MEL #049 | From First Generation Engineer to Authentic People Leader through Self-Reflection and Brave Conversations with Dr. Andria Yates

YATES (00:00)

Sometimes we think of leadership as we’ve got it all figured out but sometimes leadership is being willing to be wrong, to ask the question, to show what you don’t know, to play devil’s advocate. And I did a lot of that before I had positional power.

ADAMS (00:40)

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Andria Yates, a leadership coach in the executive MBA programs at the Haslam College of Business and startup coach for the Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

Andria started as a first-generation college student from a small West Tennessee high school, drawn into materials engineering by her love of math and science and her father’s belief that engineering was the best path to opportunity. She began her career as an aluminum metallurgist at Alcoa. She moved rapidly into early management roles, then pivoted into industrial, organizational psychology and technology startups, eventually serving as an executive vice president of product development in the Bay Area. She later returned to Knoxville to build a portfolio career in consulting and teaching while still proudly identifying as an engineer. 

Andria gave us two examples in our leadership segment. In her first management role, Andria inherited two senior engineers and learned the hard way that equal and equitable are not the same when it comes to development opportunities. Later, as a product leader in a fast-moving tech startup, she had to slow an enthusiastic leadership team that wanted to chase every possible customer request, pushing them to ask whether they should build something simply because they could. Across both stories, she frames leadership as the courage to understand people deeply, to ask unpopular questions, and to protect mission focus. 

Andria’s advice to aspiring engineering leaders? Build emotional agility and self-awareness, understand organizational environments, and lead from a place of authenticity. She recommends the work of Susan David, Adam Grant, and Brene Brown as practical anchors for engineers who want to grow as leaders in any context. Her closing message is that engineers should know themselves, seek at least a 75 % person environment fit, and stand on strong ground as authentic leaders rather than putting on a mask.

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

Without further delay, here is my conversation with Dr. Andria Yates.

ADAMS (02:38)

Hi, Andria welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

YATES (02:41)

Hi, thank you for having me this afternoon.

ADAMS (02:43)

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

YATES (02:48)

Sure. And I guess it’s okay if there’s a little personal anecdote or two in there. Of course, we love those. Yeah. So your audience, if they don’t know me, I’ll just say that I’ve had a few decades since undergraduate school. And so by giving this example of how I got into engineering will I think be telling around the time, but also I don’t think that much changed, unfortunately, in some other respects. So when I was in high school,

I went to a very small public school in West Tennessee and I loved all my math and science courses. And so I got tagged right away as you’re smart in math and science and in that timing was also a period where a push or a draw, I like to think of it better that way of women in STEM fields was

you know, just beginning in late seventies, you know, there was a lot more information about it. think engineering schools at that time were starting to pay attention to, we really want to increase our numbers of women in these programs. So then that was another sort of aspect to it. And if you were good in math and science, then STEM. And my father, I’m first generation college. And so I think,

you know, if I were to reflect on what my father would have said as the most ideal opportunity you could have as a person is to have an engineering degree. You know, it wasn’t be a lawyer or a doctor or, you know, a diplomat. It was if you could get an engineering degree and be an engineer and what he thought meant a lot to me still does. So I think put those three things together.

That’s how I went to engineering school. When I got to engineering school, it was a huge flip from big fish, very small pond to first generation college. maybe this will resonate for some of your students. I hadn’t even had calculus because they didn’t offer calculus in my high school.

And I was in classes with people who had had AP courses and didn’t have any AP courses offered either, had never had calculus. And with people sitting around who had AP calculus in high school in the same course. And so my first semester was a huge wake-up call. I’d made all A’s, I’d never struggled in school. And so in a very rigorous engineering environment, which that first year, at least where I went to school very much was, caused me to question,

Am I in the right place? Maybe I made a mistake. It took me a couple of semesters to get back on the horse again and again and feel confident. But so I just say that because I think for some people, and I see those students that I teach as well, that maybe they’ve come from programs that weren’t quite as rigorous in high school and they get to UT and then they question their abilities. And so I definitely lived that. And it made me question not my intellect, but

should I maybe not be in engineering? And I’m so glad I stuck with it because I was. But it just, was a slower arrival into the strength of being able to do it well.

