Authenticity and Mindfulness Practice Cleanses Tech Leader’s Behavior

In teaching leadership skills and coaching Tech leaders, I notice that like most of us, they have recurring habits of thought that do not serve them well. Our minds run on automatic pilot most of the time. We are extremely habit-driven pattern generating machines.

Mindfulness Meditation in the business world helps Managers and other Leaders clear their minds of stress and distorted thinking.

Mindfulness Meditation in the business world helps Managers and other Leaders clear their minds of stress and distorted thinking.

We often don’t notice our most troublesome patterns because the very “software” that is watching for patterns is the same “software” that has set up the filters for what to watch for. Our minds often jump to premature and distorted beliefs and those beliefs fall prey to confirmation bias—  we tend to see what we expect to see and ignore what we don’t want to see. Because of this we don’t realize that our own ego minds are self-justifying systems, and we don’t recognize that we are not synonymous with our ego minds.

For example, Dave is a project manager who had some unwanted mindless habits. He wanted to do a great job, so he often said “Yes” to projects and tasks that were more than he could manage, and he found himself overwhelmed and frustrated. Then his mind jumped automatically to blaming others for his stressful circumstances. “Other people are just not as conscientious about their work as I am,” he told himself and his boss. He felt resentful of coworkers whom he saw as lazy and rebellious, and his blaming attitude did not endear him to his team.

The problem wasn’t with Dave’s external situation, although he thought it was; other people had managed his team before him and had not had these difficulties. The problem was that Dave was blind to his own mind’s natural tendency to look outside itself for others to blame for the stress that he had brought upon himself. Fortunately, Dave became aware of this pattern and was able to alter it when we introduced him to mindfulness practice at work.

Mindfulness practice entails meditation, ego observation, and change skills. These tools have taken off in the business world of late because they help executives and leaders better deal with stressful, constantly changing situations as well as clean up the “software” of the human organism, so that they create fewer cognitive biases and projective mistakes. We can use mindfulness to help us do this.

In order to change ourselves and our situations for the better, we need to align our mental models of the world with the truth about the way the world actually works. Seeing reality can be difficult; our confirmation bias runs so quickly and automatically that we are practically unaware of our automatic interpretations. Like putting on your shoes in the morning, you don’t think about it, you just do it, and that is where the trouble starts. But we can never change what we have not fully recognized. We have to admit where we are now in order to get to where we want to go next.

Mindfulness meditation creates a real opportunity for deep and lasting change by helping us dig deeply into the distortions and lies our minds are constantly telling us. By learning some basic tools of self-observation and meditative “following the breath,” practitioners begin to step back from their old way of thinking, becoming more true to themselves and more flexible in their choices of how they respond to situations. As a bonus, they become more authentically aligned with who they really are down deep inside. This is supportive of ethical behavior as well as long-term happiness.

The Business of Mindfulness is Booming in Business

The Business of Mindfulness is Booming in Business

I began working with Dave by getting him to journal about the situation with his coworkers as he saw it. Then I invited him to recognize the difference between his felt sense of who he was in this stressful situation and the “observer” consciousness that was aware of that “felt sense” of himself. By identifying with the observer instead of his ego, Dave was able to get some distance from his automatic negative emotional reactions. It was only then that he realized that he had been blaming his team, although his own lack of effective communication, combined with his unspoken expectations, was resulting in their confusion. On top of that, he could suddenly see that they were afraid to ask for clarification because he had often replied to their questions in a frustrated tone.

By practicing mindfulness, Dave became much calmer and learned to observe the processes of his mind, and he recognized that his behavior was not the totality of who he was. He became aware of  how automatically his habits of mind ran away from what he was trying to will himself to do. This was the first step in  strengthening his real will, and he recognized how he could interact more positively and successfully with his team.

We all hold onto patterns of thought, emotions, and behavior that don’t actually serve us. If you would like to learn to work day-to-day from your deep authentic self instead of having to constantly manage all of the ego masks/roles you play; if you are are tired of the stress; if you are ready to try being real, then you are ready to learn Authentic Leadership Skills. Give me a call. Let’s talk. 512-507-5464

 

 

 

Three Must Skills Areas for New Tech Leaders

In over ten years as an engineer and ten more coaching technical professionals to become leaders in technical companies, I have distilled down three key skills areas that it seems like we all need more of.

