That is not a trick question. And for engineers on international projects, it might be the most important one you ask all year.

Today we are talking about leadership in technical environments, because maths, science, and logic will not save you from the one thing every project actually runs on: relationships.

Leadership is a broad term. According to communication expert Catherine Stagg-Macey, you do not need to be a CEO or a project manager to lead. When you can navigate a difficult interaction well, you are being a leader. That is it.

Catherine would know. She is a leadership consultant for tech companies, helping teams communicate in high-stress, multicultural environments so they can actually get the work done together.

So what separates a project that goes well from one that falls apart? Not the drawings. Not the specifications. The relationships.

Here is how to navigate yours, in any language.

Logic isn't always the answer

If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: just because you think you are right does not make you right.

You became an engineer partly because you like having the answers. You love predictability, and maths and science give you that. A relationship is a blurrier thing. It is not binary. Being kind, understanding another person's view, listening for what they did not quite say: none of these are black-and-white skills. You improve at them, but you never "arrive."*

You do not have to be an engineer to prefer predictability. Relationships are hard. It would be far easier if you knew exactly how a colleague will show up today, tomorrow, and every day after. You can read someone this morning. That tells you nothing about who walks into the meeting next week.

So the first step to not getting frustrated is simple, even if it is not easy: put the logical brain to one side for a moment.

Your reactions have an impact

Good news first: letting go of the need to be right does not mean giving up control. Your behaviour shapes what happens next, for better or worse.

When you work in a group, you are not working with individuals; you are working with individuals who affect one another. How you react to a setback changes how your colleague talks to you, which changes how the next person responds, and on it goes. The relationship is never just between two people.

This is hard to picture, so Catherine uses a physical exercise to make it visible. Everyone in the room takes a piece of string and holds one end of someone else's in their free hand. Pull your string, and the person on the other end feels it. Then you connect every string in the room together. Now everyone is holding several, and no one can tell who is pushing and who is pulling.

It looks like a mess. That is the point. You can finally see the dynamic instead of just feeling it. Try to have a conversation through the string, and you learn something fast: if one person pulls and the other does not, you feel the tension. Ease off when someone pulls, and the tension drops. A surprising amount is going on under the surface of every team, and this is how you start to see it.

Six ways to choose the relationship

So how do you untangle all that string? You start choosing the relationship over being right, one interaction at a time. That choice has a name most people find a bit soft for an engineering context: empathy. All it means is getting a sense of what things look like from inside someone else's world. You cannot calculate its outcome, but you can practise it, the same way you once practised calculus. Here are six ways Catherine suggests you start.

1. Know why you are bothering.

You will not practise a skill you think is pointless. So get clear on the payoff first. Choosing the relationship helps you work with a difficult colleague instead of around them. It lets you take on projects too big to do alone. Keep that in mind the next time someone tests your patience.

2. Expect it to feel unnatural.

Your head is probably already spinning, and that is fine. This will not come naturally at first, and plenty of these moments will feel awkward. That is normal, not a sign you are doing it wrong. Even when you fumble it, hold on to one question: what is it like in your world right now? Everything else follows from that.

3. Set an intention.

Before a meeting you are dreading, tell yourself one thing: "I am going to be helpful today." It sounds almost too small to matter. It is not. Focusing on what you can offer shifts your own mood, and often the mood of the whole room shifts with it.

4. Aim for five positives to every negative.

Psychologist John Gottman spent twenty years studying what makes relationships last. He found that stable relationships keep roughly five positive interactions for every negative one.* That research looked at couples, not project teams. Catherine says as much, and then makes the case that it carries anyway, because what gets counted is the same either way: how much goodwill is sitting in the account. So for every piece of criticism, you are aiming for five genuine positives to balance it. That is a lot more than most of us manage, which is exactly why teams feel off so often.

5. Praise the person, not just the output.

A generic "good job" does very little. Specific praise for a human quality does a great deal. Catherine's example: instead of "Sofia, great project," try "Sofia, you showed real courage in a difficult client conversation today. Thank you." The second one tells the person you actually saw them. That is the deposit that keeps a relationship in credit.

6. Let go of being right.

This one goes against your training, so brace yourself. Relationships run on perspective, not proof. The thing you are convinced is wrong is, from where you stand, wrong. From your colleague's chair, it is simply a different view. What looks clockwise to you looks anticlockwise to them,* and neither of you is lying. So turn the frustration into a question instead of a verdict: "Tell me more about how you see this." That one line builds more bridges than winning ever did.

Ready to lead, not just be right?

You do not fix relationships by being the smartest person in the room. You fix them by choosing, again and again, to understand the person across from you before you correct them. That is a skill, and like any skill, it gets easier with practice and a bit of guidance.

That is what I do. I help non-native English-speaking engineers communicate clearly and work well with international teams, so the project moves forward and the relationships hold.

If this sounds like you, let us talk. Book a free 15-minute call, and we will work out where your English and your working relationships could use a hand. No pressure, no sales pitch, just a conversation.

And if it is your team who keeps hitting these walls, not just one engineer, that is a conversation too. Book a team training call, and we will look at what would help them communicate better across the whole project.

One more thing before you go. If you want to hear Catherine in full, her episode is worth your commute: episode 6 of the English for Engineers podcast, Conversations at the Edge with Catherine Stagg-Macey. Listen to the full episode.

Language Notes

A few phrases in this article are worth a quick note if English is your second, third, or fourth language.

"Arrive" (you never arrive): here this does not mean reaching a place. It means reaching a final, finished level of a skill. The point is that you keep getting better at relationships without ever being fully "done."

Five positive interactions to one negative: this is a ratio, not a rule you count exactly. It means positive moments should heavily outnumber criticism in a healthy working relationship. You are aiming for the balance, not doing the maths on every conversation.

Clockwise and anticlockwise: these describe the two directions a clock's hands can turn. In the article they are a picture for perspective: the same thing can look like it is turning one way to you and the opposite way to someone standing on the other side. Neither of you is wrong. You are just looking from different positions.

FAQ

References

^[1] The Gottman Institute — "The Magic Relationship Ratio, According to Science"

Original Post from 8 April 2022; latest update: 24 August 2026.