Beyond the Pipeline: Rethinking Engineering Careers with Cassie Leonard (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

The episode features Cassie Leonard—former aerospace technical leader, executive coach, and author of STEM Moms and Beyond the Pipeline—explaining why the traditional linear “pipeline” model of engineering careers is constricting and mislabels non-linear moves as failure. 

Drawing on expectancy-value theory, she presents an ROI-style equation for decisions: attainment, intrinsic, and utility value divided by effort, loss of valued alternatives, and cost of failure, illustrating it with her choice to leave a Fortune 100 role and start her coaching business. 

This conversation applies the framework to individual confidence and authenticity, leader strategies for retention and recognition (including “rock stars” vs. “superstars”), and cross-functional empathy when trade-offs arise. 

See more about Cassie at ELMMcoaching.com.

Visit the blog post for more: https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/s3e19/

Transcript

Dianna 0:00

You've probably made a career decision that looked wrong to everyone else, but felt completely right to you, or maybe you passed on a promotion or watched a great engineer quietly check out. There's actually an equation that explains all of it, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. Welcome back. My guest today is Cassie Leonard, aerospace engineer, executive coach, and two time bestselling author of STEM Moms and Beyond the Pipeline. With 19 years of technical leadership, including a 16 year career rising to senior aircraft integration leader, she now leads ELMM coaching where she helps technical leaders and working parents in STEM design sustainable high impact careers. Today we're talking about expectancy value theory, a framework from her work in Beyond the Pipeline that reframes how engineers make career decisions, how leaders retain the best people, and how cross-functional teams can stop talking past each other when trade-offs get hard. Let's talk to Cassie. Hi, Cassie. Welcome to the Quality During Design Show.

Cassie 1:59

Thanks for having me.

Expectancy Value ROI

Engineer ROI in Practice

Dianna 2:01

I wanted to explore your work today through three lenses, the individual engineer, the leader managing them. The cross-functional team trying to ship a product, but to really set the stage. Let's start with the core idea behind your chapter in the book, Beyond the Pipeline. Why is the traditional linear pipeline model of engineering careers failing? Failing not just people, but also the projects and the products they work on.

Cassie 2:33

A traditional pipeline, there's this idea that everyone's career professional progression could be mapped as a singular, linear, two dimensional pipeline. We get in at the beginning in college or maybe even before when we decide we want to do engineering, and you flow through this pipe of getting your bachelor's degree, maybe master's or further education, and then you go from early career, mid-career, senior positions, leadership, and then ultimately you pop out at the top as the CEO of the Fortune 500 Company. It's a very idealistic model. It implies that there is one path, everyone follows the same path, And we all know that there's this: either A, not everyone wants to be the CEO of the company, or B, there's so many paths and choices and decisions and changes and shifts and in seasons of our life throughout our careers that this idea of one singular option is exhausting and constricting.

Dianna 3:37

It is constricting because, in my engineering career too, it was if you wanted to advance or get more responsibility, you had to move into that direction. That was the path that was laid out most clearly.

Cassie 3:53

It's the easiest one to manage. And there's no curiosity about other ways we value a great employee and happy, reward them. And the leaky part of the leaky pipeline narrative is the what happens when people don't stay in that company. The analogy or the metaphor says that they drip out and they've officially failed, and I just don't buy that. And everyone who worked on this Beyond the Pipeline spoke with me agreed. That you're not failing just because you're taking your engineering degree and going somewhere else, or choosing to be a teacher or researcher, or going wherever that may be, to stay at home parent even. You're still using those skills. You're still problem solving. You're still growing and adding value So why are you constraining this to such a rigid, old model?

Dianna 4:44

I've known people that they were advanced into a management position and decided they didn't really like management. They felt like they needed to leave the company and go somewhere else as something else. Instead of backtracking or shifting sideways that, there was a perceived resistance for them to be able to move that way.

Cassie 5:06

That actually happened to me when I had 16 years in a major Fortune 100 aerospace company, and I was a senior leader. I hit this phase in my life where I had two kids at home. I had a whole lot of things I had to do outside of work, and there was no option for a senior manager to work part-time. It just, they couldn't understand how that might be. It's can I go back to being an engineer? And because they could work part-time. We don't know how you could do that either. I'm gonna make my own choices for myself then.

Dianna 5:37

I've heard that from many people. There were some cases where, people did stay in the same company and there was a perception within the rest of the organization or other teammates, that it was a little bit of a failure. I think that still exists in an engineering career, but maybe not to the same extent.

Cassie 5:56

Trying to reduce it. Conversations like this are gonna help shift that stigma. There's value in any job that you work.