ADAMS (05:55)

I really appreciate you saying that. that is very much still a current challenge. And in fact, one of the assignments that I give my students is to talk about a significant accomplishment. And I say, you pick whatever you want, but I’m to give you sort of a structure about how to do this. And we do that in preparation for our big STEM Expo so they can walk around the room and speak confidently. And several of my students talked about how for them right now, one of their most significant accomplishments is

getting through the first year in engineering the calculus at the high school they were at. And so it’s still very much the case that, of course, around the country that different programs have different strengths and even the ability and the resources to offer some of the more rigorous math programs aren’t there.

We do have many students that really have to tap into the resources that we have within their first year and come up a steep learning curve to get them where they need to be to finish out. So I’m glad you persevered. can you tell us how you chose mechanical engineering for your discipline?

YATES (06:58)

Sure, and I’ll just correct that a tiny bit in that I wouldn’t have chosen mechanical.

where I went to school from undergraduate degree. At that time, mechanical and materials engineer was a, you know, not split off from each other. So I was very interested in the material side, but of course I had to take a lot of mechanical.

Thankfully, only one electrical engineering course because that was not my jam and one computer science course because at the time, computer science back then, that wouldn’t be my jam. Now, I think very differently. so material science was what I was really interested in. I think if you’d asked me when I first got to college, what I would do with that. And I guess one part I left out in the why engineering

that may also be a benefit to your students is that first generation college knew nothing about college. I knew I was going to be self-supporting right after college and I needed to be able to get a job to not only take care of myself, but to pay back my student loans and everything else. And at that time, I felt very confident that if I did my part in college, engineering would have something for me in the world. And so that was also a part of it.

⁓ So if you’d ask me then, well, what do you want to do with this material science engineering degree? I had a professor, my freshman year, who was really just so motivating and such a mentor for me. He was first generation college also. Again, I think of all the things we have in common with Alcoa and Pittsburgh. was from Pittsburgh. He went to school at night to become a metallurgist at Carnegie Mellon.

and that he worked in the day in a plant. And so he had that mindset and I think was really a beacon for those of us who didn’t come from, you know, legacy college. And he did a lot of research for NASA. He was one of those folks that I saw as you did all three. was a great teacher, he was a great researcher and he consulted. And so he helped me see that you didn’t have to know exactly what you were gonna do in engineering, but you do well.

and that there are gonna be many opportunities for you to do different things if you get the basis. And so I thought I’m gonna help you figure out the materials that will thrive in space. Very quickly I realized you needed a graduate degree to get to that level and that was not gonna be part of my path right away. Although I’ll offer that I feel like if I had had any maybe guidance or so many of the resources I think we have now for students,

If one person had said, here’s a way to go to graduate school, I might’ve done that at that time, but it was just no, you know, gonna get a job and go to work and probably not go back to graduate school in engineering. But in the early, you know, couple of first couple of years of college, I was really excited about materials in space. So that’s what I wanted. And then I was just taking all my courses and you get on that path.

junior year into senior year and interviewing for jobs. And there were just so many opportunities and different kinds of companies to work for. And I was open to everything. I had multiple ⁓ automotive industry opportunities. I had manufacturing generally opportunities, consulting opportunities, and ended up coming to East Tennessee right after my degree to work for Alcoa.

and became an aluminum metallurgist. Even though was like, know nothing about aluminum metallurgy, nothing in any of my courses about, and we were told, as I would suspect some of the engineers graduating here at UT are, it’s okay. We’re gonna teach you what you need to know to be able to do whatever the technical side of what we do. You need basic technical skills. So I would have never applied for the Alcoa job.

