MEL #044 | From First Generation Student to National Lab Leader through Choosing Harder Challenges with Dr. Claus Daniel

DANIEL (00:00)

If you choose to stay in your comfort zone, your comfort zone becomes smaller over time, 

Just getting comfortable with the things I can do or am good at,  I believe it’s a pathway towards sort of shrinking influence, shrinking opportunity. So, taking on challenges and then accomplishing those challenges, I think it’s a very, very important aspect of growth.

ADAMS (00:47)

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Claus Daniel, Associate Director for Advanced Energy Technologies at Argonne National Laboratory. Born into a family of carpenters in Germany, Claus was the first in his family to finish high school and attend college. Encouraged by an observant elementary teacher, he pursued material science after discovering a passion for physics and chemistry and a childhood encounter with an astronaut who was also a material scientist.

He later moved to the United States to improve his English and earned a Wigner Fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he helped build an influential battery program. After spending time in industry at Carrier, he returned to the US National Lab System at Argonne, where he leads an organization of scientists, engineers, and analysts working to develop breakthrough solutions to grow the economy through a reliable and secure energy system and a strong workforce.

In our leadership segment, Claus talks about how he repeatedly chose harder paths from changing countries to starting battery work where it was not expected. Through those challenges, he learned to balance influence with listening so teams can diverge before converging on decisions. Strategic focus, reflection, and resisting reactive communication became central to his approach to leadership. Claus’s advice to engineering leaders? When communicating about your work, don’t talk only about gadgets. Frame engineering as solving societal problems.

Schedule reflection, know what you can influence, and practice the discipline captured in the Serenity Prayer to lead with focus and impact. 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. Claus Daniel.

ADAMS (02:26)

Hi, Claus welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

DANIEL (02:28)

Angelique, thank you very much for having me today.

ADAMS (02:30)

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

DANIEL (02:36)

there’s a, this is actually a rather long story. So maybe I tried to see how I can shorten it quite a bit during my childhood. I come from a carpenter family. So I’m the first one in my family that went to high school, finished high school, and then went to college. So it was never really on the radar screen to do something there. In that regard, during childhood, I had sort of two wishes where I, you know, you sometimes have these

grand visions in that regard. And my options had been to either become Pope or the CEO of a major automotive company. And both of those, you know, during childhood times is, you know, something maybe you haven’t thought through what is all involved in doing that and getting there. But what really happened is I

realized a rather early inclination towards math and science. So during school, as I was going through last three years of school in Germany, have, ⁓ you’re selecting during high school, you’re almost like a major and a minor kind of selection. And so I was heavy on the physics and chemistry side. And I had the opportunity while I was in high school to join the university to a

materials week in Stuttgart at the time, is a, you know, it’s a professional society meeting. Three, 4,000 people come together and I saw an astronaut giving a presentation and the astronaut happened to be a material scientist. So somehow in my mind, I got that wrong correlation in order to become an astronaut, you have to study material science. And that’s why I did this.

ADAMS (04:11)

Wow. Well, there’s a lot there, Claus. So I really want to know about the Pope, but that’s probably for a different podcast. But I actually want to ask you, because this is really giving some insight to, I think most of our audience is based in the US. So I’m really curious about, as what we call here a first generation college student, what is that like in Germany? How did you even…

understand the process that you would have to navigate in order to go to college and pick majors. Can you just give us a little bit of insight into how that works?

DANIEL (04:40)

The selection process in Germany, sort of which direction your career takes is a process that starts very early. In my opinion, maybe a little too early. Typically during elementary school, there is a selection process then what’s the next school you’re going to. So during the time when you switch to middle school, there’s one option that sort of keeps all things open, but most of the options are ⁓ three.

are three different directions in that regard. And so you are picking for your fifth grade, you’re picking a school that is either specialized to go towards the trades. Or you take the middle, that middle pathway, the middle pathway gets you towards financial services, banking, nursing, things that are sort of in between trades, things and

sort of research and development or higher education. And then the top tier is that pathway towards higher education where you finish out with what they call the allgemeine Hochschulreife, which essentially allows you to go to the university afterwards, right? And in my case, ⁓ my elementary school teacher was the key person in that. Both of my parents had been carpenters.

