Fast-Tracking Your Career

Soft Skills for Engineering and IT Professionals

Wushow Chou

• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118662137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Fast-Tracking Your Career provides engineers and IT professionals with a complete set of soft skills they can use to become more effective on the job and gain recognition from management and colleagues. The 11 core skills covered here are accompanied by more than 40 detailed guidelines on how to master those skills. The book offers first-rate advice on how to go about acquiring communication skills, people skills, presentation skills, time management skills, and others. Specific examples about current situations are discussed, exploring the impact of the Facebook phenomenon and the subprime mortgage crisis. Visit the author's website for more information:
www.FastTrackingCareers.com

Part One

Communications

The Absolutely Necessary

Chapter One

Communications Smart

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Principle: Staying succinct and focused

Strategy: Get key points across within the audience's limited attention span

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The absolutely necessary soft skill is good communication: the ability to successfully convey to the audience what we want them to know. Those who are successful in their professional field are almost certainly good communicators.

President Ronald Reagan and Dr. Stephen Hawking have one thing in common: being the greatest communicators in their respective fields. President Reagan owed his success in garnering congressional support for his policies to his excellent skill at persuasion. Dr. Hawking, a very popular theoretic physicist, owes his popularity to his ability of explaining to laymen the esoteric concepts of black holes and time–space relationships in an easy-to-understand fashion. (Hawking has achieved this feat in spite of his severe handicaps in speaking and writing.)

Communication is not simply about writing articles or giving speeches. It is the ability to enable listeners and readers to understand what we are trying to convey to them. Accordingly, we must focus on what we want to deliver in a way that our audience can comprehend and appreciate.

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Practicing the following rules, defined later in this chapter, can help us achieve deftness in being Communications Smart:

• Being always ready for elevator pitches/speeches
• Mastering a presentation by mastering the onset
• Using three diagrams to simplify complexity
• Sizing up and resonating with the audience
• Being careful of careless comments
• Using plain language
• Using jokes and self-deprecating humor
• Being heard by listening (Refer to Chapter 2, People Smart, for a general discussion of this rule.)
• Making a convincing presentation by making a well-crafted presentation. (Refer to Chapter 3, Marketing Smart, for a general discussion of this rule.)

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RULE 1: Being always ready for elevator pitches/speeches

Be prepared to articulate short pitches at any brief opportune encounter in order to make the right impressions with the right people.

We all have had the experience of a chance encounter, such as in an elevator or at a cocktail party, with someone we would like to impress. We may also have had the experience of expected encounters with unscripted questions, such as during a job interview. In such situations, we usually have only a couple of minutes to say what is needed to impress our listeners.

Of course, we can form a response on the spot. Indeed, some people are very talented at launching a good pitch without prior preparation. But for most of us, it is more likely that we can give a better response if we are prepared.

It is therefore prudent for most of us to prepare a set of “elevator pitches” for those situations in which we need to answer questions on the fly. These pitches can also be tweaked as situations change—undoubtedly, some will need to have different versions for a different audience.

If we do encounter the need to give an unprepared short pitch and we are unable to give a good one right away, we can use a three-point response strategy to make up a pitch as shown in an example later in this section.

One important point: when delivering an elevator pitch, it should sound like an ongoing conversation, not a recitation from a prepared written statement.

The elevator pitch as it has been discussed so far is used as part of a conversation or Q&A. There is another type that is used as a response to an expected request for a short speech/presentation to a group of people. For distinguishing the two types, I shall name this variation as “elevator speech.” The occurrence of needing an elevator pitch is much more frequent than that of an elevator speech. However, when we encounter an unexpected need to give an elevator speech on the spot, we can be in quite an awkward situation if we are not prepared and do not have anything meaningful to say.

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Example: A good “elevator pitch” led to a promising career

Vincent worked as a part-time caddy at a golf club when he was a university student. He was frequently assigned to the same elderly gentleman. During a seemingly casual conversation, Vincent's comments about a market trend impressed the old man. The next day, the part-time caddy got a call from a Wall Street company and was offered an internship position. It just so happened that the elderly gentleman was the CEO of the company.

After Vincent graduated, he joined the firm. In the ensuing years, he became a protégée of the CEO, and today, Vincent is a senior VP at another large Wall Street firm.

