Joshua Tarbutton is the founder of Bravo Team, a Charlotte-based engineering design and fabrication firm he started the week after getting voted out of his first company - with $28.32 in his bank account and a full university teaching load. Bravo Team is now ranked #489 on the Inc 5000 with 30+ engineers, built on a premise Tarbutton has held since his first year as a professor: most engineering companies are extracting a fraction of what their engineers could actually produce. This episode answers the question he's been working on since then - not why engineers underperform, but why the systems around them are designed to make sure they do.
Engineers, we are ruthless to each other. We want every second of every day, every dollar that's possible. We are ruthless to each other because we hold ourselves to such a high standard, but that can often lead to very toxic culture.
In this episode:
How the Army's doctrine of 100% leadership responsibility for subordinate success - not just for results - became Bravo Team's core operating principle, and why most engineering managers have this relationship exactly backwards
Why attaching performance to identity is the structural mechanism that makes engineering environments psychologically unsafe and what Tarbutton replaced it with
The counterintuitive case for leader vulnerability: why acknowledging what you don't know produces faster, better engineering than projecting authority you don't always have
How "core hours" - a mandatory 9-to-3 in-office overlap window - generates the collisions that async work systematically prevents, and why deep work still requires its own protected space
What the Army's esprit de corps teaches about why engineers who share the hardest work often look back on it as their best professional memory, and how to design for that rather than wait for it
Bonus Content:
Changing the Narrative Around Instruction Based Management
S6E29 Joshua Tarbutton | Lessons From the Military Applied to Engineering
Joshua Tarbutton is the founder of Bravo Team, a Charlotte-based engineering design and fabrication firm ranked #489 on the Inc 5000, built from a $28.32 bank balance to a team of 50 in under eight years. In this episode he argues that most engineering companies are extracting a fraction of their engineers' creative capacity - not from lack of intent, but from structural conditions that reward execution over imagination. He covers the Army's servant leadership doctrine and how it became the operating principle for Bravo Team, the specific mechanism by which attaching performance to identity destroys engineering confidence, why vulnerability from leadership is a prerequisite for psychological safety rather than a byproduct of it, and how mandatory core hours changed the speed at which his team solves hard problems. He also describes getting voted out of his first company, mortgaging his house during COVID to make 20,000 face shields for local hospitals, and what "accidentally awesome" actually means as a philosophy of business. For engineering leaders and anyone managing creative technical teams, this episode is a direct-language field guide to building an environment where engineers can do the work they were built to do.
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Great engineering doesn’t always lead to successful products.
In this upcoming PDX Webinar, Arne Lang-Ree (Chief Design Officer & Cofounder at Spanner) will show how engineering teams can turn product-market fit into a practical design objective.
The session covers frameworks for translating user needs into engineering constraints and evaluating product success throughout development.
Join us on April 23 at 9:00 AM PT / 9:00 AM MST / 12:00 PM EST.
When Performance Becomes Identity, the Engineer Disappears
Tarbutton spent years as a professor watching technically gifted students - brilliant, unconventional, often the ones who hadn't showered in days and sat in the back of the class - get systematically diminished by environments that equated their work product with their personal worth. When he started Bravo Team, he designed explicitly against that pattern. The mechanism he identified is precise: once an engineer's professional identity is fused to their output, any criticism of the work is experienced as an attack on the person. The creative risk-taking stops, and what's left is an engineer optimizing for safety rather than for the best possible design.
When performance is attached to identity, we always are at risk of destroying someone's security and confidence.
His model for addressing this is a behavior the leader has to perform first. Brené Brown's research on shame and vulnerability became the framework: if the team perceives the leader as trapped in certainty, they'll stay trapped in it too. So Tarbutton made a habit of being publicly uncertain. Asking questions he didn't know the answer to. Acknowledging mistakes in the room rather than after the fact.
The only way out of it is for us to be vulnerable, and vulnerability requires courage and courage is only defined when there's fear.
The test of whether this is working, he says, isn't a culture survey or a retention rate. It's a simpler signal: what happens when the founder walks in with a suggestion and the team has already moved past it.
I'll come in and say, hey, have you thought about this? And they're like, oh yeah, that was like, last week's discussion.
That's the environment Tarbutton was trying to build - one where the engineers are ahead of the leader, not waiting for permission to be.
Changing the Narrative Around Instruction Based Management
Tarbutton's entire leadership model runs on a principle the Prussian military formalized in 1869: specify the mission, not the method. When Helmuth von Moltke stopped telling his officers how to accomplish their orders and started trusting them to find the path - he produced the most adaptive fighting force of the 19th century. The article on The Wave traces that same principle from Moltke's field regulations to the engineering project brief sitting on your desk right now, with one specific rewrite that changes what your team does when the design changes.
To read the full article, visit the full article on The Wave.
When Your Machine Shop Says No
Last year, a customer couldn't find a shop willing to make their part. Difficult material, tight tolerances, small quantity.
We tested our internal supply chain. Made the parts ourselves. Sent them as a surprise.
They worked perfectly. That customer has ordered hundreds more since.
Now available: custom machined parts with Pipeline engineering oversight, pricing that outperforms domestic shops, and the same supply chain we trust for our own work.
Want to learn more? Contact us at the link below: