Antonio Valadez & Nate Post | Building Better Engineers Through Better Leadership

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Nate Post and Antonio “Tony” Valadez bring decades of combined experience leading engineering, manufacturing, continuous improvement, and new product introduction efforts within the medical-device industry. Nate currently serves as Director of New Product Introduction at Edwards Lifesciences, where his career has progressed through manufacturing leadership and NPI roles. Outside of medical devices, he is the founder of Blue Collar Blades, where he handcrafts knives and other tools—a side of his career that combines engineering curiosity, craftsmanship, and entrepreneurship.  

Tony has spent roughly 30 years in manufacturing, with extensive experience in manufacturing engineering, process improvement, design transfer, validation, lean manufacturing, and engineering leadership. After holding senior engineering leadership roles across the medical-device industry, he recently founded Nexcellence Engineering Solutions, where he provides consulting and training services to regulated manufacturers.  

But the connection between Nate and Tony goes deeper than a shared industry. Earlier in their careers, Tony managed Nate during his time in R&D pilot manufacturing. Nate remembers Tony telling him that his job as a leader wasn't to change Nate's leadership style to resemble his own, but to help refine it and bring out the best version of the leader Nate already was. That philosophy left a lasting impression and became part of the reason Nate wanted to introduce Tony to the Being An Engineer community. 

In this conversation, Nate, Tony, and Aaron explore engineering leadership through the lens of an actual mentor-mentee relationship: how leaders recognize potential, give people meaningful opportunities, build trust, provide difficult feedback, and develop the capabilities their organizations will need in the future. They also discuss why technical organizations can’t separate people development from business performance—and how engineers can become leaders without losing the qualities that made them effective engineers in the first place. 

LINKS: 

 Nate Post LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nate-post/ 

 Antonio “Tony” Valadez  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonio-valadez-946621356/ 

Guest website: https://nexcellence-engineering--91l1gak.gamma.site/ 

Aaron Moncur, host 

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