Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S7E29 Heylands Lowry| Building an Engineering Culture of Continuous Improvement
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Heylands Lowry is a globally experienced continuous improvement and operational excellence leader with deep expertise in Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and organizational transformation. Over the course of his career, he has helped companies across medical devices, aerospace, and manufacturing build sustainable systems that improve efficiency while strengthening culture and employee engagement. Known for his ability to connect with people at every level of an organization, Heylands focuses not just on process improvement, but on creating lasting behavioral and cultural change.
Most recently, Heylands served as Director of Continuous Improvement at Intuitive, where he developed and deployed company-wide Lean and Six Sigma training initiatives that reached hundreds of employees across multiple events and workshops. His work included embedding DMAIC methodologies and Lean principles into core business processes while mentoring cross-functional teams on strategic improvement initiatives. One notable achievement involved reducing a surgeon payment cycle from three months down to fewer than five business days.
Prior to Intuitive, Heylands spent nearly fifteen years at Edwards Lifesciences, where he held leadership roles focused on business excellence and Lean deployment. During that time, he led numerous high-impact initiatives, including productivity improvements, throughput increases, inventory optimization, and multimillion-dollar Six Sigma projects. His contributions earned him repeated recognition as Top Talent within the organization, a distinction reserved for fewer than ten percent of employees.
Earlier in his career, Heylands led process improvement initiatives at Panasonic Avionics Corporation and served as a Six Sigma Champion at ITT Industries, where he was selected as one of only 48 employees out of 9,000 for advanced Six Sigma leadership training. Across these roles, he helped organizations streamline operations, prioritize high-value projects, and create scalable infrastructures for continuous improvement.
In this conversation, we explore what it really takes to sustain continuous improvement efforts inside large organizations, why cultural buy-in matters more than most leaders realize, and how engineers and technical professionals can become more effective problem solvers, mentors, and change agents inside their teams.
LINKS:
Heylands Lowry LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heylands-lowry-64211a99/
Heylands Lowry website: https://www.intuitive.com/en-us
Aaron Moncur, host
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I'm a huge advocate of starting with the principles. What are the principles that need to be in place? And then Bolton got the tool rather than going the other way. You'll find people are doing stuff to tick a box and not understanding what they're doing, or how to interpret the outcome, or why they're even doing it
Aaron Moncur:Welcome to the Being an Engineer podcast. Today we have a wonderful, wonderful guest for you again, Heylands Lowry, a certified Lean Master Black Belt and continuous improvement leader, who spent more than two decades helping organizations transform the way they work, from roles at Intuitive Edwards Life Sciences, Panasonic Avionics Corporation, and ITT Industries, Haylands has led large scale lean and six sigma deployments that improve safety, quality, delivery, morale, and cost across global operations. He's especially passionate about building cultures of continuous improvement through coaching, mentoring, and practical problem solving. Heylands, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for being with us today.
Heylands Lowry:Absolute pleasure, honored to be able to support your community.
Aaron Moncur:Thank you, thank you very much. I think this is the first kiwi that we've had on the Being an Engineer podcast, so that's a first new. Same question I always ask to get started, what made you decide to become an engineer?
Heylands Lowry:So, as a little kid, I had a great fascination with disassembling things to see how they worked, and unfortunately, for many years the disassembling was far as it got, so there was a lot of pieces laying around. Yeah, beyond that. So, middle section of my life, raised in New Zealand. So, New Zealand, there's not really access to fix stuff. So, my folks went lifestyle farming. So, anytime something broke, you basically had to get pretty creative on how to fix it or improve it. So, there's an expression down there held together with a piece of number eight yr or bailing twine to make the thing work, so that kind of drove a lot of creative approaches to different things, or also helped a friend that had an asparagus farm design and build asparagus, picking platforms that you towed behind the tractor to make the work easier for people, ultimately got an engineering degree there. At that point, New Zealand, it was sheep farming or tourism, but definitely wanted to use the engineering, and I'd been lucky enough to come to America for last year of my high school as an AFS exchange student, and lived in Fullerton, California, of all places. So very blessed with caring, supportive parents that said, "Well, what do you got to lose? Worst thing that happens is you come home. So packed up those two bags, came out here, and 30 years later I have a very loving, caring wife, two wonderful kids, more pets than anyone should really have. Yeah, and a very fulfilling, happy life here.