The first is what I call Proactive Learning Cycles.  This means setting up tiny projects to support your career where you can master the art of working toward measured performance goals while becoming a leader that makes stuff happen.  The whole point of leadership is to make stuff happen.  And you’ll get more bang for your buck if you focus on goals that invest in learning better process than if you simply develop a new product or strive for some riches reward.

The second area Tech Professionals consistently struggle to develop includes all the Collaborative People Skills that make worthwhile projects a success. Enrolling others in team efforts, building trust, vision, and negotiating aligned values across the team, for example.  All of these skills are based on underlying repeatable human patterns that you can learn to apply on projects.  If you are a problem solver you are halfway to being a great leader, but you must develop the people skills too.

The third area you need to focus upon is in Coordinating Valued Results.  This includes all of the skills for setting expectations for project stakeholders, negotiating commitments from team members, and managing both to assure successful project delivery.  If this sounds like project management, in a way it is.  But there are basic communication-level skills that you must learn to reliably deliver project results, and they don’t teach them at the PMP courses.

If you would like to learn more about how to be the type of leader that people naturally want to follow then join our weekly Tech Leadership mastermind breakfast.  For this week’s location call me.  512-507-5464  This group is guaranteed to help make your transition from individual contributor to leader in the Tech or Engineering field an easy and powerful one.  Why learn by hard knocks when you can model the best and learn from them in less time, with less effort.

Setting a Fire for Technical Leadership

Leadership is about making happen something that both yourself and others find important.  It is about getting from where you and your organization is right now to someplace better you both want to be.  To do that you have to get good at discovering where everyone is right now and where you all want to go together.

 

Leaderahip Cycle

You have to coordinate shared agreement about what you plan to achieve but also about exactly where you are right now and what is important about where you are going and how you will get there.  To be a good leader you need to learn to be great at evoking responses from yourself and other people. This is more than traditional communication skills, it is tracking everyone’s thinking and emotional reactions as well and being able to use those to get the responses you need.

Learn how to ask the types of questions that will help people discover the details of this process.  You need a procedure for determining exactly what success will look like and how you will recognize success when you achieve it.  You need skills to align people’s thinking and actions so that they work in a coordinated way rather than at cross purposes to one another.

You need the ability to ferret out what makes people think and act the way that they do so that you can predict how to best use them and work with them in a synergistic way that brings out their excitement and engages them in the collaborative work you need performed.

Leadership is about getting from where you are now to a better place by coordinating a like-minded group of specialists.  You can learn this.

The first skill set that must be mastered is the capability to define the current state of affairs and compare them to a description of a desired state.  And learning to make your goals a reality always starts with you proactively deciding on what you want for your team that will make a noticeable difference.

The better you are at envisioning and articulating a future that appeals to the values you and your bosses hold the more people will want to align with you and follow your lead.

 

These are the Leadership Skills I am thinking about this week.  If you feel ready to take the leading role, let’s talk about sharpening your skills in these areas.  Drop me a comment, or give me a ring: 512-512-5464

 

 

 

Tears of Joy and Fears of Disgust

William Blake, the 19th Century spiritual mystic observed — “Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.”   Now we know why these seemingly incongruent behaviors make sense in the human body.

How you respond with positive and negative emotions indicates how flexible you are when solving problems.

How you respond with positive and negative emotions indicates how flexible you are when solving problems.

Recent theories in evolutionary biology suggest that emotions are quick signals for the people around us about what we are thinking.  If you see fear or anger on another person’s face you may need to get ready to run.  If you see them laugh it may be a good time to ask for a favor.

But emotions have a powerful effect on us.  And the more we try not to express them and hold them in, the longer they impact our thoughts and behaviors.  So there is an evolutionary advantage to letting them move through us so that we come back to a base line of equanimity and contentment.

