MEL #045 | From Early Curiosity to Strategic Influence through Consistent Character and a Listen-First Mindset with Mel Kirk

KIRK (00:00)

I know that if I go to a cocktail party or something that is social with multiple people, I’m not going to stand out because

I’m not gonna draw that much attention to myself. It’s just not natural. But I will have an earnest conversation. And if someone says, hey Mel, I’d love to continue this conversation tomorrow If they say that to 20 people in the room, I’m the one person that’s gonna follow up.

ADAMS (00:48)

In this episode, I speak with Mel Kirk, an award-winning business leader who is renowned for re-engineering or transforming business operations at some of America’s most admired corporations. Mel discovered engineering through a summer STEM enrichment program and chose industrial engineering for its blend of people, process, and performance. Early co-ops and a cohort-based engineering program at the University of Tennessee shaped his Listen First leadership and opened doors to Merck

GE, Rider, and other top firms where he led large scale transformation across multiple industries. In our leadership segment, Mel shares how again and again he was asked to re-engineer processes and cultures often without formal authority. He learned to convene diverse voices, amplify technical talent, and make tough calls with integrity while shouldering real career risk. Mel’s advice to aspiring leaders, master the fundamentals, practice active listening for understanding,

show consistency of character and say yes to stretch opportunities. Follow up on access moments and build one-to-one relationships with senior leaders. 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’s my conversation with Mel Kirk.

ADAMS (02:01)

Mel, welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

KIRK (02:04)

Thank you, I’m glad to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.

ADAMS (02:07)

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

KIRK (02:12)

Well, I was minding my own business one summer and I was in the, was going from eighth grade to ninth grade and I got, Voluntold that I was going to be one of the inaugural participants in this summer enrichment program in my, in my city. And they took two kids from each of the high schools, minority, minority students from each of the high schools in the area. And it turned out to be a STEM program.

And we spent the summer visiting Georgia Tech, Clemson, other schools in the region. I’m from Augusta, Georgia, by the way. And we visited a Procter & Gamble facility. We looked at a paper mill. We went to Savannah River Nuclear Plant. And we met just a lot of different folks with engineering titles. And this was the first time.

I had ever heard of this thing called engineering. Up until that point, I was going to be the second person that won a gold medal in a Super Bowl championship at the same time. So I did. I played year round. was the year round athlete and a very good student. so the counselors and math and science teachers are my, I guess,

ADAMS (03:10)

You can play a sport or do you?

KIRK (03:24)

junior high school selected me for the program. And once I went through that summer, I was on fire to learn more about engineering. funny, I spent probably the next two years buying periodicals and going to the library and reading books, just trying to figure out what extend the learning of what I had heard from the different types of engineers.

and using that time to figure out which of the curriculums or disciplines fit me personally. And so that’s how it got started. I was an accidental tourist in a program that somebody told me I needed to go to. And it turned out great.

ADAMS (03:58)

Well, that’s great. And so you did have broad early exposure to the different disciplines and to even different potential institutions. And so can you talk a little bit about how you ended up making those down selections to go into University of Tennessee and studying what you studied?

KIRK (04:17)

The first thing for me was figuring out which discipline. so, oddly enough, I’m one of 12. And the brother, one year older than me, ended up being a mechanical engineering student at Tuskegee. But he and I never talked about his journey to figuring out what he was going to be. But he loved cars and he loved blah, blah, blah. But all of us would

tear down bicycles and rebuild them with new parts and we would cut grass for our money. And so we would tear down the lawnmower and rebuild it with new stuff and so forth. So for me, as I started studying the different disciplines and talking to the folks in that summer program, I like the idea of being blended in that

working in the engineering discipline, but also really interacting with people and trying to figure out how to improve something. I didn’t see myself as a necessarily a creator. I wasn’t going to go design the next rocket ship or, you know, or, or I didn’t see myself doing circuits or even doing civil engineering. But so industrial engineering, the more I read about it and

I had a chance to talk to some additional students, know, after that, students and professionals after that. that working in a production facility and trying to figure out the best way to make the most, whether it was cereal or toothpaste or paper, whatever, the best way to, you know, manufacture it the most efficient and cost effective ways.

