Soft Skills for engineers
Inter-Personal people skills for engineers
#79-1/12/09-Trust Your Experiences
Trust Your Experiences
“How do you recognize good management advice?”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, January 12, 2009
Hello everyone!
“Who do you trust and what is the truth in management?”
This last week I was reading some of the blogs on the people skills necessary for successful management. One blog, in particular, caught my eye. It had to do with “behaviors” that are necessary for a good manager.
Some of the behaviors put forth by the author included things like these soft skills:
1. When you are managing, never show your emotions.
2. When you are managing, never raise your voice. Always have a calm voice. If you get frustrated you can scream into a pillow in your office.
3. Always have a smile on your face.
4. Walk around and talk to your direct reports. Ask them how they are doing and give them suggestions on how they can do their job better.
These were just a few of the “best practices” that this author put forward regarding how to behave if you want to be a good manager. The author had been a manager for five years and wanted to share what he had learned.
Fair enough.
What I find interesting is this; “How is a new manager who is reading this information, to use and apply these suggestions and to know which suggestions are true and which are false?
But wait… the truth!
How do you know that the information put forth is accurate? Is there any way that you might know if 5 years as manager is enough to give authoritative knowledge? Is the equivalent of two years of engineering school enough to allow someone to sign off on the design of a bridge or analyze the orbital velocity requirements for rendezvous with the International Space Station?
Actually there is a way to know.
In our own personal experience we know what works for management and what doesn’t. In our own personal experience we have a sense of what good managers do and what bad managers do or don’t do.
And yet, many, many people choose to discount their own personal experience in order to follow the “leader”. They discount what they know in their gut to be true, because the “leader” says that something else is true, instead. And yet, we know it’s not.
So lets take some of those “gems” put forth on the blog post and see if they align with our personal experience.
When you are managing, never show your emotions.
My experience: Not true.
It’s not a question of showing emotions, its a question of what emotions you do show and the degree to which you do so. It’s not very useful to be a tyrant and yell at people and insult them in public. But it’s certainly useful to show compassion, and determination, and even sternness, and maybe levity, politeness, and at times frustration, disappointment, and even anger. It’s impossible to not show emotions. The key is to show the right ones and at the appropriate level. (I could write a book on this.)
When you are managing, never raise your voice. Always have a calm voice. If you get frustrated you can scream into a pillow in your office.
My experience: Half true, half not true.
Never raise your voice… well it depends. I have had direct reports with whom I would never raise my voice. And I’ve had direct reports with whom a good, hearty, give-and-take, with raised voices and even yelling was the only way to build the rapport and connection that the direct report (and I for that matter) wanted. To be always calm with this direct report would have actually adversely affected our professional relationship.
And the idea of always having a calm voice… come on. Have you ever been really upset and in need of help? So you called a customer service representative and the person at the other end of the line sounded as if they were as calm as could be. What was your response?
I know that my response has been to be annoyed with them. They were too calm. They didn’t understand that my situation was important.
Always being calm is nearly as bad as always yelling, almost.
And yes, if you are going to go off on someone… go scream into a pillow until you calm down.
Always have smile on your face.
My experience: Not true.
First, have you ever been around someone who always has a smile on their face? Have you ever thought to yourself, “What are they doing… always with a smile on their face. It can’t be real.” And often it’s not real.
No one wants to be around a doom and gloom person (except other doom and gloom people) but it’s important to be authentic and yet appropriate.
So rules like “always have a smile on your face” are just not useful. A better suggestion is to always be appropriate and effective in any given situation so that you and the team can achieve your/their desired outcome. (This is a topic for another book).
Now the important point about my comments is this; the suggestions put in the blog I read were a decent attempt to quantify behaviors that would make a manager a good manager.
However, management is not a simple process. It is not given to quick and simple rules. In engineering, F=ma. The laws of physics are clear, stable, repeatable. Unfortunately or fortunately, management doesn’t have similarly clear, stable, repeatable rules. The biggest rule in management is “it depends.” The best way to know if what someone is telling you is true, is to match it to your experience. And if you have no experience in a specific are, then take it “one-step-at-a-time”.
With respect to every suggested soft skill behavior I listed from the blog, we all have personal experiences that contradict what was suggested.
We all know of times when emotion displayed by our managers was just what we wanted to see, hear, and experience. Therefore, when to display what emotion is context dependent. It depends.
We all have experiences when we didn’t want our managers to display a smile. We want to be able to “read” our managers by hearing the tone of their voice. We don’t want them to be smiling when they are laying people off. Once again, it depends.