One of my professors came to me and said, I want you to apply for this job. I think this would be a good opportunity for you. And so it was a very, it was a gift for lots of reasons because that was the job I ended up choosing. And yes, I didn’t know anything about aluminum metallurgy, but I learned a lot about aluminum metallurgy and we were the quality assurance department as I’m sure you know. And so I did more than just metallurgy, even though those were our titles.

ADAMS (11:06)

Yeah, you know same for me. I was chemical engineer and then when I got a connection with Alcoa I had no idea, know what any of it was and and just as you say I mean a lot of industries I think don’t have Real content embedded in the undergraduate curriculum and so when you’re like that and then when you’re you know a huge global company that’s been around for many years You’ve got really good training programs in house, right and you put people through

you know, these specific training programs and you learn on the job and you learn all of those things. the same as what you said, would encourage students to, even if they don’t feel like they know the detailed topic right now, yeah, expect to keep that beginner’s mindset and that learning mindset and be open to learning what you need to learn on the job.

So you were with Alcoa for about 10 years and then you made some pivots. So can you talk a little bit about your time at Alcoa and then what you chose to do after that?

YATES (11:59)

Sure, I was very fortunate. I had my first two jobs at Alcoa and we had in those days there were numerous plants in East Tennessee and so you might work at the North plant, South plant, West plant, etc. And so I remember that very first job I had was in the Old North plant and I hadn’t even been in it a year.

And our ⁓ quality assurance manager said, I want to move you to the West plant in this completely different kind of role. And I remember at the time, and the reason I’m giving you this back story is because I think it wasn’t something that a mentor, anyone else had told me at the time that I think people know a little more about now is like, you go to something before you’re ready for it, or you say yes before. And so I was very fortunate that the quality assurance manager saw something in me I didn’t see in myself yet.

And I said, I’m just getting my feet on the ground in this first job and I’m developing relationships and I haven’t even had one official performance appraisal yet. You know, it was kind of the, or one year performance appraisal. And so he said, no, this is, want to move you to this other ⁓ part of the organization. And that was an incredible gift because it was like a super sized opportunity to learn so much, much faster and to go a little beyond.

the implant manufacturing engineering, I dealt with customers a great deal more, I traveled more, I interfaced with sales and marketing. And so I was still doing the implant work, but I had an expansive role, expanded role. And so that was huge for me at 23 to bump already into that. That led to another, within a pretty short period of time, opportunity in my first management role.

And that happened, I was very young and I was suddenly put in yet another part of the organization against something I hadn’t understood technically, had not even done anything with at that time. And I had a team of people that I was responsible for. They were all older, all male, they all knew everything about this area and I knew nothing about it essentially. So to launch into my first management role without even having

been an engineer in that part of the organization was again, once again, he said, you’re ready for this. And I said, I don’t know that I’m ready for this. And other people certainly weren’t confident I was ready. So, but I’m again, very grateful that that happened because I learned so much so quickly. And I guess the thing I would say is that, you know, that was my first formal managerial job where I was being paid.

ADAMS (14:21)

you

YATES (14:36)

But I think I had opportunities for leadership well beyond before that. And that was beyond that role specifically. And since this is about mastering engineering leadership, I wanted to throw that in. was skits into the resources, I guess we’ll talk about later a little bit. But last week I spoke to the management and entrepreneurial, one of the sections of leadership skills, management 331.

Highly recommend that by the way, everybody, if you decide you wanna take a leadership class outside of the wonderful one that you offer Dr. Adams. And so I was a guest in that class and I had to do, it a little bit of a warmup for this. What are the ways I’ve used leadership in my career? What were the different roles I had? And one of the things I reminded them of is that long before you get that first positional power role in management, you can be a leader.

and you can exhibit leadership. And I encourage them to go back to high school and even where they are in college and think about the opportunities they had for their voice to be heard, for the opportunity to affect positive change, to improve a situation, to motivate others. You don’t have to wait till you have positional authority. And the reason I wanted to interject that just then is this wonderful man who gave me these two opportunities.

and probably also helped me decide to come into the company when I was still in college. He saw things in me and I think what he saw is that I was exhibiting leadership without positional power in those other roles. That’s a really polite way to say it. I was also utilizing my natural inclination to be rebellious and to have fresh eyes on a situation and not have fear to call

out something I saw that didn’t make sense to me. And I think sometimes we think of leadership as we’ve got it all figured out and we’re going to, but sometimes leadership is being willing to be wrong, to ask the question, to show what you don’t know, to play devil’s advocate. And I did a lot of that before I positional power. And I think that is something I just wanted to remind your students that they can do that where they are right now.