That’s what really kind of stuck to me as I was reading and looking at the different disciplines, whether it was statically in periodicals or by talking to people. Got this idea in my head that I was going to be an industrial engineer, right? So the logical thing is I’m sitting in Georgia, Georgia Tech’s right there. I bought, I went to the library all the time. So I was always in.

books and reading and so forth. But I would also buy my own little periodicals and I got the US News and Reports or whichever periodical that was that ranked the schools. to the extent that I could dig into the industrial engineering discipline, I knew that Georgia Tech was number one. I knew Purdue was number one, two, three. was Carnegie Mellon, I think, was in there at the time and so forth. So those schools I narrowed in on right away, but…

Georgia Tech I had visited and I didn’t want, I wanted a full college campus, you know, with, and so, so Georgia Tech, didn’t want to go to an, you know, an in city school. I wanted to go to something a little bit more uniquely its own thing. And so that was Purdue. I at this point was thinking, and this was, think 11th graders, 10th, in the 10th, early 11th.

I was going to Purdue and, and I visited a couple of schools, but in between, think Carnegie Mellon and visit in Purdue, I visited the university of Tennessee. And I had also started getting some content from UT. and, the minority engineering program that Fred Brown started.

really intrigued me. And then once I saw the campus, it was a no brainer. And so I never actually made a turn for do. And so yeah, once I once I really engaged with the University of Tennessee, it was it was kind of a done deal. Two reasons one, the minority engineering program and the the culture that was built or being built being built. Well, it was built and being promulgated by

Fred Brown and Dr. Bob Netherlands at the time and then all of the the Cohorts that came before me they that whole thing was just like okay, you’re gonna be okay actually the combination of the cohorts and the structure and Fred and so forth for me was a selling point but then that same thing Fred Brown and The cohort structure was a selling point for my mom

which was probably more important. her son’s going to, I was going to be the second that went away for school. My brother went to Tuskegee.

ADAMS (08:12)

one of the things that strike me just on what you said so far is just how much information you actually had going into this whole thing. Like you, you had this exposure which sparked your interest, but then you really researched and you visited and you collected all this information.

I’m just amazed by that because oftentimes people are like, I just showed up. But I really had no idea what things were going to be like. But I am curious, since the cohort structure and the culture of the campus were such a selling point for you, can you talk a little bit about what you actually experienced once you got here?

KIRK (08:48)

Yeah, and I’ll add to that the dedicated required co-op was also a selling point because it guaranteed a stream of work. Yes. One for financial reasons, but more importantly, just from a development standpoint. So my experience once I got to university,

We came to the university early in the summer preceding the first year. So we had a pre-freshman year learning two weeks session where we got some advanced scare by doing chemistry and physics and algebra or I think it would have been one of the algebras. So we went through.

a teaser of the curriculum and we also did some testing at that point. And in my group, at the time we were the largest group that had cohort that had been put together and we were 30, there was 33 of us. And so when I got here, I still thought, so I had the cohort structure, which was going to be good in my mind to just to have people to connect to as I made this started into this journey, right?

But I still thought I was going to be fairly insular and separate in terms of how I was going to study because based on what I’ve already said, I’m a studier anyway. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to go into it and immerse myself. So I didn’t think that I would lean into

doing study groups and things along those lines together, not voluntarily anyway. But when I got to the university, there’s 33 of us and I don’t remember how many states were represented, but you had kids from East Tennessee, Middle Tennessee and West Tennessee. And then you had us from Georgia and Florida and Michigan and so forth and so on. And so you had this beautiful kind of

collage of brown talent, right?

We all had different ideas of what we wanted to be and so forth. And we were all, I won’t say all of us had it firmly entrenched in their head that I’m going to be an industrial engineer. these are the five reasons why, but everybody thought they knew what they were going to be and they were committed to it. And that was really interesting to see, you know, somebody saying, I’m studying aerospace. And I’m like, what? Why?