And, there are times when we certainly don’t want our managers to come around talking to us, looking over our shoulders and giving us suggestions about how we can do things better. There are times when we will welcome the advice and other times when we’ll probably consider it micromanagement. So once again it depends.
The bottom line is...
So the bottom line is this. Management, leadership, even contributing your maximum to your organization is not something you learn in five years of on-the-job training. (How long was the intense training your received for your engineering degree?)
It’s also not something you learn from a simple set of rules.
In basic terms…
Engineering is about knowledge; Management is about judgment.
Engineering is about rules; Management is about context.
Engineering is an application of knowledge in search of certainty; Management is the application of judgment in search of an outcome.
Very different worlds.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
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“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 01/12 at 11:15 PM Engineer to Technical Manager • Becoming a manager • Technical Manager • Leadership • Engineering Leadership • Management • Engineering Management • Management for engineers • Inter-Personal People Skills • Soft Skills for engineers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#24-01-08-07: Art of Persuasion
Art of Persuasion
“The Necessary Art of Persuasion”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, January 8, 2007
Good evening!
I just finished reviewing an article in the Harvard Business Review magazine called OnPoint, dated Winter 2006. These are selected articles from the Harvard Business Review, and the title on the cover is “The Art of Middle Management.” It’s an interesting magazine with a variety of articles and as the weeks go by, I’ll be reviewing some of the articles in my blogs.
One of the major articles is titled, “The Middle Manager as Innovator” and while I’ll probably talk about the full article in future blogs, in this blog I want to zero in on the additional reading that was listed under the “Further Reading” heading at the end of the article.
One of the articles recommended as further reading was and article printed in the Harvard Business Review, dated May-June 1998 and listed as Product no. 4258. The title of this essay was “The Necessary Art of Persuasion”. I’ll quote a few sentences from the summary of that article:
“In driving innovation, middle managers must know how to persuade key constituencies to support their ideas. This skill is particularly crucial as managers “sell” project ideas, garner needed resources and top-level support, and mobilize key players to carry out the project as a unified team.”
No doubt this is necessary at any level in an organization from the technologist to the technical manager. However, it is a skill that in most cases must be learned by the technologist who wants to become a manager because ...
we are not taught how to “sell” our ideas during our college education. While in school, we are taught that the facts “sell” our ideas. The “truth” sells our ideas. No persuasion is necessary; our answers are either right or they are wrong, and no wrong answer can be “sold” and no right answer needs “selling”.
I’ll continue to quote the article summary; “This article outlines four powerful steps to persuasion: 1) establish credibility through pertinent expertise and positive relationships, 2) clarify the shared benefits of a potential innovation project, 3) vividly reinforce one’s position through compelling examples, stories, and metaphors, and 4) connect emotionally with one’s listeners.”
Now notice the four items listed in this article summary:
1) establish credibility through pertinent expertise and positive relationships
2) clarify the shared benefits of a potential innovation project
3) vividly reinforce one’s position through compelling examples, stories, and metaphors
4) connect emotionally with one’s listeners
I find the order of these four items interesting. I’d put number 4 at the top of the list because it seems impossible to me that anyone can accomplish items 1, 2, and 3 without performing item #4 first. Who do you listen to? Whose advise do you take? Who do you take seriously? Who do you consider wise? The person you listen to, whose advice you take, whom you take seriously and consider wise, is the person you give something to that is very important and very emotional… it’s the person you TRUST.
Trust is an emotion. It is not based on logic, although we’d like to think it is. Trust allows us to listen with open attitude so that someone can indeed establish credibility, can clarify shared benefits and vividly provide examples, stories, and metaphors. It is trust that must be there first.
And who do we trust? Just look around the world. Without much effort we can see that people have a tendency to trust people who are more similar to them than those who are dissimilar to them. Said another way, we feel more comfortable with people who are more like us than with people who are less like us.
So, notice, we are building a hierarchy here.
A) Our ability to persuade is based on accomplishing the four items listed above.
B) Those four items are dependent on our ability to connect emotionally with our listener.
C) Our ability to connect emotionally is another word for trust.
D) We more easily trust people who are more like us than those who are not like us.
The next question is, how do we convey to people that we are more like them than less like them?
To answer that question, lets look at scientific research. Research over the last 40 years has given us the same conclusion, over and over again. We have three ways to communicate our ideas and our messages. We can use the words, that is the content of our message, either spoken or written. We can use our voices, the tone, speed, loudness of communication along with other vocal parameters. Or we can use our physical orientation, often referred to as body language.