And they probably have done that to get to be at the University of Tennessee in an engineering program. They probably already exhibited some of those skills.

ADAMS (16:53)

Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with what you said, but I especially like your last point there, which is to say you’ve probably already done a lot of these leadership skills already. And so I like the idea of really being self-reflective, going back and acknowledging those things and maybe even writing them down and kind of keeping a little bit of an inventory of when you have done those things to give yourself a little bit of confidence.

But also you can talk about those experiences that you’ve had when people are asking about what have you done and what are you interested in? You can call upon those things. And absolutely, even if wasn’t you were an official authority or you had a title, those were the behaviors. And that’s really what employers are looking for. It’s looking for the behaviors.

YATES (17:37)

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And I think it’s ⁓ in terms of I was responsible for college recruiting for our department for a couple of years. And I got to travel all around, you know, to the mostly SEC schools, not all we did some Purdue and Lehigh, as you know, you know, the metallurgy programs in the Midwest and Northeast. But what I saw, so I had that opportunity. And yes, you want to have the sense of you trust yourself in those behavioral

interview questions you get, tell me about a time when you. So I think ⁓ that’s wonderful advice that you’re giving, not only when you’re in college, but back to my example of, I didn’t realize that my behavior was sending the message I was ready for the promotion. My behavior was sending the message that I could be a leader because I was exhibiting leadership skills when it was just doing what I was doing and making a lot of mistakes too, of course. But so just, love that.

If your students will hear that, you’re exhibiting your leadership potential all the time in everything you do. Whether you ask a question in an undergraduate course, you’re sitting there and you’ve got a question, well, you’re exhibiting leadership to be on the stage of maybe having people look at you and saying, well, didn’t they do the reading or aren’t they very smart? So I just encourage you while you’re at this level,

you know, stretch those leadership skill muscles, like, and you might not think of that as being the leader, but you are, if you’re willing to step out and ask a question.

ADAMS (19:06)

And so you stepped up to the challenge that was offered to you to take on a broader leadership role. Can you tell us a little bit about how that went?

YATES (19:15)

so it went well, but it was a bumpy start. when you move into your first management role in a technical environment,

and you’ve never even had an intro psych or management class or like the wonderful course you’re in with Dr. Adams, where you’ve never had any training on management at all. You either have to self study or look around and see, it was more for me, what did I not want to do? It was more of, okay, I don’t want to lead that way. don’t want to lead that way. At that time, one of the gifts that I had, and it’s literally about the transition out of engineering directly. So I’ll share this.

⁓ I had been in that role for at least over six months. And the corporation that I worked for at least once a year brought people from all over international, mostly the US brought us out of the corporate headquarters. And it was about a two week training program for new managers. And it was the most wonderful experience. was, I worked with the executive MBA program over in Haslam as a leadership coach.

And so it’s kind of a lot of what those people get in a year, condensed in two weeks in a lot of ways, know, financial training, managerial training, cetera. And so those two weeks, because of a couple of things that happened in those two weeks, just got me thinking, number one, my rebellious nature is I should have had this before I had to make a decision. I this is like in week one, before I had responsibilities.

But it also, because of some of the things that was exposed to there, and we weren’t all engineers, there was all different kinds of professionals in that program. I literally had an industrial organizational psychologist say to me after an assessment, didn’t even know there was such a thing as IO psychology, he said, why are you here? I thought, well, what do you mean why I’m here? I got a little bit, my apples raised on that. It’s like, no, why are you an engineer? And why are you working at this company?

