Afleveringen
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When a candidate lists everything wrong with their previous employer, an engineer’s instinct is to hear it as information about the previous employer. It is often better read as information about the candidate. This episode walks through a hire Chris made almost fifteen years ago that ended with the word draconian in a resignation letter, and the pre-mortem that would have caught it in the interview.
What You Will Take Away
A candidate’s complaints about their previous role are data about them, not just data about the role.Two readings of the same complaint: they want the opposite, or they want to be the one deciding what comes next. Both describe real people, but different people.How to run a hire pre-mortem: imagine the hire failing in six months and check whether the answer was already sitting in the interview.The direct interview question that surfaces which axis a candidate is actually on.Why wanting a values match to be true is how you skip the second reading.
Engineering leaders hiring for senior roles who need to read past what candidates want them to hear.Managers who have been burned by a hire that looked like a values match in the interview and turned into a mismatch six months in.Engineers moving into hiring authority for the first time and building an interview process from scratch.Anyone who has sat across from a strong candidate whose complaints about their last shop sounded too aligned to be a coincidence.
Who This Is ForFollow Re:Engineered wherever you get your podcasts.
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Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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A non-compete signed in good faith does not care about good faith when conditions change. Engineers know this. They build redundant pumps before commissioning starts because hindsight is expensive and foresight is cheap. The same engineers will sign contracts that constrain their future on the assumption that the relationship lasts, the business holds shape, and the timeline cooperates. None of those are guaranteed. Episode 027 is about the pre-mortem you skip when the runway looks long, and what it costs when the runway shortens.
What You Will Take Away
The pre-mortem engineers run on projects, and the one they skip on their own careerThe contractual equivalent of a redundant pump: sunset clauses, carve-outs, mutual termination triggersWhy pre-mortems are insurance, and why insurance gets skipped when the basement has never floodedThe failure mode in a souring agreement: optimism on all sides, and a missed pre-mortemThe selective rigor that engineers apply on projects but skip on their own commitmentsA simple question to run before signing: imagine this is binding me in a situation neither of us anticipated. What would have to be true for that to happen?Who This Is For
Engineers about to sign a non-compete, non-solicit, or equity agreement they have not stress-testedEngineers who have accepted a role on the assumption of a long runway nobody has actually guaranteedEngineers who run failure-mode analysis on every project and have never run one on a contractEngineers who feel a clause is restrictive but are not sure what to ask forFollow Re:Engineered wherever you get your podcasts.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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When you get promoted over a former peer, your structural authority changes on a specific date. The relationship does not. Most engineers assume it self-adjusts, or they avoid naming the shift because the conversation feels awkward. It does not self-adjust. And the longer you wait, the more expensive the gap becomes, because the friend card only gets played once the structural reality and the relational contract are running on different settings.
What You Will Take Away
Why the managing-former-peers failure modes all trace back to a single skipped conversation, not a lack of communication skillThe three-piece structure of a renaming conversation: what stays, what doesn’t, and how to handle the collisionWhat that conversation actually sounds like in plain language, not HR-speakWhy the renaming is a recurring calibration, not a one-time event at the promotion pointThree observable signs the old contract is still running your work relationshipWho This Is For
Engineers who were recently promoted to manage someone they used to work alongsideTechnical leaders who sense friction with a former peer but haven’t named what is driving itManagers who have been in the role for a while and suspect some peer-era dynamics never got addressedFollow Re:Engineered wherever you get your podcasts.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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The work you handed off came back half done, so you figured the person wasn’t ready or you delegated too soon. Wrong read. The work didn’t bounce because they failed. It bounced because you handed over the easy part and kept the part that mattered. Delegation isn’t one move. It’s three transfers at the handoff, then a hold afterward, and most engineers do the first transfer and skip everything else.
Chris walks through a project where he handed the project management work to an internal PM but quietly kept the client relationship, the day-to-day context, the gotchas, the trade-offs. When he had to step away, the team was left deciding blind on the part he never transferred. They did the best they could with the information they had. The problem was the rest of it was sitting with him. This episode is the mechanics behind that failure and how to avoid it: the outcome, the authority, the context, and why taking the work back the moment it comes back at 80 percent is where the whole thing collapses.
