5 Communication Skills You Need As An Engineering Manager

Portugal is a paradise for wine lovers, but the wine culture can get overwhelming.

For example, when my girlfriend and I go out for dinner, simply asking the waiter for a dry red or a semi-sweet white is not enough.

There are lots of brands and varieties from different regions, with some we haven’t heard of before – it’s incredibly confusing. If we tried navigating the selection ourselves, we’d look stupid or pick one at random we wouldn’t be satisfied with.

A good waiter understands this and the fact that we aren’t experts. They offer to help, asking questions about:

Our preferences
Budget
And what meal we’d like to pair the wine with

The better the waiter, the smoother this conversation goes. But if the waiter isn’t able to ask the right questions or interpret our answers, a poor dinner awaits us.

While you don’t necessarily want to start making connections between engineering management and drinking wine, you should start making them between being an engineering manager (EM) and a waiter. Your team members are often like customers in a restaurant – maybe they don’t know what they need or how to communicate it precisely. So, you have to step in and help.

But stepping in to help can go very, very wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing. In the situations you’ll face as an EM, communication is often the main thing you’ll be doing and the key to resolving them in a satisfactory way for everyone (or at least as many people as possible). This is as true for working with your engineers as it is with upper management.

1 – Translate for upper management

A major part of your role as EM is to keep in regular contact with your company’s upper management. Most executives, especially those on the business side, don’t have a solid idea of what engineers do or their priorities. And it’s not their job to know, frankly speaking.

They’re very busy people. So, all the information they need is:

Project length
Project cost
Potential problems
The pros and cons of different approaches
And so on

It’s your job as EM to present this information in a quick, easy-to-digest way. You have to learn not to get bogged down in technical details they won’t understand, especially because they don’t have much time to waste.

In essence, you’re a translator between your engineers and the executive team. You understand the nuances of what your team is doing, but you have to put it in layman’s terms so non-engineers will understand. You also have to communicate what’s at stake with each possible decision, as this may not be immediately obvious.

Sometimes, you’ll also make a decision yourself and then need to sell your solution to upper management. This requires explaining:

What needs to be done
In what way
And why it’s the best option

2 – Communicate precisely and concisely

Imagine you’re a doctor who’s spent a decade honing your skills. You’re with a patient who’s in pain. But you’re eager to show off your knowledge, so you list the Latin roots virus names affecting them or the different ways doctors have historically treated them.

No matter how impressive this is, your patient doesn’t care. They want to know:

What’s happening
Why it happened
How to stop it as soon as possible
The benefits and risks of possible treatments

This is the information they need to decide how they want to proceed – everything else is unnecessary.

Managers can be guilty of this same mistake, especially if they have a background in engineering (and they should). It’s easy to show off our knowledge, use terms people don’t understand, and have theoretical conversations about best practices.

But just like upper management, your team members and peer managers don’t have time to waste. You don’t have time to waste. You have to communicate the essentials, which means:

Saying what you need quickly and accurately
Making sure the other person or people understands you
Asking something clearly so the other person or people know how to accurately respond

Also, make it a habit to minimize unhelpful conversations and keep meetings on point. This only applies to conversations about work, though. You don’t want to eliminate the kind of small talk that builds rapport and relationships.

**3 – Speak to people in their language**

There’s a famous Dale Carnegie quote where he says that if you want to go fishing, don’t use strawberries as bait. Sure, you think strawberries are delicious, but that doesn’t mean the fish will. What they want is a worm.

You can apply this quote to many areas of life and work, including communication. We speak to people in a way that’s understandable to us, assuming they find what we’re saying just as understandable. If they don’t get it, then the confusion must be their fault.

But as managers, this is an issue because we don’t do work directly – we work through people. And the only way we can do this is by communicating in a way that’s understandable to the person or people we’re speaking with.

For example, project managers (PMs) won’t know technical speak, but engineers prefer technical precision. So, you have to adjust your language depending on which one you’re talking to. Not doing so ensures misunderstanding and wasted time, which adds up.

Something that goes a long way to help people understand what I’m trying to say are metaphors. If I’m talking to someone who loves video games, I use games to describe what I want them to do. In other words, use things they care about to help get aligned on what needs doing.

4 – Help people understand each other

We each live in our own little worlds. As a result, we have our perspective on situations and don’t often try looking at them from someone else’s. And even when we realize other people see or handle a situation differently, we still want to do things in a way that’s comfortable to us. Many times, we don’t even want to compromise.

In my opinion, this is the root cause of 90% of the problems you’ll face as an EM. Misunderstandings and being stuck in our ways cause countless delays and unnecessary conflicts.

But if you know how to align people, it’s almost like a superpower. You’re no longer just speaking someone else’s language or translating – you’re connecting people, ideas, and processes.

This isn’t easy, but it’s worth doing, and it requires:

Understanding everyone’s perspectives
Learning everyone’s languages
Explaining both sides
And confirming everyone’s on the same page

This is especially necessary when the team members come from completely different worlds, like designers, engineers, and PMs. They all have different perspectives and likely possess diverse blind spots when it comes to the work process.

5 – Regulate emotion during conflict

People get emotional. As a result, sometimes they think their poor reactions are entirely rational, but it’s just because they’ve had a bad day. So, they raise their voice to someone else who takes it personally, causing conflict.

This often results in a deadlock. Maybe people:

Are too resentful to apologize
Want to apologize but are stonewalled by the other person
Or are waiting to get an apology first

When people get stuck like this, it helps to have a third party like an EM.

But this requires emotional intelligence on your part. You can’t just go in with a ready-made solution. You have to bring their emotions back to normal first so they’ll be ready to listen to you (and each other).

I do this in a couple different ways:

Let them talk: they will have a grievance to share, and you won’t get anything in until they’ve run out of steam
Ask them questions: specifically to confirm that you’ve understood their grievance properly
Add your own perspective: or add the perspective of the other person, doing both after they see that you’ve taken the time to understand them

After these steps, you can model skills like apologizing or accepting apologies with grace. A good apology can loosen a gridlock and open a way to move forward. The key is remembering that you have to address conflicts early before they make the team an unpleasant place to be and cause good people to leave.

The short version: talking well takes work, but the results are worth the effort

Making the switch from engineer to engineering manager requires you to learn people skills you never needed before. Mastering these is a prerequisite for good leadership.

These include:

Translating for upper management: keep communication non-technical and easy-to-understand
Communicating precisely and concisely: know your audience and explain only what they need to know
Speaking to people in their own language: communicate in ways others will understand, not yourself
Helping people understand each other: align others to prevent unnecessary delays and conflicts
Regulating emotions during conflict: calm people down and bring them back together

These skills are not simple ones, especially if you’re used to working with tech instead of people. But they’re more than learnable. Once you put them into practice and use them regularly, you’ll notice positive changes in the team. Which is, after all, your goal as an EM.