Aaron Moncur:Wow, what a blessed life. That's amazing. And I'm so happy to hear that things have worked out so well for for you and your wonderful family. I have to ask now, How many pets do you have?
Heylands Lowry:Gosh, we got two dogs, two birds, we're babysitting half a dozen of the friends' fish, and my wife got a shrimp tank, and we have roughly 200 shrimp, and 200 yeah, they, they multiply quickly.
Aaron Moncur:Wow. Okay. Now I almost hesitate to ask, but are the shrimp really pets, or are they more meal supplements?
Heylands Lowry:Um, absolutely. Pets, so she wanted to make like a self-contained environment. So that was the project. So it's snails, coolie loaches, which eat the stuff with the bottom, some snails, and some shrimp.
Aaron Moncur:Wow. Well, we have two dogs, and my wife has recently decided that we have to start fostering kittens, so we started off with our first litter. Is it a litter of kittens? Anyway, our first group, about a month and a half ago, and she just went all in on her first fostering experience. We had four kittens and the mother, so five cats total, plus our two dogs, which to me was too much. She and the kids love it, and she loves it. And where we've since sent those five back, they reached the weight that they were supposed to wait, and now we have just one kitten. Right now, which is feels far more manageable than the five that we had before. So I was going to mention that my family and I, we just got back from an amazing trip in New Zealand. It was, it was, I'd say one of the highlights of my life going there. It was just breathtaking. I mean, everything exceeded our expectations, but one of the things we saw, which you alluded to, was there just farms everywhere, right? Lots of sheep farming, and the environment that you grew up in held together with number eight wire, bailing wire. Was it like, did you grow up on a farm, or were you exposed to those environments a lot?
Heylands Lowry:So, first few years of life was in the thriving metropolis of Tokoroa. At its prime, there was maybe 20,000 people, pulp and paper bill, so all the pine forests in the middle of the North Island. And then from them, my dad sent me retired and went lifestyle farming, so we did like 40 acres of pumpkins and corn, and you name it, we raising bull calves. We did lots of different things. Great experiences. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:I have found, because I've spoken with several people on the podcast, and it seems like folks who grow up on a farm, they just, they have the knack, you know, like they have that intrinsic ability to fix things and build things, and they really understand mechanical systems very well, because it required building things and fixing things and cobbling things together, right? You didn't. Most farms don't have huge budgets to go out and buy the best equipment and keep it, you know, in perfect working order all the time with, you know, farms of technicians and things, that's just not how it works. So, you get that experience growing up, and I think it's a huge benefit to becoming an engineer.
Heylands Lowry:Yep, I completely agree.
Aaron Moncur:Well, you've, you spent a lot of time in your career working in both or improving processes as well as culture, and these are two things that are near and dear to my heart. I'm curious, for you, which of the two have been the most challenging, improving processes or culture?
Heylands Lowry:So, set the stage with, I think it's completely symbiotic, right? They got to exist together. If I look at what I think the harder winners, the experiences of I've had is culture, and let me kind of premise that with some, so my take on culture, kind of an expression I've heard that I think rings true, is experiences drive beliefs, right? So, through your experiences, you set up a belief system, that belief system then drives your actions or behaviors, which is kind of a big portion of the culture, and ultimately those actions flow through to results. So, when you look at CI, and you're working from frontline professionals, middle management to executive teams within those groups, and even as individuals, everyone has different expectations around what a positive experience or desired outcome is so it gets very nuanced and complicated to keep it as a win all the way through the chain, right. And because there's so much CIA out there, many different flavors, some people have had not great experiences, which makes it very hard to win the trust, have a different experience, and get a good outcome, and shift those beliefs, right? You're basically trying to shift belief systems,
Aaron Moncur:and what do you say, CI? You're referring to continuous improvement, is that right?
Heylands Lowry:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sorry, continuous.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, so when you walk into a new environment, a company, a team, what are some of the signs that early on tell you that continuous improvement is either going to be successful here or maybe not quite, maybe we need to make some changes before we can really see some success around CI.