When did you see a spaceship? And you had folks that were fairly committed to being electrical and so forth and so on. So that part was really interesting to me in terms of how everybody got there. But the other part was when we started studying together and we started testing together, it really highlighted

the differences in our capabilities, right? Some people were really good in the math. Some people were really good in the sciences. Some had both and so forth. And that storming and norming and stuff that happened in those first two weeks before school and then that whole first year where the groups, the cohorts that came before us told us they really work.

on our psyche around, you’re going to need each other to get through. so while, again, I thought I’m very smart, I’m very diligent about my study, blah, blah, blah, I’ll be okay. Early on, we learned the value of working together. And we also went through the struggle. It wasn’t a, I’m going to call it a struggle, but it wasn’t like a

We were fighting or anything, but the struggle of trying to figure out who leads what, when to step forward, when to step back and so forth. so at 17, 18 years old, I’m getting that education.

you know, informally but directly, which paid dividends 15, 20 years later as a leader, learning when to step forward, even when I have authority, when to lean into my authority versus when to lay back and allow others the opportunity to share their vision in there, you know, so that they feel engaged. that was not an expected benefit.

of the cohort, but I grew immensely as a leader and I.

It really, it really, this, you know, this cohort plus my co-op experience really, for me, ingrained the importance of being a listened first leader. And, you know, allowing the space for people to get their thoughts out and even encouraging it.

especially because that cohort was so smart and so talented, right? It was like, I, I, I was like, I was always very confident and convicted in what I thought, you know, but it was amazing to me that as convicted and strong as I was in my thoughts, like somebody was on the other side of the room with a completely different view and perspective.

that was valid. And so, and we just debate, you know, we disbaited and we agreed to disagree. And then we chose to, you know, if we were trying to do one thing together or something, you know, we vote and things like that. Or if we were doing a test or, or a prep for a test, we might’ve agreed on how to solve a problem and, we may agree to disagree. So it’s valuable. was that thing that was

hugely valuable from a developmental standpoint. And the other part of it was from a social perspective, we did things together, but we also had sounding boards when we ran into issues, right? Whether it was study, whether it was, you know, matriculating on a majority white campus, whether it was, um, missing home, you know, or issues from home. Yeah.

⁓ You always had someone else, whether it was in your cohort or in the engineering community that was going through the same thing or something similar. So it made the journey manageable.

ADAMS (14:51)

Yeah, and I appreciate you just talking about some of the things that you, upon reflection, recognize were so integral to your career progression and probably your own personal progression and growth. can you talk a little bit about your career trajectory?

KIRK (15:06)

How much time do you have?

ADAMS (15:08)

Not enough to go through at all because I know it is really rich and interesting, we’ll just have to go over the highlights or we’ll have to do part two of the podcast. I’m up for both.

KIRK (15:19)

So, and I say that because my journey started, I’m again, industrial engineer, I left the school with this grand vision in my head that I was going to be an industrial engineer and I was going to grow into production manufacturing leadership. And ultimately I was going to run the largest manufacturing plant of something in the US, right? It didn’t matter to me if it was widgets or.

If it was close, it didn’t matter. was, I wanted to run a facility for a host of reasons that had already worked out for myself. So I left U2 and I went to work for Merck’s pharmaceutical company. And at the time it was America’s most admired company. It was the number one company in the world and da da da da. And they chose me, right? And they didn’t historically. ⁓

recruit at UT. they found me through the National Society of Black Engineers. And when I went there, they were in the process of, so this is what 87. So they were in the process of expanding their global footprint. And like a lot of companies, they were really reaching out for new engineering talent and

They were in the, I was in the first wave of folks that they hired in industrial engineering and mechanical engineering and so on and so forth as they were building out these facilities and capabilities. And, and so because I had done the co-op work for five years, basically at UT, I came in as a level one industrial engineer, but very quickly became, you know, a leader of the

industrial engineering group and was taking on the largest, the most, both consequential and combative issues there in our manufacturing plan. had to work with the labor union and so forth. But because I had done it for five years in Knoxville,

It worked. You know, I was comfortable in the space and I was comfortable, working through. So because of that, the organization saw that I had the, was put on the list of, you know, high potential can grow to whatever. And they had an idea for my growth. And again, then one day I was walking through the cafeteria.

