Engineering Management Institute

UPCOMING WEBINAR

Strategies for Delivering a Presentation to a Hostile Audience

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Strategies for Delivering a Presentation to a Hostile Audience is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.
hostile audience

As engineers we often get the opportunity to work on great projects. We often transform the landscape through construction and make life safer and more efficient for the people using our infrastructure. However, not everyone is going to see it that way. Many of us have had to deliver a presentation to a hostile audience that does not think a certain project is the best idea. They come to the meeting with a preconceived notion of the project, not happy at the thought of what is proposed to be built.

If you are already a less than confident public speaker, speaking to this type of audience can be one of the hardest things to accomplish. They tend not to share your viewpoint, may have a dislike for technical answers, and may not value engineering expertise. Speaking to this type of crowd is never going to be easy, but there are a few things you can do to get ready.

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How to Handle Conflict Resolution Questions During Engineering Job Interviews

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How to Handle Conflict Resolution Questions During Engineering Job Interviews is a blog post by Nader Mowlaee

Engineering Job Interviews

In any type of interview, but especially in engineering job interviews, hiring managers ask questions about how you would deal with technical conflict. They want to know about your interpersonal skills and how you would deal with a problem in the office if it should arise, especially if the conflict is of a technical nature.

This is where you must utilize your interpersonal (soft) skills alongside of your technical (hard) skills to find a resolution. What’s also very important is how fast you can come up with a solution, even if it’s a temporary fix, because in many technology-oriented or industrial environments, having a technical problem or conflict could potentially lead to severe damages.

Why Hiring Managers Ask About Conflict

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Developing a Plan B When Giving Engineering Presentations

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Developing a Plan B When Giving Engineering Presentations is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

The mutter of the crowd begins to subdue as the moderator asks people to settle into their seats for the next engineering presentation.  After a brief intro, the presenter steps to the front of the room.  After a smooth speech introduction, the speaker is just going to his first slide when the projector light goes out.  While the projector’s light is now dim, the look on the speaker’s face resembles that of a deer in the headlights.

We have all seen something like this happen.  If you are unlucky, it has happened to you.  What happens next depends on your speech preparation.  If you included a Plan B as part of your speech preparation, then you can move on from the mishap with little disruption.  Most likely, you will impress the audience with your grasp of the subject matter and your ability to carry on without the projector.

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Why Communication for Engineers Is so Important

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Why Communication for Engineers Is so Important is a
guest blog by Thomas A. Anderson, P.E:

Communication for Engineers

Do you remember the telephone game?

In school, you and your classmates tried to pick a phrase and “pass it on” by whispering it to the person next to you. Then the phrase was passed from person to person until the last person announced the phrase. How much did the phrase change during the game? As people relay message from one person to the other, the message will often be distorted.

While the game is a lot of fun. It also teaches us important lessons.

  • If you do not receive information from a reliable source, you may not get the correct information. It turns into gossip.
  • If you do not produce information properly, it will not be received as planned

Communication skills are vital to success in your personal life and your engineering career. Poorly delivered messages can turn into misunderstanding, frustration, or even a disaster.

By practicing communication, you will understand more of what people say. Your family, friends, and co-workers will have the confidence to come to you when they find themselves in need.

What are the keys to clear communication?

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Avoid Torturing Your Audience When Giving Presentations

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Avoid Torturing Your Audience When Giving Presentations is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.
Torturing Your Audience

We all know it. We all hate it. Yet, all of us do it at least once in a lifetime. How often have we suffered through a presentation where the slides, usually crammed full of information, were simply read to the audience? It’s not really a presentation so much as a live reading of a document meant to torture audience — or at least it seems that way. The presenter has stuffed as much information as they can onto a slide – a bad practice to begin with – then they read those overcrowded slides to an audience. Those presentations don’t work for three reasons.

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Actions Speak Louder than Words in Your Presentation

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Actions Speak Louder than Words in Your Presentation is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Presentation
Most engineers, and most people, will tell you that giving a presentation is not something they look forward to.  However, given our love of efficiency, engineers should have a different outlook.  One reason we give a speech to an audience is because it should be the most efficient way to share information.  The presenter has information they need to disseminate to a lot of people, so why not get them all in a room and tell everyone at the same time?  Doing so might even generate questions that you can answer for the group that wouldn’t come up if there wasn’t a group of people in that room.

