Leadership/Management

How to Become an Effective Engineering Leader

April 12, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest post by George J. Newton

It 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.

Leadership Skills You Can Develop Now

December 7, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Pamela A. Scott

Are you doing what it takes to earn a leadership role at your firm?

A few years ago, I was working with a team of senior project managers (PM). The training program was “From PMs to Business Leaders.” In our first session, I asked them to list the job requirements for a PM and for a business leader. The list for the PMs was quite long. The list for a business leader had just a couple bullets on it.

One PM looked at the lists and said, “If our executive team members were killed in an accident, we wouldn’t even know how to turn off the lights.” Bingo!

How equipped are you to take on a leadership role at your firm? Below are three critical capabilities necessary to become a leader.

1) Network With Intention

How Effective Leaders Should Give Feedback — Especially During Sensitive Times

November 13, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Pamela A. Scott

Is it time to change the way leaders give feedback to employees? Feedback is tough to give (or receive) in the best of times. Doubly so during troubling times, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a high-stress environment, emotions are high. Sensitivities are raised. Feedback is tricky.

However, giving feedback is part of a leader’s job. Feedback helps employees grow and adapt their behavior. It adds to their knowledge — if the feedback is given properly.

When fall arrives, managers and employees realize it’s time to prepare for performance feedback sessions. While some companies do reviews at other times, the tips in this article can help you improve how you give feedback any time of year.

So how should effective leaders give feedback, especially during sensitive times? Below are four strategies to make feedback more effective in any climate. The content in this article has been adapted from the “MentorLoft Leadership Feedback Assessment.”

Engaging the Engagers: Succeeding in the New Era with Better Leadership and Management

November 9, 2020 By EMI

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

“Literally nothing a CEO or CHRO does will authentically, structurally, and sustainably change the value of your organization more.”

This is a statement from the recently released book written by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, PhD, Chief Workplace Scientist for Gallup, based on their research and more than 30 years of data, to help workplaces thrive and produce something the whole world wants.

What they are referencing is “improving your ratio of great to lousy managers”. The key to this, however, rests solely with leaders.

It’s Both

To succeed today in any position of authority we need to both lead and manage.

Leadership is a role to establish a clear vision for a mission that inspires others to follow and then enable achievement through times of both conflict and harmony.

Leadership Is Not a Title — It Is a Perspective

October 19, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Mike Burns, PE, PgMP, DBIA

Previously, we discussed the importance of your voice as an industry and community integrator: Who Knows What You Know? — Your Voice Matters! Taking this guidance an important step further, I encourage you to move from managing people to empowering leadership from every vantage point, as our ability to deliver complex solutions in a timely manner necessitates an artful migration of diverse perspectives into inclusive solutions.

Infrastructure projects are inherently local and therefore unique, necessitating a patient combination of political savvy and technical expertise to move from policy expectations to project implementation. At each step, we must acknowledge, explore, and address ever-changing stakeholder wants and needs. Our ability to artfully migrate these evolving demands into sustainable, resilient, and equitable community solutions requires dispersed leadership. This is a concept that is at the heart of Progressive Design-Build , which seeks to empower robust communications as leadership ebbs and flows across an evolving set of teams.

Being in Charge Is Complex and Comes With High Expectations

October 5, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Manny De La Cruz

To succeed, you must…

Go to school…
Get good grades…
Love math and science…
Get into STEM…
Take AP classes…
Love STEM…
Pick a college…
Go to college…
Love STEM more…
Get a STEM degree, preferably engineering (my opinion)…
Get an internship…
Get a job…
Be a leader/manager…

Does this list sound familiar? For many STEM professionals, and, more specifically, engineers, this list may sound all too familiar. For some, it happens early in life when parents, teachers, or some influential adult begins to tell you what the formula to success is and how engineering fits into that equation. And for other, non-traditional students, like myself, all it takes is one visit to a college campus and there is no shortage of STEM advocates singing the praises of obtaining an engineering degree.

So, you pick engineering, and for the most part, love the journey; let’s face it — statistics for engineers or the third round of calculus can get old at times. As you begin to align yourself with where you want to work, you start to hear the term leadership. To be a strong candidate for an internship spot requires you to have the trifecta: high GPA, skills experience, and leadership potential. For some, “being a leader” has been engrained as the solution to many problems, especially if you are a minority candidate.

