This transcript was produced by robots and left as-is. Accuracy and elegance are not guaranteed.

Since this is the first episode, I wanted to start by answering three simple questions. Who am I? Why does this podcast exist? And why I care so much about helping engineers grow beyond being just good technically. So I spent over 25 years in engineering consulting, controls, automation, project management, business development, leadership.

If there was a hat to wear in an industrial environment, I probably wore it. Sometimes well, sometimes like a rookie, even after decades of experience. And like a lot of engineers, I didn’t plan on becoming a leader. I drifted into it or more accurately got pushed into it. Not because I wasn’t capable, but because nobody ever taught us the human side of engineering. We learned circuits, code and calculus.

But we don’t learn how to have hard conversations, how to influence without authority, how to build trust, or how to lead people who have real lives and real problems. That gap shows up everywhere. It’s why brilliant engineers hit ceilings they never saw coming. It’s why communication becomes a bottleneck. And it’s why technical excellence eventually stops being enough once your job involves other humans. And that realization didn’t come from a book.

It came from an electrician. Early in my career, during a co-op work term, I was paired with an electrician who absolutely hated engineers and he didn’t hide it. So I asked him why. He said, you engineers sit in your ivory towers, designing things on paper that would never work in the real life. And when we ask questions or make suggestions, you treat us like we’re idiots. Then he pointed out, pointed to a section of the plant and he said, see that pump?

The entire line has to be shut down in order to do maintenance. If the engineer had just rotated it 90 degrees in the design, we could have kept everything running and done the work safely. That was a moment of clarity. Not because he was wrong, but because he was right. And it changed how I worked. I started listening to operators and maintenance staff. I asked questions of the people who touched the system every day.

I learned that practical wisdom matters just as much as technical brilliance. That lesson followed me through my career. I helped build branch offices from nothing, led teams, handled financials, navigated downturns and pressure, and eventually found myself in leadership roles where technical problems weren’t the hard part anymore. The hard part was people. And at one point, under enough external pressure and internal strain, I stepped away from a role I wasn’t showing up in well. That reset forced me to look hard at what actually energized me. And the pattern was obvious in hindsight. It wasn’t designing systems, it was helping people grow. I saw it coaching youth soccer. I saw it mentoring younger engineers. I saw it in conversations where something would click and someone would realize they were capable of more than they thought.

That’s when I stopped trying to force myself back into another engineering role and leaned fully into coaching. I realized I care more about how people work than how machines operate. It wasn’t a reinvention, but more of a continuation and evolution. And that’s where this podcast comes in. Each week on Re-Engineered, I’ll explore the human side of engineering. Some episodes will be based on ideas from my newsletter, where I’ll read parts of it and think through them out loud. Other weeks will be solo episodes or interviews with people who understand what it’s like to lead in technical environments and what it takes to move beyond the technical to have career success and thrive in leadership. But the common thread is always the same. Helping engineers and technical professionals build the communication, leadership, and self-awareness skills we were never taught, without asking you to become someone you’re not. So if you’re feeling technically strong but feel stuck, if leadership feels heavier than what you expected, if you ever thought, why didn’t anyone prepare me for this part of the job? You’re not behind, you were just never taught. And that’s what this podcast is here to address. In the next episode, I’ll take one specific idea and unpack it. Why most engineers can’t see what they’re actually good at and how that blind spot limits careers. If that sounds useful, subscribe and stick around. And if you know another engineer who could use some straight talk about the human side of the job, send this their way. This is just the beginning.