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Example: Well-prepared “elevator pitches” led to passing a PhD exam with ease and a prompt promotion

Eddy was working toward his PhD at a university. One process he had to go through was an oral exam with a committee of three faculty members. A typical student would put most of his attention on hitting the books. Eddy took a slightly different approach. From his standpoint, an oral exam consisted of several Q&As, so the best strategy was to prepare a set of “elevator pitches” to potential questions. With this in mind, he sought out those who had been previously examined by anyone sitting on his oral exam committee. He collected a large number of questions that had been asked by these committee members and prepared an “elevator pitch” for each question. (A typical student would also collect potential questions, but not as methodically and thoroughly as Eddy did.)

Sure enough, some of the same questions were asked during Eddy's oral exam, and he was able to answer them with ease. He not only passed the exam, he also impressed the professors on the committee.

One committee member was the department chair. After the exam, he promoted Eddy from the position of teaching assistant to that of teaching fellow.

Another committee member later claimed that of all the oral exams in which he has participated, Eddy performed the best. He has since helped Eddy's career in a variety of ways.

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Example: Enormous embarrassment for having not prepared an “elevator speech”

The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) has over 10,000 IT professionals and other staff supporting its IT systems, and its IT organization has several divisions. Thus, a division-wide meeting for IT professional staff often needs to be held in an auditorium.

When I was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer at the US Department of Treasury, I had the responsibility of overseeing the IT operations of all bureaus, including the IRS, under the Treasury Department. One day, I got a request from an IT division director at the IRS to present an award to a staff member in his division. I agreed. My plan was simply to walk in at the appointed time, present the award, congratulate the award recipient, and leave right away. When I arrived at the appointed time and place, I was a bit taken aback. I walked into an auditorium where the division was holding an annual professional staff meeting. When I walked in, the division director, probably out of courtesy, asked me to make a short comment to the several hundred IT professional staff attending the meeting in the auditorium. I was utterly unprepared and mumbled two minutes of nothing in my strong accent and broken English. (When I do not know what to say, my accent becomes stronger and my delivery of English becomes worse.) I was extremely embarrassed, to say the least.

This experience gave me a good lesson. From then on, whenever I go to a gathering, I always prepared a short elevator speech, just in case.

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Example: Using a three-point response to make up for an unprepared “elevator pitch”

Jon Huntsman, a popular former governor of Utah, ex-US ambassador to China, and ex-US ambassador to Singapore, is known for his three-point responses to almost any question. In responding to a reporter's query about this, he gave a three-point response: “It is easy to answer, easy to stay on top of, and easy to do” (p. 8, Newsweek, June 27, 2012).

Using the lexicon of this book, Huntsman's three-point response is essentially an unprepared “elevator pitch” to a spontaneous question. Here is my take on why the three-point response is an excellent way to deliver a good “elevator pitch” to an ad hoc question, to which we do not have a ready answer. (1) It buys us time to think of an appropriate response. While we are saying, “This issue has three points, the first point is … ,” we have about 10 seconds to think of how to begin answering the question. (2) While we are expressing the first point, we gain additional time to formulate in our mind the second and third points. (3) Consequently, we have a better chance of leaving the impression that we are organized, knowledgeable, and intelligent.

Personally, I have used this approach to my advantage multiple times.

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RULE 2: Mastering a presentation by mastering the onset

Summarize the key points at the onset of a presentation or a written report.

Depending on presentation length, key points at the onset could mean 1 or 2 minutes to 5 or 6 minutes for an oral presentation, or one or two sentences to about one page for a written report. This helps the audience grasp the content and whets their interest in paying full attention to everything we have to say.

Furthermore, most people have a very short attention span, and a limited amount of time to give, whether it be listening to a presentation or reading a written document. It therefore behooves us to develop the practice of getting key points across with a minimal number of spoken or written words. If the presentation or document is meant to be short, these words are the only ones we need to express. Otherwise, these minimal words should serve as the summary, leading to a more detailed explanation.

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Example: Conference speeches

Have you ever noticed that when a speaker begins to talk at a conference session, everyone in the audience seems to pay close attention, but after a few minutes, although the audience is still looking at the speaker, their attention begins to wane? If you're listening to a good speaker, you'll see that he or she mitigates this drift by trying to make key points in those first few minutes.

Dr. Z is a highly regarded scholar and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. I've attended three seminars that he also happened to attend. During each one, he behaved the same way—he paid close attention to the speaker during the first few minutes, closed his eyes, and then opened them again during the Q&A period at the end to ask a pointed question. Seemingly, he always deduced his questions from what the speaker said during those first few minutes.

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Example: Newspaper articles

A common example of mastering the onset is something we see almost...