One of the habits that can make you a very good engineer—or highly effective in any technical role—can sometimes make dealing with people surprisingly difficult.
You are trained to understand the problem, gather the relevant information, reduce uncertainty and arrive at a defensible answer.
Then somebody becomes upset with you.
Or a team member isn’t performing.
Or two people give you completely different accounts of the same meeting.
Or your manager says, “You need to be more influential,” without explaining exactly what that means.
Suddenly the rules have changed.
There may be no calculation you can check, no standard you can consult and no single objectively correct answer.
And if you instinctively approach that problem the same way you approach an engineering problem, you can end up thinking about it harder and harder — without getting any closer to solving it.
The problem isn’t your analytical ability
Your analytical ability is enormously valuable.
The difficulty is that human problems often contain variables that can’t be measured accurately.
What is the other person really thinking?
Why did they react that way?
Are they angry, threatened, embarrassed or simply tired?
What aren’t they telling you?
You can gather more information, but at some point you still have to act without knowing everything.
For many technically minded people, that uncertainty is surprisingly uncomfortable.
And that’s where overthinking can begin.
You replay the conversation.
You analyse what you said.
You try to predict every possible response.
You search for the “right” answer.
But sometimes there isn’t one.
A different kind of skill
Good leadership doesn’t mean abandoning logic.
It means recognising when logic alone is no longer enough.
Sometimes the better questions are:
What do I actually know?
What am I assuming?
What might this person be experiencing?
What conversation needs to happen next?
You don’t need perfect certainty before you act.
You need enough understanding to take the next sensible step — and enough flexibility to adjust when you learn more.
That’s a very different skill from solving an equation.
But for many engineers who move into leadership, it becomes just as important as technical expertise.
When you first became responsible for people, what surprised you most about how different it was from solving technical problems?
I’d be interested to hear your experience.
#EngineeringLeadership #TechnicalLeadership #PeopleLeadership #Engineering
