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40% Better - Engineering Leadership

40% Better - Engineering Leadership

Written by: Bill
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 Every week, we invite 1 expert on employee engagement and deep-dive into unlocking previously unheard of performance levels in teams and leaders.

40 Percent Better
https://40pb.com2024 Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • How Failure Made Her a Better Engineer | Sairan Aqrawi

    How Failure Made Her a Better Engineer | Sairan Aqrawi
    Jan 23 2026
    When Sairan Aqrawi decided to become a swimming coach as a teenager in Iraq, she discovered something critical about leadership: passion alone isn't enough. You need skills, responsibility, and the willingness to take action. That early lesson would carry her through 30 years of engineering across the Middle East and United States, where she learned that failure isn't the end—it's where real growth begins.
    Sairan shares why she tells young engineers that no one will die from their mistakes, using this extreme framing to help them understand that taking risks is essential for growth. Discover why she believes the jobs you hate teach you the most, how aging actually made failure easier to handle, and why the most important question isn't whether you'll fail but what you'll learn when you do.
    Learn why Sairan refuses to respond immediately to harsh emails, understanding that pausing and replying professionally instead of reacting emotionally often means the problem resolves itself by noon. She reveals the critical difference between competence and confidence—you can't fake confidence, but when you're truly competent, your body language naturally communicates it without you having to perform.
    Sairan breaks down why having an impressive LinkedIn profile full of certifications means nothing if you can't communicate effectively in meetings, how she learned to be curious about her team members instead of assuming she knows everything, and why being a role model as a leader is exactly like parenting—your actions speak louder than your words.
    From working on multi-billion dollar transportation projects with Homeland Security and Boeing to mentoring the next generation of women in STEM, Sairan explains why innovation keeps you young, how taking scary risks in your 30s transforms you into a better version of yourself, and why the first time she spoke on stage about women's empowerment she literally forgot her name and started thinking about dinner.
    Discover why engineers who only know one discipline won't thrive in today's world, how Western engineering practices have evolved to require T-shaped knowledge, and why your degree is just a plus—not the pathway to success. Sairan reveals her three-step framework for becoming an effective leader, born from 35 years of experience across small companies, big corporations, county government, and international projects.
    Whether you're a young engineer afraid to take risks, a midlife professional looking to reignite your career, or a leader trying to build psychological safety on your team, this conversation offers hard-won wisdom from someone who's failed, learned, and succeeded across two continents and three decades.
    Connect with Sairan Aqrawi:
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sairan-aqrawi-m-sc-993bb61a3/
    Website: https://www.sairanaqrawi.com/
    Download Sairan's free three-step checklist to becoming an effective leader—created from 35 years of engineering experience in the Middle East and United States. QR code available in the show notes.
    Subscribe for more conversations with leaders who understand that action breeds confidence, not the other way around. Share this with engineers who need permission to fail, learn, and grow into the leaders they're meant to become.

    I hope you enjoy this episode! Give it a like, share, and subscribe to not miss the content coming your way weekly. – Bill and the 40 % Better podcast team

    Connect with Bill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wblennan/
    Visit the 40 Percent Better website here: https://40pb.com/

    Listen to 40 % Better on these podcast platforms:
    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6qkqdMPkR9BqYPM7UPa4P0
    Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/40%25-better---engineering-leadership/id1709546347
    Amazon Podcasts: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/01ad162e-7a33-4df4-8c29-04c4af0405fc/40-better---engineering-leadership

    #40PercentBetter #BillLennan #Leadership #TeamPerformance #EmployeeEngagement #PsychologicalSafety #BusinessGrowth #Kaizen #EngineeringLeadership #Coaching The 40% Better podcast with Bill Lennan unlocks previously unheard-of performance levels in teams and leaders. Bill Lennan, founder of 40 Percent Better, interviews experts on employee engagement, psychological safety, engineering leadership, and actionable mental models. Learn how to foster high-performing teams, improve team productivity, and achieve sustainable success in business through a focus on human-centered systems.
    #technologyleadership #productmanagement #engineeringleadership #leadershipdevelopment #careergrowth #podcast
    Show More Show Less
    57 mins
  • How Clear Communication and Calculated Risk-Taking Built a Leadership Career | Sebastien Jean

    How Clear Communication and Calculated Risk-Taking Built a Leadership Career | Sebastien Jean
    Jan 20 2026
    When Sebastien Jean was five years old, he organized all the neighborhood kids into a military parade after seeing his first air show. Kids much older than him willingly followed this little commander up and down the street for 20 minutes while parents watched from their porches. That early leadership moment would eventually lead him to become CTO of Fizon Electronics, a company that makes 20% of the planet's SSDs.
    Sebastien shares how his unconventional path through the Army Reserve Signal Corps taught him that to be a good leader, you first have to be a good follower. Discover why he believes the most important leadership skill is understanding that everybody has a boss, and if your ego is always involved, you'll never succeed in a larger organization.
    Learn why Sebastien deliberately adds extra words and pauses to his speech to avoid shutting down conversations, how he coaches his nine-year-old son that politeness requires longer explanations, and why saying "I don't know" creates psychological safety that unlocks better solutions from your team. He reveals the critical difference between over-specifying requirements and giving talented engineers ownership through clear objectives without prescribed implementation.
    Sebastien breaks down why the number 648.973256 and 650 convey the same thing in presentations but one creates unnecessary cognitive load, how forward framing gets people to care before you present technical details, and why you should round complex data to the nearest multiple of 50 unless you're building car motors.
    Discover how Sebastien helps risk-averse engineers get comfortable with uncertainty through strategic proof of concepts and staging devices, why he believes he's "at least as dumb as that other guy over there" to give himself permission to ask for help, and how creating safe spaces for incomplete answers leads to breakthrough innovations.
    From building enterprise SSDs to launching new product classes in 2026, Sebastien explains why the quiet people in meetings are his canary in the coal mine for team health, how he balances aggressive risk-taking with calculated experiments, and why great leaders focus on enabling their teams rather than micromanaging implementation details.
    Whether you're leading hardware teams, managing firmware development, or trying to build a culture where smart people feel comfortable being wrong, this conversation offers battle-tested frameworks from someone who's led technical teams for decades across continents.
    Connect with Sebastien Jean:
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjean233/
    Company: Fizon Electronics (Enterprise brand: Piscari)
    Subscribe for more conversations with technology leaders who understand that your job as a leader is to make your boss's life easier while simultaneously enabling your team to do their best work. Share this with leaders who need permission to say "I don't know" more often.
    I hope you enjoy this episode! Give it a like, share, and subscribe to not miss the content coming your way weekly. – Bill and the 40 % Better podcast team

