The Fully Integrated Engineer

Combining Technical Ability and Leadership Prowess

Steven T. Cerri

• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118886359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Counseling in Career Development

College teaches you to be a good engineer. But it's likely that your college engineering courses didn't have time to teach you how to effectively contribute your ideas or how to transition to management or leadership. This book provides you with those missing tools.

• Identify patterns of behavior that don't serve you (or your organization) well and change them
• Create a plan of action that will allow for personal change that will impact your professional work
• Hone the ways that your technical work can be seen positively inside your organization
• Promote the talents and skills of the team players around you
• Become a flexible, supportive, and positive asset

1
What You Learned in College Is Limiting Your Growth As a Technology Professional

If you are an engineer, scientist, or technologist, at some point in your career, you will realize that what you learned in college is not enough to establish a successful, long-term career. Advancing your career, whether you want to remain technically focused or you want to become a manager, demands that you take off the technology blinders and give up the habits that you perfected as a technologist.

The typical path for engineers, scientists, and technologists once they leave school and enter the workforce is as follows. You begin your career as a technical individual contributor. You focus on your own individual contributions and you do your best to do a good job.

If you are successful as an individual contributor, often, you are given additional responsibilities, perhaps as a team lead or project manager of a small project. At some point, after having been given this additional responsibility, you realize that you are not as successful as you thought you would be. People do not listen to your directions, your project schedules slip, your meetings are difficult and ineffective, and you are stressed. Plus, you are not doing nearly as much technical work as you were doing before your “promotion.” You begin thinking, “Just let me get back to my engineering work. That used to be so much more fun.”

This situation is often the result of believing that what you learned as an engineer will also make you a good and successful manager or leader or long-term technologist. You assume that the behaviors that made you a successful individual contributor will also make you successful as your career advances. They will not.

The first step in getting out of this fix and moving to success is to understand that there is something missing from your current abilities, and, therefore, something needs to be added. You need to make a shift. In order to make this shift, you must understand what you are doing now and what you need to add in order to change your behavior. This book will provide you with that information. It will highlight behaviors that make you a good engineer but will keep you from being successful long-term in related endeavors. It will also provide you with insights into what new beliefs and attitudes you need to add in order to be successful long-term.

When you were trained to be a successful engineer, scientist, or technologist, you learned to look and pay attention to hard, quantifiable, unambiguous, and repeatable data that you generated, analyzed, and counted on to do your work. This is what school taught you and this is what it means to be a competent engineer, scientist, or technologist.

But, as your career grows, you need to grow, too. If you want to be someone who can fully contribute to a team, who can manage projects and others, and who can lead a team or organization, the information that you will have available will often be, at best, fuzzy and less than ideal. In fact, in the non-technical world of effective communication, contribution, management, and leadership, there is often no way to turn that fuzzy, unreliable, and less than adequate data and information into clear, reliable and sufficient data that can lead to certainty in decision-making.

Successful engineers are looking for reliable, unambiguous, quantifiable data. Successful team contributors, leaders, and technical managers know they have (at best) fuzzy, unreliable data. The world of the engineer is built on certainty. The world of the long-term engineer, the manager or leader, is built on the understanding that some decision must be made with a level of uncertainty.

The role of engineers is to build the product, or to solve the problem, based upon quantifiable parameters and data. On the other hand, the role of technical managers or leaders is to drive the organization they lead into an unknown future and to bring together the resources at their disposal/command even when that outcome may seem unreasonable or unreachable to others.

Most engineers believe they can count on improving and perfecting their skills and advancing their careers by taking one step after another, doing what they were taught in school. They believe advancement is a logical step-by-step process into the future.

However, advancing your career represents a broadening of perspective and often involves a phase shift in your thinking. And that phase shift is a shift to embrace ambiguity and the lack of a precise, right answer to all questions and problems. It will require making decisions without as much “real” data as you would like. In a nutshell, it will require the application of judgment.

In fact, as an individual technical contributor, you are paid for providing the “right” answer. As a long-term technologist, or manager, or leader, you are paid for the application of your judgment when there is no “right” answer but only answers that work, some better than others.

This Book Is Your Safety Net

Even the best performers learn to fly using a safety net. The best safety net is not someone who has observed what you are going through from the sidelines. The best safety net is someone who has lived what you are living, right now.