And the environmental engineering department head said, hey, can we have lunch? And he sat down with me and he said, you you have this ability to interact with the folks in the labor union and production floor and blah, blah, blah, blah. And one of our challenges from an environmental engineering standpoint is getting them to understand and accept some of the policies that we put in place.

would you consider coming over and working with us? You’ll learn about environmental engineering and we get the benefit of your skillset helping us to communicate what we’re trying to accomplish to the production organization. So I did, and that was my first time jumping off of the ladder, right? The developmental ladder for industrial engineers. And I never got back on. From there,

I was at Merck for another year and a half, two years. I went to grad school at Washington University in St. Louis, got an MBA.

I became fortunate in that there were managers that I was working with or people that I was working with similar to that environmental engineer. I’m sorry, engineering department head who saw me from afar and said. I see something in your skill set that I would think would benefit us and would grow you if you come this way. And so for the rest of my career, that really has been that really was the story where someone would sit with me.

I can tell you a funny one. I joined General Electric as a master black belt in doing Lean Six Sigma when Jack Welch mandated that General Electric was going to do Six Sigma across the whole company, finally. And so I was in this division in Atlanta, in the financial services company in Atlanta. And the power generation division of GE, which was interconnected in New York, had

Jack Walch and his team had mandated that they were gonna leave New York and go to build out this power division in Atlanta, Georgia. And so as they were doing that, as they were transitioning to Atlanta, the lead person that they had on the ground building the team in Atlanta started stealing my black belts from my team in GE Capital and pulling them into GE Power. So I called them and I said, hey, we need to talk.

and develop a main plan. I love the development for my team members, but we need to have an order transition to da da da. So we had lunch and he said, hey, what about you? But he didn’t ask me to come over to be a pro forma master black belt or whatever. said, know, Jack Welch has mandated that

ADAMS (20:04)

Hahaha!

KIRK (20:17)

We don’t pick up all the bad processes in New York and move them to Atlanta. And he said, he wants us to re-engineer the processes for a new tomorrow in Atlanta. And guess what your skill set is, right? So he laid this thing out and he said, would you consider doing that? you know, it’s the whole of a corporate, a whole lot of business division, re-engineering all of the business processes. And I’m thinking,

Wow, when would I ever get that opportunity? When and where would I ever get that opportunity? And so I said, okay, I’ll consider that if you give me these two things in addition. So we built a role that was the re-engineering activity. It was also the actual corporate transfer of the business from New York to Atlanta and building out the new facility in Atlanta and working with the state on tax incentives and so forth.

And then the last piece was building the culture, getting funding for me to drive building the culture, the new business culture in Atlanta. And so it was happenstance, right place, right time, but more importantly, somebody on the other side that saw the breadth of my capability and said, would you consider it? And we talked about it and we did it. And that really…

has been the story of my career ever since I took that first jump off the ladder to go to environmental engineering. It’s been, you ever seen the movie Taken? I always come back to the Taken movie where ⁓ Leon Neeson in the movie says, I got a unique set of skills. And he goes on to talk about his unique set of skills. And that has been the case for me is I’ve got a unique set of skills that…

⁓ is effective at driving change and transforming businesses and so forth. so while I started my career, my journey, articulating my vision as being an industrial engineer to grow into production management, the skills that I developed early on through the cohorts and through the co-ops and through that broadened, broadened, broadened me out.

to the point that including the MBA that I was not an industrial engineer per se. I was a problem solver that had a base of industrial engineering skills that led me to be able to do change management irrespective of whether it was a production facility or a service company.

ADAMS (22:36)

You said something that I want to double click on. So first of all, I mean, we’ll put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes and people can see that you’ve had a wildly successful career and have risen to the top levels in your various industries. you’ve said that part of your career trajectory and your growth has been from people kind of seeing your work and saying, we need that.

And so I’m curious how that happens because lots of people do excellent work. Excellent work does not get you noticed from afar by senior executives. And so can you talk a little bit about what you think it is that you have added on top of doing excellent work that has gotten you

this level of recognition that has provided opportunities for you to grow and also provided you with opportunities to even craft some of your own, you know, your own roles and add to things that you want to do. Can you talk a little bit about that?

KIRK (23:33)

think that, yes, so when I reflect back and look at why me, right, essentially, in each one of these divergent opportunities, the first thing I think is accessibility, right? So the people that approached me approached me because I was approachable.

And I use the, I use the project in that statement like four times, but.

purposely because I was.

