Why Human Skills Are Your Best Leadership Tool in a Technical World
The reality of the manufacturing industry is that, despite our investment in cutting-edge technology and optimization, some of the biggest breakdowns often aren’t technical—they’re human. For years, we’ve been programmed to believe that the solution to every problem—from supply chain disruptions to quality issues —lies in a better algorithm, a new KPI, or another piece of robotics.
Yet, the paradox remains: even the best optimization schemes only work if you can convince people to try them. This is the very tension that engineer, keynote speaker, and trainer Emily Nichols has spent her career resolving. With two decades of experience helping world-class organizations like PepsiCo, PPG, Janssen, and Henkel improve manufacturing processes. Emily realized that productivity improvements aren’t just technical; they happen at the interface between humans.
Emily joined us on the Accelerating Operational Performance Podcast to discuss her work at Connect Better Inc., which is focused on strengthening the human skills we still need in our increasingly technical world. You can listen to the episode here or watch it on YouTube here. This message is more critical than ever, especially in the manufacturing environment, where your ultimate success depends on how you lead your workforce.
Developing Leadership Skills: Lessons from the Farm to Manufacturing Leader
For those of us in senior leadership, understanding the foundation of a great leader is crucial. Emily’s path to being a consultant and sought-after speaker reveals that leadership skills are built, not born. Starting on a family farm in southern Ontario gave her early training in teamwork. She thought farming was too much work, so she pursued an engineering degree (which she says was the logical next step, right?). This evolved into five years at Quaker Oats, where her initial manufacturing career as an engineer included the mandate to deliver training on lean manufacturing and continuous improvement.
Bridging Technical and Human Foundations
Emily’s experience proves that the manufacturing leader role requires different skills than a purely technical one. It wasn’t just about the science; it was about the communication skills required to motivate the team—the very interpersonal skills that are critical to mitigating disruption. Investing in leadership development is, therefore, an investment in operational stability.
Human Skills for Manufacturing Leaders: Why Inclusive Language Matters
Emily’s fabulous TED Talk addressed an unconscious habit that can unknowingly create a skills gap and act as a barrier to inclusion: the use of gender-exclusive language in the workplace.
Emily explains that it isn’t about political correctness; it’s about understanding that the words we use reinforce and shape our company culture and how we interact with one another. When someone says, “I need six guys to fill the schedule,” or “I need a guy to fix this machine,” it automatically paints a picture in our minds of the kind of person who is expected to fill that leadership role. It happens without us meaning to do it; it’s automatic.
More manufacturing companies are trying to create an environment where more women want to be part of the team, especially in advanced manufacturing. These seemingly small linguistic slips can act as subtle barriers—a signal as to whether you belong or you don’t belong. I know this message is impactful because I even went back and subsequently edited my own keynote presentation after hearing Emily speak on the topic—and I’m sure I still slip up because it’s such a common cliché.
Emily says a simple way to raise awareness is to ask a straightforward question, as she did with one chemical client: “Are the people who work in that department all guys?” This simple act of awareness is one of the essential leadership skills needed to foster an inclusive and diverse workforce that’s ready for rapid technological change.
Inspiring Trust and Respect: The Voluntold Leader
The moment Emily gained a fundamental piece of her self-awareness—and learned to inspire trust—occurred during an unplanned leadership assignment, a crucial lesson for identifying and cultivating leadership qualities.
The Voluntold Leader: A Crisis Management Case Study
During volunteer work in South America, Emily was “voluntold” to step up as the onsite project lead for a vital water filtration facility. She took responsibility for all logistics, safety, productivity, and morale for two dozen local and international volunteers over a week.
The validation came from Norm, a gruff, experienced merchant marine whom Emily initially feared should be leading. At the end of the week, Norm affirmed, “Emily, I would work for you anytime, anywhere in the world, just call me.”
This moment is a powerful reminder for anyone in leadership roles that sometimes the most important skills are the ones you don’t realize you have: that trust and respect are earned, not through technical credentials, but through decisiveness, accountability, and the ability to organize people under pressure.
Adaptability and Problem-Solving: Lessons for Manufacturing Leaders
Engineers, by nature, are wired to optimize. We see a problem, we code, we calculate, we find the fastest, most efficient solution. Emily’s master’s thesis was about finding out how many oats are in the groats using multivariate analysis to analyze complex manufacturing processes—pure optimization. But she found out the hard way that life, and especially people, don’t follow an algorithm.