New research just out this week shows that people who are most affected by feelings of disgust and fear are more likely to think conservatively and are more likely to hang onto those feelings for a long time.  They become fixated on negative feelings.

But the type of people who are more likely to cry when happy events occur are more likely to moderate intense emotions more quickly.   They let themselves be moved and then quickly move on.

It is said that there is a time and a place for every behavior and every type of person.  When is it more important to be conservative and hold your ground?  And when is it important to be flexible and fully feel your emotions?  Which comes more naturally to you?

Success comes from having the ability to choose the right behavior to support the results you are intending.

Let me know what you are thinking.

 


Conservatives tend to have more intense reactions to negative stimuli:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140731145935.htm http://spp.sagepub.com/content/3/5/537.abstract
Dimorphous Expressions of Positive Emotion: Displays of Both Care and Aggression in Response to Cute Stimuli,  in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.  Study co-authors include Margaret S. Clark, Rebecca L. Dyer, John A. Bargh, and Oriana R. Aragón of Yale.     http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/11227082/Why-do-we-cry-tears-of-joy.html

 

 

 

Engineering People Can Be Tricky

Designing a solution takes time, mental power, and effort.  To engineers and tech people this is obvious when talking about physical reality.  Building a new product or solution you start by analyzing what you are trying to accomplish.  Then you you research and design the new product to meet those specifications.  Finally you convert those designs into a set of processes that build and deliver the needed solution in an efficient manner.

Checking system tolerance

People engineering uses feedforward and feedback to maintain system control and stability.

Scientists, engineers, and tech people are good at this sort of work.  Unfortunately, it is not just THINGS that need to be created.

In fact, I don’t know about you but on the technical projects I work on, problems are about people as much as about things.  Human solutions are generally necessary before engineering solutions will actually work.

Think about the people issues you have to deal with every day.

  • Bosses that never listen to your good ideas, or
  • executives who randomly change the goal or interrupt the project or
  • make promises to customers with deadlines that no one could keep.
  • Subordinates that want to “fix” things without understanding why you’ve done it this way for the past 6 years.  Or
  • bosses who don’t know how to let go, who hover over you or nit-pic constantly so that you don’t have a chance to do your job.  Or on the other hand
  • bosses that you only hear from when things go wrong.

Individual contributing engineers and techies tend to be passive responders.  But leading technical teams means looking around at what needs to be done and taking a proactive action to move the team and the organization forward through solutions to these problems, toward the goals that it doesn’t even know it has yet.  And that means selling those ideas to others.

Do you know how to do people engineering?  Can you elaborate the technical specifications (values) of your top team members?  Do you recognize their process tolerances?  How often do you need to run quality assurance samples on your best colleagues, and the least experienced?

People are not really machines.  But they are systems with consistent patterns of inputs and outputs.  You can learn to engineer people systems, but you have to adopt variation control procedures and feedforward mechanisms.  Otherwise people systems go chaotic.

Making the change from individual technical contributor to team leader starts with upgrading yourself.  Take a hard look at what you do and do not understand about leadership.  Now is the time.  There are skills, behaviors, distinctions, and ways of measuring performance in dealing with people just as there are in engineering and technical individual contributor roles.  Be honest with yourself.  You went to school to get the basic ideas and vocabulary of engineering, science, and technology.  But you have learned your profession on the job.  Self study can take you a long way when you are ready to learn how to lead others.

 

A Call For Honest Conversation

I would like to hear from you what differences you have noticed between engineering systems and engineering people.  What is similar?  What is different and difficult?

If you want to learn then you are going to have to be honest and admit what works and what doesn’t yet work for you.  Let me hear your thoughts.

 

 

 

External and Internal Monitoring in Engineering Leadership

 

As engineers, scientists, and technical people, we tend to think in terms of things and processes, rather than in terms of people.  That is what first interested me in the technical professions.  How about you?

Yet to make the move into leadership, along the way each of us has to learn to recognize additional “people” distinctions and algorithms.  Leadership is about managing events and internal expectations as well as internal reactions.

