Improving oneself as an engineer or businessperson

A year ago, I was assisting a garage owner with a noise problem. The garage is located in a small historic Cape Town and the owner wanted to open an exhaust repair business. Local bed and breakfast owners objected, primarily to the perceived noise of the welding and cutting as well as to cars with failed exhausts.

We did a noise-control design and sent the drawings back to the owner, who asked me to come for a site visit.

I got there. We discussed the drawings. Then he said, perhaps, I might go and discuss the matter with the town committee. So I said, fine, and drove with him to the town hall. He led me into a lobby and told me that the committee awaited behind the door on the left.

“Just knock,” he said, “and go in.” And I did.

I found myself in a room the size of a small ballroom. About 50 people sat along a huge table, with a chairperson on a raised dais. They stared at me. I realised that this was the ‘town committee’, which I had imagined to comprise, say, five people.

The chairperson explained that I was an engineer hired by the garage and that I would explain the noise-control measures to the 50-odd people assembled and answer questions. I noticed that my drawings had been stuck to the wall and that one of them was upside down.

I walked over to the upside-down drawing, cleared my throat and introduced myself. I turned to the upside-down drawing and said: “One way of getting rid of the problem may be to turn the garage upside down, but that won’t help much.” (I turned the drawing the right way up.)

I got a big laugh. Everybody relaxed. The garage extension was approved. The reason I am telling you all this is not because I want to show how smart I am, but how well I have been trained to speak in public, off the cuff, at a moment’s notice.

I learned this by going to Toastmasters’ meetings. This is an organisation that helps people to be able to speak with confidence in public. I happen to have gone to Toastmasters but there are other organisations which do the same sort of thing. There are two things one can do to make oneself a better engineer or businessperson, and one of them is to learn to be able to respond effectively to any call to address a group of people, either formally or informally. And it is so easy to do; there are Toastmaster groups everywhere – one should just find one that seems to have the sort of group of people that one might like and join up.

I’ll tell you another tale. I had to attend a site meeting, one of those explosive situations where the contractor has made a huge mess and was wildly overpaid for work which was not quite done. The client was refusing to pay any more until some progress was evident and, perhaps, not even then.

The contractor was not used to addressing groups and got the name of the client wrong, calling him Tony instead of Trevor. He laced many of his comments with deep sarcasm and in the end refused to do any more work until he was paid more money. Or he would get the lawyers in. So, since I have been trained to listen (yes, at Toastmasters), I could quite easily summarise what he had said and then ask that it be taken down in the minutes.

I then said, well, we had all heard what he had to say – we would discuss it among ourselves and we would let him know the instructions of our client. He lost it completely and swore at me and the client. And that was the end of him. How much better, I thought, if he had put his case in a reasoned way.

Now, nobody, but nobody at Toastmasters, knows I am writing this. But I do urge you to become better at your job – learn how to speak, learn how to listen.

by Terry Mackenzie-Hoy, originally published in Engineering News

Popularity: 47% [?]