After her South American trip, Emily took on a special project for her father, which required visiting weather stations in farmers’ fields in four European countries. She saw a perfect opportunity to apply her technical know-how.
- The Algorithm: She pulled in the latitude and longitude for every location, figured out sunrise/sunset times, and calculated the perfect, most optimized route, known in school as the “traveling salesman problem”.
- The Reality: The schedule dictated they would arrive at the first station just as the sun came up and leave the last as the sun went down. Things immediately started to go wrong: not having the right equipment, stations had been moved, and constant setbacks led her to complete despair.
She kept re-running the optimization algorithm, but it kept failing. It took her father to pull her out of the tailspin, simply saying, “Don’t worry about it, sometimes things don’t work out. You’ve got to do a Plan B, a Plan C”.
This is a central tension for manufacturing leaders today. We are surrounded by machines, KPIs, and the pressure to prioritize productivity.
“It’s really easy to get locked into the optimization mindset, even trying to optimize the human aspects.”
This is a failure of pure technical thinking: the lesson Emily keeps learning in her life is that you can’t optimize everything. In this context of constant disruption and the management of a complex supply chain, a strong manufacturing leader understands that people are the variable that makes everything work—or fail. Leaders must embrace adaptability and recognize that people drive processes, not the other way around.
Building Emotional Intelligence in Manufacturing
The key to navigating the modern manufacturing world is balancing technical expertise with genuine connection—a principle that forms the heart of Emily’s company, Connect Better Inc. She realized that when leaders are laser-focused on efficiency, they can lose sight of the fact that people want to interact and connect throughout a day.
- An effective leader recognizes that effective communication isn’t just delivering instructions; it’s about building relationships. You have to prioritize a connection there.
- If manufacturing workers don’t feel engaged and involved, they will find ways not to be excited about moving things forward.
The necessary shift for leaders today is toward emotional intelligence and soft skills. Manufacturing leaders need to understand that people are not just another variable to be optimized. Investing in training and development programs that focus on these important skills helps senior leadership to connect and engage their teams.
Dare to Draw: Visual Language for Leaders
Emily’s program, “Dare to Draw,” tackles another critical gap: visualization and creativity. The program is all about overcoming the adult instinct to say, “I can’t draw,” because we are comparing ourselves to a professional artist.
In today’s manufacturing, using visuals is a crucial way to get your point across. It’s not about drawing realistically; it’s about drawing well enough that it’s recognized to make a point.
Key Principle: It’s the Drawing That Matters
Emily states that the power lies not in the finished drawing (the artifact) but in the act of drawing (the action) in real-time. Seeing a leader scribble an idea on a whiteboard or flip chart makes the idea more captivating than just seeing a pre-drawn slide. It’s a “childlike” exercise that allows people to let go of their ego and focus on building a simple library of symbols to communicate complex, abstract concepts like teamwork, adaptability, or problem-solving.
Improving Organizational Performance: Why Human Skills for Manufacturing Leaders Are Important
The ultimate goal for senior leadership is sustained organizational performance, and the key to this is a mindset shift. The lesson Emily wants leaders to walk away with isn’t a technical formula; it’s an attitude:
“You’ve got to take the work seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously”.
This balance between intensity and humility is important for effective leadership. Where manufacturing plants are defined by the pursuit of optimization, the biggest challenge for leadership in manufacturing is resisting the urge to see people as variables that need to be “fixed”. When the human skills—connection, communication, creativity and problem-solving skills —get rusty, innovation stalls, and effective communication gets siloed.
The strategic value of this attitude is that it creates a culture of psychological safety. By practicing the advice to lead by example and model this approach, leaders understand that they will create an environment where people feel heard and understood. This focus on trust and respect is important for manufacturing leaders because it provides the foundation for sustainable growth, success, and innovation, which, in turn, can improve organizational performance. A fantastic way to genuinely foster a culture of continuous improvement.
Feel free to reach out to either of us—connect with Emily Nichols at connectbetter.today or us at uniquedevelopment.com—to help leaders by implementing development programs with the direction and purpose on these core leadership skills, including how to approach difficult conversations and prioritize learning and development for your entire team.
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