ShowImage

Engineers understand control systems.  We know that to stabilize output, the subsystem in charge of making adjustments must have a larger range and a faster cycle time than the processes it is controlling.  If we are going to lead, this means that we have to increase our flexibility and learn appropriate methods for monitoring and providing corrective feedback to the systems and teams for which we are responsible.  All leadership starts with keen observation.

Observation means monitoring the channels of feedback in the environment.  Self observation means even recognizing the patterns going on within our own mind so that we can compare our expectations to others on the project.

Inside every human there is an observation system and a self observation system.  Being able to assess the internal self-observation system of both yourself and of other key people on a team is a requirement for effective leadership.

 

New Insights

In 20 years of managing and coaching the technical professions, I have found that most engineers have never thought of this before.  It is obvious that projects are comprised of a large number of events that are external and useful to observe.  Less obvious is that they are also comprised of an even larger number of “internal reactions” that are more difficult to recognize.

For example, can you read the reaction, positive or negative, on the faces of your team members?   Do you really know when people on your team are aligned with you or not?  How would you know?

Have you ever seen people blow up in frustration or blow off their duties before you recognize that something is not going well on their “insides?”

Do know the differences between your expectations and your customers’ expectations of the next few days worth of deliverables?  Or will you only find those out upon delivery and review?

What about your own internal state of mind— Do you respond automatically to frustrating information, or do you differentiate between external events and internal reactions so that you can maintain a semblance of sanity on your project?

It really is possible to hone your skills of observation and learn to recognize when other team members do not share your expectations, motivations, or capabilities.  There are specific exercises to develop the ability to handle difficult situations, difficult clients, difficult bosses, and difficult people on your team.

 

Challenge For Today

Just for today, ask yourself about the people on your team you are working with— “How can I know for sure whether the images they are making in their mind matches the expectations I have in mine?”   Become sensitive to whether they really see things exactly the way that you do.  And consider, how do you know whether these differences will matter?

You can learn the patterns and distinctions of “people engineering,”  Your project, your people, and your organization depends upon it.  Just like you learned the technical skills that have made you a successful individual contributor, with a slight shift in attention, you will discover new signals that you were previously unaware of.

What aspects of leading technical, scientist, and engineers do you find most challenging.  I love to hear what is going on in your projects.  Tell me about your challenges in the comments below.

Happiness Doesn’t Come From Getting What You Want

Goals_Happiness

Most of you know that I am an expert on motivation and leadership, and the communication skills that leaders use in leading teams and helping gain alignment, commitment, and motivation in team situations.  With this background my friend Russ Taylor asked me to comment on Dan Gilbert’s work and its relation to the NLP idea of “Well Formed Desired Outcomes.”   He asks,

What would you say is the significance of this data for outcome-based change processes, or even on the ultimate value of change as a goal?

And points to Gilbert’s TED talk:

             https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy

 

Hey Russ,

Thanks for the note.  Great TED talk.  I have been thinking a lot about happiness and NLP’s concepts of “Well Formed Desired Outcomes” recently in relation to the “well lived life.”  Here is a summary of my thoughts:

First of all, the word “happiness” is a bit confusing because we have only one word for three different underlying concepts.

The first is immediate pleasure, which we call happiness.  For example, “Yum, that is a good ice-cream cone.”

The second is the experience of being fully engaged in a challenging and interesting experience that we feel is meaningful.  As Csikszentmihalyi‘s research shows, we experience these as “flow” states where we get so involved that time seems to fly by and our sense of self seems to merge with the activity we are involved in.  These states are very rewarding, and we think of them as happiness or sometimes bliss, but when we are in them, we are too busy to think about the pleasure we are deriving.

The third experience we call happiness is the pleasure we derive when we look back on some experience or period of our lives and consider how we were living according to our personal values.  This “narrative happiness” describes past experiences in terms of a coherent story.  If we feel we met our values, we feel we were happy.

It is this third type of happiness that is the subject of narrative rewriting, reevaluation, and the “synthesis of happiness” that Dan Gilbert is talking about.