I was a terrible language student. had a really bad grade in German at the time. And my parents felt like, no, we’re doing well. This is the right way to go. He should take that bottom tier. His language skills are not sufficient to advance to that top tier anyway. So let’s just go with that. And my elementary school teacher was very vehemently, ⁓ you know, acting there and telling

He also happened to be the elementary school teacher of my mom. So we knew each other very well and the families knew each other very well. And he was very forceful and saying, no, I see, I see some opportunities here. You have to send him to the top tier school there. and so that really influenced my trajectory quite, quite heavily in that regard. And I was really excited once I, once I, got my PhD during my defense of my, ⁓ dissertation.

of my thesis. He essentially joined. It was a great surprise. He was so proud that I was able to really fulfill that. And I was really, really excited and happy and thankful for him to steer me early in my life towards that direction.

ADAMS (06:59)

wow, that’s an amazing story. And so glad that he was able to join you for your defense and celebrate in you not only going to university in the technical field, but can you talk a little bit more about your decision to go on to graduate school?

DANIEL (07:14)

So, you once I did the schools at that time, was a 13 year school term. And with my inclination and excitement about physics and chemistry, I wasn’t quite sure what direction I want to take. So I ended up selecting material science because it’s a little bit of a mixture of all of them. I did during my undergraduate time, spend some time in France and

started to develop sort of an international network in that regard. It was a really interesting school between a collaboration between Sweden, France, Germany, and Spain. And all of us that subscribed to this sort of came together for a year and half in France. And I got exposed during that time, I got exposed to so many different cultures and backgrounds and…

sort family histories and things. I was also very lucky that I was very early on during my, I think it was the second semester that I got a research assistant position, an RA position with a professor that really sort of took me under his wings. Frank Mucklich is his name. he allowed me to sort of really explore a little bit where I want to go. And so my master thesis,

was heavily on the applied side. was with the automotive industry together, was working on electrical connectors. But I wanted to spend some more time on getting more into the basics, into the fundamentals. And that’s when I decided to go to graduate school, finish out my PhD, and go into research and really understand how materials work and how you can drive technical solutions with new materials development.

ADAMS (08:52)

Yeah, and I’m looking at your career trajectory. You’ve spent some time in industry, you spent some time in academia, you spent some time in the national labs, and now you’re associate lab director at Argonne. Can you just talk a little bit about your career trajectory and some of the things that you’ve been up to?

DANIEL (09:08)

Yeah, I did come to the United States in 2005 and I came primarily because my English was not very good and I had trouble understanding the nuances in the research literature and also I had trouble expressing myself properly. So I said I got to spend some time in the U.S. to understand English a little better.

I did at that time, it was a cold call to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and essentially applied there for the Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship, which gives you, it’s a wonderful fellowship that gives you two years of sort of a great deal of freedom early in your career to explore sort of new fields. And I was really lucky during that time to meet some wonderful people.

that became sort of lifelong mentors, if you will, that really helped me through that stage of my career. I’m often in contact still with them. I met people like Peter Blau, George Farr, sort of that, the material science research community in Oak Ridge was really, really strong. And that really strongly influenced me.

I developed some new areas in there and then went into some manufacturing aspects, started some battery work. I found some really fantastic mentors, both at Oak Ridge, as well as at the Department of Energy. People that come to mind right away are Craig Blue, who influenced me heavily on the manufacturing side, Ray Bowman, who helped me make strong connections with the automotive industry, and then Dave Howell, somebody from the Department of Energy.

who really gave me some incredible opportunities there. I started working quite a bit on like program development during that time, because the interesting thing with that fellowship was it paid for two years. And two years plus one day, funding, my source of funding was turned off. It came with that fellowship. And I did not realize that sort of my value that I brought to a number of

projects during that two years, I was a I would say, maybe valued contributor there. And I didn’t realize sufficiently that the vast majority of my value was that I was free.

