If you want to lead successfully, you must develop strong communication skills. Effective communication can not only transform your organization’s culture but improve its performance and productivity. You can empower employees, build trust, and foster a positive workplace.
Communication skills are also valuable to prospective employers. According to a Harvard Business School Online analysis of engineering job postings data from Lightcast, around one-third of employers require them.
If you’re interested in becoming an effective leader in the engineering industry, here’s an overview of why communication skills are important, the techniques needed to succeed, and how to improve your leadership skills.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhy Are Communication Techniques Important in Engineering?
Strong communication skills are essential for leaders across industries, including engineering.
“Leaders are called upon to communicate in different ways and for different purposes,” says HBS Professor Joshua Margolis, who teaches the online course Organizational Leadership. “As a leader, you need to ensure your team is kept informed and abreast of relevant information they need to do their jobs on a daily basis.”
Engineering leaders are expected to help fulfill these tasks by effectively presenting complex concepts and designs to departments and stakeholders. The ability to translate technical topics into simplified terms and confidently support ideas across their organizations is critical to success.
Whether connecting with clients, a new employer, or peers, your communication skills can be just as important as your technical knowledge. Here are eight communication techniques that can help you gain a competitive advantage and advance your career as an engineering leader.
Related: 6 Business Skills Every Engineer Needs
8 Communication Techniques Engineering Leaders Need to Succeed
1. Engage in Active Listening
Effective leaders practice active listening and show they care about their team by asking for their opinions, ideas, and feedback. As a leader, active listening’s biggest benefit is understanding your audience.
“This means understanding—even empathizing—with your audience, and tailoring your communication to fit that audience,” Margolis says in Organizational Leadership.
Here are tips for practicing active listening with your team:
- Give them your full and undivided attention.
- Avoid distractions, such as phone calls or emails.
- Resist the temptation to interrupt with your own opinions and ideas.
- Present open, positive body language to show you’re listening.
- Rephrase or paraphrase what your peer has said in your response.
- Ask open-ended questions to elicit more detailed responses.
2. Ask Questions
Asking questions is essential to active listening because it enables you to better understand others’ perspectives, learn something new, or clarify something they’ve said. For example, phrases like “tell me more,” “define that for me,” and “explain what you mean” can elicit better answers than “yes” or “no” questions.
By asking the right questions, you can gain insight into what your team needs to succeed.
3. Practice Public Speaking
Being an engineering leader requires public communication and presentation skills to share research, data, and technical concepts with team members and clients.
According to Organizational Leadership, leaders must master the “six C’s of communication”:
- Compassion: Conveying an empathic understanding of a situation and your audience
- Clarity: Ensuring your message is clear to someone unfamiliar with a given situation
- Conciseness: Guaranteeing your message is no longer than it needs to be and conveys a central point
- Connection: Building an emotional connection with your audience
- Conviction: Infusing your communication with a sense of personal investment and commitment
- Courage: Exuding confidence in the face of uncertainty, risk, or danger
As you work on developing stronger public speaking skills, here are best practices that can help:
- Watch your body language.
- Study great public speakers.
- Practice voice and breath control.
- Prepare talking points and rehearse your presentation.
- Know your audience.
Learning and engaging in data storytelling—the ability to communicate insights from a data set using narratives and visualizations to inspire action within your organization—can also help.
4. Be Clear and Concise
As a leader, it's vital to simplify your message, speak in specifics, and establish clear goals and performance metrics for your team's projects and initiatives.
“It’s important to be clear and consistent about the ways in which your vision and strategy for the organization will enable it to fulfill its mission,” Margolis says in Organizational Leadership.
This can lead to less confusion around priorities and engage your employees. Similarly, when presenting to clients who don’t have the same expertise as you, use clear and concise language when explaining technical terms and concepts.
Another helpful approach is identifying your organization's vision, purpose, and strategy to write a statement of direction. According to HBS Professor Anthony Mayo, who also teaches Organizational Leadership, it should:
- Meet your employees where they are.
