Of course, if we were able to watch a great athlete training, or a great writer writing, or a great coder coding, we would see that honing a strength is hard work—it is by no means easy to find that incremental margin of performance when you are already operating at a high level—and that a strength is not where we are most “finished” but in fact where we are most productively challenged. Yet we are told to resist the temptation to “just” play to our strengths, and instead to work constantly on our weaknesses. In common parlance, we are told to avoid “running around our backhand.” This betrays, perhaps, a misunderstanding of what a strength actually is. It is not, for each of us, where performance is easiest—it is where performance is most impactful and increasing.

It’s just like how many marketing, sales, and creative teams often don’t talk to engineering. Too many numbers. Too black and white. Too many geeks in one room geeking out.

But I wanted to understand the squishy stuff and the geeky stuff. And I liked all of it. I could also translate back and forth—explain the squish to engineers, translate the 1s and 0s to the creatives. I could synthesize all the pieces and keep the whole company in my head.

To this day, it’s hard to describe the power those simple words had. He could have said dozens of other things to make me feel better—“You’ll find a way through this,” “It’s not as bad as you think,” or “Here are some things to try.” But what he said instead was specific to me, and something I felt he genuinely believed. It didn’t mean my opinions were always right, but his vote of confidence that they came from a principled place restored some of the confidence I had lost. By recognizing a strength of mine, Chris gave me a renewed sense of motivation.

Paul did a lot more at Alcoa than use powerful words. He and fellow company leaders dismissed managers who didn’t turn knowledge about process improvements into action or, worse yet, covered up safety problems. As business author David Burkus argues, the genius of zeroing in on safety is “you can’t improve safety without understanding every step in the process— understanding each risk—and then eliminating it.” As a result, hundreds of process improvements “made the plants run more efficiently,” and Paul “gradually changed the systems and the culture” so that “executives began sharing other data and other ideas more rapidly as well.” Paul was effective not only because of the powerful language he used to fire up employees and focus their attention on the details of Alcoa’s production processes. What Paul didn’t say provides an equally important lesson for friction fixers: we can’t detect even a whiff of jargon monoxide in his words after reviewing numerous speeches, interviews, and written statements.

Barry’s attack hits home. I had once been an engineer, and I know an engineer doesn’t design a bridge that might hold its load. An engineer starts with complexity and crafts certainty. I knew what it was like to be careful, to balance literally thousands of considerations in making a system work.