What You Will Take Away
Why “I need to trust my team more” is the wrong diagnosis. The mechanism isn’t how controlling you are, it’s what you actually transferred at the handoff.The difference between transferring a task and transferring an outcome. Task assignment keeps the definition of done in your head, so every judgment call routes back to you.The three-decision test for authority. If you can’t name three calls the person can make without checking with you, you transferred labor, not authority, and you’re still the bottleneck.Why authority without context sets someone up to fail with full permission. Judgment runs on the why, the constraints, and the trade-offs you already rejected, and if you keep those, they decide blind.The third path on check-ins, between swooping in when you’re nervous and going dark until something breaks. Pre-scheduled and structured, so your nerves don’t drive it and their silence doesn’t hide a problem until it’s expensive.Why holding the line at 80 percent is part of the mechanism, not a personality trait. The moment you take the work back, authority snaps to you and the person learns not to fully commit.
Engineers who delegated something and watched it bounce straight back, then assumed the person wasn’t readyNew leads who feel busier after handing work off than they did beforeAnyone who’s said “I’ll just handle this one” and meant it as a fix rather than a relapseEngineers who heard episode four on the indispensability trap and want the actual mechanics for getting outTechnical leads who keep getting pulled back into work they thought they’d already delegated
Who This Is ForFollow Re:Engineered wherever you get your podcasts.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineering judgment gets treated as something mysterious. A gift. Something senior engineers have and junior ones don’t, with no clear path between them. That framing is convenient for the senior engineers and useless for everyone else. Judgment is good decision-making folded together with technical knowledge, lived experience, and consideration of who comes after you. Each input is learnable, each one alone produces something worse than judgment, and bad judgment persists because it still looks like rigor from the outside.
What You Will Take Away
Engineering judgment isn’t a special category. It’s good judgment applied to engineering work, built from technical knowledge, lived experience, and consideration of who builds, operates, and maintains the design after you.Each component matters on its own. Technical knowledge alone gets you correct but useless. Lived experience alone gets you a gut call without rigor. Downstream consideration alone gets you good intentions without competence.Bad judgment doesn’t look like incompetence from the outside. It looks like rigor. That’s why it persists, and why nobody catches it until the operator is the one paying for it.When the three inputs are working, judgment doesn’t show up as heroics. It shows up as a hatch nobody argued about.Lived experience doesn’t respect discipline boundaries. The electrical engineer made a structural call because the input was there.Credentials get you the title. Judgment is what you build from there, by asking, listening, staying curious, and integrating what you can’t calculate.Who This Is For
Engineers who have been told to “use judgment” but never given a definition that holds up.Engineers who have watched senior colleagues make calls they couldn’t explain and want to know how that gets built.New engineers being graded on judgment in performance reviews with no visible criteria.Engineers who have taken the technically correct path and been overruled by an operator’s gripe, and wondered why.Senior engineers who want to teach judgment to their teams but don’t have a way to break it down.Follow Re:Engineered wherever you get your podcasts.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Most engineers stepping into leadership have the credentials. The degree, the certification, the years on the job. What they don’t have yet is earned credibility, and that gap is real whether they acknowledge it or not. There are two ways to handle it: assert your way across it, or learn your way across it. The first closes the gap on paper. The second closes it in reality. This episode draws on a conversation with a retired Canadian Armed Forces lieutenant colonel whose first six months in command maps almost perfectly onto what happens when engineers get their first leadership role.
