The Leadership Shift Every Engineer Has to Make w/ Ashley Chang

Speaker A: So as an engineer, a lot of times your value comes from knowing everything and solving the problem yourself. But as a leader, you have to let go of that. It's really tempting to want that full visibility and control, but your job now is transitioning from being the person to solve that problem to empowering and coaching your team to learn to solve those problems for you.

Speaker B: What you should address versus what you shouldn't address. How do you evaluate that?

Speaker A: I think the heart of it is understanding. Hey, is this a baseline skill that's applicable across multiple things? Asking open ended questions is the biggest tool you have in your toolkit.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Leadership Launchpad where we help technical managers improve themselves, their teams and their organizations. If you are a technical leader, an engineer technician looking to become a leader, or someone who supports technical leaders, this is the show to get actionable insights from people who have been in the trenches and help you improve not just your performance, but the performance of those around you. Our guest today is Ashley Chang, the training and development manager of manufacturing at Anduril. Ashley and I have known each other for several years now. She was actually a guest on the show back when this was the Making Better podcast. I wanted to have her back on for two specific reasons. One, she started her career as an engineer, so she knows the role of an engineer and what that life is like. But second, she is now the leading training at arguably the most disruptive of the latest generation of hard tech defense startups. Her career spans technical environments like Anduril as well as non technical environments like Pinterest, established companies like Boeing, and startups like Virgin Orbit. She has seen a lot both of what works and doesn't work when it comes to developing a technical workforce. All this to say I am extremely excited for the conversation. And Ashley, welcome to the Leadership Launchpad.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me on again, Matt. It's always a pleasure talking with you.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I'm really excited for this. There's all kinds of things that we could cover. But since, like I said, you started your career as an engineer and now you are a people manager, you don't just support people managers, you are a people manager and you've been one, I wanted to start there with kind of for you. What was that transition like? Just as an engineer and individual contributor, what were the challenges that you faced when you made the transition from being an individual contributor to a people manager?

Speaker A: Yeah, great question, Matt. For me, I think the hardest part of transitioning from an ic, especially as an engineer, to a, uh, people Leader is that mindset shift around control. As an engineer, a lot of times your value comes from knowing everything and solving the problem yourself. And I think what also gets you promoted into that leadership role might be that ability to problem solve, drive those outcomes and have full control of that problem set. But as a leader, you have to let go of that. It's really tempting to want that full visibility and control, but your job now is transitioning from being the person to solve that problem and to empowering and coaching your team to learn to solve those problems for you. So I think it's that, that's mind shift number one. And I think on the flip side of that, there's also that swing to the opposite side of the pendulum, right? Where like, once you realize, hey, I shouldn't be micromanaging them, it's very easy to overcorrect and think, hey, I'll just stay out of their way. And that's also a trap within itself. There's like a massive difference between micromanagement and setting clear expectations. I feel like people want to know, hey, what are my guardrails? What does success look like? And setting expectations in that way for the team sometimes is really what they're looking for. Yeah, a lot of times I also think it's like dependent on where your team in that life cycle is forming, storming, norming and performing. And you know, if they're still in the forming stage, you might want to lean more on the, hey, what are the clear expectations to set? Where are the guardrails? I help them stand up rather than, hey, if they're in the norming and performing stage, you can probably lean back and say, hey, how are you going to drive that outcome? And you let them actually set the standard for the team. It's not always a one size fits all.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Andy Grove, who is the CEO of Intel, he uses the phrase task relevant maturity, where he's always talking about, you know, thinking about each person on your team and not how long they've been with the company or how long they've been at the team, but for this task, how mature, you know, what, what experience do they have for that task and using that to determine how you delegate to them and what you delegate to them, how closely you manage them versus how far you step back. And of course that's really difficult because now that means you act differently for every single person on your team, which is why it's so challenging.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm, um, glad you brought that up because I think a lot of times we Think delegation. You can delegate things just one way, but for your novice, the guardrails you provide is much more in depth than for someone where you're like, hey, I'll just act as a thought partner, or you let me know, you know what your process is, and I'll just say, yay or nay. Yeah. Huh. But I think that comes with, like, experience and scope and for, like, new leaders. Finding that right balance, I think, is a very common struggle. Yeah.