Dianna 6:04

You introduce expectancy value theory as a way to explain what's actually happening when people make these career and work decisions for themselves. So how do you describe this value calculation in a way that the engineering listener for a show can immediately recognize?

Cassie 6:24

I love this equation. Jacqueline Eccles and her associates put out a paper um, using a much older equation, but she translated it into how do you apply this to why girls weren't entering, STEM careers to start. So she was looking at like fourth and fifth graders, I believe, much earlier than the conversation we're having. But it breaks it down into this calculus that we're solving every day, whether we're deciding what we wanna have for lunch or what we wanna do next in our career. It's all the same factors. And it's just how we weight them and scale them. That's entirely personal and no one knows what the other person's factors are, but we're all navigating very similar equations. So I'll break it down. It's in my book. I list it as the return on investment. So basically the decision you make and the value it has. The numerator is the sum of three types of values: attainment value, intrinsic value, and utility value. All divided by the cost: so that's the sum of the effort or the energy you expend the loss of other valued alternatives and the risk or the cost of failure if it doesn't go well.

Dianna 7:42

So you say we run through this ROI formula countless times each day. I would imagine that with big decisions like career moves or shifts in directions from, what we're deciding to do, like on a project, if something fails, what do we do now? I can see people spending a little more time considering these kind of things. But maybe they're just not thinking of it in terms of an equation. So you said you found the equation and it helped you. So how, how did it help you with some of these big decisions that you were making?

Beyond the Pipeline Myth

Cassie 8:17

Yeah, exactly. The equation itself. I don't know if everyone I'm pretty sure everyone doesn't picture this equation when they go through these very complex decisions, but as an engineer and as a self-described nerd, I love having an equation that shows the thought process that we're all spinning with. And sometimes it's hard to articulate, hard to put your finger on what it is and why you're struggling through this decision. So for me, for an example. Deciding when I wanted to, we'll go back to that example of I wanted to shift to part-time. I wanted to find more space for time, with my kids doing all the things that I was getting really excited about, like supporting women and working parents in STEM. So the attainment value would be those external, sometimes I call'em the"shoulds", the measures of success that other people can see and what it says about you Just that glow of, I'm doing awesome, but choosing to go and lead my own life, make decisions, and run a company, had some external value. But the intrinsic value, the, what does this feel like for me had a lot more positive in the, if I go and I'm gonna start my business and I make my own choices, forge my own path, that's feeding into what I value in myself, that adventurousness the curiosity and the engineer. And then the utility value is that we need to get paid. We need to eat, we need to feed our family. So that's the functional, and absolutely the engineering job would've added more utility value than my own business. But that intrinsic value felt higher. But then when we get to the cost, the effort of sitting on a WebEx call, so many hours a day. I was losing so much energy in my current job. Whereas now in my small business, I gain energy from the conversations, so the cost is much lower in that piece. The loss of valued alternatives: I did have to walk away from a really awesome job at a really cool Fortune 500 company, and I had to weigh that. That was one of the biggest decisions: was weighing walking away. And then the cost of failure: I really had to turn on that one too, because choosing to leave was much riskier than staying in this traditional path. The one that's laid out, it's clean, it's pretty, you stay in the pipeline. But I had a wonderful senior manager who told me,"You know what? If this is really what you want, go-jump. And if, in six months or a year, you decided it wasn't the path, call me and I'll bring you back right away." And so that just totally cleared risk of failure out of the way, and I made my jump.

Dianna 11:24

Wow. So you had, some support. It sounded like you talked with people about this big decision to make, and you got some of the support to lower that denominator on that ROI equation.

Cassie 11:36

I didn't have this equation, so I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time, but really you're working through these six components. Each conversation you have gives you more clarity on what are the values or what are the costs, and then you can start making thoughtful decisions.

Dianna 11:53

Because sometimes these kind of values are hard to nail down. They're, um, they're a little bit squishy, right?

Cassie 12:01

I believe squishy is a perfect word for attainment and intrinsic. Utility value is very functional. The other one I find squishy is, to use your word, the effort, because we run and we use all this energy and sometimes we don't place value in the cost of the energy to do the job. Or the savings of energy or the energy you can actually receive from making some choices.

Dianna 12:30

Oh, so the effort: the effort, is the net sum of what's left over how much you put into it versus what you get out. I can see that as useful to break down too.

