MEL #057 | From Corporate Research to Energy Innovation Leadership Through Earning Trust with Dr. John Farrell

FARRELL (00:00)
Become a feedback junkie if that is an opportunity. The only way we learn to grow is through feedback. Feedback is not often provided readily. People will want to avoid conflict, especially if you’re a leader. So find out ways to uncover your blind spots and what are the barriers to your development because they’re not always obvious.

Angelique Adams (00:42)
In this episode, I speak with Dr. John Farrell, Associate Laboratory Director for the National Laboratory of the Rockies, Mechanical and Thermal Engineering Sciences Directorate. John’s path into chemistry was anything but linear. A high school friend and an inspiring freshman professor opened his eyes to science, eventually leading him to earn a PhD in physical chemistry. After 15 years in corporate R &D at ExxonMobil, he transitioned to national lab leadership, where he now oversees hundreds of researchers across diverse energy technologies.

In our leadership segment, John talks about one of his first major leadership roles, which involved building a brand new research group from scratch. He had to earn the trust of senior scientists who did not automatically respect his formal authority. Through humility, delegation, hiring strategically, and learning to communicate through story, he developed both the culture and credibility needed to move the work forward. John’s advice for aspiring engineering leaders? Seek mentors, pursue feedback intentionally, and guard your time fiercely.

Leadership is fundamentally about people, not just technical excellence. Start with core leadership tools, practice them daily, and grow your skills steadily over time. 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. John Farrell.

ADAMS (02:00)
Hi, John. Welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

FARRELL (02:03)
Thank you Angelique, happy to be here.

ADAMS (02:04)
thrilled to have you here. Can you start by telling us how you got into chemistry as a career path?

FARRELL (02:09)
Yeah, I imagine it’s about as nonlinear a path as most people take into their careers. I never really thought much about science or engineering until high school. And a friend of mine at one point was going to a career fair effort and said that he was going to think about being a microbiologist, which I thought was very specific and very particular. But then I also thought this guy wants to be a scientist. And it kind of my eyes to sort of the possibility of science and engineering as a career.

That first got me started thinking about it. I went off to college and sort of stumbled into chemistry because I had an amazing freshman chemistry professor who really ignited the excitement of the class. So it points out the importance of teachers and educators to inspire youngsters. So I ended up becoming a chemistry major and decided I really liked the technical side of things. Went on to do graduate work. I got my PhD in physical chemistry.

Then went on to do a postdoctoral appointment and then joined industry for 15 years. I joined ExxonMobil’s corporate research laboratory. It was an area that was really well aligned with my background. Exxon still had a corporate research lab focused on long-term R &D, which I thought was a great opportunity to explore. Spent 13 years there, 15 years actually spent learning a lot about business and how it intersects with engineering and science.

And then took the job with the National Renewable Energy Lab, which has recently been renamed the National Laboratory of the Rockies, and have been here for 12 years and have a variety of leadership roles.

ADAMS (03:37)
And if you can go back to sort of earlier in your academic career, your decision to go on to graduate school, was that something that you had planned the whole time or was there something that that motivated that decision?

FARRELL (03:48)
I think what really triggered that was spending some time in industry as an undergraduate, seeing what people with bachelor’s degrees in chemistry did in a day-to-day basis. And unlike engineering, if you have a bachelor’s degree in science, oftentimes you’re not doing the same type of, let’s say, professional responsibilities as people with high level degrees. And so I saw that people who are really succeeding and having an impact most often had advanced degrees.

And I actually like the challenge of going on for a graduate degree and seeing whether research was something I wanted to focus my career on.

ADAMS (04:25)
Okay. And then you said you worked in R &D in the corporate environment for many years and then transitioned to the national lab. Can you talk about the similarities or differences between the national lab environment and the corporate environment?