And so we talked about that and what this person was doing was looking at the results of my assessment. And the story that I heard, and it’ll be interesting to see if this resonates for you, Dr. Adams, that we need people like you in this company, but they made us move to these different quadrants in this big room based on who we were and our, you know, the assessment. And I was alone. 37 people and I was over there alone. And they said,

look at where you are and look at where everybody else is. And we need people like you. You’re a strategic thinker. You like to see the big picture. You’re not afraid to call out truth to power. You know, they just like listed all these things about me. I’m like, how do you know? You don’t even know me. How do you know? And they said, but middle management in this corporation is going to be hard for you because you’re going to have to just persevere.

ADAMS (21:47)

it.

YATES (21:56)

through this path for a while before you can get into a position where that is going to be honored and that you will be able to do more of the things that you really have the skillset to do. And I was just like, I wasn’t sure how to take all that. Cause I thought I had my career path in front of me. And so within a couple of years of that, what I started noticing about myself is that while I cared about the equipment and the customers and the processes, I really was much more interested in the people.

I was interested in how they learned, how they grew. We had a big, you know, very expensive modernization going on in our plant at the time. And I remember thinking, we’re pouring all this money into equipment and processes. What about the people? What about that operator who doesn’t have a college degree and has never operated a computer? And do we have any training for them? Well, you know, we’ve got ergonomics, we’ve got how high they need to sit in the booth. I mean, like their emotional experience,

And so I started being self-aware about that. And that was the beginning of the leading to exploring, what else might be out there for me if it’s not continuing in technical management? And that’s how I got to industrial organizational psychology. So that path, it’ll go really fast through this loop ⁓ is that.

did some research, ended up at the University of Tennessee in a jointly administered program between the psychology department and what is now Haslam. It wasn’t Haslam back then. And I learned so much. Didn’t really know what I was gonna do with it, but I remembered that engineering professor I love so much. I thought I could consult, I could teach, I could do research. I don’t know which yet, but it’s about people, it’s about, it’s using my engineering mind, it’s using my managerial background.

and it felt like the right thing to do. So my, my late husband and I made that decision that we would cut our income and go back to school, So we did that. And then I, when I finished my degree and there’s a lot that I did during my graduate school years, but I acted as a consultant and then went to actually work for one of my clients. started moving into technology.

And I had a job with a startup in Knoxville that again, I’ve been on retainer as a consultant with them. And then they asked me to come on board, credible opportunity and learn so much. The internet was just kicking off. know, this is the, you know, mid to late nineties. And then I got this opportunity to go to the Bay area for like the second gold rush for internet development and products. And I had, I was an executive vice president of product development for this

startup, was second hire. And man, was that a wonderful learning opportunity. And I was hired, not because I was a psychologist, but because I was an engineer. And it was the two together, of course, but then that was a wonderful experience. And, know, building something from scratch, Greenfield organization, hiring everybody. And so then life changing.

We had been hoping to add to our family and that happened. And so I made the decision in my late thirties, almost 40 to take a break from flying across the country back and forth. And ⁓ with the second child to be home a little bit more for the first few years, transitioned from that, I got asked to come back to UT and teach. I started building a consulting practice here in Knoxville. So I’ve do a number of different things with the university and I have a private practice.

and I love teaching undergraduates. And so that’s where I am now. But I’m still an engineer. Absolutely, always will be an engineer.

ADAMS (25:39)

Andria, can you give us an example of how you’ve used leadership skills in your work?

