Engineering Management Institute

UPCOMING WEBINAR

Why Engineers Make Great CEOs

By

Why Engineers Make Great CEOs is a guest blog by Thomas Anderson, P.E.

CEOsEngineering is the most common undergraduate degree of the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). It has been for some time. Approximately one third of CEOs majored in engineering and only 11% graduated from business school. The Harvard Business Review has a list of the 100 best-performing CEOs on the planet.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos topped the list. Bezos earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella is an engineer. General Motors’ Mary Barra as well. Carlos Ghosn of Nissan and Dennis Muilenburg of Boeing also have engineering backgrounds. Ursula Burns, the CEO and chairman of Xerox Corporation started her career as an engineering intern. In fact, 24 of the top 100 CEO’s have a Bachelors or Master’s degree in engineering.

Engineers are a little bit different. Sometimes introverted and always good at the math, they build and fix things; complex things. They have a unique ways of looking at the world. The qualities below make engineers exceptionally good at leading companies.

CEOs

[Read more…]

4 Opportunities to Grow Your Leadership Skills

By

4 Opportunities to Grow Your Leadership Skills is a blog post by guest author
Patrick Sweet, P.Eng., MBA, ASEP
Leadership Skills

Leadership skills are crucial for engineers looking to take on more responsibility, and move into management. If you’ve ever read this blog, or anything I’ve written on leadership in the past, you’ll already know that.

What you might not know is how to develop your leadership skills. This is a constant struggle for engineers looking to break into leadership roles – how can you grow to become a leader if nobody gives you the chance to develop those skills in the first place? How you can get leadership experience if all leadership roles require previous leadership experience?

Today, I’m going to share five ways that you can grow your leadership skills, regardless of whether you already have a formal leadership role at work or not. Pursuing just one of these ideas over the next year can do amazing things for you personally  and your ability to lead others.

[Read more…]

4 Occupational Safety and Health Administration Tips for Engineers

By

4 Occupational Safety and Health Administration Tips for Engineers is a guest post by Heather Lomax.

Health Administration

Engineers are typically accustomed to hazardous conditions, but that doesn’t mean that OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) best practices should simply be swept under the rug as common knowledge. Electrical mishaps, fires, and deadly equipment accidents are just a few of the potential hazards that engineers of all fields are susceptible to, so even one forgotten guideline can be the catalyst for a slew of OSHA violations.

Here are 4 Occupational Safety and Health tips for engineers:

[Read more…]

Delegating Effectively When Working with Engineers

By

This is a guest blog post by Carol Evenson

Delegating EffectivelyThere is a myriad of guides available online that will offer to teach you how to manage your team’s workloads and delegate tasks to your subordinates. Engineers are a slightly different group, though, and as such, there are a few differences in how you should handle delegation in the engineering world.

While there are always exceptions, as a rule, engineers tend to be more analytical and even a bit introverted. If you want to ensure that your work gets done to the best of their abilities, you will need to interact with them differently than you might for other members of your team. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you direct the engineers on your team:

[Read more…]

3 Actions That Help You Lead Your Engineering Team Despite Fear

By

FearHere’s a topic not often discussed in the offices of the majority of leaders:  FEAR.  We’ll talk about risk, or problem’s, or setbacks.  But never fear.   Why is that?  Probably because the word “fear” comes with a lot of baggage.  Fear isn’t something that’s talked about openly, ever.  It’s a sign of weakness or lack of capability.

The truth is, fear is present whether we want to admit openly or not.  Leaders have fears, team members have fear, even senior leaders and clients have fears.  Fear of failure, fear of looking bad, fear of missing something important that sets a project on its rear…the list goes on.  Some of these fears are project or mission related, some are personal.

Regardless, fear still exists.  Am I wrong?

Here’s an example:

[Read more…]

Why Delegating Will Make You A Better Engineer

By

This is Part III of a six-part series about leadership for engineers preparing for their first professional leadership role.

Delegating

You’re in your first professional leadership role and all eyes are on you to deliver the goods.  After two months of 60+ hour weeks you’re running on fumes and the project’s only a fifth of the way done.  What’s a person to do?  Delegate.

The good thing about occupying a leadership role on a project is that you have a team.  For some first time leaders, however, they may not understand the great opportunity they have to spread their load to those on the team.  Instead, the team becomes just one more thing that they have to manage.

