Tell me a skill that you struggle to learn in your role? What’s been harder for you to master?

That’s an excellent question!

I think learning how to communicate to different audiences is a hard skill. It’s hard because a lot of us are well, engineers – we’re so used to communicating to other engineers. It’s a running joke that most of us spend our time “glued to our machines” – we’re deep into code. Not only that, but the majority of weekly meetings usually involve communicating with other engineers. It’s not that a lot of us don’t practice communication, per say, but most of that practice is in the technical domain. And getting to practice to talk to other parties is harder, because well – there’s just not as many opportunities.

It’s very easy for engineers to understand and to talk to other engineers. But talking to non-engineers – management & leadership, producer owners, stakeholders, customers, and vendors – is harder.

Engineers are very “detail-oriented” people – we tend to get “granular” to effectively deliver our points. The granularity serves a solid purpose during code reviews or design reviews, where deep, technical explanations are needed to explain the justifications undergirding decision-making or why teams abide by specific best practices. Engineers also bring a lot of deep-thinking excitement, passion, and excitement to their jobs – as a consequence, they tend to start talking “super fast”.

But when we talk to someone else in an org – someone who isn’t an engineer, someone who “thinks”, but they don’t “think like us” – ell, we need to communicate differently. We need to adopt a different form of communication, where we communicate the right level of context in the clearest, most concise way. There’s the old adage of a two-minute elevator pitch, or even “five minutes or I’m out”; this holds truth – those first few minutes really matter when speaking to someone else.

Let me share useful tips :

• Top-Down Level View – focus on presenting a top-down level view – what’s the big picture view. The eye in the sky. The 30K+ foot view. It’s tempting to give all the details right away, but can we save details for later?
• Concise – Keep your communication concise and present the right context
• ELI5 – When in doubt, leverage reddit-esque “ELI5” ( Explain-Like-I-Am-Five ) or the Feyman Method.
• Leverage Additional Communication Modes – Leverage visuals, tables, or diagrams in place of textual form.
• Speak slower – remind yourself to consciously speak slower
• Solicit Feedback – ask for feedback or input from others for how to convey or to communicate messages. Join a toastmasters session. An improv class. Or public speaking classes.