I began my career as an aerospace engineer, with a Bachelor of Science in aeronautical engineering, advanced through geology to a Master's Degree in geophysics, and an Masters of Business Administration, and then became a technical manager, a systems engineer, and general manager of a division of a large software company. I have worked in the aerospace industry and the geophysical industry. I have worked for the US government, the Department of Defense, as well as a commercial printer company. As someone who has worked through the issues of being a technologist in the role of technical manager and leader, I know that it is not an easy world to navigate. It is more like a satellite traversing an asteroid field.

Everyone who wants to be a professional at some point in their career needs a safety net. And this book is one of your possible safety nets. It can help you understand where the surprises are, where the difficulties will occur, and where to find the dark and light corners. It can help to traverse to the other side, to the clearing, where your decisions move the team and the project forward smoothly and effectively.

This book will bring the safety net of my experience to teach you how to make the necessary changes on your own in the shortest amount of time and in the most elegant way possible. Depending on where you are in your career and what you want, different chapters of this book will appeal to you more or less. Take what you can use. Leave the rest for later.

2
Why Should You Read a Book by Me? Or … Why Is This Book Important Now?

It is reasonable to ask, “Who is this guy and why should I read his book?”

Let me start by where I come from so that you can see how I so easily understand where the technical professional lives and what has to happen in order to achieve long-term career success and even to transition to management.

From the time I was a small boy, I knew I wanted to be an aeronautical/aerospace engineer. In elementary and high school, as well as in college, I built rockets. Not the cardboard kind, but rockets made of cold rolled steel tubing, using zinc and sulfur as solid propellant. My rockets reached altitudes of almost a mile and returned by parachute, sometimes. Although my friends helped me launch my rockets on launch day, I did most of my rocket work alone. I was not a member of a rocket society or club. I built my rockets through long hours in the family basement and launched them on our large family farm. I loved what I did and there was no need to share it with anyone else until the launch day.

I went off to college and received a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering and upon graduation joined Rockwell International working in the advanced systems division as a flight performance engineer. After two years at Rockwell, I left to go back to school and received a Master of Science degree in geophysics. I then worked for several years for the United States Geological Survey as a software engineer and earth resources sciences researcher.

I then returned to Rockwell International to my flight performance team and worked on advanced deep space systems as a flight performance engineer and as chief systems engineer. While at Rockwell, I met three other engineers and after several more years at Rockwell the four of us left and started our own company focused on software development and computer systems engineering.

After ten years and a couple of moves to field offices, the company was worth $100 million. During that time I received an M.B.A. Also, during that time I advanced my career from engineer to Program Manager, to Director of Engineering, to Vice President of Engineering, to Chief Operations Officer, to General Manager of a company division.

I later joined a start-up that became a highly successful commercial bar-code printer manufacturer. I was its first Product Manager and later became the Director of Corporate Training.

About 16 years ago, I started my own training, facilitation, coaching, and consulting company. It became clear that throughout my career I had developed a technology, processes, and an approach that most effectively transformed engineers and other technical professionals into even more effective technical professionals. That process transformed them into great technical managers, as well. I did not receive any official training in communication or management that was worth a dime along the way. All of the management training available then (and seemingly now as well), is most concentrated on using software to manage projects or on developing budgets and schedules. Even so-called communication and management courses are seldom taught by people who have communication or management experience in technical organizations. Instructors seldom have degrees in engineering or other technical fields (they often have degrees in psychology, not engineering) and often merely repeat what they have been told to say in their trainings. Nowhere was there anyone from the technical world who could teach me how to deal with people, and I quickly learned that dealing with people is what effective communication and good management are all about.

I learned how to deal with people on my own, often by taking courses that had nothing to do with technical management, and I became very, very good at interpersonal communication, management, leadership, and motivation. I built incredibly effective teams made up of people that other managers often did not want. I was able to turn around projects that had become unmanageable. I had a reputation of being able to handle very challenging issues around technology and people. Often, I was given the teams and projects that were broken, and I fixed them.

The processes and the technology of management that I developed over this period I call becoming a Fully Integrated Technical Professional^©. It means being an engineer AND being able to contribute fully to your organization, using all your talents and all your capabilities. Whether you want to become a more effective engineer or you want to be an effective technical manager, I believe the processes I teach are necessary and, if followed, will get you there.

Since becoming a...