By Babette N. Ten Haken
I mentor engineering student entrepreneurs for the Michigan Clean Energy Venture Challenge and TechArb, the University of Michigan Student Incubator, in Ann Arbor. Many while many technical professionals view undergraduate curricula as insufficient for teaching them the soft skills necessary for pitching ideas to angel investors or running a company, they realize in short order that these skills are some of the most powerful they can develop.
Soft skills are the ones valued by hiring managers. Soft skills contribute to emotional intelligence, or EI, according to a recent study conducted by CareerBuilder.com. In this study, the majority of hiring managers valued candidates with a strong EI score and IQ over those with a weak EI score and strong IQ.
Hmmm….
If you’ve taken some personal and professional inventory, then you realize the value you bring to your job and your profession needs to be communicated in order to be valuable. Your ability to communicate your value to internal and external customers is the fulcrum of your career. If you can’t communicate, how can you advance?
When placed in this context, those soft skills don’t sound very soft at all.
I consider soft skills to be essential components for business development. And business development is part of your job, even if not written into your job description. Those alleged soft skills involving communication are as much a part of your professional arsenal as are discipline-specific theorems and methodologies. You don’t practice your discipline in a vacuum if you want to make money. And you don’t work in a homogeneous environment if you want to drive revenue. It’s time to think horizontally, across those professional and departmental silos.
There is too much excuse-making about the shortfalls of engineering education in developing communication skills in graduates. It’s not a matter of what you didn’t learn, what was omitted from your undergraduate or graduate curricula, or whether you had time to take those extra classes. None of us took those extra classes. But we all took classes involving team-based assignments.
And I doubt you always took the role of worker bee in every team. You did lead, at some point. Was your leadership based on your magnificent use of technical terminology or, rather, your ability to coordinate everyone towards a common goal? You participated in teams and experienced group behavior dynamics. The last time I checked, that pretty much sums up the atmosphere in the workplace.
It’s no longer acceptable to graduate and not be able to speak productively to your peers, regardless of their academic disciplines. And learning to speak to others effectively may involve developing friends outside of your academic and professional circles. The dynamics of business are hardly confined to peer conversations. How can you expect to rise through the ranks of your professional organization and garner successful performance reviews and recommendations without effective communication?
You are not your professional degree or the latest certification you have earned. You are the relevance and value of your throughput and output of those titles, put into action. If you want peers and colleagues outside of your professional discipline to understand what you bring to the table, consider how you—as a professional—put your skill sets into action for their behalf, not yours. It’s like handing the baton to the next person in a cross-functional relay race.
I recommend challenging your communication skill set inside as well as outside of the work place. Consider mentoring grade school students or volunteering for a stewardship activity like Engineers Without Borders or Habitat for Humanity.
Place yourself at the mercy of people with limited technical resources, little or no education, linguistic barriers, and absolutely no idea what an engineering degree means. What they have is passion and an overriding desire to improve their situation. They’ll certainly find a way to communicate with you. No problems there. Will you return their gift to you?
When you take away the tools of your trade—your job description, your job title, your academic degrees, and your ego—you have nothing left other than your willingness to communicate. Communication is the greatest common denominator between people. It is the hallmark of humanity.
Perhaps the workplace feels like a primitive frontier to many technical and nontechnical professionals. What would you do if your annual performance review were in the hands of one of those Engineers Without Borders recipients residing in a rural village in Peru? Now that’s something to think about.
Babette N. Ten Haken believes the fulcrum for leveraging innovative business development is collaboration between technical and non-technical professionals. This post is excerpted from Chapter 6 of her book, Do You Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and You, available on Amazon this spring. Visit www.doyoumeanbusiness.com for more information.
