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    Essential Leadership and Management Skills for Engineers: No Nonsence Manuals, #4
    Essential Leadership and Management Skills for Engineers: No Nonsence Manuals, #4
    Essential Leadership and Management Skills for Engineers: No Nonsence Manuals, #4
    Ebook112 pages1 hour

    Essential Leadership and Management Skills for Engineers: No Nonsence Manuals, #4

    By Mark Lynch

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    About this ebook

    The best engineers are often highly effective managers and leaders. If you are ambitious and aim to advance your career, obtaining these skills is crucial.

    Perhaps you've been promoted to a management position because of your performance as a technical expert. If so, what you now need are the new, complementary skills to survive and thrive in this brave new world.

    Likewise, for small manufacturing businesses, strong inspirational leadership and effective management is the surest way to get the very best out of your people, your assets and your limited resources. This guide provides crystal clear advice in the following areas:

    Leadership: This section gives you the information, tools and examples to not only develop your leadership potential, but also to inspire others and use leadership qualities to advance in your chosen field.

    People Management: Working collaboratively with other engineers is critical to high performing manufacturing teams. For engineers who find themselves leading teams or promoted to head-up technical units, possessing the right people skills is frankly vital.

    Networking: Quite simply, the quickest way to get on in your career. It involves connecting with people, sharing ideas and seizing opportunities. Also tapping into others' knowledge and experience is an invaluable way of solving technical problems.

    Public Speaking: A great skill engineers are rarely trained in. Learn how to be a self-assured, fluent public speaker and banish anxiety. Confidently address other employees in the workplace, represent the business externally or deliver a public presentation in or out of work.

    Project Management: Engineers commonly undertake work as part of engineering teams. Obtain the benefits offered by a structured, organised way of working. Understand and apply the key stages of formal project management, but better tailored to small businesses. Gain the key skills employers value.

    Essential Leadership and Management Skills for Engineers contains proven practical knowledge to be applied from day 1, in your current role. It's a no-nonsense manual written for you if you want to realise your career ambitions by quickly learning these complimentary skills.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMark Lynch
    Release dateAug 18, 2014
    ISBN9781502279903
    Essential Leadership and Management Skills for Engineers: No Nonsence Manuals, #4

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      Book preview

      Essential Leadership and Management Skills for Engineers - Mark Lynch

      1. Introduction

      The best engineers are often highly effective managers and leaders. If you are ambitious and aim to advance your career, obtaining these skills is crucial. For small manufacturing businesses, strong inspirational leadership and effective management is the surest way to get the very best out of your people, your assets and your limited resources.

      Maybe for you it’s more personal. You may have been promoted to a management position because of your performance as a technical expert. This is great, except lots of your time is now spent managing teams and dealing with people issues, with surprising little deep technical work. What you now need is the new skills to survive and thrive in this brave new world. Well we’ll help you master these 5 essential leadership and management skills:

      • Leadership

      • People Management

      • Networking

      • Public Speaking

      • Project Management

      On the ground, the roles of engineers and technicians typically include management-related tasks. Engineering employees find themselves responsible for leading teams and managing projects, as well as being accountable for budgets and assets. They work with suppliers and customers, in addition to being in frequent contact other functions within the business.

      However, the reality is good engineering and operations managers are in short supply. Engineering commonly deals with specifics, whilst management is often more subjective and intangible – so perhaps it’s not surprising.

      Considering the above, oddly enough the availability of good quality information to help engineering managers lead and succeed, is far less obtainable than detailed technical training. But if engineers are to truly realise their potential and advance their careers, they need to consider and act upon key management skills. What’s more, if engineering is to be well represented at all levels of the business, all the way up to the board, then engineers need to further their expertise in this area.

      Wherever you are in your career, you should strive to obtain and practice these transferable skills.

      Some crucial management and leadership themes are examined below. Our best practice information is complimentary to your technical skill development. If your career aspirations include deeper, more specialised technical knowledge, you’ll be working with other technical specialists and so will need strong communication, networking and perhaps project management skills. Likewise, you may be leading a project or team of engineers. Alternatively, your aim may be to develop your career, taking on positions of greater responsibility in technical management. Clearly, vital competencies like decision making, leadership, public speaking, financial and business skills, will all be hugely beneficial.