Gilbert and Wilson’s research is important and sheds light on the exaggeration of choice and the illusion that if you get what you want you are going to feel happy.  I don’t think it is surprising anymore that this is not the case.  In fact, setting desired outcomes, like any other expectations, is a surefire way to create suffering.  Think of what the Buddha said.  If you could live totally in the now with acceptance for all that is as it is, then you cease suffering.

This does not mean that all choices are equal, or that freedom of choices is of itself, bad.  Only that if you think that happiness comes from what you get, you are likely to be disappointed.  Some quote I once read seems right to me, “In the end we are about as happy as we set our minds to be.”  (Abraham Lincoln?)

Nevertheless, we are still outcome driven creatures at all levels of experience, from the micro, “I think I will adjust the temperature by opening the window,” to the macro, “I want to be a doctor when I finish school.”  Achieving goals has little to do with happiness, and lots to do with effectiveness, which has something to do with the first two types of happiness but little to do with the third.

The couch potato might not be happy, but that is not because he or she doesn’t produce results, but because when he looks back on his life, he has neither a narrative that satisfies his values, nor the experience of flow states that come when we are fully engaged in an activity that we find interesting.  Doing nothing, and having no goals, however, may lead to the immediate satisfaction when we feel the relief of stress that comes from relaxing, and the immediate pleasure that comes from programmed entertainment, but it doesn’t lead to feelings of long-term fulfillment.

Now if your choices are constrained by circumstances, you may later synthesize happiness by coming to the conclusion that you did what you could with what you had, and in that sense you did your best and lived the best life you could.

But if you perceive that you have choice and don’t make use of it, that is a prescription for regret and lack of happiness.  Though sometimes this regret and happiness is ameliorated by addiction to mind-numbing alternatives like TV or drugs.  Many people have given up hope for any good life.  They try to “get by” with diversions, distractions, and dissociation from life.  But surly this “coping” does not constitute the good life.

On the other hand, setting goals and going after them doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness either.

Perhaps a better approach is to set goals for effectiveness sake, rather than with some expectation that we are somehow going to be happy when we achieve them.  For example, “well-formed desired outcomes” are more useful as communication tools for coming to a shared understanding and a consensual set of agreements between people than they are for generating happiness.

On the other hand, recent research about goal setting has suggested that if you want to be happy AND effective, concentrate your immediate attention on the process rather than the end goal.  (This idea is not new to Buddhists however)   The attitude that comes from taking up the challenge to continually improve your performance at the tasks we are doing leads not only to Flow States (Intermediate happiness) but to long-term happiness based upon narrative review.

When I teach about goals these days, I still teach the Well Formed Desired Outcome Frame questions as a way to build a shared goal between two or more people.  I think it is important, for example, to be able to think in sensory grounded terms about how you will know if you achieve a goal.  And stating goals in the positive so that you are moving toward some target rather than away from some fear is still a useful distinction.  As are ecology and timeframes and all the rest of the well-formed outcome criteria.

But I also teach about the difference between “Ends Goals” and “Means Goals.”  Well-formed Means Goals provide the distinctions for determining whether your performance is improving or not.  When you pay attention and challenge yourself to improve, and when you have a sensory-based measurement that provides feedback about whether you are or are not improving, you are very likely to go into one of those blissful “Flow States.”

By concentrating on the process you are doing and its improvement, rather than the end goal, you find yourself enjoying your task, and you are likely to improve in ways that are meaningful to you and meet your personal values, and so you feel the bliss of being “in the flow.”  Later when you look back on your improvements, you feel that you were meeting your values and so you experience long-term narrative happiness.

Oh, by the way, this is also the path toward excellence of performance and expertise.  Do it for 10,000 hours and you will become one of the more skilled in your field.  But that can’t really be your motivation if you also want to be happy.  But by focusing on the path, the happiness takes care of itself.

That is what I am thinking.  What are you thinking about goals, happiness, and effectiveness?

 

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If you would like to learn more about using Goals to structure success and effectiveness or Mindfulness practices to connect with deep happiness check out my Course Offerings Page or consider the possibility of treating yourself to one-on-one Coaching.