Heylands Lowry:Yeah, so kind of a couple of telling factors or things I look to investigate or ask questions around is one of the things, is well, how are you intending to set it up? Is this seen as an additional load on top of the existing work you're doing, or are you actually prioritizing enough to dedicate some amount of time to it? How are you addressing the reward and recognition side of the business to change the kinds of behaviors that you want to see, right? Are they the same as what it was yesterday? Going forward, if it's going to change, there's other systems that support those behavioral changes that need to be in place. The activity is typically can be completely new or somewhat new due to changes. When you make change, people will have failures, right? You're learning as you learn, you make mistakes. So, how do people manage or treat those mistakes? That can be very telling onto how engaged and empowered people can feel to make things better. Is there history? How many attempts have we made at a CI engagement? If it's failed, do we know why it failed, and have we addressed those issues at some level? So, a little bit of digging on some of those kind of issues
Aaron Moncur:you mentioned. Reward systems, can you think of any, any specific situations that you have encountered in your career where reward systems were altered to improve business outcomes, not just business outcomes, but outcomes for, you know, the participants in those systems, the engineers, the technicians, whoever, whoever the team was made of, anything like that come to mind that you can share that might be illustrative,
Heylands Lowry:yeah. So a big thing around lean right 5s success programs, which is all about positively infecting the environment that you're working in, not the way you work. There's like standard work and other things for that. So if we look at success 5s I've seen people put kind of the bragging rights or friendly competition in place, peer-to-peer challenges, which is positive, pizza parties, some kind of, you know, just a public thank you, or financial recognition for those things. Another big call out to make is the mindsets different, and it feels very, very awkward, right? So, the adage always gives us, if you cross your arms the way you normally do, it's easy, right? Now you're asking people to do it the other way, sounds easy, but it feels very awkward and different, right? It's just not, yeah, it's not a simple thing. So, when we historically look at business, action is what is recognized and rewarded, right. Just get in there and take action. So we're jumping in human nature, that I do it too. I want to jump in, I want to solve true CI says you need to step back and truly define and understand the problem before you jump in and solve. And in all honesty, every time I shortcut that one, guess what, I was working on the wrong thing, right, because I didn't take the time and diligence to work out what we really needed to solve, so rewarding people for slowing down and taking the time up front. Overall, I truly believe it'll take less time. What may not feel it in the moment?
Aaron Moncur:What's an example of a time when you jumped in too quickly, and didn't really understand what the problem was, and then you know, later on, you had to step back and reassess the core problem.
Heylands Lowry:I mean, there's been a few of them, right? So, get things through NCRs or cappers, where we believe we know what the failure mode was, or what was causing the failure, without actually stepping back and trying to say, you know, when is it occurring, where it is occurring, is it actually this is the failure mode, or a symptom from the failure, before diving into kind of solutions.
Aaron Moncur:Pipeline now offers procurement of custom machined parts at significantly lower costs without sacrificing speed or quality. We design and build custom machines ourselves, so we consume a lot of precision machined components. Over the past several years, we developed a proven overseas supply chain to support that work, and in 2025 we successfully piloted that capability with select customers. Now we're opening it up more broadly. If you'd like to see how our prices and lead times compare, send us a drawing or two for quote. Visit Team pipeline.us or message me directly on LinkedIn. This, this is what I call the absolute certainty principle. This is a phrase that I coined, but, of course, the idea has been around forever. I have an example that I use to share the absolute certainty principle, which says that sometimes we are so absolutely certain that we know what the problem is, that it becomes to the exclusion of all other possibilities, many times some of those other possibilities being the real culprit. I, we have a pool in our backyard, and there was a time when the pool got very green, and I just could not, I couldn't figure out the right mix cocktail of chemicals to get it back to, you know, that crystal clear blue color that we all love to see in a pool. So I eventually called our pool company and said, 'Hey, I've tried to do this, I can't do it, I can't figure it out, come help, please. And so they came, they, you know, took some water samples, did some tests, and said, 'Okay, we know what it is, it's this blah blah.. I don't remember what it was, phosphorus something, and I said, okay, that's great, you're positive that that's the reason, and if I pay you to do this, it's going to work, right? And they said, yep, we're absolutely certain that that's the reason. So they came in and they did their thing, and you know, no surprise in this context of this story, it did not work, and so I was like, hey, you guys told me you were absolutely certain this well. We thought we were, we were came back in, did some more testing, and oh, actually it's this other thing, so they came in, but they were so absolutely certain to the exclusion of, you know, they probably didn't do their full testing on it, and that's why they didn't realize what the real problem was. All right, let's see, what are some of the teaching approaches that you've found to be the most successful when you're teaching, whether it's Lean or Six Sigma, or other continuous improvement methodologies.
