March/April 2019

In Focus: Leadership
Talking—and Listening—Your Way to the Top

BY PATRICK INGRAHAM

As engineers seek to move up the career ladder toward management and leadership positions, effective communication skills will benefit them greatly. While it is no secret that top managers demonstrate effective communication, what are the specific skills that engineers need, and where can they go to gain, practice, and maintain these important skills?

Dorota Shortell is CEO of Simplexity Product Development, which provides engineering services focused on product and custom equipment development. As she explains, many engineers did not get into the profession because they thrive on working with people. However, she stresses the importance of young engineers talking about the good work they do, in order to get a leg up on their peers when they try to advance in their careers.

“A lot of times, engineers are pretty shy about self-promotion,” Shortell says. “They don’t want to seem like they’re bragging, but communicating to your superiors about the work you’re doing is important. This is especially true for young women engineers who can be intimidated by higher-ups. You can do great work, but if no one knows about it, your manager’s busy with other things, you’re not going to get recognition for that work.”

Another skillset stressed by many expert engineering communicators is good listening. Shoots Veis, P.E., is an engineering consultant and supervisor who authored Public Speaking for Engineers and offers related workshops. He explains that a good listener can determine what audience members need to learn from a presentation and incorporate that information into it.

“Effective speakers will take that material and communicate it well to the audience, in a manner that promotes understanding,” Veis says. “Engineers that communicate well are a sought-after commodity, and the ability of a project manager to communicate with their clients is more valuable than their technical proficiency.”

Mike Geisel, P.E., the director of public services for the City of Chesterfield, Missouri, says that becoming an effective listener allowed him to build trust with his subordinates, which ultimately allowed his team to solve problems faster and smarter.

“Engineers are instinctive problem solvers,” the NSPE member notes. “I found that I was often too quick to offer solutions or problems, when subordinates really simply wanted to either keep me informed or just use me as a sounding board. I had to learn to let them finish [and] fully share their issue, and then ask a simple question: ‘What are you asking me to do?’ Oftentimes the answer was ‘nothing’; they just needed to share the information. This allows and encourages your subordinates to come to you without fear of you taking over and diminishing their input.”

Majella Stevenson, P.E., F.NSPE, director of business operations at the US Navy’s Fleet Logistics Center in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, discourages engineers from getting too tangled in the technical jargon of engineering, particularly when communicating with nonengineers.

“As engineers, we can get caught up in the beauty of the technical aspects of our work that most people would be less interested in,” says Stevenson. “To communicate effectively, especially with nonengineers, the person you are communicating with needs to understand why it matters to them in the simplest way possible, such as: If I.M. Engineer cannot do X, then Mary J. Contracting Officer cannot do Y.”

Stevenson adds that the art of mediation is another useful communication skill that proves effective for supervisors.

“Not only do you break up office squabbles,” Stevenson says, “but mediation skills teach you to understand a position from another perspective. It forces you to articulate key elements of your concern succinctly so that the other person understands your point of view.”

Opportunities for Improvement

Communication skills are often gained with work experience, but numerous organizations and institutions can help engineers learn and practice these skills on their own time.

Arkansas State University’s online Master of Engineering Management degree program requires students to take courses such as Integrated Marketing Communication and Human Resources Management plus courses in statistics, finance, and operations research, to help them gain different types of communication and people skills.

“Engineering managers need to be able to communicate not only on a number of different levels to their employees and fellow engineers about different projects, but also to clients, investors, stakeholders, politicians—and, most importantly, the public as a whole,” says Program Director Joan Burcham. “Our program is designed so that—on top of everything else a manager needs to be successful—engineers are able to differentiate who their audience is in order to communicate effectively.”

Other universities, such as University of California, Berkeley, and MIT, have taken note of the need for engineers and engineering managers to demonstrate these communication skills and have developed leadership programs that stress them more than the technical skills engineers should have gained from their undergraduate education and early work experiences.

Several state societies also offer their own leadership institutes that prepare engineering professionals for roles as  business, community, and organizational leaders. The Texas Society of Professional Engineers’ PE Leadership Institute is one such program.

The Leadership Institute accepts a class of 20 participants of various ages and career stages. During five weekend-long sessions over eight months, participants discuss the day’s topics and practice applying the skills that will position them for career advancement. They learn about personal development, interacting with teams and clients, and leadership communication skills, before finally committing to a 100-day personal development plan that they present at the final session.

According to TSPE Deputy Executive Director Claire Black, one of the activities in the session on leadership communication skills involves participants reading case studies or books such as the New York Times-bestselling business book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, which teaches best-practice skills for business interactions. Although discussion about the required reading is a part of the session, the group focuses on practicing the skills covered in the reading.

“When participants come into the session, at least 50% of it is interactive—putting the participants in scenarios where they have to actually put those skills to use,” Black says.

Kyle Womack, P.E., a principal and vice president for Parkhill, Smith & Cooper and longtime proponent of teaching effective communication skills to engineers, is a facilitator for the program. He says that the only way to improve communication skills for engineering managers is to challenge them.

“Engineering managers should encourage meaningful dialogue with their direct reports, their teams, their peers, and their supervisors,” Womack says. “Managers can inadvertently cause themselves or others to either ‘defend’ or ‘withdraw’ from conversations. If we could change our mindset in communication to a few concepts, the dialogue and effectiveness would increase greatly.”

Top Tips for Success

Womack says the following suggestions will help any person, not just an engineer, become a better communicator:

• Practice every chance you get and create opportunities that allow you to do so;
• Don’t send that email—pick up the phone and communicate;
• Get up from your desk and go have a face-to-face meeting with your direct report, peer, supervisor, or client;
• Ask to present a portion of an agenda for a team meeting, or ask to lead a team meeting;
• Ask to sit in or take part in presentations to clients, with proposals, or to the public;
• Speak up in team meetings and share your thoughts and ideas, and encourage others to speak up as well;
• Have conversations where you can really get to know people and they can get to know you;
• Write letters or reports and get others to review your skills to help you improve; and
• Ask to attend a training program on presentation skills.

Geisel adds that opportunities to practice communication skills can also arise outside of work.

“First, in any social situation, you should always use eye contact and full sentences when you’re talking with someone, even if it’s a friend,” Geisel says. “Engage in casual social contact to improve your interpersonal skills and don’t be afraid to put yourself out there frequently. Too often engineers avoid engaging in social settings—but my advice to young engineers looking to become managers would be to practice stepping up and speaking to somebody you don’t know.”

According to Stevenson, having a deep understanding about the business and industry you are in is vital to becoming a great professional communicator, successful engineering manager, and leader.

“I believe the best way for engineers to move up the ladder is to understand the business,” says Stevenson. “That includes finance, how business comes in, strategic partnerships, key customer sectors, etc. Understanding these factors will help guide how [you] communicate based on [your] audience. If you want to lead a technical section (i.e., become a civil engineer branch head) and speak exclusively to other technical folks, you need to be a subject-matter expert. If you want to run the business, you need to speak in a way that people understand the relevance of your actions to them.”