 

What It Really Takes to Be a Leader

As a leadership coach, trainer, and specialists I am always surprised at how easy it can be to improve performance in most teams.  That is perhaps because so many people in business are not engaged.  Industry consensus is that the main reason for that is poor leadership.  Managers do not really understand leadership.  I guess that this is even more true among the technical and engineering teams that I work with, since so many of their managers rose from engineering ranks and probably didn’t set out to be people leaders.

Servant

Leadership always starts with followership.  As the song says, “We all gotta serve somebody.”  So there is always a tradeoff between serving yourself and serving others.  To do this well requires a host of skills.

First of all knowing your own values.  Then connecting with a vision you feel contributes in the world so that you can align your personal values with that vision.

This means you need the communication and questioning skills to elicit and understand exactly what those you serve want so that you can use that as guidance to align your own goals with theirs.  This is one of the top areas where most people fail.  Can you define what those you serve want to see, hear, and even feel that will let them know you are successfully helping them?  For that matter have they even defined it?

Many bosses treat your services much like art, they know it when they see it, but they couldn’t tell you exactly what makes it it is bad or good.

To be a leader you have to know how you and those you serve will define success.

Another key skill of leadership is the ability to negotiate commitments.  To be successful with those you serve you need detailed specifications for your agreements.  Otherwise you will get to the end and find you have built the wrong widget or delivered the wrong service.

You also need to be able to create a vision for the delivery of some products or services that your boss or customer wants and is willing to pay for.  This means that you must always define what you want in relationship and reciprocity to others.

Then you have to generate and communicate a meaningful sounding vision to those people you enroll to help you deliver on your commitments.   You have to help them understand what is required and sometimes even how they must go about providing it to you.  You negotiate agreements and commitment from the people you enroll so that you can assess whether they can and will deliver and to make sure that they do so in a timely manner and with an acceptable level of quality.

These negotiation and assessment skills will make or break you your success.

Leadership comes down to a set of learnable personal and interpersonal skills.

  • Relationship skills to get to know people, establish rapport and trust, and build alliances with others so that you can communicate accurately and work together smoothly
  • Questioning skills to discover and specify reciprocal needs and desires
  • Alignment skills to bring your work in line with what is desired
  • Visioning skills so that your work is useful, makes a difference, and feels worthwhile to you and your bosses. and enroll others to help you deliver on your vision
  • Negotiation skills to establish measurable commitments
  • Management skills to keep the work on track while your people make it a reality
  • Assessment and communication skills to provide appropriate feedback to steer the work and make sure that your people deliver on their commitments so that you can deliver on your own.
  • You encourage your people and reinforce desirable results to strengthen relationships and increase engagement among your team members.

To do this well you organize, plan, and execute a series of personal habits that support achieving those goals you have negotiated.  In this way you deliver on the commitments you make and therefore build trust with those that you serve.  It is a whole lot more than simply being able to articulate a worthwhile vision and enroll others in that vision.

You can learn about these key success habits but to make them your own you need to practice and drill these skills until they become automatic.

That is what I am thinking about today.  I would like to know more about what you think of these ideas.  Drop me a note or leave me a comment.

What Makes Work Worthwhile to You?

What makes work worthwhile?  What about life?

Those moments where everything seems to be fulfilling your life purpose are some times called “Flow States.”  You may have notice how sometimes everything seems to be going your way.  At those moments “you” are dead.  The ego “I” ceases to exist when totally absorbed in the flow of now, with enough challenge that it is not worrying about anything else.  If this focus also happens to move us toward fulfilling our life’s values then something special happens.

Leader'sArrow

To live on the edge of the wave, that razor-thin line where everything you do matters, and everything you think is in service to what you do, and your heart is completely open so that your feelings are as sensitive as possible to what you are trying to accomplish.  This is where the ego I disappears.  Death while physically alive.

I find this a worthy practice.   My clients have been having a discussion about ways to support that fine line and live there more of the time.

It takes more than conscious awareness, though this is necessary.  It takes love and groundedness as well.

Think what could it mean to be in the middle of a technical project fully alive and living with the conscious question, “How can I be in the living cycle of love at this very moment?”  This is a high human aspiration indeed.  What could it possible have to do with solving technical or team or project problems?  This is the sort of question that makes us more than just an animal or an automaton machine.  The living cycle of love requires that we know where that longing is in our body and to tend to it consciously.

