The Real Job of Leadership in Technical Teams with Nancy Cable

Episode notes

Most people think leadership in technical companies is about being the most knowledgeable person in the room. Knowing the answers, setting the direction, and solving the hardest problems yourself. But the longer you spend actually doing the job, the more obvious it becomes that this is almost never what matters. The real challenge is much simpler to describe and much harder to execute. Getting people aligned on what actually matters, making sure they’re working on the right problems, and then building the environment where they can keep improving how they do it. Most teams don’t fail because they lack talent, they fail because they slowly drift away from focus without realizing it. In this episode, I sit down with Nancy Cable , Senior Director of Manufacturing at Ursa Major, to talk about what leadership actually looks like inside a fast-scaling aerospace company. We get into how she thinks about building and scaling manufacturing systems, why hiring for attitude and initiative matters more than pure technical skill in her world, and how she thinks about managing teams that are growing quickly in both size and complexity.

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