What You Will Take Away
The gap between your title and your earned credibility is real on day one. Asserting your way across it makes it invisible. Learning your way across it makes it temporary.Two failure modes show up when engineers step into leadership: assertion mode, where the team learns to wait you out, and the disappearing act, where you defer to everyone and show up with no point of view.The third path is holding the role clearly: make decisions, stay responsible, and be honest about what you don’t know while staying genuinely curious about what the people around you do.Your credentials got you in the room. They don’t get you the room. That part is earned through actual work and actual conversations, not through asserting it away.Military colleges have a reputation for producing officers who arrive knowing everything. Engineering has the same problem. The iron ring does not confer credibility. It starts the clock on earning it.The engineers who build credibility fastest treat the people around them as the resource, not as the problem.One question worth sitting with: who around you actually knows things you don’t yet? Name them. Then figure out how you’re using that resource.Who This Is For
Engineers who just got promoted and are trying to prove they deserve it.New managers who feel the pull to over-explain and over-certify every decision.Engineers who have gone quiet in a leadership role because they don’t feel ready.Anyone who has watched a new leader assert authority and seen the team tune them out.Engineers who know the gap is real but haven’t named it yet.Follow Re:Engineered wherever you get your podcasts.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineers think they have a communication problem. They have a system problem. Every individual communication failure compounds into a predictive model that other people run of you, and that model is what gets used in rooms you’re not in. Chris tells the story of being told over beers that some of his clients thought he was a real piece of work, then unpacks how he’d been counting only the deliberate signals while ignoring the noise. The capstone of the Communication System arc, this episode names the cumulative effect of every communication act and gives engineers an audit for predicting and adjusting the model their decision surface is running of them.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineers don’t fail in high-stakes rooms because their analysis is wrong. They fail because they’re answering in the wrong unit. A project manager walks a client through a scope change in hours; the client asks for dollars; the PM keeps giving hours. The problem isn’t accuracy — it’s currency. Every room runs on a different one: internally it’s hours and feasibility, for clients it’s cost and timeline, for senior leadership it’s exposure and consequence. When you force the other person to do the conversion, you’re making them do your job. This episode introduces a single pre-meeting question and a three-part structure — impact, exposure, recommendation — that compresses technical analysis into something decision-ready without losing the rigor underneath.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineers don't lie about what they don't know. They go quiet. That instinct is correct in technical work, where you don't sign off on a calc you haven't verified. It backfires in leadership, where silence isn't neutral and the room fills it in with whatever leaks through. This episode names the three failure modes that look like professionalism from the inside and ghosting from the outside, and gives the three-part pattern engineers can use instead: what you know, what you don't, and when you'll know more.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineers operate on a transmission model. You send, therefore you’ve communicated. But communication with people who have to act on the information isn’t a transmission. It’s a confirmed receipt. Chris breaks down a sixteen-month project that ended in a small-talk-to-firestorm phone call because critical scope and budget changes had been technically delivered, but never confirmed. The fix is mechanical: a three-step protocol that turns email into the record and the call into the actual communication.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineers default to comprehensiveness because leaving something out feels wrong. In a design review or on a set of drawings, that instinct is correct. In leadership, it backfires. The person asking the question usually isn’t requesting a briefing — they’re trying to make a decision, and when you deliver more than they asked for, you don’t look thorough. You look like you can’t tell what matters from what doesn’t. Using a story about a technically brilliant direct report who buried every answer in context, Chris walks through the design target engineers need to swap in: tailoring the response to what the receiver can actually use, with precision held in reserve rather than delivered by default. The active move is a single question to ask before the next significant response.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineers can have every leadership mechanic in place and still be invisible to the people who matter. The problem isn’t the quality of work. It’s an undesigned signal path between that work and the people making decisions about their career. This episode introduces the Signal Path Audit: map the decision surface, trace how information about your work currently reaches each person on it, and close the gap where the path is too long or too lossy. Using a personal story where structural compression attributed his work to someone else, Chris names the distinction that unlocks the whole problem: self-promotion says “look at me”; signal design says “here’s the information you need to make a good decision.” This episode closes the Relationship System arc. Visibility is the output signal of the external operating system built across the last four episodes.