A Practitioner's diary

With number of years of experience managing global remote engineering teams, I have been through the customary feedback sessions with my global counterparts on the maturity levels of the teams from year on year. Amongst all, “Communication” always topped the list of improvements. I did not pay heed to it in my beginning years and honestly didn’t know what that feedback exactly meant and what actions would improve them.

Communication is heavily influenced by clarity of thoughts followed by articulation. It is coupled with the ability to recognize the cultural differences quickly and adapt to them. I am no expert on the topic of culture but do recommend reading the classic work by Geert Hofstede “Cultures and Organizations Software of the Mind”. The book by Geert Hofstede helped me to understand and appreciate cultural differences and helped me to build a good working relationship with a Western European entity in my previous assignment.

Besides the culture aspect , I tend to record an observation on the current generation engineers and technologists. It is true that the recent generation (Generation-Y) does not seem to be bothered about proficiency in English and it is far below than desired. For those who question as to why English proficiency should be the yard stick in measuring ourselves; my humble answer lies in the statistics. Our Software export is expected to touch 100 billion USD and India’s software exports to Western Countries has been contributing a significant part in our foreign exchange reserves and our own GDP. Therefore, it is imperative that we look at this seriously so as to not to lose our edge on our achievements and differentiators in the times to come. We are making efforts to learn /teach other European languages while losing ground on the one we are good.

To this end, we all would agree that one of our unique differentiator is our “foreign language skills –especially English communication skills and I am afraid that we are slowly losing that.

Many of the brilliant practicing engineers fall short of basic grammar, written and spoken skills irrespective of their medium of instruction and social background. They do have fair clarity of thought and is usually lost in their articulation. They usually fail because they become dependent on the ability of the listener. If the Listener lacked the ability to listen to the thinking and focused on how it is being said, a pure articulator would for sure lose the ability to get through the point. I have had very sound technical people report in to me with this problem.

Some of them are successful in imitating accents but lack the depth in their written communication. Most of them struggle in writing a comprehensive report as part of their work and require assistance.

I had had training programs to my teams on so called “soft skills” that addressed this aspect but did not see any remarkable improvement except the feel good factor that I had attempted to fix the gap.

Yet, it is true that personal motivation and determination are required to improve one-self but how do we help to address the gap.

 Comments , suggestions and best practices are welcome !.