The Making of a Chief Engineer 

“I am calling to ask you to accept the role of Chief Engineer for the Excavator Product Line,” said the Vice President responsible for Caterpillar’s global excavator business. The position would be in Akashi, Japan. I accepted immediately.  

At the time, my family and I were on vacation at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. I had prepared my wife for this possibility, but the big challenge was telling our children. Our oldest was an adult living on her own. However, our son was entering high school, and our youngest daughter was entering junior high. Moving to Japan is not something most adults prepare for. Moreover, there is no way a young person could anticipate anything beyond leaving what is known and comfortable to something unknown. 

I’m not sure I felt too much different than my kids.  

I had spent the last six years as the Director of Engineering of the Building Construction Products Division of Caterpillar, Inc., located in Cary, North Carolina. The division heavily dependent on the North American housing market and had weathered the global financial crisis in 2008. What now seems a distant memory taught me lessons I would not want to relearn today. The division was hemorrhaging cash, making it an easy target for the Board to take action to improve the overall company. A complete business turnaround was needed and implemented. Being on the other side of that chaos was comfortable for me. We were in the final stage of building a new design and development center. The business was thriving and, better still, profitable. 

The call to be a Chief Engineer is not unlike the call to be an officer of the company. There are only so many slots available and many desire the role. However, in today’s world, the pool of candidates to become a Chief Engineer is a shallower pond than the sea of candidates for roles leading the company. I hypothesize that the elements that make a Chief Engineer are rarer than the ingredients necessary to lead a division. I support this position with fifteen years of experience working depth charts for the Chief Engineer role alongside those working depth charts for product managers and officers.  

I will not venture into whether Chief Engineers are born or made. It’s a bit of both. The table stakes are simple: one must be technically strong, mentally tough, and organizationally connected. Put simply, you need to know your stuff, have grit, and be able to influence up and down the company.  

Demonstrate technical strength 

While it’s obvious a Chief Engineer must be technically strong, it’s a point worth dwelling on. Disciplined thinking in the product and processes of development overcomes many of the behavioral risks involved in program execution. Pressure from executives to make the program go faster at less cost is inevitable. I witnessed an officer once say, “You need to go twice as fast for half the cost.” He was dead serious. While it is ludicrous to think such a thing possible, a Chief Engineer must constantly deal with that sort of pressure.  

Influence the organization 

If technical competence prevents getting entangled in impossible situations, then organizational influence allows the Chief to direct the ship in a positive direction even when facing unreasonable demands. It would have done me no good to argue with the officer about the unrealistic nature of the request. Removing or replacing the Chief with someone who will agree does no good for the program or the team. How the Chief Engineer rights the ship after being challenged publicly is critical. 

Another important element of influence is maintaining momentum across the company and the supply base. As Excavator Chief Engineer, I spent as much time with other parts of the company and suppliers as with the engineers in my own department. This maintains focus. My department was dedicated because it was our product, but the suppliers and other company divisions had other projects to work on. I needed to ensure the Excavator program had the greatest mindshare. This may sound selfish, but it is necessary to keep the program on track. 

Show mental toughness 

Grit is synonymous with mental toughness. One dictionary definition for “grit” is: courage and resolve; strength of character. I recall a discussion with a Chief on how he wanted his children to have grit. He knew they would be better people if they had to persevere through trials in life. This is also true for engineers. Going through challenging situations does two things. First, it teaches how to deal with a situation that seems out of control. Second, it builds confidence that you can get through it. 

Few things in the engineering world challenge are as challenging as dealing with a disappointed and angry customer or facing an assembly line shut down because of parts you are responsible for. This is when mental toughness grows and refines. There is a vast difference between the problems I faced early in my career and the ones I encountered later. The difference wasn’t in the magnitude of the problems I faced but in how I learned to approach them. As a Chief Engineer, mental toughness is crucial because it gives your team and the entire organization confidence that the issue will be resolved. Like a ship in a storm, a passenger is comforted by the captain’s calmness and would be terrified if the captain screamed and shouted as if things were out of control. 

Acquire experience(s) 

As I reflect on the best Chief Engineers I know, I see a common trait: experiences, not just experience. Many people think that experience simply means time doing something. More importantly, however, is going through the experience completely. The best Chief Engineers I know have deep knowledge not just of their machine but of the subsystems inside that machine. One specialized in the operator station and the user interface, another had deep experience in hydraulics, and another in transmission and powertrain design. The art of product development is managing the system interactions and trade-offs to create a great machine.  

As a Chief Engineer oversees a new product program, irrespective of the end product, they are constantly thinking about the elements of the product that are changing and how the changes in the various parts will impact the final product. Past experience developing a piece of the machine or system makes them more effective at knitting the machine together. Changing too many things at the same time compounds the risk to the program. The Chief’s experience dictates what system gets changed and how much change is manageable.  

Experiences refine an engineer’s metal and qualify them for their next steps. Experience builds technical competency, enabling an engineer to exert mental toughness in challenging situations. As these things occur a confidence is built in and around the engineer making them a candidate for the role of Chief. It is this confidence, not arrogance, in their preparation that enables someone to become an excellent Chief Engineer.  

Consequently, organizations must be mindful of allowing chief engineers to gain experiences, not just by being involved at a point in time, but by taking a concept into production. This end-to-end experience allows a Chief to see things before they come to fruition—good and bad. Too often, people abandon a job midway. Imagine an Olympic athlete stopping in the middle of a race and saying, “I don’t need to finish the race; I know what it is like to be in the Olympics, so I’m ready for the next thing.” This sounds crazy, yet many jump from job to job without gaining the complete experience of putting the product they are responsible for into production.  

Early in my career, I was moved into a computer simulation role in fuel systems, a component within the engine. This was at a time when a young engineer was told what he would do next. “Steve, we’re going to move you into an analysis role. I think the product is going to fail, so it will be beneficial for you to see this from the inside,” exclaimed my boss. That is encouraging I thought but he explained that they would find me a new job if that happened. Witnessing the complexities of component development was the prize, not necessarily the product itself.  

This element of people development is underappreciated in many parts of the world today and is the rare earth element contained in the handful of great Chiefs. Allowing people the time to go through component, system, and complete machine (product) programs is the foundation of great engineers and, ultimately, the fertile fields from which future Chief Engineers will be picked. When HR processes or organizational dynamics inhibit the cultivation of this field, it ravages the harvest like a seven-year drought. Great Chief Engineers protect the fields they cultivate because they know these are the plants of future generations of engineers and likely the next Chief.