Effective engineers are strong problem solvers. Great engineers have also become inspiring leaders and master communicators. Whether you want to take your career to the next level, or simply aspire to round-up your skillset, leveling up your self-awareness and communication skills will open many doors on your personal and professional path. In a spirit of sharing, here are four lessons I have learned.

Humans and computers

The story began when I was nine years old. Personal Computers were beginning to make their way into schools and libraries. I was privileged and fortunate enough to have one at home, and very lucky to find a friend who taught me the essentials of hardware and software. In those days you needed to know both. You would program the chip directly, there was no Garbage Collection and, in this case, a fancy 512 KB of memory to play with. Computer programming was a different animal altogether, and quite fun to me. It felt like a game, and still does to this day. And so, I followed a somewhat established path of math and science education to eventually land a job at playing my favorite game. Mission complete? Well, not quite.

As time went by, I eventually realized that my need for connection with others wasn’t quite fulfilled through my studies or my work. It didn’t feel like I was helping and connecting with others in a direct and meaningful way. I was intrigued and curious about other business functions, especially product and marketing, which heavily rely on communication. “What’s so hard about it?”, I thought. I was in for quite a surprise. I could never have imagined, even in my wildest dreams, how subtle, complex and refined that new game can get.

As I decide to undertake the journey and start a new business in Chile in 2002, I soon realize that the task at hand was daunting, not that of building our product, but that of building our product together. This adventure of collaboration altered the course of my journey. It crystallized into a realization that “Communicating with computers is far simpler than communicating with people”, or to put it in reassuring engineering language, “People are systems of immense complexity, and spoken languages, protocols of colossal intricacy.”

So I began learning. I listened to the advice of peers and proven communicators and carefully watched them in action. I read books on effective communication, emotional intelligence, and team leadership and practiced one skill at a time before moving on to the next one. One of the most important steps I took was reaching out to teammates whom I had failed to listen to, understand and support effectively. I asked them what I could have done better, and I listened.

Learning, to me, encompasses the purpose of life. It is playful in its essence and makes living about the journey rather than the destination.

Four principles I try to practice along the way

1. Listen, listen, listen… and watch

TL;DR
Try and listen with your ears, eyes and heart, not just with your head
Speak tentatively and create space for others to safely share their stories
Watch and listen to yourself as much as others
Stay candid when it is hard to do so, that is when it matters the most
Leverage mirroring and other active listening techniques

Exploring possibilities with teammates, friends and mentors is often a good way to start learning any skill. So I asked around.

“In your opinion, what are the three most important skills in communication?”

Nearly invariably, “Listening” was part of the answer. David Deal, whom I consider an expert craftsman in that field, and who happens to help me write these very lines, answered that question with “1. Listen, 2. Listen, 3. Listen.”

What does it mean to listen, and how can we get better at it? I believe the answer greatly depends on our degrees of extroversion, and intuition. Listening is in part creating space and safety for others to participate in the exchange of information. The more extroverted we are in relation to others, the more we should be self-aware of our propensity to occupy that space and refrain from doing so. Listening means opening our mind to the ideas of others, and broadening our perspective by leveraging diversity of thoughts.

The more intuitive we are, the more we tend to solve puzzles and search for information inside instead of outside. And so we listen to our own internal voice using our mind rather than to the voice of others, using our ears. If you are intuitive, which can be considered a trait for many engineers, try to tame your inside voice and make the effort to clearly listen to others. If you are ever in doubt, you can always use paraphrasing and other active listening techniques. Many experiments have proven that the exact intended meaning of a message, is nearly never fully understood. And so, we can always pause and resort to constructions such as:

“This is what I heard you say: <fill in>. I understand what you mean is <extract meaning>. Is that right?”

Finally, being in receiving mode means listening for a message. That message is not solely composed of words. If we are in an oral conversation, intonation becomes a crucial part of the meaning. Even more importantly, body language can reveal an undercurrent that is most often unintentional. It is therefore critical to learn to look and become attuned with one’s emotion inside, and others’ outside, as they tell us a raw, unfiltered story about ourselves, our teammates and about the dynamics in a meeting room.