Heylands Lowry:So, I've been really, really lucky to work with a bunch of very talented learning developers. Early in my career, this was something that I was completely ignorant around, so I'd jump in and basically start creating slides and put it out there for people. What they've kind of imparted to me and shared with me, which I now take on board fully, is take me a step back, just outlining here is the topics of what I wanted to get across right with the right flow. Then I don't know if you've ever heard of the Bloom's taxonomy, so it's kind of a levels of learning, so it's then says, well, let's distinguish, is this a concept that I just need to be aware of, or is it something through that I need to be able to actually pick up pen and paper hands and apply, so there's different levels of learning to that, right? So, an outline of the topics, booms, and then below that, there's some principles that I would put on the table. So, definitely want it to be engaging, right? You want to pull the audience and make them part of the training. No one wants to sit and get beaten to death with PowerPoint presentation just blurbs, right. It's how do you engage them, either through hands-on activities or through sharing examples that are meaningful to them and their peers, right. For making more relative to the work, another big piece, interactive, so the more hands-on, practical you can make it, the better. So I typically want to put an example in that's for just the concept, so generally, so different ways of stacking the dishwasher, right? So it's not related to the work, there's no personal preference or bias behind it, versus then going into a very technical one where we're saying, "Hey, can we apply that same principle of standard work to how do we do this job, so we've learned the principle. Then we apply it, and then lastly, I'd say feedback is critical, either for the trainer and or for the content, right? Nothing's ever perfect. You can always make improvements, capture that feedback, and incorporate it. So, see either continuously approve the continuous improvement material,
Aaron Moncur:like having a checklist for a checklist.
Heylands Lowry:Yep, exactly.
Aaron Moncur:What about teams who aren't fortunate enough to have, like, a dedicated resource, such as yourself, that is focused on continuous improvement? What are some things that they can do to learn themselves about continuous improvement, whether it's lean or six sigma or some other methodology, and begin incorporating it into their organization.
Heylands Lowry:There's many, many, many online resources are available out there. There's some great videos, so the Atkins two minute lean, where there's kind of these little snippets of learning moments that you can see the concept and then and see it practically applied to then consider how to do it within your own own environment, tons of open source resources out there for people.
Aaron Moncur:Well, Atkins, two minute lean, you
Heylands Lowry:said
Aaron Moncur:that sounds interesting. I'm gonna have to check that one out myself afterwards. All right, let's, let's talk about the idea of morale for a minute. People talk about culture all the time, it seems like, but you don't hear the word morale thrown around very often. What, what, what does morale mean within the context of engineering or manufacturing environments, and how have you seen it used or misused within those environments?
