It takes more than technical proficiency to navigate management and workplace culture to create a winning work environment
Engineers face plenty of challenges throughout their careers and can sometimes lose sight of the human element of engineering. In fact, this is a recognized concern—a 2021 article published by the Institute of Education Sciences lamented the lack of soft skills among engineers and engineering graduates.
These soft or “people” skills are just as important as technical competence and, in some cases, even more so. In most environments, engineers must work collectively in teams as collaborators or team leaders. Communicating both simple and complex technical ideas to other personnel needs to be done carefully and effectively. When faced with the inevitable misunderstanding or conflict, the engineer is often faced with roadblocks that inhibit moving forward. Understanding who we are as engineers and how to interact with others under a variety of circumstances can go long way in ensuring work gets done correctly and efficiently and is a key ingredient in career advancement.
The next three books listed here have proven to be helpful as a part of my personal growth over the years and have allowed me to better use my technical talent to achieve goals throughout my career. Although embarking on a journey of self-discovery and improvement can be undertaken at any age, students should at least have some exposure to these concepts before entering the workforce. Graduates and seasoned engineers alike can benefit from balancing their technical and leadership skills. Complementing self-training with professional courses is a great way to learn and improve soft skills.
Conversation Skills
Conflict is inevitable and how an engineer leads and navigates the conversation is crucial for anyone tasked with designing, maintaining and troubleshooting factory systems and new products. The book “Crucial Conversations” by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler is an excellent read. As well, attending a course or skills workshop, based on this material, can be a vital step. This book teaches skills that promote good communications that can help solve conflict or avoid it altogether. Engineers and engineering managers need to focus on common goals and shared interests to ensure conversations are meaningful and productive. Many world-class companies have offered this course to all their employees to create more effective work environments. The recognition that employees are naturally diverse goes a long way in fostering trust within a company.
Crucial Conversation is not a book just about dealing with conflict but about how to engage in conversations that avoid communication traps. Looking for common ground and listening to what others have to say creates a safe environment to conduct business, interact with other engineers, or when dealing with design issues on the factory floor. Like other soft skills, the ability to avoid or diffuse conflicts can be a huge advantage in the boardroom and production office.
Understanding Your Team
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is an effective tool to help individuals understand their personality preferences, work style and communication tendencies. Although the assessment is typically done by trained professionals, there are a variety of online tools and texts available to get things started. For an engineer to communicate effectively, understanding oneself is just as important as understanding others. This assessment can also be used to highlight possible areas of self-improvement.
Some experts may challenge MBTI effectiveness, however in my personal experience is, it is an effective tool. Myers-Briggs seeks to define personality using the following traits in 16 combinations:
- Introvert or Extrovert
- Sensing or Intuitive
- Think or Feeling
- Judging or Perceiving
After testing, I learned I had to strive to become more outgoing. After making a concerted effort, I was promoted to engineering manager. A significant achievement that I am confident would not have occurred without this insight and guidance. As a result of knowing myself and learning to be more understanding and flexible with my interactions, I was asked to mentor some of the more difficult engineers and take on a challenging department because plant management had confidence that I was capable of functioning in difficult management environments.
Personality Types
The second book in this series references these personality types. “Type Talk at Work: How the 16 Personality Types Determine Your Success on the Job” by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen, discusses how different personality types approach their career development and how they work. The authors also provide practical advice on how to use the MBTI results to improve communication skills leading to better collaboration and higher job satisfaction.
An understanding of the 16 personality types is only one step in the process. The authors emphasize that the key to managing others effectively is to manage yourself first. The next step is recognizing how each of the personality types can work with each other. People with certain personality types may excel when it comes to attention to detail and precision while others can be extremely creative but not able to define the practical application of their ideas. A good engineer can leverage the strengths of the people on a team to achieve success.
High-Performance Thinking
The third book, “Think Like an Engineer” by Mushtak Al-Atabi is a great selection for finding ways to develop problem-solving abilities once you have established your skills at type-watching and applying professional conversational techniques. Approaching issues in a more systematic, but still creative method, is a skill many engineers lack. This book helps engineers create a framework for high-performance thinking by providing practical examples and case studies. The author starts by building a foundation from which you and your team can promote a culture that supports performance expectations. Understanding how our brains are wired can also aid us in our development. Engineers can learn to avoid loopholes and biases by adapting the process of Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate (CDIO Model) to leverage our natural mental processes.
Building effective teams requires a good understanding of how to create and maintain good communication, collaboration and problems solving. This is the focus of part two of the book, which discusses how engineers need a solid understanding of their personality type and how to recognize types in others to be effective. Creating a culture of trust and transparency can increase team performance by orders of magnitude that far exceed the competition in many cases.
Developing soft skills is an absolute necessity if an engineer wants to successfully navigate management and workplace culture to create an efficient and safe working environment. Skills and techniques for design are enough for an engineer to be considered proficient. But as your sphere of influence grows, more tools and techniques are needed to be effective and promote growth by breaking out of our comfort zone. There are significant stresses imposed on engineers in modern manufacturing. It is now, more than ever, that we need to find ways to recognize personality types to work quickly and effectively while still engaging in challenging conversations.
