Leadership Questions
Kyle McGinley, Maintenance Engineer
2026-01-13
Kyle’s been an engineering for 5+ years and working on going from individual contributor (IC) to the “front line leader” level. He’s a friend who I always try to bounce thoughts off at work so figured if I’m working on getting more insights into current leaders and how they think about the role/responsibilities he would also be a good brain to pick.
I sent him an email with some sample questions, and he took a day or two to formulate his responses below. I’ll ask him another round of questions in the future.
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Here’s some questions I’d love to know your thoughts/answer to.
When you are in a meeting or seeking input from your team, what has been the best way to get honesty/candor from your team?
Whenever I’ve worked to influence my team (whether it be to get them to give feedback, participate, be honest about their thoughts about something), I’ve done it by appealing to things that they want by using a central justification.
For best practice – appealing to the team through the idea of improving our jobs to make their lives easier.
For star team – appealing to the team through the idea of making their job safer
In these examples – I focus on the bottom line for them. If they believe in why being honest, or why being productive is important, then that will make it easy for them to do so.
I also talk below about what one of my old bosses did – he sent an anonymous survey every month to the team to ask for feedback and input on his performance. That helped make the environment feel a lot more open and transparent.
What has been the hardest “leadership skill” for you to develop in yourself? How did you go about it?
One skill that always gets overlooked is learning how to negotiate as a leader. As an IC, I don’t really have a lot of opportunity to practice this so it’s been a hard skill to develop. When filling in for Terri as DOA for a couple weeks, I had to learn how to negotiate with different groups. With everyone being “short” it becomes a challenge when a job falls on the border of shaky job role boundaries. I had to learn negotiating with other groups to focus on being transparent and appealing to what they want. A couple examples are the following:
Negotiating with ops to see if they can PSSR tomorrow vs at midnight tonight – asking “what is the benefit we’re looking at for keeping someone over”, “could we consider accepting the risk to wait 5-6 more hours to avoid an upset in an employee’s outside life”, etc
Negotiating jobs with other groups – working on a you do me a favor we’ll do you one, working on boundaries between groups, ensuring we have good communication/respect between the two, etc.
This is still a skill I’m working on and I’m sure I’ll have a lot to learn about this whenever I eventually get to my first FLL role. I think what makes this easier is to have clearly established boundaries between roles and to develop great relationships with the other team leads and operations folks.
Negotiating becomes a lot different from a leader’s perspective than from an ICs perspective. If you lose negotiating as an IC, typically it just means more work for you. If you lose negotiating as a leader, it typically means more work for your team. How well your relationships are with other groups, and how well you define your boundaries can now directly have an effect on people other than yourself.
What level of the org did you feel the most power to change the “culture” in a positive way?
In terms of job role, I felt like my role in operations had the most power to change the culture. Generally, the more centralized you are to the work that gets done, the more influence you can have over how that work gets done. When I was in operations, everyone came to me for everything. I felt like I had a lot of power to say “this is how we should do it” and “this is the way we should do it”. I think I drove a lot of the culture at Clemens by showing them how efficient an engineer could get work done. That step up in productivity made people at Clemens more excited to get things done and changed the culture to have things be a little more productive in what they wanted to accomplish. Part of that was also Shaym who challenged the folks under him to accomplish more than what they had originally done in the past.
I feel that the superintendents have the most power to sway the culture in a positive way. Managers are usually disconnected enough from the day to day - look for the bottom line in what the superintendents try to achieve and relay feedback from the VPs. First line leaders are the liaison between ICs and superintendents, and a lot of their job is to advocate for/protect the ICs and be a guide for the day-to-day fires. Superintendents are the ones that are close enough to the ground for them to understand what’s going on but far enough above that their words have a deep impact. I’ve always thought of superintendents as the “culture leaders” of a department.
How can I make good changes at my level without upsetting the apple cart? aka How to influence without “authority”
From what I’ve learned, change without authority needs several things:
An appeal to the needs of the person you are trying to influence. What’s in it for them? How does this help them?
Honesty from yourself – why is this change important to you? How can that person help you?
How does this change help the company? What is the return for the change you are trying to make?
Support from someone with authority (if you can get it)
Who do you look to as a great leader (inside or outside of CPC)? What about them do you admire/want to imitate?
I’ve had some great bosses in the past.
