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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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The Best Ways to Find Public Speaking Opportunities Around You

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Public Speaking Opportunities is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Public Speaking OpportunitiesTo get better at public speaking, you need to practice public speaking.  It may not seem like it, but there are many public speaking opportunities out there.  When you are not a seasoned public speaker, you should be looking for any chance to get out there and deliver a speech.  Ask the people you work with about public speaking opportunities available to employees.  Many companies encourage their employees to join Toastmasters and will provide the resources needed to participate. 

Public Speaking Opportunities
Here are some public speaking opportunities for you to consider:

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Speech Preparation: Preparing and Not Preparing for Presentations

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Speech Preparation is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Speech Preparation

I’m always excited when I get to deliver a speech, so I sent in an application to speak at a conference of operators on one of my favorite subjects.  I had spent two months with speech preparation and would be able to deliver it a couple of times for practice, between the acceptance at the conference and the day I would speak.  My proposal was accepted and I celebrate each time I get to convey the message, because I want my audience to walk away with a heightened appreciation for infrastructure.

Developing the presentation was not a burden because I believe in the issue and expended the effort necessary to develop a good speech.  I focused on defining the scope and objectives to fit them into a 30 to 45-minute time frame.  I found just the right story to open the speech and used graphical slides to reinforce each point.  I practiced several times before my first delivery and made small adjustments to the presentation after each delivery.  I have given the speech many times and it has never failed to be a hit.

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Five Benefits of Public Speaking

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Five Benefits of Public Speaking is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Five Benefits of Public Speaking

Engineering is a tough job that is dedicated to completing complicated designs that solve complex problems. Solving those problems is not up to the engineer alone, but requires a team effort of partners to secure financing, address the social and environmental impacts, determine the best design options and construction techniques and tackle a host of issues that arise during a project. That means engineers must communicate with others to get their work done and sometimes that means giving a speech to an audience who needs to know what you know. One of the benefits of public speaking related to standing in front of an audience is that it lets your team’s engineering design (and you) stand out in a world that is crowded with experts.

Benefits of Public Speaking tweet

Here are five specific benefits of public speaking for engineering professionals:

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Presentation Visual Aids – Design a Tool, not a Crutch

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This is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Visual Aids
Engineers use a variety of tools to complete their daily tasks. The list may include a calculator, a computer with the right software, and a book of engineering standards. These tools support the practice of engineering and make for a more productive engineer.  They assist the engineer, but they do not replace the practice of engineering.

The same principle applies to an effective presentation.  Visual aids, including the set of slides that are shown during the speech, should be a tool to assist with communication, not a crutch for the speaker to lean on because they didn’t prepare.  Too many speakers believe creating a slide deck is all there is to public speaking.  Instead of properly preparing and delivering a good speech, they rely on poorly designed visual aids to do the work for them.

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Good Communication Skills- An Engineer’s Career Escalator

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This is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Communication SkillsThe boss and I were talking the other day about hiring a young engineer. The person we were considering checked a lot of the boxes we were looking for and they had a decent interview. There was no doubt they would meet all the requirements we had in the engineering skills job description. During the first 90% of the conversation, I would bet they were going to get the job. Then came this question:

“Do you think if they had to present in front of a city council I could trust them to go to the meeting without me?”

Unfortunately, the answer to that question was “No.”

That ended any chance the engineer had of getting that job.

I don’t know where they landed and I suspect they were able to get a job. However, it was evident throughout their interview that public speaking was never going to be their strong point. At least, not if they didn’t make an effort to improve their public speaking.

Most engineers need to be trusted to be able to stand up in front of an audience and communicate with that audience. Those engineers that do it well will catch the attention of clients, the public, and the boss because communication skills are highly valued in an engineer.

Communication Skills

PSMJ Resources polled a number of public works departments about the engineers that work for them. They asked them to list the most important skills needed to do a good job. Here is the list they came up with:

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