Heylands Lowry:So kind of queue it up with the typical approach to the goals is safety, quality, delivery. Then I was taught morale or engagement, and those result in cost savings, right? If you get those pieces right, you'll drive the cost down. So, the morale in my head is the foundational piece. So, I'm sure you've gone to restaurants or service places where there's a disengaged person versus an engaged person. That experience is the same, right? So, when you're in there and you're wanting to change the way we do things, where there's going to be some hiccups and little speed bumps, and need positive collaboration to make it better. Morale has to be in place. Other thing I've seen change radically is there's a huge difference. If I came to your work, Aaron, and told you this is how you're going to do your job, I. Give you the even more fun example. My kids, right, they've taught me this emphatically. When I tell my kids how to do something, what happens is they will give me the 900 reasons why it failed and why it wasn't a good idea. When I engage them in creating the solution, they'll bend over backwards to make sure it works right. So, by empowering them and ingraining them in the process and making them part of it, getting their fingerprints on it, you can actually turn morale around, you are giving them the chance to write their own destiny, right, to find how the work that they do day in and day out is done,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, yeah, a few thoughts come to mind earlier when you were talking about the morale as being the foundation of a culture or a team environment. I thought of, I mean, I'm in Phoenix, Arizona, and the local municipal airport is the Sky Harbor Phoenix airport, and it just, it drives me crazy every time I go there, because there's, there's no basis of truth at all in this marketing pitch that someone thought would be a good idea, but as you're, you're on the monorail, going to and from the airport, as you're walking around inside the airport, there's this automated voice that comes on every now and then, and says, "Welcome to Sky Harbor Airport, America's friendliest airport. And I have never had experiences at Sky Harbor that were particularly friendly. In fact, I remember this one time there was a gate agent that I needed to talk to about questions about her flight, and I walked out. Oh, she was so sour, she just wanted nothing to do with me. I was perfectly nice and pleasant, and, and she was just like shutting me down. I don't want to talk to you, and I don't know, maybe she had a bad day, but anyway, like, the morale there, right? Well, the morale does not seem particularly good, and, and just because leadership, quote unquote, alleged leadership at the top says Sky Harbor Airport is now America's friendliest airport. If the morale isn't there to back it up, those words are empty. They mean nothing. They probably have a negative value, right? Because then people like me go there and have the opposite experience of like, come on, what a load of nonsense here. Yeah, yep, yeah, completely agree. All right, especially for teams that don't have, like, a practitioner who can come in and do this for them. What are some of the biggest mistakes, the most common obstacles, and challenges that you see teams encountering as they try to incorporate continuous improvement,
Heylands Lowry:so a big part of it that I think you need to do is out of the gates to say, for us, what does success look like, right? What do we actually want? What's the end game? What do we want this to look like? So, if I look out there at industry and say, boy, when I'm done, what would I love to leave as a legacy? The one that always comes to mind for me is Toyota, right? And it's interesting, so Toyota doesn't have a huge CI, continuous improvement department, or a lot of the infrastructure you see out there, what they have done is they've embedded those practices into the everyday activities, and that's just how they do that work, right? So, defining what you want it to end up looking like, I think, is critical up front, and then defining a path to get there. So, another, another big thing I see is tools are kind of fun, and you can get your hands and play with stuff. Right behind the tools, there's a set of principles, so I'll just pick on one, a lean one, flow. So people who will talk talk you blue in the face about value stream mapping or process mapping, and all these things, and what you're actually trying to address behind the scenes is flow, right? That's what you're using those tools for those linkages aren't always there, so I'm a huge advocate of starting with the principles. What are the principles that need to be in place? And then Bolte got the tool, rather than going the other way. You'll find people are doing stuff to tick a box and not understanding what they're doing, or how to interpret the outcome, or why they're even doing it. Why am I creating this? Why am I filling in this form or tool? I don't even understand the question I'm trying to answer. Right,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, right. We've talked about a little bit, at least superficially lean and six sigma, there's also like a DMAIC out there. What, what are the differences between these things? Are they all interrelated? Are they used together, or are these like separate methodologies that teams can choose to implement?
Heylands Lowry:Based analogy, I can give you practical terms. So, putting a house together, I need a plumber, and I need an electrician. So they're both integral to making that house function properly or together, so let's just say lean on the surface I'm going to say is primarily very cross-functional team based, focused on a process, classically you're identifying waste and removing it, another piece that I was taught, which I'm a big, big advocate for, is principles, right? So, flow, standard work, performance measures, the things that you would expect to see in a lean process, not only taking waste out, but putting those in. On the six sigma side, we're saying, with my process today, as it spits stuff out, how much variation do I have? Is that within customer spec, or does it fall outside, or so? Do I have a lot of defect fallout? If I do, there's ways to squeeze down that variation and shift the mean to have the process perform where you want to. So, variation reduction, shifting the mean for six sigma, I call it the country scoot and squeeze, squeeze it down and scoot it to where you want it to be, and lean is getting the principles in and the waste out.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, so
Heylands Lowry:very complimentary.
Aaron Moncur:Oversimplifying, lean is getting rid of waste, and 666 sigma is managing variability. How about DMAIC? How does that fit in there?