It probably doesn’t require that  we work in any particular profession.  Could be computers, or training, or projects, or coaching, construction, accounting, whatever.

When we live our work lives It seems that it is all meaningless and empty, and perhaps it is.  But all that we do can be of consequence.   That is why if work is to have meaning it is important that we learn to create the meaning for ourselves.

Being the senior consciousness is only half of the equation, the masculine or active half.  The other half is the reciprocity of ever-changing feedback cycle of love.  The sacred witness is one side, the cycle of loving compassion is the other.   Both are required to live a meaningful life, to make work really worthwhile.

 

We need rituals.  Little practices of the mind and body that serve our success.  We need rituals for grounding, rituals for evoking the cycle of love, and rituals for evoking consciousness.

Grounding is coming back to self connected to reality and to highest and best spirit and has to do with finding the stable place within the moving center of the body.

Consciousness is of the mind and the willingness to be at the witness awareness on the cutting edge of the now with presence.

Loving compassion and the cycle of love is holding each other, and one’s self, as sacred manifestations of the life force and tending to us with high expectations and positivity so as to encourage expansion.

What does all of this have to do with leading?  With technical projects?  What does all of this have to do with making meaning from your work or work from your life’s purpose?  I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Successful Engineers Need More Than Technical Skills

I was walking with a colleague that runs a successful technical firm this morning, and we were talking about breakdowns that come from people who are too smart for their own good.  In years of consulting and managing engineering projects I have noticed that engineers and technicians often damage their careers in this way.

As smart problem solvers, we want to design and build the best solution we can.  But a product or solution is only really good when its users find it valuable in their particular context and market.

My friend has been asked to take over the development of a complex system because the previous engineering firm decided to build what they “knew” the customer needed rather than what the customer had told them they wanted and needed at the current time.

But why would giving more functionality than was required be a problem?  

Better Mousetrap Blueprints

Design is only one of the factors that Engineers have to track. Others include political contexts, budgets, and customer’s egos.

Well, what the ousted engineering firm didn’t realize is that requirements are not just about the product, or in this case, the system.  Customers may define requirements about the product or technical details, yet they always do so in the context of their political circumstances and personal egos.  But most engineers were never trained to be capable of seeing beyond the concrete details of the tangible project.

That is why Scientists, Engineers, Technical Specialists, and Technical Project Managers eventually need people skills training as well.  It doesn’t matter how great the better mousetrap is, if the customer decides not to deploy it on the right mouse trail, the project can’t really be a success.

To create a successful new product or solution and avoid communication breakdowns you have to track not only your customer’s technical requirements but also their political environment, their product and budget cycles, their ego needs, and the forms of deletions and distortions that they habitually make in their own thinking and communications.  That way you can begin to predict the types of problems that will likely arise on a particular project, with the particular people, and in that particular environment.  Recognizing these “soft” factors is not only important for your customers but their customers as well.  How many scientists, engineers, or technicians really know how to do this proficiently?

It is possible to learn to ferret out these hidden issues from customer’s implicit assumptions.

Political skills and peoples ego structures are learnable just like engineering, analysis and design skills.  It takes a special sort of questioning, and you have to understand the range of possible ego and political dynamics, but these so called “emotional intelligences” are not nearly as difficult as science and engineering.  It is just that most engineers have never had an interest or been exposed methods to go about gathering this sort of information.

Perhaps that is why so few engineers make great business managers; they find focusing on the hard tech details fun, but they miss the easier soft skills details that create the context in which the technical project or product will be deployed.  To be business successful you need both skill sets.

If you are interested in learning more about how to go about gathering this sort of contextual and emotional intelligence and how to use it to improve the quality of your projects, I would recommend a book by David Moulden, NLP Business Masterclass: Driving peak performance with NLP.   Check it out from Amazon.  Engineering leadership has always required more than just engineering.  It requires human systems skills as well.  This book will help you learn to make the distinctions that solve project breakdowns before they happen.