Many engineers find their first encounter with delegation to be anything but simple.  Why?  Emotions.  Up to this point, they’ve been the doer and now they are in an entirely new environment where they may still be doing, yet need to pass on work to other people so they can be doing. Instead of leveraging team to effectively accomplish a project, many first time engineer-leader’s horde the work. Or worse, micromanage the work that is delegated. [Read more…]

Relying on Courage to Bridge the Experience Gap

By

This is Part II of a six-part series about leadership for engineers preparing for their first professional leadership role.

It was the first day as project manager and Ed was sweating the moment he got into his car for the fifteen-minute drive to the office.  This wasn’t just any sweat.  It was the sweat that comes from fear.  Ed figured that he had a lot be fearful about.  Selected a month earlier to fill the role as project manager for his first major construction project, he had spent the intervening time with his head buried in the project specifics: the expected technical challenges, special design considerations, the schedule and resource plans.

Then a week ago his mentor and champion, Cindy, asked him how it was going with his team.  Had it been assembled?  Had he met with them?  What did he know about them? What strengths and challenges did he foresee with the members?  All good questions, except Ed lacked answers.  Sure, the team had been assembled and he’d met with them.  But his focus had been entirely on the project’s technical aspects.  He hadn’t a clue about their strengths or the challenges that might arise.  Although he knew their names and what expertise they were bringing to the team, he had no idea about who they were.  Besides, was that really necessary?  He was being paid to get a project designed and built, not hold hands.

Yet for some reason, Ed’s anxiety level was increasing the closer he got to the office.  Although he thought he had a good grip on the project, he seriously questioned whether he really did after his talk Cindy last week.  This morning he was bringing his team together in an attempt to get them more involved in the project as the start date approached and to get to know them personally.  But he was stressing big time about this.  Were his efforts too little and too late?  Worse, would the team see his efforts as genuine?  What if they figured out that he was scared about delivering success on his first run as a project manager?

[Read more…]

How to Go from Managing to Leading a Team of Engineers

By

This is a guest blog post by Carol Evenson

 

Managing

Effectively managing any group of employees can be a difficult proposition, but providing leadership for an engineering team or department typically entails a number of unique challenges. Simply managing the efforts of an engineering staff may not always be sufficient. Managers who are able to provide clear direction, ensure that their group is able to function as a cohesive team, and avoid the most common and costly missteps and oversights are far more likely to make the leap from simply managing their staff to leading their engineering team to greater success.

The Importance of Effective Communication

[Read more…]

Don’t Let Lack of Experience Keep You From Speaking With Authority as an Engineer

By

This is Part I of a six-part series on debunking misconceptions about leadership and speaking with authority for engineers preparing for their first professional leadership role.

Speaking With Authority

Starting out in any endeavor you lack experience.  In business, in relationships, in your technical pursuits – doesn’t matter.  You enter into everything you do for the first time without experience and the only way to get the experience is to go out into the world and just do it.  As it is in every undertaking in life, so it is with leadership.

I didn’t begin feeling entirely confident in leading others until well into my military career.  It wasn’t that I lacked the theory of leadership or mentors or the opportunities to lead while in college ROTC.  My lack of confidence in my leading ability came from one gap:  experience.  The training I had while at college prepared me by providing me with a body of knowledge about leadership.  The hands-on experiences leading other people and projects came many years later.

If you’ve not lead other people or a project before, you’ve still been exposed to this “experience gap”.  You’ve got the knowledge; you just lack the boots-on-ground aspect.  The good stuff that comes from experiencing it first-hand.

Before getting into the four components that helped me bridge the experience gap, a quote that’s stuck with me from early in my career: [Read more…]

Four Service Roots to Engineering Leadership

By

This is a guest post by Philip Zimmerman PE, PCC, DMin.

Service RootsMy introduction to leading by serving began with my dad who was a chemical engineer and continued with my first two employers who both were professional civil engineers. Through their direct instruction, mentoring, and coaching I learned and mastered four service roots that I still use to this day. These include the golden rule(+), empowerment, professionalism, and humility.

The first root, the golden rule(+), I picked up from my father who routinely instructed me to treat others as good or better than I would like to be treated; he daily modeled this principle in word and deed. Through his mentoring and modeling I learned this principle goes far beyond just fulfilling a need, it was giving others above and beyond my own desires for the same things. I discovered that maturity in this area was experienced as joy in the heart knowing the need of another had been met. An ancillary heart sensation of maturity was purpose fulfillment.

[Read more…]