YATES (25:43)

You know, if I may ask your permission to offer two, it was hard for me to think of one. You you’ve been doing things for decades. It’s like delimited to ⁓ one, but I want to offer one from that first management opportunity that I had. And maybe your audience could think about this both from the position of them being managed and then when they’re being a manager. So I remember I’d had no psychology.

no managerial training, on the ground learning. And I had two young men and they were young men, but they were older than me on my team. And they were both senior engineers. And my philosophy at that time was you treat everyone equally, right? You know, want to give everybody the same opportunities. You want the opportunities for growth. And I was thinking about them and their professional development, even though I’d never really been told to do that. It was really my…

The measurables for me were, you know, they’re very tactical, practical, oriented, not necessarily about my people. And I say my people, you know, kind of broadly, because that’s how we talked back then. And so these two young men could not have been more different humans. And again, I had no notion of extroversion or introversion or, you know, what different skill sets and how that might play into someone’s preferred opportunities in their job.

And so I gave these two people, it was really a boon to get to do this, to go present to the leadership of our organization. And this worked again over time. And for one of them, it was the biggest gift I could have given him. He actually left engineering, went into sales and marketing. He loved to be on the stage. He was really good at it. And he was a good engineer too, but.

And then when the next opportunity came around to offer that opportunity, it was like I had punished the second person. He didn’t want to be on stage. He didn’t want to speak. It was really painful to him. And he didn’t know how to tell me that. He didn’t know how to say no. He was a brilliant engineering mind, but that wasn’t his path. And so I learned a really hard lesson about the difference between equal and equitable.

And so to meet people where they are, to where you have the opportunity to offer different pathways for growth and development and not to assume everybody wants or needs exactly the same treatment and to be frank about that and to ask, not just do, to ask what somebody wants. So that was a huge leadership, I could say success and fail.

But have this philosophy of if you have a problem, you have a failure, you got a gift there too, because you can learn from it. But that was a painful one because that other engineer was not happy with me at all for that.

ADAMS (28:27)

That’s really such a great example. mean, and very vivid as well, because you’re right. mean, something like that, being able to present to leadership, you will get those two extremes. And here, from your vantage point, you’re like, this is such a huge opportunity to be seen by leaders. the leaders will finally get to see how good I think you are, and we all know you are.

in the wrong context, just as you said, it can be seen as a punishment. I would imagine that in addition to your reflection of really understanding the equitable, equal and equitable difference, and you kind of mentioned to it about asking, but the other thing that leaders need to understand what to do is really get to know your people. When you’re building rapport, that’s when you can start to learn about their…

motivation preferences and their work style preferences and all of these things that at the end of the day really makes the difference between whether or not somebody is miserable at work or happy at work. I mean, there’s compensation for sure. There’s, you know, can you work from home? Not. I mean, some of those things are outside of your control, but then there’s just like the day to day stuff that to the extent that you as a leader can use whatever levers you have within your power to kind of make sure that you are.

are tailoring what you can tailor to those work preferences of the people that are on your team, then that just makes a huge difference to people’s day-to-day lives. Yeah.

YATES (29:50)

Absolutely. I think about ⁓ it was, and I don’t know that I said this, but it was about them presenting something they had done, like it was their work, their success story. And so that’s influenced me tremendously. Even in the classroom, I usually give group projects as part of the assignments. And I always tell students in these groups, not everyone has to be the presenter. That where you stand up in front and this person talks and this, you go in a line, it’s like assess your

your cohort skills. Maybe one of you is really great at creating the presentation visually. Maybe another is great at speaking. Maybe another is great thinking on their feet for the Q &A. Not everybody has to speak. And so that experience long ago, that stuck with me. And even in parenting, if I can throw that in. And I was in prime, my late husband and I were primed to not expect to exactly the same thing out of children. Because they need different things.

ADAMS (30:44)

Absolutely. Absolutely. And you said you had a second example, which we love. We love multiple examples. So absolutely.

YATES (30:50)

Well,

these are kind of my bookend examples, my first managerial job and my last big managerial job. So when I was in that position in California, I was on a leadership team where, and I’m thinking of this particular example, the CTO, the chief marketing person, my self-product development sales and the CEO, we had been given an opportunity.

