Leader

Dr. Youngblood has served in various leadership positions over the years. Leadership comes natural to him, but he doesn't feel the need to always be the leader—some situations are better served by being a good follower and always a good listener. Since good leadership always felt natural and less challenging than the technical, Dr. Youngblood has focused his career on more technical aspects as he feels there will always be time to move into leadership/management. Although, he recognizes that leadership is a tough job itself that takes time to master. 

Dr. Youngblood has adopted the philosophy of Servant Leadership, and as he is called to serve in leadership positions, he treats it as that—serving. He believes that the most important part of an organization is its people, in fact an organization/company/university/etc is nothing but its people. By enriching the lives of the people in that collective and enabling them to be the best versions of themselves, they in-turn will make that organization the best version of itself.

I believe in servant leadership: a leader puts their people first and serves them, rather than being leader-first. My job as a leader is to have patience, build trust, and provide guidance. Everything else in this statement follows from that.

People first

I believe in listening to and developing the people I serve to be the best version of themselves. I take an interest in their career goals, and I provide challenging assignments that give them room to grow and the satisfaction of accomplishment. I believe in recognition of good work, constructive and timely feedback, and giving credit where credit is due, and also in accountability for mistakes. It is a leader’s responsibility to set the example, especially in how to handle stress and disappointment, and I believe that even the appearance of impropriety is impropriety. Pushing to be your best includes the risk of failure; through failure we learn, and we use it to move forward better. And I do not believe that anyone is irredeemable.

These beliefs came from watch-standing, not from reading. In the Navy’s nuclear program I supervised five to seven teams of five to seven people in radiological repair work and led the Division Training Group (Navy Achievement Medal). At PARC I led a team of six to nine people from the trenches for six years, doing the work beside them through more than fifty consecutive build cycles. The people are the record: doctoral students now at OpenAI, Sandia National Laboratories, and Salesforce; interns and junior researchers I mentored into research careers; a final doctoral student whose program we built around her life rather than the department’s default clock. What people go on to do is the only leadership metric I fully trust.

Two-way communication

Two-way communication is central to good leadership. Leaders provide a line of sight to the organization’s mission and objectives. They are clear about the rationale behind their decisions, their perspective, and their point of view, and consistent in their messages, behaviors, and expectations. But they do more listening than talking: valuing opinions and suggestions, and staying committed to helping everyone be their best. Leaders follow through on their commitments.

Influence spent on others

I believe in using influence to champion the worthy causes of those I serve, to provide them opportunity, and to remove obstacles, shielding them from politics and distraction that disrupt more than they enable. A leader’s job is to protect their people’s interests and provide the resources, tools, and training they need to do their jobs and be their best. Leaders do this with confidence and humility, seriousness and levity, strength and vulnerability.

The deepest form of this belief in my career is my relationship with titles. I have kept choosing the build side of investigator teams, PI on five awards and Co-PI on ten, and I walked away from tenure to work as a deep generalist across teams. I have never confused the administrative title on a project with what makes a team work; leadership that requires the title is not leadership. The same belief runs through the service I choose: board leadership of a rural water association, where the stakes are a community’s drinking water; sixteen years as a Scouting leader; and years of conference leadership for my research communities, recognized with the Douglas D. Dankel II Award for service. Service is not adjacent to leadership. It is the substance of it.

Culture, diversity, and positive scrutiny

Every organization, as a collective, can set and enforce its values, define its culture, and be the best version of itself by every member being the best version of themselves. Leaders are enablers, guides, and facilitators supporting the people who turn those ideals into reality. I believe in self-reflection and assessment, in being evidence-driven through tested hypotheses, and in torturing ideas through the scrutiny of diverse lenses. Only organizations with sufficient diversity in their people can do this work of turning ideas into the best ideas. So leaders build diverse teams and establish cultures of positive scrutiny, where hard questions are how the team cares for the work. And leaders create environments where everyone feels safe to take the journey of discovering the best version of themselves while executing on strategy and meeting goals.

I have led that kind of team on purpose: studio teams that paired computer science students with artists because neither could ship without the other, and multi-institution research programs where integration meant coordinating Cycorp, Stanford, UT Austin, Michigan, and the Naval Research Laboratory toward one demonstration. Diverse teams are not a compliance posture. They are how the best ideas survive contact with reality.

I have been responsible for other people’s work since a Wendy’s kitchen in 1987, and the metric has never changed: the people I served, doing their best work, long after they stopped needing me.

• Assistant Area Manager for Human-Machine Collaboration Research at PARC

  • Manage the daily engineering and research operations for a growing group of 5-7 local researchers/engineers and multiple external partners

  • Managing a budget of ~$12 million USD

• Chief Executive Officer for a start-up company, Geometric Analytics

  • Managed a team of 3, internationally embedded in France

  • Managing a lean budget of ~$40 thousand USD

• Computer Science Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  • Managed my own research group of 6-18 doctorate, masters, and undergraduate research students and multiple external partners

  • Served on University and College Computing Infrastructure Committees

  • Managed a budget of ~$2 million USD

• Chief Scientist of the MAVHome Project at the University of Texas at Arlington

  • Managed the project with a rotating group of 4-6 faculty and 8-18 student researchers

  • Managed a budget of ~$4 million USD

• Software lead for the Enterprise Data Publisher (EDP)  at American Airlines

  • Managed the project with a 5 person development team

• Lead Engineer for the Channel Element Services portion of the Common Base Transceiver Station Platform (CBTSP) at Motorola 

  • Managed the project with a 3 person development team

• Student Leader at the University of Texas at Arlington

  • Served as Vice-Chair and Chair of the ACM/IEEE-CS Chapter

  • Served as the Dallas-Fort Worth Professional ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter Chair

  • Served on the Joint Council of Engineering Organizations (JCEO, student governance organization) as the CSE representative

  • Served as the Student Body President for the College of Engineering and as part on multiple University committees as a student leadership representative

• Non-commissioned officer in the US Navy Submarine Force

  • Led the Division Training Group teaching and reinforcing fundamentals and advanced skills to the ship in Nuclear Operations and Repair. Team of 6 serving 1500+ personnel

  • Senior Radiological Controls Shift Supervisor in charge of the radiological controls (containment, exposure monitoring, health physics, waste management and shipping, etc.) of all nuclear repair operations supporting Submarine Squadrons 6 & 8 in Norfolk, VA. Managed 2–7 teams of 5–7 people to support work up to shipyard-level and sometimes beyond. 

  • Engine Room Supervisor in charge of nuclear propulsion operations at sea managing a team (4 watch stations and up to a dozen people) to support U.S. naval operations. 

  • Leading Engineering Laboratory Technician in charge of a 6 person division that was responsible for all primary and secondary nuclear power plant chemistry, radiological surveys and controls, and personnel dosimetry. 

  • Ranked the #1 non-commissioned officer in my division the last 2 years of my service 

  • Responsible for U.S. Government assets worth over ~$100 billion USD and the safety of over 200,000 people 

• Shift Manager for the Wen-Corpus Company

  • Quick serve restaurant manager managing a shift of up to 7-12+ employees providing service to hundreds of customers  daily

  • Ranked National DECA Top 10 in Quick Service Restaurant Management

  • Managed a store with over $2 million USD in sales/year and ~$700 thousand USD in assets