      If you have ambitions and want to progress, you’ll need some of these skills to get on. Think about it – you wouldn’t put an apprentice in charge of a big-money production order! Plainly, they wouldn’t have the knowledge or experience. Likewise, you’re unlikely to ‘drift’ in to the best paid, most responsible positions. As such, leadership and management are skills to be learned and honed like any technical skill. Too often technical staff often ‘have a go’ at management, risking potentially disastrous results for their team and the business. Sadly too many of us have experienced ‘bad management’ at some time or other. Why not give yourself and your employees the best possible chance by finding out what ‘good management practice’ looks like.

      This section contains practical knowledge to be applied straight away in your current job role. Implement these proven ideas with confidence. Alternatively, use it as a spring board to research and find out more. Be motivated, discover what works for you and go and realise your potential.

      2. Leadership

      Leadership is a great skill to compliment the technical expertise of any engineer. What’s more, it’s the ideal competency if your aim is to get on, get noticed and get your career on the move. But what is leadership? How is it different from management? Can it be taught or are we born as leaders? This section gives you the information and tools to not only develop your leadership potential, but inspire others and use leadership qualities to advance in your chosen field.

      Key Leadership themes covered below include:

      • Leadership Behaviours in a Nutshell

      • Creating a Vision for the Future

      • Communications Skills

      • Decision Making

      • Leadership and Teams

      • Motivating and Inspiring Others

      • Leadership Styles

      • Practical Leadership Tips from Business Leaders

      Leadership Behaviours in a Nutshell

      (Source: The Psychologist Manager Journal, Volume 12)

      • Consulting: Checking with others before making plans

      • Delegating: Authorising others to have substantial responsibilities

      • Influencing Upwards: Appealing to those at the top

      • Inspiring: Motivating others to greater commitment and enthusiasm

      • Mentoring: Facilitating skill development and career advancement

      • Networking: Developing and maintaining useful relationships

      • Problem Solving: Identifying and acting decisively to remove impediments

      • Rewarding: providing recognition, praise and remuneration for good work

      • Team-building: encouraging cooperation and resolving conflicts

      • Supporting: Assisting and encouraging others and allocating resources to help

      Creating a Vision for the Future

      A key theme of leadership is the ability to form a vision of the future, followed by successfully convincing others to help achieve it. For engineers and technicians, the leadership vision may be a project, a change activity, a new production run, problem solving or any other technically challenging activity. The point is a leader doesn’t just let the situation evolve. Instead they inspire others to apply themselves, to achieve a common purpose.

      The leader’s vision may sound rather cryptic. Simply put, it is a good idea - a good idea that has advantages for the business and for the people involved. Ideally the vision should be aligned to the business objectives of the organisation. In so doing, there is a far greater probability in gaining agreement from both management and all employees.

      A good leader will be skilled in getting others to buy into the vision and recognise the advantages of the change. Considering this, an effective leader is often persuasive, able to convince others’ thinking and importantly able to articulate the ‘new’ way of doing things.

      A vision, by definition, is about change. It’s about doing things differently. As such the ability to think unconventionally and take risks are common leadership traits, as are boldness and confidence. Think outside the box and be prepared to consider alternative points of view if you have leadership aspirations.

      Visions and new ideas can come from a broad range of sources. Talking to people and networking are common ways to find out what others are doing. Reading and researching also yield alternative ways of doing things. Being creative, brainstorming and seeing how others have solved problems, can also assist in visionary thinking.

      Communications Skills

      To get their message across and really inspire others, the best leaders possess great communication skills. Most engineers and technicians in teams will have expertise in a given field. Many are creatures of habit, typically trusting in years of training and experience, with an inbuilt reluctance to change too radically. As such, leaders will sometimes find themselves having to overcome this. Persuading technical professionals can be challenging. A powerful combination of evidence-based demonstration and effective communication is a good starting point. So what are the traits of a leader with strong communication skills?

      Active Listening

      Listening - probably one of the most underrated communicated skills there is. To listen effectively requires the ability to concentrate on what others have to say. This may involve requesting opinions from a range of perspectives, some of which may differ from yours. The ability to listen well requires strong self-control – actively stopping yourself interrupting and replying because you are itching to put your opinion across. It requires keeping your feelings sufficiently under control, even when what you are hearing is highly emotive. Also, letting the speaker finish ensures you receive the whole complete message in the correct context. Sounds obvious? Well it’s amazing how many people don’t do it. Listen out for this at your next meeting if

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