Speaker B: How? Any particular strategies that you've used to help find that balance? You know, when you're first coming onto a team or when you get a new person onto your team, how do you figure it out?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. I will be honest. I still struggle with it to this day. It's building that self awareness to know if you're in one of those things that you're like, hey, I think I've stepped in too far. A lot of times it's just asking for feedback, like, hey, what do you need support with? How am I doing? Where do you need more clarity? And then also it's understanding, like, are there friction points on the team that you're currently seeing that you're like, hey, this might be a structural issue. Do we not have enough processes, do not have enough clarity? Or hey, am I too involved? Is this friction because I'm the problem?

Speaker B: It's me getting in the way? Yeah.

Speaker A: Am I getting in the way? And so really pausing to ask yourself and the team those questions, I think is the first step. I don't think showing vulnerability to the team is a problem. Uh, in fact, I think it should be encouraged because you want to build that culture of openness that's actually going to add to the speed of which your team moves. If your team feels comfortable with sharing, hey, I've hit a problem. Can you help me solve this? Your leader should be modeling that as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's funny when you mentioned the difficulty, because I agree with you. It's something that I still struggle with, and it makes me miss my time in the cockpit because I often think as an instructor pilot, ultimately kind of what you're doing. What I'm doing as an instructor pilot is trying to delegate all responsibility to my student. Right. Like, I want to make it so that the student is able to fly the plane. And the nice thing about being in the cockpit is that it's. You learn really quickly if you're delegating too much. And I, uh, usually talk about it in terms of most all of us instructors. We would Talk about having this ever expanding bubble of comfort of like how far you're willing to let your student go before you intervene. And the natural state of being an instructor is the bubble expands until something goes wrong and then it contracts. Like you get scared and it contracts, you almost die and it contracts and then it expands again, then it contracts and then that's kind of how you go as an instructor. And I think that's true as a manager, as a leader as well. It's like, you know, you're constantly trying to delegate, trying to delegate, but, but the tricky part is that those mistakes are often not as easy to diagnose. And that's why, as you say, like, it's all about that self awareness. It's all about really thinking about, okay, what is the problem here is am m I being too involved? Am I not involved enough? Am I being unclear? That's the art of being a manager.

Speaker A: I'm going to steal that example from you. I think the Cox example is amazing.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you for that. Because that's a concern that comes up a lot, I think, this idea of the challenges of delegation. But the main thing I wanted to focus on with you for this conversation today, given your role, is you now. You, like we said, you know, you started as an engineer, you became a people manager, but now a lot of your time is supporting people managers, specifically supporting them within manufacturing. And so I wanted to start with kind of thinking through, you know, uh, and as I said in the intro, you've been in technical environments, non technical environments. Given where you're at now, like, what are some of the things that you've seen that are different between like general training that, you know, you would see anywhere in a company or in any company, and the kinds of training that comes up in manufacturing or engineering focused organizations. What, what are some of those differences?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think I'll start at the core of it. Good training shares the same goal, right? You want someone to walk away knowing exactly what they need to do or change. There's that tangible outcome. I think where manufacturing or technical specific training diverges is we're allowed to get more specific because the audience is more specific and the environment, especially in a manufacturing environment, is highly hands on. So in general training, you're designing for this massive audience. Your theory has to be able to function for multiple functions. When you zoom in, your audience shrinks. The outcomes become a lot more specific. And so I think in manufacturing you're dealing with physical tools, muscle memory. Sometimes you're dealing with experienced folks who might have old habits that no longer serve us in a certain way. M There's a lot of change processes and so you can't teach that just through a CBT or a zoom training. I find that a lot of the operation specific training we're doing a lot of hands on work. Like a lot of hey, we're going to give you physical space to practice. It's going to involve demonstrating and practice in a safe environment where you can fail and the consequences aren't going to be detrimental to the product, it's not going to be detrimental to your safety. And I think that's one major difference. As you see with the whole work from home and all that stuff. General training, you're still able to adapt a lot of virtual and CBT environments. In manufacturing we still have to take a step in and say where are we investing in like the physical content?