2. Stick to observations, avoid judgements and evaluations

TL;DR
Slow down, recognize when you are telling yourself “villains or victims” stories
Search for explanations that presuppose of positive intent
Question yourself to grow. You are the only one that you can change
Use a pragmatic language of observations devoid of evaluations

One of the major hurdles we create for ourselves is making suppositions that, in the blink of an eye become assumptions, increasing and confirming our biases while dictating our emotional response, and subsequently our behavior. These stories are often unconsciously designed to validate our pre-existing biases and to explain the world in a way that doesn’t require questioning ourselves, thereby preventing us from learning and growing.

Our prefrontal cortex (part of the new hardware that evolution has provided us) is in a perpetual quest of understanding and predicting the world around us. It does so very fast, and generally assumes a worst case scenario. This evolution design is at the root of “fight, flight, or freeze” and other primitive behaviors that helped our ancestors escape predators. This kind of responses, however, are counterproductive in our modern world, where teamwork and collaboration are essential to success.

Validating assumptions that support the shortest and the easiest way to an explanation, prevents us from questioning ourselves. This can result in finger pointing supported by our invented villain and victim stories. It prevents us as a group from understanding a situation objectively. On the other hand, we can decide to ask ourselves questions such as “Where could I be mistaken?” and “What can I do about the current situation?”

As scientists and engineers, we tend to be pragmatic, at least in the practice of our craft. However, staying away from judgements and evaluation of intentions of others and of ourselves can be tricky. Developing a pragmatic language of observations, and abstaining from judging intentions or pretending we are mind readers can help a lot.

We know we are emitting a judgment when we give implicit intention to the subject in our sentence. For example:

- “My teenage daughter is disrespectful to adults.”

- “Joey ridiculed me in front of our boss at this morning’s stand-up”

We can choose to stay away from judgements and evaluation by candidly sticking to observations. Observations are often expressed as gaps between what we observe and what we expected. Here are a few examples from Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication²:

Evaluation: “The boss is procrastinating around this decision.”

Observation: “The boss told us she would announce the decision by last week, but we still haven’t heard.”

Evaluation: “You lied to me about your grades.”

Observation: “I heard you say you passed all courses, but this report shows two F’s.”

Note that both these examples imply a negative moral judgement, or an assumption of negative intent on the other party.

We should also be aware that construct such as “he/she thinks that”, are assertions that imply mind reading. It is another form of evaluation that steers us away from facts and reality. For example:

- “My boss thinks I don’t care about the project.”

- “My husband believes I don’t love him.”

Now, let’s go back to the judgment:

- “Joey ridiculed me in front of our boss at this morning’s stand-up.”

The first story that comes to mind might be:

- “Joey wants to get a promotion and therefore he made fun of me at the stand-up to assert his dominance in front of our boss.”

It is easy to spot a villain and victim story here. This is a good signal to prompt the following question:

- “Can I think of something else that would explain Joey’s behavior without making him a villain or me a victim?”

By doing so and pausing time between stimulus and response, we might end up with other stories such as:

- “Joey saw our boss was uncomfortable and wanted to crack a joke. He wanted to re-establish safety in the conversation for him. He also fully expected me to be witty and come back at him to further diffuse the tension in the room. It was nothing personal.”

We have no real way to fully assess someone else’s intentions. What we can do is choosing the stories we tell ourselves and own the space between stimulus and response.

Dear reader, if you are interested in reading more, you can head to part 2.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I am grateful for your time and consideration. I will cherish the gift of feedback, and would appreciate if you could tell me in the comments:

1. The one concept that most resonated with you
2. Any suggestions you may have to improve the content or the delivery

Thank you! 🙏

1: Stephen R Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Habit #5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.↩

2: Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life ↩