So as soon as I cost some money, my value drops dramatically.

ADAMS (11:21)

You

DANIEL (11:21)

And all six, I contributed to six research teams at that time and all six research teams all of a sudden didn’t need my help anymore. So, and then at that time, Craig Blue, Ray Boeman and Dave Howell really helped me sort of figure some new things out. They saw some opportunity in my capabilities and offered me an opportunity to do some research on materials and processing for batteries and do an assessment on it.

ADAMS (11:29)

Wow.

DANIEL (11:47)

was an interesting time because it was just one year after Oak Ridge National Laboratory finished a leadership study concluding that the laboratory cannot contribute anything in that area and that they should stay away from it. Because some other laboratories are far ahead of them, such as ⁓ Berkeley or Argonne, for example. And I didn’t shy away because I didn’t have a charge account.

right? So there was this one charge account and batteries. And so I jumped right in and utilize that. And I said, okay, what just happened to me shouldn’t really happen. And so let’s build a strong network. Let’s find people I can collaborate with. Let’s build a program together that has more than just one project. So it’s more resilient. So that gave me the sort of the start in

program development. And from there on, I worked a lot with ⁓ the wonderful community at Oak Ridge together and at the University of Tennessee. In 2007, I became a joint faculty with the University of Tennessee, first in the material science and engineering department, and then later on when the Bredesen Center was ⁓ created in the Bredesen Center. And that was really wonderful to sort of explore both of those things. I did a little bit of teaching, did some seminars.

⁓ with a number of the material science faculty at UT and created a sort of a network around me that was very supportive and it was exciting to see how we could build something. And I think these days nobody at Oak Ridge would say anymore that Oak Ridge cannot contribute to battery research, which I’m really proud of that I was one of the early ones helping to change that a bit.

I don’t want to say that it’s all on me, right? I think that’s very important. There was some really, really good research going on, but it was in smaller pockets and maybe less connected on it. So somebody that really comes to mind right away is Nancy Dudney. She was an absolute accomplished, phenomenal researcher in that space, and she had a fantastic research group that she was leading. And I learned a lot from her.

and was really able to build on that with her together, something that became a much larger research portfolio later.

at a certain time, spending about 16 years at Oak Ridge, I felt I need to take on the next challenge. And I was really, really fortunate when Carrier Corporation came to me and asked me to help them with some technical problem they had. The technical problem was not too exciting for me, but maybe I was at that time loose enough in the socket to entertain a discussion.

And what happened is I had a very interesting discussion with the Chief Technology Officer at the time at Carrier and walking them through how some challenges they’re currently facing, in my opinion, could challenge their business model quite dramatically. And we had such a good discussion that they allowed me to take on some completely new endeavor and let me work very, very freely on some new projects.

around their future product agenda. It was an exciting opportunity for me to explore how corporate America works. spent about two and a half years at Carrier and worked with a team that was spanning 16 time zones. It doesn’t make for a good working hours or work life balance there when you try to touch base with the entire team that spans from San Francisco all the way to Singapore. But it was

fantastic to sort of see how the things from the applied energy research that I was doing before gets translated into industry. At a wonderful time there, building a new agenda for the product portfolio, we got some really good projects lined up and people signed up for it. And I was able to hand over that plan back to engineering, which then allowed me to sort of take on the next thing and…

really go back where my passion is. My passion is with the Department of Energy and solving some big energy challenges that the United States has. And in that regard, when the opportunity at Argonne came to lead the Advanced Energy Technologies Directorate, I took that opportunity, came back to the lab system. And ever since I’m really excited to be here, ⁓ I have a fantastic, talented team build on that strong reputation that Argonne brings to the table.

and work on collaborations with the entire lab system to tackle our engineering challenges for a great future.

ADAMS (16:08)

Listening to your story, there’s something that to me sounds like this reoccurring theme that I’d love to explore with you, which is that you’ve had many moments where you chose the difficult path. So I’m thinking about, you’re thinking, my English isn’t very good. You could very easily have had a very successful career just staying in Europe. You said, no, my English actually isn’t good. I’m going to go to America. And you say, you my funding’s dried up.