Cassie 12:42

I find that a lot of times with a lot of my clients and coaching, when we spend time talking about what parts of your life, what life domains, give you energy and which ones are like a black hole, just drawing in all your energy, it starts to create a lot more awareness of the narrative of your current life. And once you have that information, you can make much more thoughtful decisions

Dianna 13:06

so this is the ROI applied to the individual level and we're talking through some examples of how an engineer, in our case, could use a framework to evaluate decisions that might look surprising from the outside, like you starting your business. or someone that was a manager deciding to back down and do more technical hands-on things instead. So you mentioned confidence, that thinking through this helps lead you to more confident decisions. So what are some of the other rewards, that engineers and people have when they truly understand their own ROI?

Cassie 13:48

Having that sense of self, that you are moving in the direction that feels authentic and resonant for you, and you're no longer doing things because someone else told you you should. And that's one of the biggest things that I took away from exploring this model was: no one knows what your equation is. They know what the six factors are, but no one knows how much, how dearly you hold effort. How little you hold utility. And so every person can look at, from the outside, see the variables and say, oh, you should do this. Let me give you some advice. But until it gets rolled into you and you get connected with your weight factors- your functions, your differential equations, whatever level of complexity you wanna add to this- it is not going to be the path that you truly are gonna find the most enjoyment, the most energy, and the most willingness to stay with it and keep forging forward. But when I look at it, I see: I don't wanna move my family to California when I have a high schooler. I do wanna go spend more time playing beach volleyball. So no one right answer with all our variables. This is not algebra, this is complex. I like to think of it'cause I have a aerodynamic degree and it's never quantifiable. We have equations, we have ways to, like measure the flow of water and all the eddies, and you can model it in a system. But running those partial differentials will give you a different answer every single time you run it. Just like a river is gonna have a different eddy and a different flow every single time. So it's not binary in any way, shape or form, and having that understanding that you're making choices based on dynamic and moving variables, but you did the best at the time of the information you had- that I believe builds confidence and helps us move forward. And maybe helps us support other people along the way as well.

Leaders Retain Talent

Dianna 15:53

I really like how you frame that, with the eddies and the point in time and that it isn't binary. if I may, if we can scale this up to one level, to the engineering leader. This is someone that is managing or leading other engineers. What's the strategic risk when leaders misunderstand or they ignore these value misalignments on their own team? Because they're the ones that are trying to help the engineer grow or put them in a position where they're going to succeed or maybe offering some of these, pipeline alternatives.

Cassie 16:30

I love this question because you're going back beyond what I wrote in the book. Akin to what I was just saying, that we aren't able to solve other people's equations and they can't solve it for you. When you're a senior leader or a manager and you're trying to help guide and coach other people in their career, or find cool opportunities and pair people with the right next steps, you don't know what their weight factors are. You don't know if this is the perfect opportunity for them. It would've been the perfect opportunity for you if you had been them. We don't know anyone's variables. So the best thing you can do as a people manager or a leader is to ask, to have conversations, to share what the opportunity is. So hypothetically, someone came to you and said they have this team leader to go build the next widget, and they need a top performer. Who do you have? I can say I have Cynthia and she's fantastic but maybe Cynthia's grandparents just got sick. She's in a season of her career where she does not have the bandwidth to take on this opportunity. We don't know all the variables. We don't know the costs. We don't know anything until we ask. So take the time and share and learn about your people. And it doesn't always have to be in the moment the opportunity comes up or the promotion, it can be every single time you meet with them. Just learn a little bit more about what makes them feel like them, what motivates them. Those really fall in the attainment and the intrinsic value spaces, and you can learn a lot from having one-on-one conversations on those.

Dianna 18:16

Can leaders use this kind of framework to re-recruit their best people and to keep their critical knowledge in house? so for example, if they're in their one-on-ones or noticing somebody is a little disengaged, can this ROI equations, help them talk with or talk through certain scenarios with their people to give them more engaging work or the work that's a best fit for them?

Cassie 18:44

I would've loved if I had a manager who'd brought this equation or just these six factors in and said,"Which ones do you feel strong in right now, and which ones can we work on?" That would be a really interesting way to start a conversation with some structure. Instead of the,"What's going well, what can we change?" Like start, stop, continue. There's other frameworks, but they don't get to the root of the challenge sometimes because we're on this linear path. We've seen what everyone else did. And it's hard to tell your boss,"No, I don't want that next promotion. I'm really happy doing the job I'm doing right now, and for this time in my life it's the right fit." Or,"I'm getting burnt out because you keep giving me the exact same work and I'm bored. I want something that shows my value, lets me push myself." And so having those six buckets, the three numerators, the three denominators, you could start to talk about where the gaps are and where you wanna go. It was Kim Scott's book on Radical Candor, and she in there talks about rock stars and superstars. And I love how she broke out that there's some people who are rock stars, they're like the bedrock of the team who don't want to go up to management, and they don't want to become the CEO. They wanna do really good engineering. And right now, from my experience, I haven't seen leaders who are really good at finding how we celebrate those people. What value can you add to them? might be giving them more money without the promotion. It might be recognition. It might be not forcing them to get on a stage and talk to people'cause they hate that. But just knowing what their value is and how they wanna be recognized can continue to re-recruit and celebrate all your top performers.