Speaker B: Yeah, I wanted to dive into one thing you mentioned there. You mentioned, you know, kind of unlearning or old habits or just relearning new ways of doing things because this kind of touches on and oral specifically being that you're, you know, you're doing, you're really trying to shake things up and do things differently but also just kind of the general re industrialization effort in the U.S. so we have people who have been maybe doing things for a long time but a traditional way and we're trying to do them plus also trying to bring in a whole bunch of new people into the situation. Do you find that there is a lot of changing habits, changing old habits in order to be successful in manufacturing today? Or is it that you're primarily just starting from scratch?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it might not be specific to. I actually saw uh, this some of the other technical spaces I've been at where it's like people bring practices that were acceptable at their previous company. And so whether it was automotive, whether it was aerospace, everybody's standards and requirements are a little bit different. And then also what companies allow people to get away with is also different. So you have a mod podge of like all these folks with. It's about norms, right? Like people will do what they're comfortable with and people will do what hasn't been challenged. So we kind of find ourselves saying like what's the clean slate? Like what does good look like here and how do we establish that as early as possible? I think at Andrew we also have this unique case where we have so many different product lines and I think good training bridges that gap between learning and doing. And so we lean a lot on the job training as well. That's what qualifies our folks to be able to perform the operations that they need. And it's very specific to the individual lines. So we have to start leveraging a lot of the technical experts who have built that product from start to finish. I think before. Matt, you've mentioned several times no training team can own all of training. And I completely agree. How do you ensure consistency to that and how do you leverage these people to be a force multiplier? We want to teach them, hey, how do you get people to perform things consistently? How do you teach them? Um, how do you demonstrate a task? How do you give feedback on the task? How do you assess competency? Building that capability across and then using those folks to start evangelicizing. What does good look like, I think is one of the foundational pieces. We started very early on.

Speaker B: Just a quick interjection. I wanted to remind you that I run a company called Bilt where we train the next generation of hard tech leaders how to build teams capable of solving the world's hardest problems. If you are an aspiring technical leader, an existing leader, or responsible for training leaders in your organization, Please check out BuiltLeaders.com to see if we can support you and your team. This came up in a recent discussion. It, uh, was just a couple episodes ago. I had a discussion with Roy Sampson, who I've known, also known for years, and he's a technical trainer. And he was talking about the same kinds of things, this idea of how essential the on the job trainer core is for a, uh, technical training team. And I think if, you know, we're relating this to a lot of managers, what are some of the common gaps? Because I think traditionally if you have never, especially if you're a new manager, you've never taught anybody, you've never been in an education environment or a training environment. I think it's really easy to just think the best technician. I'm just going to make them a trainer. Like they like, let's just make, let's just have them train all the new people that you've been, you've been here for 20 years or you've been doing this thing for so long, you're the, you're the highest quality person I got. Just like, let's make them a trainer. What are some of the common gaps that come up? Because, you know, I always use the phrase, you know, great players don't always make great coaches for that kind of on the Job training. What, what did you, as you were setting up the training for ojt, what were some of the crucial elements that you had to make sure you include so that the high performers would be good coaches?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. I think I'll, I'll start off with saying like it's always having to say the quiet part out loud. Like we make a lot of assumptions on hey, we actually think that this is common knowledge and people are going to act in X, Y, Z. Like we have to actually take ourselves out of all of these assumptions from the get go and be like, no, this is a person who has maybe just walked off the street and they might not have any background knowledge. So we're going to start at base level. That's actually one mindset that's actually really tricky to pull yourself out of, especially if you're an environment that has hired from um, a lot of existing like minded companies. I think the second is after you take yourself out of mindsight and stating, hey, these are, you know, what the good requirements are. We give our folks, you know, a structure as in like, hey, you're going to demonstrate it once, then demonstrate it with an explanation on the why have them repeat it back to you. You're going to confirm their understanding. Not just by saying hey, uh, do you understand xyz? Have them talk through you. Training isn't just a you talk at them kind of thing. You're facilitating an understanding and that means really clarifying what they are getting out of it just as much as what you think you're inputting into that. Uh, and then it goes through several more stages of, you know, after you demonstrate the why you demonstrate the actual steps and it's a repetitive process where you're adding these things on in blocks and having them do that back for you in blocks.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes especially the, the mindset thing. I think that's, that's just such a huge one and it's, and it's nice because you can get a good sense of it pretty quickly. You know you can just kind of ask somebody like hey, explain this to me like I'm five and see what they say and see how deep they go, see what assumptions they're making. And it'll always give you a gauge of like, okay, where are they at on this scale of in many ways like truly understanding just how much expertise they have. Because I think that's where the phrase great players don't make great coaches comes from is the great players often don't recognize just how much skill they have. They don't recognize like what the magic of their skill is. And so it's making sure somebody can kind of back up and visualize that. I think at least that's what I'm hearing from you.