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How to Begin your Speech Planning and Design

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How to begin your speech planning and design is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.Speech Planning

A long time ago in a conference room far, far away, speakers used to give their presentations using a slide projector.  Before computers were easy to move around, the slide projector was the all-in-one machine used to put graphics on the screen during a presentation.  You may have heard of the Kodak Slide Carousel.  You may have even used one in a presentation or two.  To use the carousel, the graphics the speaker wanted to show during the presentation were made into slides.  Those slides were loaded into a wheel and as the wheel advanced, a new slide was projected on the screen.

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Expect Murphy’s Law to Apply to all Engineering Presentations You Give

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Expect Murphy’s Law to Apply to all Engineering Presentations You Give is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Engineering PresentationsI’ve had the honor of speaking to thousands of engineers across the world over the years, which has helped me to understand why public speaking is so important to any professional.  It gives you the ability to reach and impact a lot of people.

That being said, there’s been a few times, where I showed up to speak and everything went wrong, and I had to adjust.  This happens more often than not and that’s why I am really excited to share the following story with you from our guest author for this week Shoots Veis, P.E, author of Public Speaking for Engineers, about engineering presentations. Enjoy it…

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Don’t Ignore Opportunities to Celebrate Engineering

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Don’t Ignore Opportunities to Celebrate Engineering is a guest post by
Shoots Veis, P.E.

Ignore OpportunitiesIt was Engineers Week and I attended a nice banquet to celebrate.  The evening commenced with drinks and socializing among local engineers and their guests, followed by a decent dinner.  The program began mid-meal, with the emcees telling jokes and getting the proceedings underway.  First up, scholarships were given to local high school seniors intending to study engineering.  The outreach events from the past year were then highlighted and a new batch of Professional Engineers were given plaques after reciting the Engineers’ Creed.  A heartfelt moment was shared when a new member of the Engineering Hall of Fame was introduced and reflected on his career.

The evening went along fruitfully until the Project of the Year awards.  All the goodwill and energy in the room built up over the evening was quickly drained from the room with back-to-back dreadful speeches by engineers receiving Project of the Year awards.  It was like an iron curtain dropped to halt all of the evening’s enjoyment.  The first engineer/speaker received the small project award. He was unprepared to speak about the project, rambled off subject, and could not make himself heard. It was dreadful.

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5 Tips for Improving Internal Team Communication

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Team Communication
Project managers spend the vast majority of their time communicating with others.  Depending on the source you reference, the figure can go as high as 80 percent of one’s time is tied-up in some type of communication.  A good amount of this time is spent in external communication: the client, the architect, the design team, regulatory officials, vendors, and others.  That’s a lot of stakeholders, however, the majority of the time you will invest elsewhere – in team communication.  How you approach team communication is by far the most important thing you will do as a project manager.

Effective Team Communication Enables Successful Projects

Think about the teams you’ve served on thus far in your personal or professional time. Some were successful, others not so much. If you spend time considering why success was achieved in certain teams over others, I suspect you’ll find team communication played a role.

Over my career, I’ve served on many teams.  Those teams that achieved the best successes by and far enjoyed stronger team communication.  The team leader set expectations, maintained open and transparent lines of communication, and encouraged the same across the team.  They also were proponents of the Rule of Three C’s – communicate, communicate, communicate.

I attribute the rule to an Air Force Chief I worked with when I was junior captain many years ago.  A week didn’t go by where I didn’t hear “captain if you want to be more effective in getting everyone on board you need to communicate, communicate, communicate!”.  He was on to something – the teams he led were always the best in the squadron and more often than not, the best on the base.

The take away is that effective team communication enables successful projects.  If you foster an environment of open and transparent communication with your team, you also are providing an environment that will enhance the likelihood of project success.  Without effective team communication, you greatly reduce the likelihood of project success.

Team Communication

How to Enhance Team Communication

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