By Roma Ihnatowycz

Communication expert Suzanne Stevens talks to Accolades about a skill that is growing increasingly important in the field of engineering: communicating effectively.

To start, what exactly is your area of expertise and what falls under the umbrella of communication?

We specialize in influential face-to-face communication, both verbal and kinetic, which means that it’s not always just about what we say but how we say it. There are three key areas that we address: one is to win and maintain business, the second is to create positive stakeholder perception and the third is interpersonal communication.

When it comes to effective communication, where do you find engineering professionals can improve?

Sometimes kinetic skills can be lacking. Other times, they are “over professional’ – they actually remove themselves from their stakeholders. With architects, for instance, they may talk over their heads. Many engineers do not know how to bring it down to the best interest of the audience in the room.

Why is this important?

You need to move people to action, and there is a gap here. You can make a great presentation, but the question is does the audience understand it and are they going to act on it? The action is the influence and there is a lot of work that goes into that. What many people are doing is throwing their message against the wall and hoping it sticks.

What would be considered to be more effective communication?

Understanding how people make decisions. Learning what their experiences have been with other projects they’ve worked on, what kind of firm they want to work with, what is important to them in making that decision etc. Good communication succeeds by focusing on what is important to the individual who is listening, so you need probing skills, true listening skills.

Can you name some challenges you’ve faced with engineering clients?

Engineering is very rational and to truly listen to what is important for another individual is not. Making decisions is also not rational. So in this case we are actually teaching rational people how to extract emotional behaviour in how people make decisions. A lot of our engineering clients, for example, deal with architects, who are very visionary and emotional individuals. If you don’t understand that architect as an individual, you are going to have a problem. We train people to make sure that they are constantly asking strategic questions and listening to how that person makes a decision, rationally and emotionally.

You appear to be teaching them to ‘read’ people in order to adjust their communication accordingly. Are there tools for this?

Yes, and let me stress that it’s tied to face-to-face research. It is not something that you can find out off the Internet or a business report. To truly find out how someone makes decisions you have to be face to face. We do that based on understanding what people value. You can listen to what we call cues. You can tell someone’s style of personality from their voicemail or how they write an email. You may not know what’s important to them but you can get an idea of their style. So you’re getting cues. People are telling us this all the time.

There are professionals, engineers among them, who feel the quality of their message, regardless of how it is communicated, should suffice. How do you respond to this?

You may win business that way, but you may have more of a challenge maintaining it. Because the reality is that this is what got you in the door, but to truly maintain that business you really need to always give information to people based on what they deem as important to them. That’s what keeps the business. Listen to what is important to people in order to bring messages to the table that will influence them.