FARRELL (04:37)
Black Sun’s corporate research lab was probably one of the last holdouts of the Bell lab era of research labs. And so it was a place that really fostered a sense of discovery and long-term investment in knowledge development that has a lot of alignment with the national labs. Now national labs are…

Distinguished by having unique capabilities, hardware, modern capabilities, and staff that have long-term investment in expertise that allows that to be deployed in a way that uniquely provides opportunity for industry. So there’s always that natural connection between what is being done in the national labs and what is then subsequently taken up by industry and deployed commercially. So working that interface is something that I had the pleasure of doing while I was with Exxon.

and then working on the other side, to the national lab, just moving on the other side of that handoff, if you will.

ADAMS (05:28)
Yeah, that makes sense. then I would imagine, you correct me if I’m wrong, but I imagine that in your role now, you also interface with universities, with academia. And so I’m curious, you know, how that interfaces or are there any differences in the interface with academia versus the interface with corporate R &D?

FARRELL (05:44)
I would say the biggest difference is really the fundamental purposes of the university, which is knowledge creation and workforce development, training the next generation of researchers. They are typically focused on very early stage research. We call it early TRL, technology readiness level, and really focusing on things that may not pan out, but if they do, then they could have big impacts, so high risk, high reward. There’s a transition as you move up the deployment path to

larger, larger scale. so de-risking technology, making sure it will work in the real world is a key part of the work that the national labs do. And so with the universities, we’re focusing on the early stage and all this creation. Then we take it down and then we work with industry to figure out how to get over the obstacles that are preventing it from being commercially deployed.

ADAMS (06:31)
And do you find that like work practices or maybe culturally or language or just any sort of major differences that you find yourself having to navigate when you’re working with these different organizations or is it maybe more domestic versus international or are you finding that maybe at the sort of R and D environment, you’re really kind of primarily speaking the same language.

FARRELL (06:55)
There is the same fundamental language of technology, which is helpful. It’s a helpful link between all those different parts of the ecosystem, if you will. With universities, I find that, especially the way that universities have evolved in the past several decades, the professors are very entrepreneurial. They have to go out and raise money. They are in many ways like a startup within an environment that also has a teaching responsibility, but

They have to hire employees to show their students, they have to raise money, they have to a business plan. So it reminds me a lot more of small scale startups in terms of the outlook and philosophy that they bring to problem solving. On the other side, companies who are going to be investing a tremendous amount of money on much more risk-adverse. And they believe in technology, but at the same important time, they’re aware of the many ways they’ve gone referring to the past and deploying technology before it was ready. So they’re much more interested in

utilizing the capabilities of the national labs to identify what the critical flaws are, testing things under scenarios that are emblematic of extremes in the real world where things might fail, just understanding how to put more robust technology together, or in many cases, deciding that a technology is not ready for prime time, not making that investment.

ADAMS (08:03)
And can you talk a little bit about your current work and what you’re doing now as an associate laboratory director?

FARRELL (08:09)
Yeah, it’s great job. I get to work with about 550 researchers here at the laboratory over a broad range of technologies, including power generation, so wind, water, and solar power, as well as geothermal, work in buildings, technologies, advanced manufacturing, industrial innovation, and also fossil energy development. So very broad. It’s always fun to find the connections between those technologies. A lot of the interesting science and technology occurs at interfaces.

So it’s really a great opportunity to work with the a lot of smart, dedicated people to about technology that are going to be important for the country.

ADAMS (08:57)
All right, John, can you give us an example of how you use leadership skills in your work?

FARRELL (09:01)
Yeah, I think I’ll start with one of the first formal big meaty challenges that I had when it was an industry. And this followed a minimal reorganization within the research laboratories, but they recognized that a lot of the technologies that were going to be important in the future were not represented by the structure that they had internally. They went through reorganization and created a new group that I was put in charge of with about 30 different researchers with really diverse backgrounds. This was the part of Vexon’s business that

was not really directly tied to the businesses or chemicals, oil and gas production or refining. It was really the type of work that was important for the company to understand, whether it was global climate change or fuel engine interactions or hydrogen fuel cells, a lot of the new technologies that were coming around for transportation and trying to formalize it in a way that had a long-term research strategy around it. I was put in charge of a group with a lot of people that

very diverse backgrounds. Some of them had been around for a very long time. And it was just a great opportunity to develop a culture, to develop a strategy, to develop some cohesion, vision, and had to sell the mission. It was brand new. A lot of the business sponsors weren’t really familiar with what we were trying to do. So it really was a whole combination of all of the leadership challenges in one. In particular,

There are a number of quite senior people at the time who did not recognize formal leadership authority. It didn’t matter that I was the boss. I had to earn their respect. I had to earn their trust that I was actually doing something that was technically defensible, but at same point in time that I was able to lead diverse group of people. So it was a great opportunity to understand the importance of humility. I did not know everything. There were a lot of new technology areas that I had never had the chance to work in before.

