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How to Become an Effective Engineering Leader

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This is a guest post by George J. Newton

Engineering LeaderIt can be challenging to transition from being a great engineer into a position of leadership. While your technical knowledge and skills are essential to the execution of your role, being in a position of leadership also necessitates a range of non-technical skills. Here are four key principles to help you become an effective engineering leader, one who can not only achieve results, but also lead and inspire teams.

1. Understand Your Team’s Needs

Management positions require that you understand your team’s day-to-day job and develop empathy. The more you can understand your team’s individual journeys and experiences, the better placed you can be to support them to meet their goals and needs. Importantly, this will help you to ensure that they are not only engaged with the work, but that they are also being productive.

leader

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The Power of Perseverance in Developing a Strong Engineering Career

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This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

perseveranceThe good news is that your beliefs can strengthen your engineering career success, and as you build stronger core beliefs, you will raise your motivation to learn and grow into a more capable engineer. But the bad news is that changing your life and reaching your career goals will not be an easy task. You will likely fail over and over again before you succeed, and the chances are that achieving new levels of success on the job will take longer than you had initially forecasted. 

However, through building new habits, developing your skills, and demonstrating tenacity and grit, you can create a strong engineering career beyond what you initially thought was possible. On the other side, a poor set of personal habits, a low level of aptitude, and a lack of perseverance can explain why most engineers fail to achieve their career goals.

We are going through a very tough job market right now, and since the pandemic began, there have been many engineers who lost their jobs or had to pivot into a new career path so they can survive, keep making an income, and in some cases, to thrive. But you can’t allow job market setbacks, short-term failures, and temporary job losses to take away your energy and take you away from getting what you deserve.

Perseverance

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3 Virtual Presentation Strategies for Tech Entrepreneurs to Accelerate Stakeholder Buy-In

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This is a guest blog by Melissa Marshall

Virtual Presentation StrategiesIt is no secret that your ability to communicate well about your tech is often the make-or-break reason for project success. You can have the best idea or product in your market, but if your key stakeholder does not “get it,” then you do not get the critical buy-in you need. Communicating tech is so challenging because you must decide which technical details are most important to the audience’s appreciation of the importance of your work, and then you often must make those ideas understandable to audiences that often have little background in your area of expertise. Add to that the challenge that most presentations are now occurring virtually to very distracted audiences, and you have a huge communication challenge to overcome! Here I’ll share three strategies you can use in your next virtual presentation to be more successful.

Be Audience-Focused

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How “Grow” Became a Four-Letter Word

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This is a guest blog by Peter C. Atherton, P.E.

Grow“Grow just means more work for me and more rewards for you.”

That’s an increasing lament from practitioners to principals across our industry.

What went wrong and, more importantly, how can we fix this?

There are many great reasons to grow as an organization.

Here Are Four Reasons I Think Most People Can Get Behind on Our Teams and in Our Firms:

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Seeing the World With an Entrepreneurial Point of View

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This is a guest blog by Patrick Sweet, P.Eng., MBA, PMP, CSEP

EntrepreneurialWhen I was an undergraduate engineering student, my favorite professor was a brilliant man named Dr. Peter Gregson. While I would never call him eccentric, he definitely stood out from the rest of the faculty. He was one of the few professors in the department who actually made things. He had developed products and built companies to sell those products throughout his career. This gave him, in my mind at least, a lot of credibility as an engineer and as an educator. Unsurprisingly, one of Dr. Gregson’s mantras was on the importance of having an entrepreneurial mindset. Whether you work for yourself or for someone else, seeing the world with an entrepreneurial point of view can have a profound impact on your career as an engineer. Ultimately, engineers who learn to think like entrepreneurs are better innovators, solve bigger problems, and are more productive than their colleagues.

Focusing on the Problem

As engineers, most of us are trained to master “solution space.” In school, we’re handed assignments and asked to solve for x. The problems that need to be solved are literally packaged up and delivered to us.

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Developing an Entrepreneurial Mindset

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This is a blog by Jeff Perry, MBA

Entrepreneurs

“If you don’t take control of your career development, it’s highly unlikely that anyone else will!”
~ Derric Yuh Ndim

Whether you are an entrepreneur, business owner, leader, or individual contributor/employee, there are lessons you can take from how entrepreneurs successfully operate so you can build a great life and career.

Entrepreneurs are known for being visionary, risk takers, and innovators. Often they go “all-in” on an idea to try and make it happen.

Does that mean you have to put it “all on the line” and “risk it all”? No, not necessarily. But you can take smart risks that seem difficult or uncomfortable right now that will lead to personal and professional growth.

Why Mindset?

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8 Tips From an Engineer Who Started a Business From Scratch

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This is a guest blog by Leanna Michniuk

starting a business

“That feeling of what the heck are we doing never really leaves you. You just keep at it until you figure it out and surround yourself with really smart people to help you get there.”

The very first episode of our new series, Civil Engineering Entrepreneurs on The Civil Engineering Podcast, has recently published! We’re partnering with the Engineering Management Institute to deliver expert insight and helpful ideas for engineers.

In this first episode, host Anthony Fasano, P.E. sits down with Gordon Greene, P.E., of Patel, Greene & Associates, LLC (PGA) to learn how he successfully grew his company from a few employees to 85+. During the episode, he calls out eight sound pieces of advice for people who are starting a business from scratch or perhaps looking to improve upon their strategy.

Read on to learn his eight tips and how you can implement them into your own company.

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4 Behavior Changes That Create Confidence Through Consistent Implementation

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This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

confidenceYour low self-esteem is a temporary condition. You will rebound from it, just as surely as you gravitated into it. As Jim Rohn once said:

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”

If you’re aiming to develop your inner confidence, then you must accept the fact that confidence is the byproduct of consistently implementing a set of actions and behaviors that create self-worth. These actions and behaviors will cause your character to transform and you will become a more confident version of yourself because you have increased your perception of yourself.

Here Is the List of Four Behaviors You Must Give up in Order To Create New Levels of Confidence:

1. Eliminate Negative Self-Talk

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Confidence = Decisiveness + Commitment + Resourcefulness

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This is a guest blog by Jen Bunk, Ph.D.

ConfidenceIn my last article, I talked about calling forth your confidence. We all have confidence — it’s simply hard to find it sometimes. Especially amidst the chaos, negativity, scarcity, and all of the other problems that we face on a daily basis.

But that’s the whole game, isn’t it?

To be able to shine with confidence despite massive challenges!

That’s how you win as a technical leader.

That’s how you win at the game of life.

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Building Self Confidence – You Are in Charge of You!

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This is a guest blog by Pamela A. Scott

Self Confidence

“Remember, you have been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.” – Louise L. Hay, motivational author

I love that quote. We are all experts at telling ourselves how we messed up. It’s time to shift our focus by building our self-confidence.

If you think you’re the only one with self-confidence issues, think again. I realized recently that most (if not all) clients I’ve coached over the past 15-plus years have struggled with self-confidence. That includes CEOs and other executive-level staff as well as teenagers trying to find direction.

Reprogram Your Brain

Let’s start with listening to how you program your brain via the words you use.

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