And I want to work on batteries, but I’m in a place where they say that they’re not going to work on batteries. So you know what? I’m going to get them to work on batteries as opposed to going somewhere else where they’re working on batteries. it’s just, I mean, those are just a couple of examples, but it just seems like your mindset or your approach is often to push through in the challenging pathway.

for whatever reasons that that’s meaningful for you as opposed to potentially taking. And I wouldn’t even call it the easy way out, Because the alternatives are themselves worthy endeavors, but you have chosen to do the more challenging pathway. I’m just curious, first of all, do you agree with that? if you do, where does that come from?

DANIEL (17:17)

Yeah, I think I have never really thought it along those lines. So thank you sort of for opening my eyes in that direction a little bit on it. But I think one key thing is when I think about leadership and when I think about advancing either your own sphere of influence or the field of research, right, advancing knowledge in that regard, I feel about

It’s very important that we step out of our comfort zone. If you choose to stay in your comfort zone, your comfort zone becomes smaller over time, right? It’s sort of like training your muscles. You gotta get your muscles feel sore once in a while for them to grow and to get somewhere. And I feel it’s very much the same in that regard. so taking on challenges,

And then accomplishing those challenges, I think it’s a very, very important aspect of growth. And it’s something we should take on in a very intentional manner, right? Where are my shortcomings? Where are my areas for development? And how do I work on those? ⁓ Just getting comfortable with the things I can do or am good at. I believe it’s a pathway towards sort

shrinking influence, shrinking opportunity, and less growth than the other pathway.

ADAMS (18:46)

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

DANIEL (18:49)

So this is a tough one to answer, right? Because I think leadership is a process rather than sort of a skill in that regard. And I think there’s many times where you can, I feel like it’s probably a relationship that you develop through mentoring activities. And at any given time, you’re switching back and forth with a person.

or a network of sometimes being a mentor and sometimes being a mentee. So I, for example, these days that I am an associate laboratory director and supposedly be a leader in the lab system, I tend to be asked often to mentor people. And the main reason why I do that is because I learned from them. So in that regard, I’m actually their mentee, right?

So I think what’s very important, what’s probably the most important part in my view on that to display leadership skills, leadership capabilities is that you listen carefully to other people, that you try to watch people and try to understand what makes them effective in any given situation, what allowed

a certain outcome in that situation to occur. And if that outcome is right, then I want to learn from that on, you know, how do I repeat that? If that outcome is not right, I want to learn from what kept it from the right outcome coming. I think the most important part there is sort of the realization that the only person I can truly change is myself.

anything else I can try to influence people and then hope that their reaction will be more aligned with the kinds of things that I might want to try to get at or influence the future with or something like that. And I think that’s a very important aspect because I think it changes your view from, you know, being a victim to truly being a leader. And I think that’s key difference, right? If something

bad happens to me, just being the victim and sort of find reasons why I couldn’t succeed is not a solution. It’s not helping me in that regard, but understanding what got me to some place and what I could do different to change the outcome that develops leadership.

ADAMS (21:00)

Yeah, I completely agree. And I’m wondering if you have your own internal process that you use. I’m thinking about, you know, just, just, just double clicking on what you were just talking about. So let’s say something bad happens to you. You have an outcome that you, you did not want. And now you of course have some reflection to do, but then at some point you have a decision to make, you know, what am I going to do with this situation that has happened to me? And it sounds like you, you lean into.

What can I do differently? What can I learn from it, et cetera. But I’m curious just about your own internal dialogue and your own process. And this is something that you’ve honed over many years. This is something that takes a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a couple of hours, a couple of moments. And what are some of the ways that you’re thinking about getting yourself into the mode of being able to be more productive with the setback than maybe lingering there?