Heylands Lowry:So that's kind of the framework that hangs under the Six Sigma. So there's like a phase of defined. So back to the planning piece, right? So in the define phase, I need to know who my key stakeholders are, what's in scope, out of scope, kind of high level understanding of objectives and expectations, so define measure what are we currently doing analysis improving control, so it's a sequenced approach to the problem solving within it's typically used within six sigma or a three is also mac to mac,
Aaron Moncur:okay, okay, so they're all kind of different puzzle pieces of the same picture.
Heylands Lowry:I would say when you're starting out, my recommendation is typically there's a lot of noise in processes just from things that have crept in over time. As humans, we like to add, right? So, when I get a non-conformance or a capper, it's easier for me to add something in to double check or triple check something rather than identify the root cause and remove it. So, over time, things get more and more complicated. So, the lean goes in there and cleans out a lot of that noise, and then on the back side of that, I would come in with the six sigma to then say, without all that huge amount of noise, how much variation do I really have, and do I need to squeeze it down.
Aaron Moncur:That's a great explanation. I really like the way that you, you clarified that. Can you think of a time, like a specific story, or an example of a time when you were able to pull something out using lean principles as opposed to adding something back in.
Heylands Lowry:Yes, did a lot of work with the plant in Singapore on hand sewing of valves, so kind of the situation was trying to scale the business right, and a lot of what, what the, the easiest, fastest thing is copy paste to ramp up for capacity. A little bit more workers going in there doing a re-engineering to say, well, how much latent capacity is hidden in there? How much can I, how much more can I get out of what I've, what I've already got. So, we went over, was like two weeks in Singapore, two weeks back. We worked on these production lines that were hand sewing heart vowels through working with that team, wonderful folks that were truly engaged, really understood their craft, and were able to create standard work, so they looked at a beginner and intermediate and expert, compared those processes and created one called new standard work. Right, so here's the sequence of steps that I do them. Description of what the step is at target time, and it's not to make people robots, it's to say if this inspection is supposed to take five minutes, and you're done in a minute. There's a chance you've missed something. Raise a flag, right? If it's supposed to take five and I'm struggling at 10, raise a flag. That's that's the intention and drive behind it, and calling out if it's critical, critical to quality, or if there's safety needed. So, those folks are able to crank out a 30% productivity improvement, which is massive. The unexpected plus was they actually took the yield and moved it from 91 to 95% yield, which is amazing, right? Because when you get on that tail end, it's really, really hard.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, so
Heylands Lowry:just by. Having people take out some of that variability, they also radically improve the yields.
Aaron Moncur:Amazing! Wow, great experience. How about leadership? I mean, looking at the teams you've seen be most successful with continuous improvements, what - what has the leadership done in those environments that made the team or facilitated success for the teams?
Heylands Lowry:So, I'll give you that old image, right? Show me how I measured, and I'll show you how I behave. That is so, so true, right? Aka, if it's important to my boss, it's important to me. My boss doesn't care. There's no value in me doing it. So, Kaizen events, right? So, very pointed, short turnaround type events, having an executive or the area leader come in and kick the thing off, and actually sharing that is a goal for them, and it is important, and coming back at the end of the day every day to do a wrap-up and supporting when you need to break down barriers is game changing, as opposed to we never see anyone just
Aaron Moncur:being involved, really.
Heylands Lowry:Yes, yep. Be involved, show that you care, show it's important. A simple turning up and thank you. An announcement at an all-hands or a department meeting can be game-changing for folks, right? Recognition,
Aaron Moncur:yeah. And, and really, the people even above that level of leadership need to give those leaders time to do that. Right, I mean,
Heylands Lowry:absolutely,
Aaron Moncur:you can't not give the leadership enough time to go in and really truly be involved, and then get upset when results aren't what you want in that particular area.
Heylands Lowry:Yep, and the other adage, do as I say, not as I do.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah,
Heylands Lowry:so if you're going to impose leader standard work on folks, you should lead by example, right? You should be doing it too.