I had to rely on my team. I had to delegate effectively. had to make sure that I was giving leadership opportunities to people and helping them become the next generation of leaders. I had to make sure that I had a robust pipeline of hiring talent. So I became responsible for our developing a team in hiring, understanding what makes a good hiring decision. So it was a rather unplanned opportunity to sort of embrace the whole ball of wax, if you will, with leadership.

single.

ADAMS (11:20)
Yeah, this is a great example. There’s a couple of things that you said that I wanna touch base on. So one, I love that you said that there were some senior people who did not recognize formal leadership authority because so many of my listeners are either students or emerging leaders and there’s this real misconception that, once I get the title, my life will be so much easier, because everyone will just do what I say, right? And of course that’s not true.

A question that I have is, did you feel prepared in terms of leadership development? Because as you mentioned, you were at Exxon at the time. And so this is a place that, and I came from a company as well who did a lot of

leadership development inside of the company. I, as I was taking on more roles in my own career, I generally felt like I had least some preparation. There were either leadership development, know, courses, tools, training, either in-house or they sent you out, out of the house. And so I felt generally prepared and I know lots of places these days don’t do that anymore. So I’m just curious what your actual sense of readiness was.

for leadership roles.

FARRELL (12:27)
That’s great question. think speaking personally, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I never really felt ready and I figured I would just sort of make mistakes along the way. hope that nothing tragic came about them. That said, there’s a distinct difference between the development opportunities at a large company and for example, with the national labs or small company are able to provide. Both my children are engineering, they’re both engineers now. They are both working in large companies that have very

robust development opportunities. And so my advice is always to take advantage of those opportunities. I probably took advantage of a third of the ones that I could, which in retrospect was a miss Even things that I didn’t think were important, like negotiations or facilitation skills, which were a common offering, really impact how you deal with people. And there’s one thing about leadership that differentiates from being an individual contributor is that you have to deal with people and your success.

is based on how well you deal with people. And every problem that you encounter, almost always, root of it involves people. So I probably would go back, if I could, and think more of those classes, because there really was a robust offering, especially in terms of formal leadership development. Exxon and GE were two of the companies that I think distinguished themselves by having very diverse businesses as part of their overall series of companies.

They could not have leaders who were well versed in all the technology. So they focused a lot on the cultivation of senior executive leadership within their own companies. They hired and pretty much promoted from within. So it was a very unique environment to learn those skills in a leadership framework that really emphasized diversity of experience and training. So I did benefit from that. And I do recognize that that isn’t always available to the people, but it was in my case.

Impactful even now there are still some tools that I consciously will pull from that were developed as part of the early leadership training. So find it valuable.

ADAMS (14:20)
And you mentioned this opportunity that we’re talking about was really, it was meaty in that you got a glimpse of sort of everything that goes into leadership, the people side, talent development side, the strategy side, operational side, all of those things. I’m curious if you can maybe just pick one that comes to mind and tell us a little bit tactically about some of the things you were actually doing to try to formalize.

your recommendations on how you would approach these things.

FARRELL (14:50)
Sure. I think the one that stands out is one of the technology areas that was within the portfolio that I was developing was around life cycle assessments. At the time, this type of cradle to grave assessment of what are the impacts of a process in terms of the energy and mass flows and then the environmental impacts, it was a tool that had been, I would say, incompletely utilized within industry. was now becoming important and

It became clear that applying it in the context of an energy company was useful not only to develop processes that better performance and better economics, but at same point in time, help to address some regulatory issues that were important to the company as well. So at one point, I remember speaking with my technical team and we had developed a small team and hired people who had expertise in the area, but we were having challenges with senior leadership, understanding why we were wasting our time.