DANIEL (21:48)

I often take time to reflect. think particularly during the, during nowadays when it’s a very fast moving world, it’s a world of instant gratification. Social media is causing us to constantly switch gears, move quickly. Our brain is sort of trained to get that quick dopamine.

and, you know, count our likes, count our connections, all of those things. most of that is distraction. Most of it is noise. Most of it does not move myself, my team, my organization, the department of energy, the nation, the world forward. Most of it is, you know, actually quite honestly holding us back. So the important thing is that, we need to schedule time for reflection.

listen and think. And that’s what I try to spend actually more time on than other things. So when I get an email that causes a strong reaction, I stop immediately and I don’t respond and I think about it. And sometimes it’s even sometimes it’s something urgent. But I say reacting quickly might actually make the situation worse than waiting a little bit thinking about it sleeping over it.

Early in my career, I was maybe a little too quick sometimes in reactions, and it has caused some issues on a regular basis. It’s something that I had to learn really hard, the hard way. I was, you know, sometimes firing off things too quick. was responding in meetings too quick. mean, to this day, I spend a lot of time in meetings reflecting on when to interject. So I tend to…

I tend to lead more meetings than in the past in my current role. And what I realize is it’s very important to get input from the entire team before weighing in. Even by just sharing my opinion, I’m influencing other people on what they will say because they try to be aligned with the leader in the room. And that, in my opinion, is often motivation towards getting a

a convergent idea right away. And you got to be very careful that you have some development of divergence to scope out problem statements to understand where things are before you converge on one outcome. Right. That’s very important that you take that time.

ADAMS (24:03)

And I wanted to highlight something you mentioned, which is really important. This idea of leaders being really aware of their ability to influence decisions just by sharing utterances or reflecting on an opinion or reflecting on an observation. And this happens, you the higher up you go in an organization, the more weight

your voice carries. so I appreciate you mentioning that because I do see that, particularly with early leaders, not recognizing that. They think, well, we were peers yesterday. So today it’s the same. And it’s like, well, actually, no. Your role brings with it a weight that influences the way that people interact with you. And so I just wanted to highlight that and then just reinforce what you said. And I appreciate you saying you’re aware of that. And so you’re intentionally

both reflecting on what you’re hearing, but also you’re creating the space for, as you said, these diverging opinions to occur and really getting a lot of good input, diverse input from people before you weigh in because you recognize that when you do that, it can cause, certain reactions will naturally happen because the leader has interjected. I’m curious.

Did you already know that as you were coming up as leaders, that’s something you’ve observed? How did you come with that sense of, I actually need to pause here and make sure that I get all the opinions that I feel like I need before I interject?

DANIEL (25:35)

⁓ no, I would actually say no, I absolutely, this is something that has to be honed and worked on every day. And I would maybe even take a little step back in that regard. I would not say that I am fully aware of that. But maybe what I’m trying to do is I try to be more aware of times when I don’t do that. Yeah, I forget to do that. Right. Then I had been in the past, right. And then in doing so trying to get better. think it’s

This is a process of continuous improvement in that regard, right? You can, you know, I catch myself on a regular basis still sort of maybe jumping the gun a little too early and not allowing for a good consensus to be built or for, you know, the best idea to be developed or something like that. Early in my career, it was often, you know, maybe a process where I clashed one too many times in that regard.

I was really lucky that I had some phenomenal leaders sort of influencing me over the time. And when I say leaders, it’s not always just by their position. It’s just by their influence on me, the time they spent with me and those kinds of things. in that regard, I had a few times where maybe some people that were far senior to me in meetings and that observed me. And then after the meeting, they came to me and said, know, Claus, you don’t…

you don’t always need to share your thoughts right away. You need to listen sometimes. And ⁓ it took me a while to sort of internalize that and figure out what they really meant on that. And it’s this thing about also understanding when are you making obvious comments and maybe that’s not needed. You just let other people do or you wait a little bit and then other people might make that comment.

And then it becomes way more impactful if the team comes up with a solution that aligns with what you had thought. That’s a great validation. And if you share your idea maybe too early, you might actually come up with an outcome that is not optimal because you’re influencing the other people to discard their ideas. And they might have been better.