Speaker A: And to your point, like for coaching, I think this is relevant for like technical leaders as well, where a lot of times they will find this challenge of folks wanting to have all the answers or they don't understand what their report isn't understanding. And that's when I lean on hey, asking open ended questions is the biggest tool you have in your toolkit. Whereas like we're listening to understand, not providing the answer in our questions. I think a lot of times we get tripped up and we'll say, well hey, have you tried XYZ to solve your problem? And they say, no we haven't. We'll just go implement X, Y, Z rather than saying hey, what have you tried? Or hey, you know, walk me through your thought process on this. Leverages like, you know, better insight into what was their frame of mind and how are they viewing the problem. You get to understand the reality of their situation much faster as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, totally. So that covers like I think kind of the end of the road, you know, like the OJT portion. But you all before that you also mentioned how training is often kind of looking to fill in the gaps or find the common spaces. Uh, when you think of manufacturing as kind of. I'm sure there's lots of manufacturing. I don't know how Anduril is organized, but just in general, like when you think about onboarding in a manufacturing world because we know that OJT is gonna be the bulk of like how you learn your skill. What's the bridge between somebody walking in the door and starting their ojt? Like what are you looking. What do you think makes good onboarding in a manufacturing environment to provide kind of like a uh, common. What. What are you looking to commonly provide to everyone?

Speaker A: Onboarding serves two customers. Your new hires is one customer and then the business is the other customer. And from the new hire perspective, like from the get go, you want them to feel valued, you need them to feel bought in, you need them to feel invested in. And that creates that psychological safety for them to start performing with confidence and then also building their competence, right? Yeah. For the business we have to get them up to speed as quickly as possible for what they were hired to do. It's always about speed, speed. And so I think it's like for us we look at manufacturing onboarding, like, we're, I think, in a specific space where we're not a super mature organization. Right. In a mature organization, everything's set in stone. You have a lot more guardrails on what is that structure of that role? And there's expectations that are clearly, clearly set. In a maturing, uh, organization, you can't just teach someone, hey, this is how you're going to implement that skill. You have to teach them how to navigate the whole ecosystem. You have to, you know, help them build relationships. If things go wrong, how do they escalate? Who do they talk to? Because we know things will go wrong. Like, things are always changing. So we design our onboarding experience to kind of encompass both the skill set of what is needed, base level of what look good, looks like, and then how do you start building those relationships? How do you understand what the culture is that is going to make you successful Here we talk a lot about continuous improvement, and then we try to empower folks. Hey, if you see something that needs to be improved, we encourage you to speak up about that. We're not training you to just follow a static process. We're asking you to help build and improve upon these processes. So I think it's like a twofold mix of like, hey, what's that structured? How do we show you what good looks like? How do you practice that? How do we invest in you, make you feel like you're part of this culture, that we want you to start enacting, like, continuous improvement. We want you to feel like you have a voice in this and then passing them off to like, here are the relationships you should be building. And then ojt here's how you're gonna actually start doing the specific work to your lines.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is so true just how much, how different all training is depending on the maturity of the organization. And the less mature you are, the more it is about relationships, mindset, culture. When I flying in the Air Force, the planes I was flying were literally older than I was. They're almost as old as I was. And so the training program was pretty solid. Like, we knew what needed to happen, we knew how to fly the plane, but that's just not the case in a lot of places. And the. And I think the interesting thing is a lot of organizations use that as a reason to not do training because, like, look, everything's always changing. It's just like, we can't go from one day to the other. We don't know what's going on. And at least in my experience, even in the most chaotic of organizations, 70, 80% of it isn't changing, you know, and so there is still a lot. And that's why I, at least from the outside, was really excited when I was watching Anduril scaling. There was a clear investment in training. Like just the number of job wrecks I would see come across my LinkedIn feed that were training related. I was like, okay, these people are focused on this, which got me really excited. But yeah, it is, it's being realistic about where your organization is at, the broader organization, and being realistic about what training can then honestly do and what you should focus on.

Speaker A: No, exactly. That speaks to volumes of like training is, it's the cheesy metaphor. But I tell our leaders, like we view training as a product just as like how you're investing in all these things for your product. Training is our product that we push out to support, you know, the outcomes that you guys have. So yeah, we do appreciate the investment that the companies put behind all of that as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's a perfect shift then to the final topic I kind of want to dive into with is that relationship between training and leaders. I think I'm less interested in like the top level leaders because like, yeah, like you need executive buy in or you need support for resources and stuff, but more like director. And below, like how do you think about developing relationships with leaders throughout manufacturing and kind of what do you need from them to make training successful?