Aaron Moncur:Yep. Okay. For, for younger engineers, especially, what? Because you've done a lot of mentoring in your day and coaching teams, right? What, what advice would you give in the area of continuous improvement, or or even just general succeeding as an engineer, is there have you found there to be like some some common patterns that you've observed, and then you, you, you coach around
Heylands Lowry:such a one lesson I've learned that I wish I had of known earlier in life is take the time to define what success looks like for you, not what others think, not what right peers think. So, for me, early in career, it was, how do I make enough money to survive through, and it's changed over time through to today, where time with my wife and kids is important, right. Absolutely, love what I do for work, and have the purpose, but I want to balance that. Having that guiding goalpost out there for you, I think is game changing, right? Because you know what you're driving for, right? Set that target. So, define what success looks like for yourself. Another one I'll say is honesty and integrity. Be true to yourself. Show up as you are in your complete self, right, and it will be enough, and if it's not, you're probably in the wrong place. This is another one I put on the tape
Aaron Moncur:that could be hard to hear, that you're in the wrong place, right? Especially after investing so much time, maybe you went to school for that particular profession. Yeah,
Heylands Lowry:yeah, so not saying it might be you're working for the wrong company, not, not necessarily the career choice could have been wrong, it just may not be a match, right,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, right,
Heylands Lowry:yeah,
Aaron Moncur:all right, well, hey, Linds, what, what's something that you're working on right now, maybe it's a skill that you're trying to develop, or or maybe it's a technology you want to learn more about that perhaps someone in our audience right now might be able to help you with. You know, we're really trying to encourage community with the podcast and all the other things we do. We've got our PDX event, we've got our webinars, we've got some local hardware meetups, we've got a newsletter, we've got the Wave dot engineer, all these different community things, and I would love to find ways just to connect people, you know, more more often, and and have different people from the community find ways to help each other. So, what's what's one way that our community could help you, and hopefully someone out there hears this and then gets in touch with you,
Heylands Lowry:so I'd love to hear different approaches in terms of influence, right? So it's one of those critical skills when you're trying to either invoke change or bring people along on the journey with you. So, what is effective approaches that people. People have, in terms of influencing different teams. I'd love to hear different topics, different ways. Yeah, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:man, I could see an entire podcast about that. That would be a really interesting topic to dive into. Okay, great. All of you heard that. If you have resources or particular expertise in the area of influence, then please reach out to Heylens. I'll throw one idea out there. You, you may have read this book already, Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
Heylands Lowry:No, but I will.
Aaron Moncur:It's fantastic. Yeah, if you're trying to learn about influence and persuasion, ethical influence and persuasion. He goes to great lengths to emphasize that is a great, great book. Influence the psychology of persuasion. Yeah, all right. Well, for everyone out there, else out there who might have something to add to that particular topic, Haley's, how can how can people get in touch with you?
Heylands Lowry:And from the easiest way, LinkedIn, so first names, H E Y L A N D S. There's not many of us, as I think there's only one. So, Heylands Lowry, and then if you can drop me a note, just preface it with pipeline, so I know where it's coming from, right?
Aaron Moncur:Perfect, awesome.
Heylands Lowry:Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:all right. Anything else that we haven't touched on Heylands that you think would be interesting or useful to bring up before we sign off here,
Heylands Lowry:just a just a little call to action or shout out. There's many different approaches to CI, right, and a part of the underlying thing. I think it's a very positive skill set to have for engineers, for everything you do, right. It's a great add-on skill set. There's many different approaches. Be open, seek to understand. Right, what I do now is different than what I did 12 months ago, and I hope that 12 months from now I'll have learned new stuff and do it differently again. You learn through mistakes and seeing other people's best practices don't get stuck right, share it forward. So, if you've had a bad, bad experience, don't let that be your guy, your guide to moving forward with continuous improvement.
Aaron Moncur:Wonderful sage advice, Heylands. Thank you so much for being with us today on the podcast, sharing all of your wisdom and your experience. We really, really appreciate it, and we wish you the absolute best moving forward.
Heylands Lowry:Thank you.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of Pipeline Design and Engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines, and custom fixtures complemented with product design and R&D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us to join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit The Wave dot engineer. Thank you for listening. Being An Engineer has more than 300 episodes, and you don't have to listen to them in order. If you're dealing with a specific challenge right now, there's a good chance we've already interviewed an engineer who's been through it. You can jump around, search by topic, and listen to what's most relevant to you. See you on the next episode.