Dianna 20:45

So a leader might be able to use this to be able to help determine how best to celebrate the people in the positions that they want to be in. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

Cassie 20:58

Celebrate the people, the positions. The recognition, the time on station, the energy piece is a big one. Maybe you have a great person who loves the job they're doing. They love the people they're working with, they love the pay. Everything's going great, but they are putting in too much energy and they are getting exhausted, and that is a huge attrition risk. So you can retain some of your top team members by understanding when you need to take something off their plate. Give them more. When you need to help them pause or shift to part-time, even for a short amount of time. And drive a conversation with them if that's valuable.

Dianna 21:42

Yes, but I did wanna go back to that because you mentioned,"I wish my manager or my leader had pulled this out with me." so you think this could be a framework to better understand where somebody might wanna go in their career?

Cassie 21:59

I think it would be wonderful for the potential next steps. We need to be careful that we don't treat it like a five year plan because that is an ongoing, enduring document that can grow and change and probably should. I like to think of this one as more those eddie's in the river. It might be completely different in six months, and so not having the conversation with your employee, hearing that they don't have the energy or the time because their daughter's potty training right now. They can't take on another job at this moment, but that doesn't mean in four weeks that's gonna be the same situation. So giving them space to continually refine and fix or adjust their own variables and their own waiting structure and not labeling anyone that, oh, this person- I think the biggest risk would be,"oh, they don't have ambition." We won't give them any more promotions. But that the rivers change, everything flows, and so it can continue to flex throughout their career.

Dianna 23:05

I understand. So the five-year plans and the long-term planning are one thing. This is more situational and making decisions based on what's happening right now, at the current time.

Cassie 23:18

So we compare the two. Just sticking with the river analogy, if you don't mind that the five-year plan is how the water gets from the top of the mountain and where it wants to go. Are you going to the ocean? Are you going to a lake? What's your end destination? And this equation would be. What's the decision at every single rock in the river, every single drop off? How do you adjust?

Cross Functional Value Talk

Dianna 23:41

hmm. I like that. This kind of alignment with the values and then the efforts and costs. this doesn't really stop at the individual or the team boundary. It can show up across the organization. How do different functions like R&D, marketing, and finance end up speaking different value languages, especially when trade offs surface?

Cassie 24:11

There's a lot of value calculations going from team to team on any major thing. And I'll speak for airplanes because that's my frame of reference. We did major commercial aircraft modifications in my role, and you'll have the engineers where we put out the work, the design engineers, instructional engineers. We put out the drawings and we've told the shop to go and modify the plane. There's a lot of intrinsic value and attainment value of our good engineering being consumed effectively. Yay, we did a good job. At the same time, there's the supplier managers who are putting in maybe way more time and energy to make sure the parts show up on time. They don't have time to go work the other parts of the other programs because they have to focus on this one. So there's a lot of cost and they get no glory at the end,'cause of course the parts were supposed to be there on time. I think the interesting part of your question is what happens when there's a conflict and when the teams need to come together and solve problems together. And I think this could be valuable because of how we respect each other. And how we have conversations where we're aware that we're not all coming in with the same end value and we're not all coming in with the same entry cost. That could add value in how we speak to each other and how we get things solved in a more effective way.

Dianna 25:46

Do you think this framework could help the different areas of the team bridge differences and align them around a certain goal? Or is it more of recognizing the value equation for each team as it contributes to the goal?

Cassie 26:06

I would love if there could be some experiments around this.'cause first thought is, I can't see how bringing this equation and putting it on the whiteboard when all the mechanics are talking to supplier managers, who are talking to leaders, who are talking to engineers, all get in one room. I don't think adding that to the whiteboard and just confusing people would work improve the situation.

Dianna 26:30

I think I agree with you. Yeah.