And I mean that kind of loosely. One of our clients had said, or potential customers actually said, could you do this? And then it’s like a lot of times I’ve seen in organizations both as a consultant that lived experience where it’s like, okay, go rush. Technical people go figure out, can you do this? Like, you know, how much would it cost? How quickly could we do it, et cetera. And so, you know, a week later, whatever the timeframe was, we’re back at that big conference table again with the report.

And it comes out, yeah, we can do this. We didn’t have the financial people in the room. So I thought, okay, I’m gonna play that role a little bit right now too. And everybody was just ready, like, we’re gonna do this. Yay, we can do it, we can go back. And I loved my chief and he was a smart guy, really capable, but he wasn’t easy to reign back in when he had, you know, this is what we’re gonna do. And so that was another example of leadership that I said,

Can I just interject something here? And I’m sure this has been said by many other people. I don’t claim it originally, but it was original to me at the time. that was guys just, and I was the only woman in the room was like, guys, just because we can, that doesn’t mean we should. And that was hard to say. It might mean that we lose a customer and we were building a business, but my concern was

we were going away from our original mission and the product that we were trying to be known for. And just because somebody wanted it, we shouldn’t. the technical people said, we could build it. And this is that that didn’t mean we should do it. And I think being a leader sometimes means calling out those situations to just, take a breath. Let’s consider. And I believe that really

brilliant technical people sometimes it’s about can we build it? Can we figure it out? Is it possible? And they’re not necessarily wrapping around, but should we? What are the other considerations? So that was the other one I wanted to share.

ADAMS (33:10)

Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. I mean, there’s a couple of things there. the one hand, there’s the leaders have to be willing to potentially say something that’s potentially.

wasn’t even controversial, would say. Maybe unpopular is maybe the word I was looking for. Potentially unpopular in this conversation and you’ve got all of the people super jazzed about it and you’re going to interject something that’s one probably going to immediately drop the enthusiasm down, right? So you’re going to cool down the room real fast when you say something like that. But what you’re also doing is you’re slowing things down, right? You’re saying, let’s think about this a little more broadly.

Let’s slow this decision making down, which I think is really important. So leaders need to be willing to be the one to raise a hand to slow things down and potentially be seen as the Debbie Downer or whatever you want to call it. The other thing that struck me, what you said, was that the financial person wasn’t in the room in this conversation. And so I do think that’s also really important to…

One, try to get all the right stakeholders in the room to begin with, but when you don’t have that, it’s important to make sure that somebody can act as that voice. And one thing, kind of going back to our shared experience with Alcoa, one thing I remember Alcoa doing, and it’s very vivid, there was a period of time there where we all had, like it was just like a piece of fabric that you could slip over a chair, but it was this blue piece of fabric that you would slip over a chair and it said customer on it.

And so any meetings that we had about the technology, really about anything, we were to act as if the customer was in the room and make sure that we at least had some part of conversation to say, OK, what would the customer say about this? I just thought it was a really great visual to force that kind of thinking that you just said, which is, the finance person isn’t in the room, so I need to at least make sure that I ask, you know,

some questions about their topic to make sure that we don’t pull ourselves in a different direction. so I just, yeah, I love that example. And I think it raises a couple of really important points for leaders.

YATES (35:16)

Well, thank you. I wanted to offer that one because our chief technical officer who, know, incredible man, I learned so much from him. He told me after that meeting, he said, in all my years in the Bay Area in technology, I had never heard anybody say that. It was always just because we can, we should, we should build, build, build. And I do understand, especially in that environment, you you don’t want to be the Debbie Downer, but it’s, I think it’s pragmatic. And I think that’s another thing that engineering

grounds me in is let’s look at data, let’s look at facts and you know, I’m all about strategic thinking. In fact, that’s where my preferred energy goes. But I love that balance of always coming back to reality and what makes sense for our current situation or what will be the downsides if we go forward with this path, like looking at all the aspects of it. And that’s what I didn’t see us doing. It was just like we were just going to fly forward.

