Becoming a star engineer—Part II

Part I established the central finding: star engineers aren’t distinguished by what they have but by what they do. Kelley’s research identified nine specific work strategies that account for the gap between stars and solid performers. What’s striking about this list is how few of them are purely technical.

Blazing trails means taking initiative beyond the job description—helping a colleague who’s stuck, identifying a gap between two teams and filling it without being asked, doing the smaller unglamorous work that moves the system forward. Stars don’t wait for someone to define the opportunity. They see it and act on it, daily, in ways that compound.

Knowing who knows is about building networks of genuine expertise rather than relying on formal channels. Getting an accurate answer quickly from someone who actually understands a domain beats spending three hours searching documentation or waiting for a ticket response. Stars cultivate these relationships deliberately, which means being useful to others before they need to make a request.

Proactive self-management is the refusal to wait for a manager to create a career path. Stars identify the skills they’ll need and acquire them, create opportunities to apply those skills, and understand their own development trajectory clearly enough to steer it. This is harder without organizational support, but the research suggests stars do it regardless.

Getting the big picture means accumulating enough context—about customers, competitors, other teams, leadership priorities—to understand how individual decisions connect to larger outcomes. This doesn’t happen through meetings. It accumulates through sustained curiosity and pattern recognition over time.

The right kind of followership is one of the subtler strategies. Stars are effective subordinates. They support their leaders, exercise independent judgment without undermining authority, and push back on decisions they believe are wrong through appropriate channels. The “good No. 2” is a rarer and more valuable person than most organizations recognize.

Teamwork as joint ownership shifts the frame from “my tasks” to “our goal.” Stars take collective responsibility for outcomes, including the group dynamics and conflicts that affect whether the team can function. They’re not just cooperative—they actively work to keep the collaboration healthy.

Small-l leadership is influence built on expertise and interpersonal understanding rather than formal authority. It means asking questions before assuming you understand someone’s needs. It means building a following through demonstrated competence and reliability rather than through position.

Street smarts covers organizational navigation—managing competing interests, building alliances, understanding which battles are worth having, and advancing cooperation over conflict where possible. This is the strategy that gets dismissed as “politics,” but the research treats it as a legitimate and learnable skill.

Show and tell is communication calibrated to the audience. A technically correct explanation that doesn’t land with a non-technical stakeholder isn’t effective communication—it’s abdication. Stars craft messages that move people, not just messages that are accurate.

None of these are mystical. They’re all observable behaviors that can be practiced and improved. What the research found is that most engineers have access to these strategies in principle but don’t apply them consistently. Stars weave them into their daily work until they stop being strategies and become habits.

Part III looks at what happened when organizations actually trained engineers in these behaviors—and what the measured outcomes revealed.