So it became an opportunity to really understand the importance of communication, succinct and clear communication and the power of narrative in terms of communicating. Because it was ultimately when I put it in the context of a story that, hey, here’s how we have been able to do something thus far. The story is something you can relate to and it is something that you care about. And then here’s how you can take advantage of that and embrace it and develop it forward.

That really was the one example where I saw how important it is to understand your customer when you’re speaking to somebody from a communication standpoint to understand what their motivation is and how to leverage the skills of your team to put together a story that could then resonate. Because if you don’t have a way to communicate what you’re trying to do, no matter how good of an idea it is, you will basically fall flat or at least not reach your potential in the right.

ADAMS (16:34)
Yeah, I think that that’s so important that the idea of the, of being able to tell a story around what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. And I do think that tends to be an area where those of us with technical backgrounds can struggle sometimes. It’s often not part of our normal training. And then oftentimes we’re even resistant to this idea of like the data speaks for itself. Why do want me to wrap a story around it?

And I’m curious how you go about maybe coaching others about the power of story and maybe even how to approach it as a technical person.

FARRELL (17:02)
I’ll admit it can be really hard. Yeah. One of the pejorative of terms that often gets thrown around is marketing. as if marketing is a blanket term for trying to pull the wool over somebody’s eyes. Really in the research environment in particular, as you said, a lot of times the best ideas should just be obvious to people. the reality is that a lot of times if you’re trying to sell your idea to somebody and if you’re in a research environment,

and you’re writing proposal, you’ve got somebody on the receiving end who has to be able to immediately understand what you as a specialist are trying to get across. And we have the potential very often to overestimate what people understand. And so being able to put yourself in the audience’s shoes and understand the…

way in which they are receiving your information, I think is a really important skill to learn because just because it’s obviously you doesn’t mean it’s obviously the person receiving it who has the decision to fund your idea. And the burden is on you to make sure that they understand that not for them to spend the time and tease it out of what you provide them.

ADAMS (18:16)
All right, John, as we wrap up, what advice do you have for engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership roles?

FARRELL (18:23)
I think the first piece of advice that we would give is to seek and make use of mentors. I’ve been very lucky to have mostly informal mentors come into my circle. And I think their wisdom, their perspective, their experience are extremely valuable. But probably what’s most valuable is their detachment. We all are living in our world with our problems and somebody who isn’t in the weeds.

oftentimes can use their wisdom, perspective, and experience to help us see where our barriers are and just help provide guidance that might seem obvious, but we all too often aren’t able to see just because of our closeness to an issue. I would say be diligent with your self-discovery.

Become a feedback junkie if that is an opportunity. The only way we learn to grow is through feedback. Feedback is not often provided readily. People will want to avoid conflict, especially if you’re a leader. Your team will very likely always have some people who are very affront about pointing out my shortfalls. That’s a gift. But that is not often the case. So find out ways to uncover your blind spots and what are the barriers to your development because they’re not always obvious.

Focus on your time management. I think, especially now, there are more things competing for attention than ever before. Engineers and scientists are knowledge workers. We need time to think. That means we have to be ruthlessly prioritizing our schedules all the time. And I’d also highlight, if you’re the leader, I touched on this earlier, but leadership involves dealing with people. And so really focus on understanding how people behave.

manipulate them, but to be effective. People bring different diverse backgrounds and experiences with them. And very often we are just at the very early interface of dealing with somebody and it’s easy for myself to take away conclusions that are incomplete or incorrect just based on not knowing the person where they’re coming from. So I think investing in understanding people will make the technology side a lot easier.

I guess the other thing is for leaders who are just beginning their path of leadership and the transition from an individual contributor to a leader, don’t try and do too much at once. If you’re learning carpentry, you learn a few basic tools, you perfect those, and then you pick on the specialty tools as you progress. Focus on the core tools and practice them. One thing to read about them is to actually put them into practice on a daily basis.

ADAMS (20:44)
John, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.

FARRELL (20:47)
Thank you.