Scott Clary was my boss while I was in PEFS. One thing I remember about Scott was that he was always excited about the work I would do. It would feel like he was my cheerleader – and that made even the most menial tasks seem really important. I ran torque calcs for the 1792 TUS and he loved calling me a “torque calc SME” throughout the whole turnaround. That made me feel really special and made my work feel really important. One thing I will always take from Scott is he sent out an anonymous survey every quarter to his team reviewing his supervising skills. The survey would allow people to give him feedback and let him be better as a supervisor. That showed several things to me. First, that he even cared about feedback from the people under him at all (an excellent quality in a supervisor). Second, that he was always looking for ways to improve. Third, that he was not above everyone else and was far from flawless – it felt like it was him admitting that he makes mistakes as well. I’ll be taking that survey idea for myself whenever I become an FLL.
Shaym was an excellent supervisor as well. One of Shaym’s great qualities is that he knew EVERYTHING. Shaym would know what you were about to say as soon as you walked into his office. He knew every pipeline/cavern configuration, almost more so than the ops specialists who worked there for 25+ years (he was only at Clemens for a couple years). For every outage, unit upset, etc. – Shaym was like 7 steps ahead of anything that could come up. I learned from him that knowledge is truly what influences power and leadership. If you know everything and are confident in it, people will naturally follow you and feel confident in your decisions. I always felt comfortable being under Shaym because I knew nothing would slip past him. It made selling things and getting work done under him a LOT more difficult but when he approved something, I could be sure that it was absolutely correct. Shaym also challenged his employees a lot. Clemens had never had an outage where they worked several things at once and Shaym pushed a lot of people who didn’t have experience in outage planning to perform. He said a lot of things like “Clemen’s first treater outage” that would make us feel like we were working on something important and monumental and I think that inspired folks to be a lot more excited about what they worked on. He pushed me to become a lot more thorough in the work I did – which was quite a challenge as only a second year GRAD.
More selfish/personal questions:
What do you see as my growth opportunities? What can I do to improve blind spots and move from a good engineer to great engineer?
Growth as an IC:
You should know, in my opinion, that you are on your way to the top caliber of engineers in this company (on the way to compete with the great ICs like Ben, Jack Huber, Pellerin, etc). I think what defines greatness in an engineer is two things: knowledge and drive.
Knowledge-wise – you have an extreme strength from your time in Reliability in your last role. Obviously, everyone learns more with time but your hunger for knowledge makes continuous growth in this area inevitable. To further sharpen the sword, you could probably spend more time with the rotating reliability guys to increase your skill in rotating (since you already have a ton of knowledge in fixed). I know you ask your OEs if there anything you can help with but maybe you could ask them more things like “what are you working on today”, “how did you analyze that process trend”, “what moves are you making to optimize the furnace and why?”. That might add some more value to those 9:30 visits. I don’t think this area is a weakness by any means but those are just some suggestions if I had to think of something to improve your knowledge further.
Drive-wise – I think you’re an engineer who is driven to do something when it is urgent (defined by the unit) or has some pressure to it (from boss or compliance, etc.) Otherwise, things start to slip in your backlog. This is a typical approach for engineers in our company (I don’t think this is a Thomas specific problem). I think what moves a good engineer to a great engineer is driving items based on the value of them rather than what’s “hot” in the moment. That, and driving all work you have HARD in general regardless of priority. Driving things like the set pressure alt MOC, steam traps, level switches and driving them hard and with passion are what can set you apart from a good to a great engineer. Now, whether it makes sense to spend the effort to become a great engineer knowing that you’re leaving in the fall is something you will have to weigh and think about the time value benefit for.
Growth for a leadership role:
In my opinion, once you step into the leadership role you will eventually get, you will have to make a couple adjustments from what I see day to day in your role here.
Become more serious about work. As a leader, your attitude and mentality can greatly influence the people you have under you. If you’re serious about doing good work, the people under you will feel that and reflect that, too. You have to care about the status of the units, the production impact, the bottom line for the company, and you have to care about the people.
Focus a lot on the how the things you say can affect your employees. I see you be a little rough with Santiago sometimes. I know he acts like he can take it but it might hurt him inside to be talked down to and to have a question he asked feel like it was stupid. I think in this setting practicing this is alright because he will always have Terri to fall back on and give feedback to, but I think you need to watch out for this whenever you actually get into a real leadership role. Your direct reports won’t tell you they’re feeling hurt due to being afraid of losing their job. It might create resentment and cause people to leave. It’s always better to veer on the safer side for things like this – making sure Santiago feels valid in the questions he asks no matter how insane they are, making sure you take people’s feelings into account whenever you can, making sure people feel safe to make mistakes that they can learn from. These are all important things that not only impact how people work but these can affect their life and mood as well – a boss has such a big impact on people in and out of work.
You have a lot of strengths as well about being a leader that I see in you as well!
You can make decisions with confidence
You’re not afraid to give criticism when needed
You know when to ask for help or reach out to another group when needed
end of convo————