And I think that’s the dance we’re trying to do on figuring out how can we get best possible outcomes there by having everybody contribute to it.

ADAMS (27:45)

The other thing you mentioned was the need for reflection and the need for slowing down just in general because we’re constantly being bombarded with messages and images and everything else and everything because of the way we can communicate these days. Everything has this sort of sense of urgency almost built in, even if it is or not. And you are taking that very seriously yourself. I’m curious.

If that’s something that you’re talking about with your team, and if so, are there any sort of team discussions or team norms that you’re putting in place that might sort of propagate that whole idea of, I know we’re getting pinged, we’re getting messages, but let’s take the time to pause and reflect and really come up with what we think is the best recommendation or outcome or solution. How can you propagate that sense down to your leadership team?

DANIEL (28:37)

Yeah, I almost do that daily. We have very intentional discussions about the distractions that email, for example, do to us and that writing an email is not accomplishing a task or getting a job done, that it often just pushes something off to somebody else’s plate. We have very intentional discussions about that we’re writing too many emails. We’re having intentional discussions about the need for focus, not to respond to every

action, not to react, but to really think about what we need to engage in. And then maybe in a more formal way, what I do is I take the team sort of on what I call a strategic retreat twice a year. One time in the fall, we spent two days away from our workplace.

and really think about if we remove all constraints, what is it that we need to do? How do we maximize impact? And then later on, bring constraints in and say, how do we deal with these constraints? And where should we go to really maximize our impact? And then in the springtime, I tend to typically do like ⁓ maybe a half year check in, only one day of an engagement there. We often bring our team together, but then we reach out to other teams.

inside and outside the laboratory to help us in that process. think that’s very important to get some other viewpoints on it. And what it does in most times, it’s not bringing any sort of vast new understanding to the table or some debate where it’s like, yeah, we have never done this before. I think what it really does, it helps us to focus and it helps us to reinforce that need to turn down distractions.

to not always react right away and to be more in an active role and creating our future in a very active role in that regard.

ADAMS (30:32)

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

DANIEL (30:38)

⁓ so this is hopefully… ⁓

you know, advice is always it’s really hard, right? Because you want to, you want to make sure that it’s valuable to people what you’re saying and that they get some benefit from that. But so what I would say in that regard, as engineers, we tend to often focus on building gadgets. And when we’re building gadgets, when we talk about building gadgets, we are not connecting with large portions of the population. And it does two things.

One is it turns off interest for some people so we don’t reach our message to them. And that can have different outcomes. It might maybe a sponsor, they’re not interested in what we’re telling them. It may be the general public, they don’t appreciate why we’re here and what we’re doing. It might be somebody that would be really good at helping us in solving our problem. It would be a great engineer themselves.

But somehow we lost them and they go somewhere else and they’re lost in that engineering community as a good contributor. So in that regard, let’s not build gadgets. Let’s work on societal problems. Let’s figure out how do we talk about the problems we’re solving. think engineers are very, important. We have some big problems to solve this century.

And if we don’t all get together on that and get those solved, we’re going to have some big problems in that. Now on the personal side also, I would say we talked earlier in the earlier segment about ⁓ leadership and distractions and how to focus. I think one thing that is very important is that we realize ourselves, you know, what can we and can we not influence and then focus in that regard. So I’m a strong believer in the serenity prayer.

the serenity prayer prayer is really looking at, you know, having the courage to change what you can and having the serenity to accept what you cannot. And then having the wisdom to know the difference. ⁓ and that’s, that’s the hard part. That last portion is the hard part on really understanding that and looking at that. And we need to make sure that we spend adequate time thinking about that. And if, if you think about that every day a little bit.

then maybe you can turn down some of those distractions and you can become a great leader and really transform the field of engineering, transform the way our institutions are dealing with certain things and really help us see that next big thing we need to tap.

ADAMS (32:59)

Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.

DANIEL (33:02)

Well, Angelique, thank you very much for the great conversation.