ADAMS (36:11)

it could have very well been that just a little bit of thinking and going through whatever criteria you decided, and the answer was yes. And now everybody feels very confident about it, So you shouldn’t be afraid to slow down and do a thorough analysis on something. And if it turns out that it really is a good idea, then by all means, move forward with it.

YATES (36:29)

Well, thanks for letting me reflect on those two things because I haven’t done that that way in a long time. And that’s very useful to me right now as well. So thank you.

ADAMS (36:47)

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

YATES (36:53)

Well, I’ve tried to keep my mind in an engineering mindset through our conversation, but I’m going to go to that other side as a model, not as a functional neuroscience reality, but the left and right brain. I’ll go to my psychology side of my brain now, because I think the first thing I’m gonna recommend three different researchers and their work that I think would be very useful.

to engineers, think they would have been to me. I know they would have been for me before. And I use their work myself for my own development, but also in the people I work with now. So, and I’ll just throw this one other thing in as a precursor, whether you’re going to go to work for someone as an engineer in a big corporation, if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, I’m working with students who are in entrepreneurial ventures now, and then startups in other areas.

or if you leave engineering altogether someday, no matter what you do next. That’s why I chose these three resources. I thought they could be useful to you. So the first one is Susan David. Susan David is a clinical psychologist who works at the Harvard Medical School and also Harvard Business School. Dr. Adams will have all these resources if you wanna link to newsletters, their Instagram, their LinkedIn, the books that they’ve written.

TED Talks, things like that, because all three of them are well known for those things. And so Susan David, chose, and there are other people I could have chosen too, but her primary well-known book is Emotional Agility. And I taught a course for quite a number of years actually in the psychology department, a special topics course on social and emotional intelligence. And I think that’s a really important skill to know your own emotions, back to the example of me being able to

know the folks on my team well, to know how they might emotionally react to something, how to manage my own emotions when somebody was upset with me or something didn’t go well. There’s so many areas in leadership that having emotional agility is a huge strength. So I recommend her work. So again, back to Socrates, know thyself and then figure out where you could use some help when you know yourself. The second one is know your environment.

And so I’m going to recommend Adam Grant’s work. Adam’s at the Wharton School. Adam’s an organizational psychologist and he has written several books and is very well known. His work around organizational behavior and there are lots of organizational development and organizational behavior kinds of courses you could take and books you can read and management theory, but he makes it very practical and very

applicable at multiple levels. So if you’re a brand new engineer or you’re, you know, have big leadership responsibilities and big teams. So Adam Grant’s work, organizational psychologist, highly recommend it to understand your environment. Then then you’ve got the ingredients of person environment fit. It’s, I think, naive to think you can always be in the perfect environment for yourself. If you can get

75 % good fit, that’s kind of my measure. So that you’re happy when you go home at the end of the day and you’re not miserable in the environment you’re in, or you see hope, motivation, opportunity. When it gets below 75%, I’m probably gonna be counseling you on maybe looking for a different organization, different opportunity. And so those two ingredients will help you with that. The third is the work of Dr. Brené Brown, and she’s well known.

in many areas now, but she’s actually her doctorates in social work. She has recently released a book called Strong Ground. She has the Daring Leadership series. And the reason I’m recommending her work is because when I talk to people about leadership generally in my role as leadership coach, I want them to be authentic leaders.

And I think we haven’t even really talked about different kinds of, you there’s so many theories about leadership and the types of leadership skills you can have. And I think you need to know how to exhibit different kinds of leadership depending on the situation. But sort of my ground, my strong ground to use Brene Brown’s new book title is be yourself. Don’t put on a mask because people will see that right away. And I’ve made that mistake. That’s why I say that so emphatically know yourself and be who you are, be an authentic leader, and then stand your ground in that authentic leadership. Find your strong ground. And this new book, I think, and I’ve read, I think everything she’s ever written from her very first TEDx, TED Talk in Houston, which I highly recommend. So I hope you’ll think about that particular book and her work, because I think it would serve you well.

ADAMS (41:26)

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

YATES (41:29)

Thank you. This was a pleasure, as always, to talk with you.