Cassie 26:31

curious and a little more empathetic and thought, maybe, about what the other people are going through, what their energy expense is, what's in it for them, not just what's in it for me, we could get a lot farther and have much more civil solution-based conversations. I think a lot of times when we're in a rush, when we're under cost and schedule pressures, we need the other teams to jump. We need them to send us this information. But being able to speak to their numerator- what's in it for them, what the values are, either utility or we're all on this mission: mission alignment can be a huge motivator that would fall somewhere in that squishy attainment intrinsic world- using those motivators rather than just,"I need this by close of business today- full stop," will create more synergy.

Dianna 27:29

I think so too. We looked at this through three different lens. For the individual engineer, the managing leader, and then for empathy for working on a cross-functional team. What's one simple value audit step an engineer can take today to better understand their own ROI?

Cassie 27:52

I would love if people would take one of these factors. Maybe it's the energy. Where is your energy going today? Which parts of your spheres of your life domains, so be it work or family, or time for your community volunteering, which one of those spheres is giving you the most energy and which one of them is drawing the most energy away? And just starting to be aware of the cost and return of that would be a wonderful place to start in auditing your value.

Dianna 28:27

Interesting. it doesn't have to be constrained to work. It could be all aspects of life where I guess I think about that as What's filling my bucket and what's draining my bucket?" And, making sure that my bucket's not empty.

Cassie 28:43

I like to think of it as we are an ecosystem of many systems. Uh, can you tell I was a systems engineer for a while? But all these different systems intersect and they bounce off each other. And so if these were each buckets, which ones are collecting energy and which ones have a hole that are draining out?

Dianna 29:03

Now, for the engineering leaders, what's one conversation starter that leaders can use to gauge alignment or misalignment on their teams?

Cassie 29:15

One of the really interesting conversations that I don't hear is around that loss of alternatives. We show them the shiny new opportunity. We say,"Hey, this is what you should do." Which means you can't still do this job that you're currently in, which means you probably can't do this mentoring: whatever that loss is. And just acknowledging that it is a multi-dimensional decision. There's no such thing as no-brainer when we're talking career development. So bringing in just one question of,"If you took this opportunity, what do you see that you would be giving up?"

Dianna 29:57

I see. And then that lets the person think about- more holistically- the change because yeah, like you said, you're not just moving forward, you're also leaving things behind.

Cassie 30:09

Yeah, and sometimes we don't let people leave things behind. We expect them to close the last job with a perfect bump on it and jump forward at the same time or overlapping. And we don't give them space to acknowledge that there is loss. I shifted teams once and I had to shift programs, and I've been leading a team of 35 people and I adored all of them. Going to my next promotion to another program was a loss because I missed and all those connections and I had to make new ones. And giving that even just a moment in the conversation to acknowledge can help you retain those future top performers. And then you don't have to re-recruit them because you're seeing them for who they are all the way along the journey.

Dianna 31:01

Not just focusing on what you're going to gain or do differently, but what you could potentially be leaving behind, is an important one.

Cassie 31:10

It's never as simple as it seems when we're making these decisions.

Dianna 31:15

So for listeners who wanna keep building this muscle: beyond"Beyond the Pipeline" and"STEM Moms", what's one resource you recommend for engineers moving from technical expert to strategic leader?

Cassie 31:31

I think the important thing about moving from technical expert to strategic leader is recognizing that doesn't have to be moving to management. Leader is a term that can be any type of engineer, any type of technical person can also be a leader. And so it's not necessarily moving from, but maybe collecting both technical expert and strategic leader. But with that, one book that I really enjoy is Reimagine Your Work by Wendy A. Cocke. And she talks about how to understand who you are, And so thinking of yourself as a one person business, even inside a major organization. And understanding how you show up for other people and how you're seen. And so taking a few minutes with that book as well will give you a great companion to the narratives in Beyond the Pipeline and the worksheets that I included in STEM Moms.

Dianna 32:37

So, where can people learn more about your work or continue this conversation with you?

Cassie 32:42

I am glad you said clarifying and not just nerdy. Thank you. I'm at ELMM Coaching. That's ELMM coaching.com, and I am also on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with everyone who'd like to continue this conversation. I really, even from this one, I learned so much more about this equation and about values and choice from every person I talk to. Thank you.

Dianna 33:08

Thank you, Cassie. That equation, Cassie walked us through attainment value, intrinsic value, utility value divided by effort, loss of alternatives, and risk of failure. I want you to sit with that for a minute. Pick just one factor. Maybe it's effort where yours is going right now, and whether you're getting any back. That's it. Just one factor and see what it tells you. If this episode resonated, share it with an engineer on your team or a leader who you think could use a different way to have the career conversation. And you can find Cassie and learn more about her work at ELMM coaching.com. Thanks to Cassie for a conversation that honestly made me think too. This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. Thanks for listening.