding of what the state of the art is. And to me, that means it was a successful event. I look back with great pride on how we executed that.

ADAMS (26:14)

Yeah, this is a great example. one of the things that immediately comes to mind is this idea of managing, you’re bringing two different stakeholders together with the idea of accomplishing a goal. And they have very different interests. They have different starting points. They have different outcomes they’re trying to achieve. you’re trying to bridge this gap. And of course, my guess would be that you wanted to cater more to TVA and their needs, because they were sort of the

the client or the sponsor of this event or some sort of way. But you do have a group of faculty that have their own way of working and their own way of doing things, and you’ve got to somehow convince them to maybe do things a little bit differently. So can you just talk a little bit about what were some of the tactics that you used to try to convince them to change maybe their mode of communication? And you mentioned one about just letting someone know, we want to

This is just the start of a relationship, hopefully. So let’s, if you frame it this way and get them curious and get them interested, they’ll come back for more information and then you can get into the details. So that was one, you already mentioned one example, but I’m curious if there are any other tactics that you found like you needed to use that worked well for you to kind of get this group of stakeholders on board with maybe doing things a little differently.

SIMS (27:30)

Sure. I think I’ll go all the way back to the beginning. The very first thing I would say is for an event like this, you have faculty targets in mind. And what I mean by that is you know which faculty would be good for this type of event who have at least some experience communicating out to this level of stakeholder. And then you know some faculty who

don’t exist in that space and who it would take a lot more of a lift to bring their presentation, their communication expertise, and their narrative more into line with what you need. So the initial goal was target the ones right off the bat who I know will bring a presentation and a communication skill that needs minimal work. And then if I can’t fill up or we can’t fill up the entire roster with faculty like that, let’s go to the next common denominator, which is

Professors who would need a bit more work, but whose work is in line with his mission And so that was the first step and if you if you set the groundwork early instead of and this is something that I Maybe have gotten a little bit of flack for throughout my career I don’t play a lot of favorites, know I have plenty of friends at the university and at the time I had plenty of friends at the university and some asked me if they could come and present at TV idea days and I said you just don’t have work that aligns with the need

and we’re hosting an event for TVA, you’re you’re not the right fit. And, you know, I had to tell people who are my friends and my colleagues and who I would go and have beers with after work that I just can’t support you being here because it’s not the right fit for the thing we’re trying to put together. And so I think it goes both ways. It’s, it’s being okay saying no, when you know something’s not a good fit, but also starting from a very base level of who can I pick early on that’s going to lower my work limit.

And that’s the that’s a leadership practice. I guess you could align with maximizing when you’re putting a team together and when you’re starting to give people jobs, make sure that you’re aligning your expectations and execution with the skill sets that they bring. And so I wanted to maximize their impact and minimize my work on this because I was still a full time faculty at the time. I still writing proposals, still mentoring students, still teaching a class. And so I didn’t have 20 hours a week to devote to this event. I had three.

So I had to bring that back into line by initially starting by picking people I knew would be a good fit. And at the end of the day, I think we filled up the roster with 90 % of people who I think were a great fit. And then we had to go back and pick a few who I thought, this is going to be a little bit more work and we’re going to cycle this down and do a little bit more poking and prodding. But I know we’re going to have a good event at the end of the day. And overall, I’d say that was one tactic. The other tactic was

as you point out, was just making sure that they understand what was at stake. If I’m talking to a faculty member and they say, I’d like to talk about this because it’s important and I think it helps everybody understand it, you have to go back and say, it does help everybody understand if you’re in a group of people who have that level of understanding or who are even interested in your 15 minute presentation. But when we’re talking out to stakeholders at the application side,

What’s at stake is their understanding of how they can use it if all you talk about is the science. And if they don’t, at the end of the day, understand how they can use what you’re presenting to them, then you haven’t met the minimum ask of this event. so communicating those topics directly and just being honest with people, being willing to say no, and then making sure that you’re selecting early on people that maximize impact without playing favorites.

without thinking about who you’re gonna make mad to an extent. You don’t wanna make anybody mad, but if you can avoid it, but make sure that you’re picking people who maximize the impact and minimize your effort on it. So that would be mine.

ADAMS (31:10)

Yeah, that’s I mean, those are those are great tactics. The other thing that that comes to mind just as you’re talking is it sounds like you also had real clarity about your goals and outcomes and you you probably had your own ideas about what you were hoping to achieve. You, as you said earlier, you really talk to the stakeholders, you talk to TVA to learn about what they wanted. And so I imagine that having that clarity allowed you to be.

a little bit more definitive or decisive, I should say, about yes, no, fit, not fit. You knew what you were going for. And so, at least in your own mind, as someone who’s organizing this and who’s leading this, you could very clearly make those distinctions. And then you knew, okay, yes, this is a very clear yes, this is a maybe with some work, and then these others were no. And then as you said, even though you may have gotten some flack from your friends because they turned out to be a no.