The data consistently come back the same. The ability of the words (i.e., content) to make the emotional connection is estimated to be around 7% (+/- 2%). The ability of our voice tone, speed, loudness etc., to make the emotional connection is estimated to be around 35% (+/-2%). And the ability of our body orientation, posture, (i.e., body language) to make the emotional connection is around 58% (+/-2%).
It doesn’t take long to look at these data and determine what the message is. The connection that builds trust, that allows our messages to be heard is not based on the words we use, it’s based on our voice and our body language. And in fact, we all have plenty of examples of this in our real life work experience. How often have you been in a meeting or been in a discussion and everyone has seemingly agreed to an action, a decision, or a conclusion only to discover three days later it is as if no one apparently attended the same meeting. Each person had a different interpretation primarily because the emotional connection of trust had not been established allowing people to understand the same thing, agree to that understanding, and commit to that agreement.
The ability to communicate at these much subtler levels, to build trust based on similarity and an emotional connection, will allow you to be listened to and to be accepted. It will allow you to be heard. It is only then that your stories and metaphors will be heard. It is only then that your credibility can be built. It is only then that you can secure the necessary resources and build the team that can get the project done.
The subtleties of human non-verbal communication are the foundation of all human communication. Master them and you master the Necessary Art of Persuasion. Master the Necessary Art of Persuasion and you master the foundation, the first step to management and ... leadership.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Posted by Steven Cerri on 01/08 at 06:35 PM Engineer to Technical Manager • Inter-Personal People Skills • Communication for engineers • Soft Skills for engineers • Soft Skills for Technologists • (0) Comments • Permalink
#23-01-02-07: Radio Head
Radio Head
“Being real doesn’t get it”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, January 2, 2007
Good evening!
I was listening to a radio show just before the new year to an interview with the lead member of band Radio Head. Now Radio Head has been called one of the best bands around and at times the best band playing anywhere. I don’t much listen to them, but I found the interview interesting and there is a connection between what I heard and technology management.
At one point, the lead member of Radio Head was asked what it’s like to continually play the same songs over and over while on tour. He responded that by the time his band had played the same songs over and over on their last tour and then they thought about the fact that they were going to record some of those same songs and then they would have to play them again on their subsequent tour, he indicated that it was a bit much.
In fact, he said that on his last tour there were times when he would just stare at the audience for a long while mumbling something about having to play these songs again. The interviewer said that she had heard that at one point he was “unravelling” on stage and he admitted that he indeed had been “unravelling”, mumbling and complaining to the audience. Having to play the same songs over and over was getting to him he said. When she asked about his rationale for doing that in front of the audience that had paid money to see him and his band, he said that,
“Well, I can either be real or not. I think people want me to be real.”
REALLY?!
The people in the audience didn’t pay to see him be real. They paid to be entertained. The band members can be self-indulgent before or after the show, but not during the show.
Do you go to concerts hoping to see the band members work out their personal crises on stage or do you go to hear them play the songs that excite you and make you want to hear more? In the environment of a concert, the band members are expected to transcend their personal issues and do what they came to do… play their music, and play it well. The situation, the context, requires that they behave in a way that is appropriate for that context. (Bruce Springstein gets sick before many of his concerts but you wouldn’t know it when he steps on stage.)
So, “What does this have to do with management, and technical management in particular?”, you might ask. The same is expected of a manager as is expected of the band. As a technology manager, you’re not expected to work out your issues of management, leadership, self-esteem, authority figures, shyness, etc. while you are managing or leading your direct reports. Just like the band members, you’re expected to be human, you’re expected to lead your team, but your are not expected to be “real” in the sense that you don’t deliver. And as a manager or leader your job is to deliver the management or deliver the leadership. That means your job is to be effective.
You’ll often hear me say that I’m not concerned about the comfort of the manager. Some people say that the manager needs to be comfortable in order to do a good job of managing. Not so. I don’t care if the manager is comfortable. It’s important that the employees be motivated and if that means that the manager is uncomfortable, so be it. As a technical manager your job is not to be “real” in the sense that it interferes with your effectiveness. Just like the audience that paid to attend a concert to be entertained, your company is paying your to be an effective manager and an effective leader. And, your direct reports are expecting the same thing.
Let me be clear. In order to be effective you don’t have to give up your humanity. However, if being effective means stretching your behavior so that you are a little uncomfortable, then stretch. In the final analysis your being paid for the results of your team, not for being “real”.
Just some food for thought.
Until next Monday.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Posted by Steven Cerri on 01/02 at 10:05 PM Leadership • Management • Inter-Personal People Skills • Communication for engineers • Soft Skills for engineers • Soft Skills for Technologists • (0) Comments • Permalink
