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?  

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.