- Give them a sense of where the organization is going.
- Offer a roadmap for how they can bridge the gap between the two.
How you communicate that direction is just as essential, particularly regarding technical projects.
“To get people on board, they need to grasp what you’re conveying, so they’re excited to join you in turning that direction into a reality,” Mayo says.
5. Show Empathy
One of the most important skills needed to communicate effectively is emotional intelligence, or the ability to understand and manage your and others’ emotions. The better you are at acknowledging and understanding your team members’ feelings and experiences, the more heard and valued they’ll feel.
Developing empathy as a leader touches on additional components of the “six C’s of communication” in Organizational Leadership. Compassion, the empathic understanding of a situation and your audience, can help you develop a connection with your audience and tailor communications accordingly.
In engineering, you'll need to build your emotional intelligence to bring out the best in others and cultivate high-performing teams. By taking the time to understand your employees’ wants and needs, you can boost engagement, build trust, and foster a strong company culture.
6. Receive and Apply Feedback
Another way to build trust among your peers and grow as a leader is through feedback. Effectively giving and receiving feedback isn’t an easy feat, but it's important to thoughtfully consider any comments you receive and ask questions to better understand them.
When giving feedback, consider these points to ensure you’re boosting employee engagement rather than deterring it:
- Exercise empathy: Put yourself in your colleagues’ position and try to understand where they’re coming from and what they might be experiencing.
- Take time to prepare: Before offering feedback, strategize what you want to say and how you want to say it.
- Speak in specifics: Be specific when delivering feedback to ensure you communicate a problem’s root cause.
- Save time for inquiry: Always incorporate inquiries at the beginning of the conversation to understand how things are going and their perspective on the situation.
- Focus on the future: Shift the focus of the conversation from what’s happened to what’s next after offering initial feedback.
Leaders should set an example, so act on the feedback you’re given to show you value your team and are serious about improving. This will encourage your employees to do the same and help create a strong, productive organizational culture.
7. Establish a Workplace Communication Strategy
It’s vital to develop a framework that outlines how and what your organization communicates internally and externally. This ensures all parties receive the right information at the right time.
According to Organizational Leadership, leaders can develop this framework through contextual intelligence. At a high-level, contextual intelligence focuses on understanding the dynamics and the competitive and contextual landscape that shape and influence your organization's business strategy.
“Leaders can apply a similar approach to interpersonal relationships by focusing on contextual intelligence at the micro level,” Mayo says in the course. “That’s the process you must go through to both understand what brings out the best in others and adapt your approach to that understanding.”
In addition to a clear strategy, your internal communication plans should detail which tools your team can use to distribute information—such as instant messaging platforms, video meeting tools, and project management software—along with basic guidelines for using them.
8. Create a Positive Organizational Culture
Communication can be easier and more effective in a positive work environment. According to Organizational Leadership, workplace culture—the internal set of values and beliefs expressed in how employees interact and behave—is largely influenced by how effective leaders communicate with their teams. If your organization’s culture is founded on trust, respect, and honesty, employees will be more receptive to hearing what you have to say.
Speak openly about your organization's goals, opportunities, and challenges to foster an environment wherein employees feel empowered to share ideas and collaborate. This will ultimately create a safe space that encourages creativity and critical thinking and expresses to each individual that they’re valued.
Improving Your Leadership Skills
By developing these essential communication skills, you can stay ahead of changing workforce demands and gain a competitive advantage in the engineering industry.
“Communication sets an agenda, informs and builds understanding, and aligns with organizational objectives,” Margolis says in Organizational Leadership. “Communication is also critical when you’re trying to inspire and rally your team toward a possible future for the organization and help your team envision their roles in that future.”
Learning and practicing effective communication skills is one of the best ways you, as an engineering leader, can bring value to your organization and grow your career.
Do you want to enhance your leadership skills? Explore our online leadership and management courses to discover how you can bring out the best in your team and become a more effective leader. Download this flowchart to determine which course is the right fit for you.