I was open from a personality standpoint. Remember I said early on, I learned the importance of listening. so when you do that, you have to take the overt part of you and push it back, right, to allow folks to feel comfortable to talk to you. And I think

You know that character kind of plays out as people saw me and other places I was always open to a conversation so one is being approachable. To.

Because I had worked so much, I think early on and I had these weird experiences like growing up and things, one of 12 and so forth, I had ideas that I was willing to share and comfortable sharing. So I had a comfort level of talking about the possibility of being a…

what it would be like to be an environmental engineer, what it would be like to be this transformational manager and so forth. And so I could have those conversations, but I think even more importantly than that, I did the critical assessment and said, yes, where a lot of people would say no. And so each one of the opportunities that I was engaged in a discussion on.

There was a real risk of failure that had the potential to pretty consequentially derail my career. So when I stepped off the industrial engineering path and went to environmental engineering, the people in the environmental engineering, I knew they liked me. I knew they had plans to grow me and so forth. But when I stepped outside of that,

they had to keep building their team with the people that were in the organization. So where they had slots for me before, they really had to move those slots to other people. So there was a risk that I would get over here and not like it or fail and then wouldn’t have the right home to go back to on the environment and the industrial engineering side. So it was saying yes to something that could really take you out, right?

⁓ and each one of these roles that I took, whether it was their general mills, general electric, all the way up through writer, they were all the same where they were career risks. And so the willingness to have the conversation about them and then, you know, doing, the self assessment on what happens if you fail, what’s the, what’s the benefit if you win or succeed and what’s the, what’s the risk and benefit if you lose.

or fail, I did those. And then the last thing that I was saying in terms of really being visible is.

I knew me.

So there are all these forums that you get when you’re in a corporate environment where you can go and meet leaders and, you know, for people that are branded, you know, recognized as high potential, they create opportunities for you to interact with folks. And when I say I know me, I know that if I go to a cocktail party or something that is social with multiple people, I’m not going to stand out because

I’m not gonna draw that much attention to myself. It’s just not natural. But I will have an earnest conversation. And if I have an earnest conversation, whether for two seconds or whatever, and someone says, hey Mel, I’d love to continue this conversation tomorrow or in the next week when I’m back in town or whatever. If they say that to 20 people in the room, I’m the one person that’s gonna follow up. And so,

Throughout my career, if somebody said to me, if they said it to me in a cafeteria, on a golf course, at a cocktail party, whatever, if they say, hey Mel, get on my calendar and blah, blah, blah. Guess what I did? The next day I would get on that person’s calendar and all of my peers would say, well, you had a meeting with the senior VP? You had a meeting with the divisional president? What? Well, he told me to get on his calendar.

And he had told them too, but they didn’t, they thought it was just filler words, right? It could have been, but he shouldn’t have told me. So, so I always followed up on that because I felt like where I could not differentiate myself in those social environments, I can differentiate myself one on one. And I would come in with my, you know, one or two pager of introducing myself to them the way that I want it to be introduced.

ADAMS (27:42)

you

KIRK (28:01)

And then letting that flow into a conversation that was, you know, that was back and forth on what they wanted to learn more of. My objective was to use those sessions to let them know broadly about who I am, how I think, and so forth and so on. And I did that more than my peers did it. And I, you know, I’m not somebody that’s gonna, again, you know, run up and down the hallways, you know, saying, hey, look at me, look at me, look at me.

but I will take advantage of a very singular and intimate conversation to let people know this is genuinely who I am and this what I got to offer. And those things presented a lot of opportunities. It did a couple of things for me. One, it helped facilitate those conversations because now people at higher levels know the breadth of my skillset, one, and how I process information. The third and most important

part of that, you know, beyond knowing my skill set and how I process information is it created ⁓ a level of protection for me that if anybody, if I was on a job or in a role and I was not in headquarters, or I was somewhere not directly visible to these leaders and my boss came in one day or doing a talent review and they said,

You know, my name comes up and they say, Mel Kirk’s not doing this, this, this, this, and this, or Mel Kirk did that. Those leaders, because they know me, know how I process, my skill set with no enough to say that don’t sound like Mel Kirk. And so I use those in-person singular interactions to create a level of protection myself

in very aggressive corporate environments,

ADAMS (29:49)

Mel, can you us an example of how you’ve had to use leadership skills in your work?