Manny, where are you going with this? Great question. So, you want to be a leader/manager? Are you sure you know what you are asking for? It is my opinion that most of us do not really appreciate what we are asking for when we say we want to be a leader/manager. Being in charge is complex and comes with high expectations and many burdens.

What Does Being in Charge Mean?

1. Delivering Results

Not-So-Obvious Customers

September 14, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Manny De La Cruz

Way before I decided to go back to school, I worked. I worked a lot and mostly in jobs that required customer service. I did door-to-door sales, telemarketing, and finally food service. I enjoyed being a server. I was good at it and always had cash in my pocket. I had two goals at that time: pay rent and have fun with the rest.

Through these jobs, I learned about customer service and in those days, how the customer was always right. I won’t claim to have been a poster child for great customer service, since on several occasions the human in me and all that was going on would catch up and a customer might get the short end of the stick. Customer service is something that has become synonymous with hospitality and entertainment. It is easy to spot bad customer service at a drive-through or a check-out line, when you are trying to ring up your own groceries only to be met with an error and no associate around to help you (we have kind of lowered the bar, folks). But what does this have to do with engineering?

Funny you should ask. If you are in an engineering role in outside sales, consulting, or contract engineering, perhaps your customers are pretty obvious. But what about in other engineering roles, like plant support, manufacturing, or research? Perhaps those customers are not as obvious. In reality, regardless of where you work, more than likely there are some internal customers who are relying on your service, and not being aware of who they are could cost you dearly.

Here Are Five Things To Consider When Thinking About the Not-So-Obvious Internal Customers You Work For:

Remember Who You Work For

September 7, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Mickey Addison, MSCE, PMP

When someone asks a leader who they work for, the best answer is “I work for my team.” That’s obviously not a complete answer, but it speaks to a mindset. Leadership is service, and leaders who approach their roles with that mindset are more likely to be successful. It’s not the complete answer, of course, so to that end, let’s spend some time thinking about respect. Leaders must demonstrate respect, require it in the team, and be able to move our organizations forward in a rapidly changing world.

Everyone Deserves Respect

Would You Want to Work With You?

May 12, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Steve Soldati, P.E.

Picture this: It’s 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning, you’re thinking about where to go for lunch, but you are still waiting for a response from your project team member. You had requested this information via email three weeks ago and every few days you get a, “You should have it soon.” You sent an email earlier that morning asking for an update on the project designs and calculations to incorporate into your plan set, which is due in just one week, but still no word. You go off to lunch, steaming and upset about the lack of urgency and communication of your colleagues.

When you arrive back at the office, you open your inbox to see an email from your team member with the requested design and calculations. “Yes, finally!” you shout out loud. But when you open the email, the design is incomplete, and your team member has additional questions that should have been asked much earlier. You storm over to their desk to chew them out and tell them how poorly they performed. You tell them they need to communicate better, learn to design properly, and take responsibility for their work. Then you head back to your desk to rework the design, spending many additional hours to get it ready for the upcoming deadline. And you grow even more frustrated and stressed because there is still so much on your plate that needs to be done, but you are now worried that won’t happen. This causes you to become even more uneasy, cranky, and unpleasant to be around.

Continuous Learning: Providing Coaching and Accountability

April 20, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Mike Burns

Last month’s blog discussed Embracing a Risk-Intelligent Approach. The guidance stated that we shouldn’t be paralyzed by unknown unknowns, allowing a risk-intelligent culture to support sustainable growth. In these uncertain times, as we respond to broad human suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d like to expand on mitigating unknown unknowns as an introduction to our continuous learning discussion.

A risk-intelligent approach creates a culture where teachers, students – leaders, managers, and staff thrive in a continuous learning environment. As this culture matures; mitigating inherent risks and exploring opportunities becomes a natural output of our sustained discussions. Concurrently, these discussions will surface strategic risks, informed by our trajectory and influenced by systemic threats, e.g.financial crisis, geopolitical events, and pandemics.