It sounds like you were comfortable with, I’m very clear on what my goals are here. And so I just have to make sure that that is executed well. It doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. doesn’t mean I couldn’t invite you to something else, but I’m pretty clear on what I need to do here. And that’s not a good fit. just to reinforce that, mean, you didn’t say that explicitly, but it was pretty clear from how you described the tactics that you use that you were pretty clear on what you were trying to achieve and got there.

I’m sure based on your own, but also from, sounds like really important conversations from your stakeholder.

SIMS (32:36)

Definitely, I think that we’re doing a lot of talking right now and I think you’re doing a great job listening. I’m doing most of the talking, but when you’re in these stakeholder meetings, it’s extremely important to listen because they’re gonna communicate to you what they need. And I don’t just mean listen in the moment. I mean listen in that take what they say, take good notes and go home and start to distill it. Go sit back at your desk, take some time to really digest what they said because there’s…

Gonna be a lot said there were multiple stakeholders in the room. They all had ideas that they would like to presented. OK, go back, sit down, look through your notes and start to say, well, there’s overlap here. There’s a good fit here. I know somebody works on this and start to distill that down. So listening is not just an active thing in the moment. It’s a follow on thing as well, where you start to really take what you heard and ingest it, digest it and start to execute on how it.

how you create impact out of their needs.

ADAMS (33:41)

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

SIMS (33:46)

think the biggest thing that I thought about this question a lot because I think there are so many small pieces of advice you can give, but I don’t necessarily want to try and give a lot of individual pieces of advice. I want to give one big piece of advice. And I think that this has been represented. You’ve heard about my career trajectory in how I’ve lived so far is that we are as a species, very risk averse. We think I’ve

I don’t want to take that risk to step over the ledge and do something that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to talk to people who are outside of my comfort zone. I don’t want to learn things that make me a little uncomfortable in terms of how do I start to execute these leadership skills that I’m reading about? How do I actually start using them? I would say, one, take risks slowly at first. Figure out how to become comfortable with it.

in smaller doses before you take a big leap because risk is risk. It feels uncomfortable. And if you take too much of it, you become very careful in your execution or something and too careful. You’re so worried about messing up. If you take a really big risk early on that you more focus on what could go wrong instead of what could go right. And so start with small risks. Maybe that’s in

joining a club at school and starting to be the chair of that club, taking on a leadership role that really only affects a few people around you. If you fail or you make a mistake. And the next step, start getting engaged in something more public facing. For me, that was the Energy Policy Council I helped write a law about. And then I eventually ended up serving on it. That was a big risk for me because I was now engaged with lawmakers and lobbyists and people who had sway in the community.

and I needed to execute well. And that was my next level of risk. And then following that, I stepped out and became a Lawrence Fellow. And part of being a Lawrence Fellow is saying you’re going to do something, how it’s going to impact a laboratory and doing it. And there’s a lot of risk in that because of the 300 or more postdocs at Livermore, there are at any given time, six of us who are Lawrence Fellows. And so it’s very selective group. You’re very public facing.

You have a lot of, a lot of scrutiny on top of you. And so that was a big risk. And then coming all the way to where I am today, I took an entire career change and that was my next big risk. But each one of those you’ll see is a small ramp up in the level of risk associated with it. And I learned how to focus my efforts, not on what could go wrong, but what could go right if I did well. And focus instead on not making mistakes on if I’m going to make a mistake, how do I?

come back from it? How do I bounce back? Because the bigger the risk, the bigger possibility of the mistakes. But if you build your risk slowly and your risk tolerance slowly, you also learn to build your bounce back slowly. And then those big mistakes, you can start to learn how to cope with when they happen. So that would probably be my piece of advice, because I think we get kind of caught, especially early on in our career, in the idea that what you do now is what you will do forever. Or

how I am now is how I will be forever. takes risk to move outside of that expectation of our career and ourselves. And that is what I want to communicate is be okay with some risk, but be honest about your expectation of how you should take on that risk early and learn to take risks in small doses and then start moving into those bigger risks.

because you’ll be able to focus on what matters when you start taking those bigger risks if you learn how to tolerate them in smaller doses early on.

ADAMS (37:14)

Zach, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us.

SIMS (37:16)

Happy to do it, anytime.