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineers treat conflict like a system fault — find the root cause, fix it, restore steady state. In human systems, that instinct doesn’t resolve conflict. It suppresses it, and suppressed conflict doesn’t disappear. It migrates downstream and detonates where you have the least control and the highest cost. Using a real situation where avoiding early friction with a young engineer led to a near fist fight with a client and a threat to blacklist the company, Chris walks through the pattern: block the signal upstream, it explodes downstream. The episode distinguishes productive friction (signal) from destructive friction (noise) and gives three concrete moves for reading and using conflict instead of eliminating it.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineers trying to influence peers, contractors, and cross-functional teams face a total authority gap — and they handle it badly. The default moves are logic and persuasion, which creates resistance, or avoidance, which creates a self-built bottleneck. This episode introduces the third path: lateral influence built on shared stakes. Using two summers working as construction manager for a client — where the contractors answered to nobody he managed — Chris shows how one plainly stated fact moved faster than any airtight case. The mechanic isn’t persuasion. It’s finding the problem that’s already everyone’s problem and naming it out loud.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Most engineers are deliberate about the signal they send downward and sideways. The upward signal gets left to chance — not because it seems unimportant, but because “managing up” sounds like politics. This episode reframes it: your boss is a stakeholder, and you already know how to manage stakeholders. The failure isn’t effort, it’s misclassification. Three failure modes — the silent performer, the firehose, the always-fine — all produce the same result: a boss making decisions about your career on incomplete information you had but never sent. The fix is mechanical, not political: own the agenda, calibrate the signal, and stop leaving the most leverage-heavy relationship in your career on autopilot.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Most engineers apply the same level of analytical rigor to every decision regardless of what it actually requires. That’s not thoroughness — it’s a mismatch, and it signals to everyone watching that you don’t trust the team, yourself, or the process to handle uncertainty. This episode introduces decision triage: the skill of classifying what a decision requires before committing to a level of analysis, then matching the rigor to the classification. Using a real example from a water system repair, Chris walks through what triage looks like in practice — including a four-question framework engineers can run in under two minutes. The episode closes the arc: precision is about being right; triage is about being appropriately right.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Most engineers stepping into leadership already know what they should do differently. This episode is about why they don’t do it consistently — and it’s not a discipline problem. The solve-it reflex persists because identity updates on feedback, and the old feedback loop is faster, cleaner, and still running. Using a control systems analogy — a system with a long time constant competing against a faster parallel loop — Chris explains why the new identity keeps losing on response time. The episode closes with a single diagnostic question and one concrete action to start collecting the evidence the new identity actually needs.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Engineers don’t avoid performance conversations because they’re conflict-averse. They avoid them because they misclassify them as irreversible. They wait until the pattern is undeniable, the evidence is airtight, and the case is built - and by then the conversation has become a corrective action instead of a calibration. This episode names that as a decision error, applies the influence framework from Episode 10 to the hardest conversation most engineers keep delaying, and makes the case that the signal to act is when it still feels premature. Not when you’re sure.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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Most engineers trying to create alignment are optimizing the output without understanding the inputs. This episode breaks influence down as a system with three inputs: sequencing context before conclusions, lowering the cost of dissent, and ensuring every exchange ends with clear movement. Using a controls engineering story that will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever run a pre-shutdown meeting, Chris unpacks why the same engineer, the same plan, and the same room can produce two completely different outcomes - and why the difference isn’t persuasion skill. It’s system design
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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In this conversation, Chris Stasiuk explores the challenges engineers face when transitioning into leadership roles, particularly the pitfalls of over-relying on logic. He emphasizes that while correctness is crucial in engineering, leadership requires a different approach that values influence, trust, and emotional intelligence. Stasiuk discusses how this disconnect can lead to ineffective leadership, where compliance replaces commitment, and teams feel disengaged. He encourages leaders to reflect on their reliance on logic and consider how to foster genuine alignment and ownership within their teams.
Send us Fan Mail
Re:Engineered is a podcast for engineers and technical professionals navigating the shift from technical excellence to leadership responsibility.
Hosted by Chris Stasiuk, a professional engineer with over 25 years in engineering consulting and leadership roles, the show treats leadership, communication, and decision-making as systems to understand — not personality traits to fake. No buzzwords. No corporate theater. Just clear thinking about how technical people actually lead.
Explore episodes, transcripts, and related resources at https://chrisstasiuk.com/podcast/.
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