    Connect with Bill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wblennan/
    Visit the 40 Percent Better website here: https://40pb.com/

    Listen to 40 % Better on these podcast platforms:
    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6qkqdMPkR9BqYPM7UPa4P0
    Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/40%25-better---engineering-leadership/id1709546347
    Amazon Podcasts: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/01ad162e-7a33-4df4-8c29-04c4af0405fc/40-better---engineering-leadership

    #40PercentBetter #BillLennan #Leadership #TeamPerformance #EmployeeEngagement #PsychologicalSafety #BusinessGrowth #Kaizen #EngineeringLeadership #Coaching The 40% Better podcast with Bill Lennan unlocks previously unheard-of performance levels in teams and leaders. Bill Lennan, founder of 40 Percent Better, interviews experts on employee engagement, psychological safety, engineering leadership, and actionable mental models. Learn how to foster high-performing teams, improve team productivity, and achieve sustainable success in business through a focus on human-centered systems.
    #technologyleadership #productmanagement #engineeringleadership #leadershipdevelopment #careergrowth #podcast
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 21 mins
  • From Student Entrepreneur to CTO Leading 371 Engineers | Taran Lent

    From Student Entrepreneur to CTO Leading 371 Engineers | Taran Lent
    Jan 16 2026
    From College Meal Plans to Multi-Tenant Cloud Platforms: How a CTO Built an 80% Market Share by Stacking the Odds for His Teams with Taran Lent
    What started as a hungry college student solving his own problem with slips of paper and a bicycle turned into a career building mission-critical payment platforms serving 80% of colleges nationwide. Taran Lent, CTO of Transact Seaboard (soon to be Illumia), shares how sports taught him that being coached means someone believes in your potential, and why he refuses assignments when he knows they're set up to fail.
    Discover why Taran believes the most well-intentioned thing leaders do, the hero mentality, is actually destructive. Learn how a 10-minute conversation where he refused to accept an assignment without proper resources turned a $65 million acquisition into a product growing 14% year over year. Taran explains why playing to win means having a full team focused on fewer things rather than spreading eight players across an eleven-player game.
    Taran breaks down his overarching leadership framework: a leader's only job is to stack the odds in favor of their teams so they have the best chance to win. He shares why conviction requires letting people throw rocks at ideas, why Sullenberger was still asking for better ideas 400 feet above the Hudson, and how going slow to go fast through unit testing, load testing, and security work lets you move fast for two decades instead of limping along forever.
    From building the first off-campus student debit card system to partnering with Apple to put student IDs on phones and watches, Taran reveals what makes closed campus environments different from traditional payments, why autonomous robots are delivering lunch to students, and how cashless campuses create safer communities with better operational insights.
    Learn why great leaders define problems instead of dictating solutions, why asking smart people for recommendations always produces ideas two or three times better than yours, and why sustainable high performance over long periods is the only definition of excellence worth pursuing.
    Whether you're leading product teams, fighting for resources, or trying to build conviction before execution, this conversation offers battle-tested frameworks from someone who's been building and scaling platforms for over two decades.
    Connect with Taran Lent:
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taranlent/
    Company: Transact Seaboard (rebranding to Illumia in 2026)
    Subscribe for more conversations with technology leaders who understand that short-term wins at the cost of long-term sustainability aren't worth celebrating. Share this with leaders who need permission to refuse assignments that aren't set up for success.
    I hope you enjoy this episode! Give it a like, share, and subscribe to not miss the content coming your way weekly. – Bill and the 40 % Better podcast team

    Connect with Bill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wblennan/
    Visit the 40 Percent Better website here: https://40pb.com/

    Listen to 40 % Better on these podcast platforms:
    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6qkqdMPkR9BqYPM7UPa4P0
    Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/40%25-better---engineering-leadership/id1709546347
    Amazon Podcasts: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/01ad162e-7a33-4df4-8c29-04c4af0405fc/40-better---engineering-leadership

    #40PercentBetter #BillLennan #Leadership #TeamPerformance #EmployeeEngagement #PsychologicalSafety #BusinessGrowth #Kaizen #EngineeringLeadership #Coaching The 40% Better podcast with Bill Lennan unlocks previously unheard-of performance levels in teams and leaders. Bill Lennan, founder of 40 Percent Better, interviews experts on employee engagement, psychological safety, engineering leadership, and actionable mental models. Learn how to foster high-performing teams, improve team productivity, and achieve sustainable success in business through a focus on human-centered systems.
    #technologyleadership #productmanagement #engineeringleadership #leadershipdevelopment #careergrowth #podcast
    Show More Show Less
    43 mins
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