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

This episode, I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted to reflect on a conversation I had recently with my uncle Randy, who is a retired lieutenant colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces. I sought him out to learn how the military approaches leadership. In his case, the Canadian military, but through various deployments, he was exposed to how a lot of different countries run their command structures.

What I was really trying to understand was the gap between titles and earned credibility. And what happens when engineers step into leadership and don’t recognize that gap exists? You can either assert your way across it or learn your way across it. The first makes the gap invisible. The second makes it temporary. I went into the conversation looking to learn about military leadership in general. What I came out with was far more useful. And it started with a story about his first six months of his career that maps exactly onto what I see with engineers stepping into leadership roles.

So in this episode, it’s not an interview, it’s a reflection. I’m sharing what I learned and what I think it means for you. He said something almost in passing that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. He’d said during this initial deployment, “We pretended I was in charge, and they pretended I was.”

So here’s how the story starts. My uncle Randy graduated from the Royal Military College before I was even born and was commissioned as a lieutenant. In the Canadian and British tradition, that’s pronounced lieutenant rather than lieutenant. Three months after his graduation, in August, he arrived at his first regiment. He was 22 years old. He had a degree, a rank and classification training. He was officially in charge of 30 soldiers.

When he arrived, the sergeant major was 40. He’d been doing this job for 20 years. He knew every procedure, every field condition, every soldier Randy had not yet met.

In Randy’s words, the sergeant major took him under his wing. The gun sergeants took him under their wing. And that’s when he said it. “We pretended I was in charge, and they pretended I was.” Within six months, Randy is deployed to Churchill in northern Canada on an Arctic sovereignty patrol, minus 40 Celsius, living in tents, learning everything he could from the sergeants he described as brilliant. He stayed in the military for 36 years, serving his country. The title was real, the credibility wasn’t yet, and he knew it. That’s the whole point.

When we talked, Randy named the other version directly. Military colleges have a reputation, he said, for producing — and I’m quoting him here — “arrogant little pricks who arrive at 22 knowing everything.”

That reminded me of something I heard constantly when I graduated from engineering. In Canada, professional engineers wear an iron ring on the pinky finger of their working hand, a reminder of their professional responsibility to the public. The story behind the ring is worth a separate episode, so I won’t cover it here. But the running joke I heard often from non-engineers was that that iron ring cut off the circulation to the engineer’s brain.

I’ve seen both versions in engineering. The one who shows up with credentials and immediately starts proving everyone was right to hire them. And the one who shows up, looks around, figures out who actually knows things. The first type is exhausting to work with. The second type builds credibility fast — faster than the first type ever does. Asserting your authority closes the gap on paper. Learning closes it in reality. You can paper over the gap with enough certainty and authority, but the people around you know. They always know.

I ran into this lesson early in my career, and I talked about it in the very first episode of this podcast. On one of my co-op work terms, I was paired with an electrician who hated engineers. When I asked him why, he said, “You engineers sit in your ivory towers designing things that would never work in real life.” Then he pointed to a pump that had been installed in a position that required the entire system to be shut down in order to do any maintenance. If the engineer had rotated it 90 degrees in the design, like maintenance people told them, they could have serviced it with the system still online.

That’s the same lesson from the other side of the table. The engineer wasn’t pretending to be in charge. He just acted like the credentials meant he already had the answers. The operators knew better, but nobody asked them.

In a leadership role, the gap is the same, but the stakes are higher. You’re not missing a field insight. You’re missing what your team knows, what your stakeholders actually need, and sometimes what the real problem actually is. The engineers who earn credibility fast in leadership are almost always the ones who show up like Randy. They know the gap is real. They’re honest about it. And they treat the people around them as the resource, not as the problem.

Your credentials got you in the room, but they don’t get you the room. That part has to be earned.

In practice, I commonly see two failure modes that show up when engineers step into leadership. The first is assertion mode. The new leader overexplains, over-certifies, doubles down on being right. The team learns to wait them out, nobody pushes back, the leader thinks it’s working, but it isn’t. The second is the disappearing act. The leader knows they don’t have the credibility yet, so they go quiet. They defer to everyone. They lose the room, but in a different way this time, by not showing up at all, or with any point of view.

Randy’s approach is the third path. He held the role clearly. He was the officer. He made the decisions. He was responsible. But he was also honest about what he didn’t know and genuinely curious about what the sergeants did. That combination is rare, and it’s what built his credibility over 36 years. For engineers, the move is the same. Hold your point of view, make decisions, but treat the gap between your title and your credibility as something real — something that gets closed through actual work and actual conversations, not through asserting it away.

If you’re stepping into a leadership role right now, or you’re early in one, your credentials are not the issue. They got you the position. They got you the promotion. They landed you that opportunity. But the people around you are watching how you handle the gap.

One question worth sitting with: who around you actually knows things you don’t yet? This isn’t a rhetorical question. Actually name them. Then figure out how you’re using that resource.

The title is the starting line. Credibility is what you build from there.

My uncle spent 36 years in uniform because he walked into his first regiment at 22 and was honest enough to let the sergeant major teach him something. That’s it. That’s the whole story.