Speaker A: I think that's a great question. I usually look for like co ownership of those outcomes that training can provide because we know that training teaches the skill. But back to like OJT and the work, you know, the transfer of that skill actually happens in the day to day. So if we're setting standards, if we're saying, hey, this is what good looks like, I need leaders to support and back that up. Right. Hey, if you're seeing people do it differently on the floor and you're not reinforcing it, training will only go so far. And so for us it's a lot of a partnership of like understanding, hey, well what are the issues you guys are seeing and need corrected and then what can you commit to? If we are to set that standard of hey, this is what it needs to be and that sometimes that doesn't even fall just on leadership. It's pulling in your functions in quality, putting uh, pulling in functions and safety and being like what are you guys seeing consistently across the board? And is this something that we should be investing resources in and would you be happy if this is what we implemented more often? Not everyone is really excited to support the efforts, but it's a lot of like, root cause analysis and building bridges between different teams to drive to. Yeah, that's what we want people to hold the line on.

Speaker B: Yeah. It is so important, as you said, to like, really understand where things are at and where you want them to be. And the worst thing that can happen. I always say it's like if you say anytime this thing happens, we shut down the production line and then the person walks out the door and that thing happens and the production line doesn't shut down, like, okay, it's all gone. Like none of the training is lost, all credibility. And so matching those expectations is essential.

Speaker A: It's so funny, in leadership training we say this thing where it's like people don't remember what was said, they remember what's reinforced. And so you can say it till you're blue in the face, but if you're not holding people accountable to it, then people are going to walk away just continuing what they've always done.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true. And it's just, it's great to, uh, I think this is a really important thing to highlight for training and especially for managers is if you're trying to make a change on your team, a skill change, a behavioral change, and you know, you have a training team that you can work with, it's never about, hey, go training team, go fix this for me, it's, hey, training team, how can we work together to fix this? Because training, uh, can never own it all. You can never own it all. It's all about how do we work together to identify the problem and then reinforce whatever that that solution is.

Speaker A: Yeah, people talk a lot about how communication is important in the business, but I think honestly, when you're working somewhere that moves as quickly as it does, change happens really fast. Which means communication also has to be like, right up in line with them. Communicate, communicate, communicate. I think over communication is not actually as big of as a problem as under communication.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: As leaders, I think we also get inundated with so many different meetings and signals of change that we forget that the teams below us might not have had those same signals.

Speaker B: Yeah, one point I wanted to double click on because you mentioned the speed and we kind of touched us on this before of, of understanding, you know, being realistic about what training can do and, and how rigorous the training can be given how quickly everything's changing. How do you decide what we can train because it is solidified enough. And what you can't or what you should address versus what you shouldn't address. How. How do you evaluate that?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think from the heart of it, it's like understanding, hey, is this a baseline skill that's applicable across multiple things? Like, is this just a hard truth? And the application, the specifics of the application is what's changing. But there should be probably a baseline of. But at its core, this will always be the case. And if so, we could totally train to the core. We push that out and we start building in levers of. And by the way, for the specifics in X, Y and Z, you guys will have to use judgment. Read more resources, talk to your managers about those. Yeah, and we set that up pretty quickly. I think for elements where we say, hey, we're going to, you know, hold the horses and take a pause on this is we ask questions like, hey, how ready are you guys on this process to be rolled out? Like, if you're telling the audience that they have to do X, Y, Z, but there's no controls or no workstation to each even do X, Y and Z.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Then we probably shouldn't roll it out yet because people are going to take this training, expect to be able to do the process you've told them. Um, but nothing is in place for them to enact it. Then absolutely. We will be pausing on this until we have a better path forward.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Or even quality control and inspections. Like, if we're saying this is the quality standard, but we can't inspect to that standard, and we don't have any feedback mechanisms to tell you whether or not you met that standard. Well, then it, it's not going to go anywhere.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, precisely.

Speaker B: You know, through this discussion, I think really it's just like it's pushing kind of a, an eyes wide open strategy to training, you know, and it's all about communication and clear understanding of a good relationship between training, leadership, management, understanding what needs to happen, what's possible, and then working together to drive towards a solution so that nothing's happening in a silo.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Awesome. Well, this has been great, Ashley. I'm really excited we got to chat about this. It feels like every day there's a new headline about what Andrew is doing. Uh, and I'm here for it. Having been in the military myself, I actually just finished reading about the whole Pre World War II industrialization effort and everything that transformed the country with that. Um, it's really excited to see what anduril's doing and so many other companies. So. And especially since, given that you just traveled back from Australia, so. So thank you so much for. For taking the time. It's been great chatting with you.

Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Uh, Matt, it's always a pleasure talking to you. And yeah, it's been a wild ride here at Hand, but I could not be happier to be working for such a mission driven company.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much.

Speaker A: Thank you.