KIRK (29:52)

Yes. Wow. I’ve had a variety of roles. So let me break it down in two ways. Leadership when I have been the authoritative leader or the leader with the authority, and then leadership when I have not been the lead authority.

they’re fairly similar. The most important thing for me, because I’ve gone into environments where my charge has been to create or change environments, has been to make sure, I believe at my core that organizations are better when they get the full benefit.

of the best capabilities of everybody in the organization, right? And so I’ve done acquisition integration and other things where I’ve gone in and have integrated teams that we’ve purchased where there’s a founder or a singular leader that sits in a corner office and directs traffic and tells everybody what to do, right?

And those organizations can be successful, right? They can have a product or a service or something and they can be successful. I don’t think they’re optimal, but they can be successful. And so for me, it’s always been more important to figure out a way to get all of the voices in the room to engage in setting the culture and…

and solving problems. so come back to that listening.

earnestly listening and creating an environment, you know, through asking questions or if I’m facilitating a conversation, if I’m in a room of 15 people and I’m facilitating a conversation and I could be the boss, I could be the leader of the organization, I will make sure that by physically positioning myself in the room by

directly asking someone a question or encouraging out their thoughts that everybody in that room feels like they got their thoughts on the table or their issues on the table or their thoughts on the table. And so from a leadership standpoint, that’s very important to me. The other part, the other side of that is having the integrity to address

when their thoughts or ideas are not going to be integrated into the solution. Right. It’s, you know, you don’t, I’ve never felt like, you know, I used to do time studies. I used to go on the production floor and I timed somebody and, know, I’d set up production standard and invariably I’d come back down and deliver the standard to the team. And, you know, they’re always going to have a different opinion of how fast the standard should be. And.

But it was important for me not to just go into the system and post the standard and then they see it the next time they do the job. It was important for me to go down and sit in it, right? And go say, okay, here’s what the new standard is gonna be and listen to all of the countervailing points as to why my standard was wrong, right? And if there were valid points, I would say, okay, I’m gonna go back and consider that. If there were just…

If I felt like I had incorporated those points into my standard, I would just share that with them. And so at 17, 18 years old, doing that in my co-op assignment, you know, led me to have a backbone and a, you know, understanding of the importance of standing on what you believe in. And so, so having the integrity to come back and have the discussion about, about the things that are going to be uncomfortable to people.

and doing it with integrity. The other part of leadership for me is allowing your team members to live in their integrity. People are going to come to work, they’re going to have a bad day. And some people will have bad months. And I’ve had a couple of those folks, right, where I had a team member that

This early in my career, I had a team member. I was my first line supervisory role and I had a guy that was, it seemed like he was purposely messing up. We would give him something to do and it was clear as day what to do and blah, blah. He would muck it up. And so the team members are like, you gotta fire him. You gotta fire him. You gotta da da. And I was like,

Okay. So I had a conversation with him and he said…

You’re actively walking yourself out the door. So here’s your opportunity to talk to me about what’s going on. And I said, if I have to remove you, I will hate it for you and your family, but I’ll do it because it’s important to the mission of the organization that we do it, right? And it’s not fair to the rest of the team that we’re taking a hit for. And.

because of how I approached him and allowed him to live in his integrity, he shared some extremely personal stuff that was going on in his life. And I listened and I didn’t go down the path of pushing him out the door, but I said, okay, I got it, I understand it, here’s what I need from you. And that guy and I had…

a great relationship from that point forward and he pulled himself together. And so I’ve replicated that throughout my career. There’s always going to be people in your ear that says, even your bosses may say, you got to fire this person or you got to do this or you got to do this. And I think it’s more important for me as a leader to come to work and be consistently the same person.

through ups and through downs so that the organization knows who they’re dealing with. And I saw that role modeled by a couple of leaders in different places. And that was one of the things that was important for me is the consistency of character and working from my moral and ethical center versus what the noise around you tells you you should do. So.

allowing people to live in their own integrity and live and fail in their own integrity. then, and then me, you know, having consistency of character from one day to the next, irrespective of good, bad, down cycle, up cycle, consistency of care, energy and celebrate, you you celebrate the wins, you, you, get into the learnings of losses, but the integrity that you, at which you do your job should be the same.

