Most engineering leaders learn leadership the hard way.

They get promoted from IC roles and suddenly find themselves managing people they used to work alongside. They default to command-and-control because that's what they've seen. They struggle with influence across teams they don't control. The transition is messy, stressful, and often unsuccessful.

Richard Ford took a different path. He's the VP of Engineering at CyberCube, with a resume that spans a PhD in Quantum Physics from Oxford, developing IBM's computer virus immune system, and building the world's largest web hosting system at Verio. But his most valuable leadership training came from an unexpected place: 10 years as a university department head.

This wasn't a detour from his tech career—it was the perfect laboratory for mastering engineering leadership.🎧 Subscribe and Listen Now →

The Academic Leadership Laboratory

"Being a professor, being a department head specifically was the best training in the world for running engineering teams," Richard told me. "Because as a department head in a university, you have no carrot and you have no stick."

Think about this constraint. His biggest reward? "I can give you a slightly bigger office next year." His biggest punishment? "I will give you a bad review, but it won't make any difference to your raise and it won't make any difference to your employment because you're tenured."

This forced Richard to develop something most engineering leaders never master: pure influence without authority.

"What you learn to do is manage by influence, to get people on the boat and make them want to come with you, and to build consensus," he explained. "And I think there's a lot of parallels with engineering where it's all about the people and it's about having influence across groups that you don't control."

The academic constraint created the perfect training ground. No shortcuts. No positional power to fall back on. Just the fundamental skill of making people want to follow your vision.

The Influence Toolkit

Richard's academic experience gave him what he calls "a big grab bag of different techniques for getting people to come along, ranging all the way from 'Hey, let's try it your way' to really let them explore, give them a lot of freedom, all the way down to 'No, I'm calling the ball. This is getting done this week and this is what we're doing.'"

The key insight: "You shouldn't just default to a style. You should look at the personal group that you're working with. You should figure out what is the most effective approach to get the result that we need to get as a team."

This adaptability comes from understanding that "this sort of failure mode where we have a default style as a manager, as a leader, it is actually terrible. It's a snare."

Instead of one-size-fits-all leadership, Richard developed situational mastery. By nature, he's "much more of a consensus builder and a group builder, but that's not my only style, and I can pull in whatever style the situation requires."

The Partnership Mindset

Academic leadership taught Richard something else crucial: how to think about working relationships.

"I don't think of my employer as my overlord. They're my partner. We're doing this together," he said. "You want to find an employer and an environment that suits your skillset, that suits how you think about the world."

This partnership mindset extends to his team management. "If you're not in the right environment, you'll never do the best work of your career. And what are we here to do? We're here to do the best work of our career because it's so fulfilling to be at the top of your game."

The practical result: Richard gravitates toward environments that bring out his team's best work, not just maximum compensation. "There's such a thing as enough when it comes to comp. Money isn't my primary motivator. It's fulfillment."

Communication Across Differences

Academic leadership also taught Richard that "everyone's different, and so you have to take a variety of approaches to get your message across."

His communication strategy is deliberately multimodal: "There's physical—we're in the same room, one-on-ones or group meetings. There's presence going out to the satellite office. Then yes, I send out an email every few weeks to the team telling them what's up next. And we have all hands and we have smaller group meetings and I push stuff out in Slack."

The principle: "We shouldn't require the consumer to match our style. We should try and match the style of the consumer because that's gonna be most effective."

Even his meeting structure reflects this understanding. "It's always the last thing somebody says in the meeting that's the thing they actually set it up for," so he books 30-minute meetings for 25 minutes, knowing the real conversation happens when people feel they have time to bring up what's actually on their mind.

What This Means for Your Engineering Leadership

First, develop your influence toolkit beyond hierarchical authority. Practice getting alignment through understanding and motivation, not just positional power. The academic exercise: try leading a volunteer project where you have no formal authority.

Second, build situational leadership skills. Don't default to one style—develop approaches ranging from collaborative exploration to decisive direction-setting. Match the approach to the specific challenge and team dynamic, not your comfort zone.

Third, think partnership, not hierarchy. Optimize for environments that bring out your team's best work, not just maximum individual compensation. As Richard puts it: "There's such a thing as enough" when it comes to money, but no limit to fulfillment and growth.

Fourth, communicate multimodally. Different people consume information differently. Don't make your team adapt to your preferred communication style—adapt your communication to reach everyone effectively.

The leadership question: Before making any major team decision, ask yourself: "How can I get people to want to come with me on this?" The answer will usually produce better decisions and stronger team alignment than pure top-down directives.

Richard's academic detour wasn't a detour at all. It was deliberate preparation for the influence-based leadership that modern engineering teams actually need. The constraint of no authority forced him to master the skills that make authority effective when you have it.

About CyberCube:

CyberCube is the leading provider of cyber risk analytics for the insurance industry, delivering the data and modeling capabilities that power over 70% of global cyber insurance premiums. Founded in 2015 and now backed by over $180MM in recent funding from Spectrum Equity and others, CyberCube serves more than 130 clients across the insurance value chain—including 75% of the top 40 US and European cyber insurers.

The company’s engineering teams, led by VP of Engineering Richard Ford, build AI-powered software solutions that help insurers, reinsurers, and brokers quantify and manage one of the most complex risks facing organizations today. With a multidisciplinary team spanning San Francisco, New York, Chicago, London, and Tallinn, CyberCube is on a mission to build societal resilience to cyber risk by making it quantifiable, insurable, and manageable at scale.

Learn more at cybcube.com

High Output is brought to you by Maestro AI. Richard talked about how academic leadership taught him to "get people on the boat and make them want to come with you"—but that influence-based approach creates a new challenge for engineering leaders. When your team is distributed across Slack, Jira, and GitHub, it becomes impossible to see who's actually engaged and where your influence is working. Maestro cuts through that chaos with daily briefings that reveal where your team's time and energy actually go, so you can spot when your leadership approach is building momentum or hitting resistance.

Visit https://getmaestro.ai to see how we help engineering leaders measure influence and team engagement beyond vanity metrics.

Leading through influence instead of authority? We'd love to hear your approach. Schedule a chat with our team → https://cal.com/team/maestro-ai/chat-with-maestro

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