"Engineering Management Thought of the Week" Jeff Glass

One of the best ways to help your career is to help your boss’s career. Making your boss’s life easier is a goal which will usually be very beneficial for your own career. One of the traits I appreciated most in my employees when I was running a corporate product development lab was the ability to determine and communicate the critical issue on which we should focus at any given point in time. One might also refer to this as being skillful at root cause analysis but I like to say it is just being good at simplifying complex issues and situations. This is quite a deep skill because there are always many, many issues to consider. That is, in any organization there is a lot of “noise” that can hide or obscure the most critical issue that should be addressed to achieve a goal. Thus, an employee that can consider the multitude of issues, keep them in mind, consider their importance, use both analytical and intuitive skills to sort them and then provide a clear, concise opinion of the critical issue that the group should focus on is invaluable. More often than not, I found many employees would get “bogged down” thinking about the large number of issues that needed to be addressed. This can cause resources to be spread too thin, employees to be distracted with non-critical issues and create a climate of generally being overwhelmed. Thus, when you find an employee who can see through the noise and articulate a clear vision of what needs to be addressed, you should nurture and reward them. Of course, as a manager it is also your job to cut through the noise and determine the key issues but many times you will not be close enough to the situation to make an accurate judgment. Thus, you are better off if you can find these exceptional employees and integrate them into the decision-making process.

Side Bar: In order to simplify, you must first understand the issues deeply yourself. That means first studying and analyzing the complexities. This reminds me of a “Pet Peeve” I have (for my other Pet Peeves, see: https://jtglass.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/possible-hot-buttons-for-your-managers-translation-%e2%80%9cmy-pet-peeves%e2%80%9d/). I am always disappointed when I hear complaints from students that they did not “have enough to do” during an internship. If you really do not have enough assigned to you during an internship, you have the perfect opportunity to define the area you study and then practice your analysis and simplification skills. And you get paid for it at the same time! This is an opportunity that will not come along often so if it does, please don’t complain about it, take advantage of it. In fact, one of the best internship projects that I have heard about was one in which the student did exactly this – his boss did not have anything for him to do so he spoke with several other people, decided what problems needed to be solved and then worked on the one he felt he could have the most impact on. He left a new inventory process at the company by the end of the summer internship that simplified the tracking and managing of inventory for the company!

In summary, develop your ability to cut through the extraneous issues in your projects (i.e., the noise that surrounds all activities) and focus on the most critical issue that will enable you to achieve the goals for your organization.