ADAMS (36:08)

Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of things that you mentioned that I want to dive a little deeper into, but I really like what you said in the first part of your discussion, which is that you listen and you as a leader, you had specific behaviors that you would do to invite contribution from your team. And you talked about, you know, positioning yourself in the room and soliciting information and encouraging people’s input.

which is excellent. And I love the fact that you talked about both sides of this, and you were clear with them when you weren’t going to take their input because you didn’t think it was right or didn’t fit the context or whatever. And I think that’s so important because oftentimes, particularly the emerging leaders, newer leaders really struggle with that. They think, I can only be one way. I only can listen. And if I don’t listen,

and take what they say that I’m not a good leader. And I say, actually being a good leader is, of course, inviting input, but reflecting with yourself about what needs to be done, because ultimately you are accountable, and then clearly communicating. Give credit where credit is due. If you took their idea and you incorporated it, by all means make sure they understand that and give them credit for it. And if you didn’t take their input, for whatever reasons,

being clear with them that no, you’re not going to take it and this is why. And I think there’s this misconception that when you don’t take people’s input, that you’re a bad leader or that they won’t like you anymore, your retention scores will go down and things like that. And I was like, no, actually, think what people really want is to follow somebody with integrity and somebody who communicates well. So I just appreciate you giving those examples because I think that’s

It brought that clarity of the difference that people often get confused.

KIRK (37:59)

Yeah. You know, one other thing that I’d like to share along those same lines, right, as a leader again, one of the things that I’m most proud of across my journey, especially as a leader, is in every role that I’ve had, my

my direct reports and some of their direct reports have

And I’m in technical organizations and manufacturing and then maintenance and so forth. I’m in these grunty organizations. But in each of the places I’ve been, my direct reports and some of their direct reports came into the organization first name, last name. But when they were on my team, the organization

recognize them with one name. So here’s why that’s important, right?

somebody that is a deep, deep down in the nuts and bolts statistician that’s doing reliability analysis in the organization is never recognized. But the CEO of the company knows that person as Cindy or Rajiv or whatever, First name basis. And that happened because when

when there was an issue that we were trying to solve.

I always get attention, right? I always get attention. But what I have been, it’s been very important for me to do is to use the attention that I had to amplify the capabilities of my team, right? And so if I go into a meeting, had, I’m gonna give you an example. We had a major technical issue at Rider, the last company that I worked for, where the technology,

that was introduced in the trucks, not just our trucks, but trucks across the industry had a major technical issue. And it manifested itself in that trucks were failing on the road, right? So customers were getting, you know, had deliveries and trucks and they were going X, Y, and Z and they would not, the trucks would never get there. And so everybody’s got this issue. And of course everybody,

and our team and other companies, they just kind of scatter shot it trying to figure out what was going on. But what I said was, no, we’re going to do this in a very ordered basis. And so we had the reliable engineering team and these other grunts, right? These technical grunts go in and cut the data, right? Several different ways. And we had, we had daily meetings on this data, right? Trying to figure out what was happening to us. And while those meetings were arranged,

And the people were drawn into the room because my name led that Mel Kirk said you will be here, therefore you will be here, right? Including the CEO and the CFO and so forth and all these folks. But the people that led and gave the updates and delivered the message were the people that were doing the work. I didn’t take their work. I amplified their work. And so by virtue of those discussions, they went from John Doe to just John or Doe.

And that’s extremely important because when they’re in the cafeteria, right, and the CFO comes by and says, hey, Cindy, how you doing today? Never spoke to her. She’d been in the company for 15 years, never spoke to her before. Now they’re on a first name basis. That to me is leadership because part of your job is to develop talent and give them room to shine, not take their shine, right?

give them room to shine and amplify it in a way that they and their families benefit from the work that they do. Right. And so that’s, ⁓ and I’ve done that in every, every role that I’ve been in that, you know, it wasn’t important for me to move from one organ to organization to the next and take people with me and have this Legion of acolytes and so forth. It was more important for me to make sure that

the folks that worked in the organization got the benefit of the work of the the accomplishments that they drove. And that’s that’s different. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of managers, a lot of managers see their promotion based on the accumulation of their employees work without amplifying who did the work. And I didn’t need it. I didn’t need it. Didn’t want it. I wanted them and their families to benefit from it.

ADAMS (42:25)

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

KIRK (42:30)

Couple of things. In thinking about pursuing leadership roles, start with the boring and the basic and the fundamentals, right? ⁓

As an industrial engineer, one of the things that we are asked to do and most of us hate doing is doing time studies, right? That’s one of the most basic features of being an industrial engineer, getting a stopwatch and a pad and going out and evaluating how somebody performs work and setting standards. And most of us in this curriculum don’t wanna do it. And in electrical engineering and…

the others, there are baseline things like that that you don’t want to do. You don’t want to do them for long anyway. I’ve come to the conclusion that those core things have so much more value to you than you can see in the moment. And so for me, I switched industries, what, six or seven times.

Right. And I went to, I didn’t just go into a new industry. went to the best company in that, in that other industry. And when I walked in the door, I was able to, to understand the lowest element of work in an organization because I did time studies, because I had done, you know, process maps and things along those lines. Right. And so it was easier for me to go talk to somebody about.

what they did and ask questions about what does that do, when why does that matter and so forth and then get my own understanding of those processes, right? And so ultimately as I became, know, wanted to start to exude some level of leadership in those areas, I leaned on my understanding of what the organizations did and that came because I didn’t cheat myself on the core, on the foundation.

So that’s one. Two, of course, is listening and active listening and listening from the standpoint of understanding the person’s, the speaker’s perspective and how that perspective plays into a potential solution. A lot of times people will listen. They will listen.

for the sake of preparing their counter argument. And that’s not what you want. You want to listen to find the elements that are needed to find the optimal solution. And that doesn’t necessarily come from you. And so ⁓ that’s important.

Solving, you know as you’re going through this engineering education you’re gonna be in especially when you get into your junior senior you’re gonna have collaborative sessions and so forth and That’s vitally important because there’s very few times where you are going to make a singular decision Even if you’re the CTO any of the C’s right when you get into the C suite you are processing a an amalgamation of information that comes from different sources, right

And all of those sources have their own intentions and their own opinions on how the ultimate solution should fare. so being able to process that information and then with integrity evaluating and then making a decision and sharing that across the whole and then getting the whole to follow it is important. Right. And so that’s why the active listening that I talked about earlier is important because

When you turn around and try and make a determination of what you want to do as a leader and you want the organization to follow you, it’s you’re better served if you take a kernel of what you learned by listening and integrate that and what you communicate back out.

Even if you say, you know, you could say it generally, you could say, Sally, and like you said in our discussion six weeks ago in the facilitation, right? Then Sally and that team knows you heard them, right? And so that’s important. you know, I said it before, I think consistency of character. One of the hardest things for an organization is to go in on Monday.

and meet Monday mail. And then on Wednesday, they meet a different mail. And on Friday, they see a different mail, right? And it’s all based on stressors, right? And so forth and so on. And the organizations that I’ve been in that work the best, the leaders that worked have been able to, and even in my case, where I’ve been able to get things done that other people couldn’t do or wouldn’t do, it was because I was the same every day.

the consistency of character and voice. My teams never, and the organizations never had to guess who Mel was, right? They didn’t say, okay, does he have on a blue shirt today? Right? So that’s important, especially the further you go in an organization. So I think those, I think the last thing, and it’s a part of the integrity is just know thyself, know thyself. I mean,

You know, whether you start your own business or you work in a corporate organization, there are going to be folks and situations along the way that’s going to try to change you from who you are. And it’s hard to do what I just said in terms of having consistency of character and delivery if you don’t know who you are.

because an organization will change you, know, and depending on the CEO, know, GE was, I worked for General Electric when Jack Welch was there and they had a certain way of doing business and you could walk through the organization and you could see all these mini Jack Welch’s, right? And then they switched, know, Jack retired and Jeff Immelt came in and he changed a few things and then you had these mini Jeff Immelt’s and

To me, again, my experience is that that’s the worst thing that you can do, right? Is find your own authoritative leadership voice and your own authentic leadership character and you gotta stick with that. People will follow you with that.

ADAMS (48:07)

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

KIRK (48:09)

I enjoyed it.