LEADING

Leading in service systems management and engineering refers to the function of an engineering
manager that causes people to take effective action.

LEADING ACTIVITIES
The managerial function of leading includes performing five specific activities related to leading
the engineering unit or department to achieve organizational objectives. These activities are
outlined here (Kotter 2001):
There are five specific leading activities that will be reviewed:
1. Deciding – Arrive at conclusions and judgments with respect to priority, personnel, resources,
policies, organizational structures, and strategic directions.
2. Communicating – Beget understanding by sharing information with others and talking, meeting,
or writing to others.
3. Motivating – Inspire, encourage, or impel others to take required action and creating workplace
conditions to ensure work satisfaction.
4. Selecting people – Choose the correct employees for positions in the organization or for specific
team activities.
5. Developing people – Help employees improve their knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

DECIDING
Making decisions is a key responsibility of service system engineers and leaders. The quality of
decisions is the hallmark of excellent managers.
Engineering managers are typically quite proficient in handling this latter type of decision making, which
follows the typical steps enumerated here:
1. Assessment of facts and evaluation of alternatives.
2. Use of full mental resources.
3. Emphasis on creative aspects of problem solving.
4. Consistency in thinking.
5. Minimization of the probability of errors.

DECISION MAKERS
Companies deal with strategic and operation issues such as which markets to enter or exit, which
businesses to buy or sell, where to allocate capital and talent, how to ferret out service innovation, what
is the best way to position brands, and how to manage channel partners. Businesses lose ground if
decisions cannot be made quickly and effectively and are not executed in a timely and consistent
manner.
Decision-Making Styles
Decision-making style changes according to managerial authority. Managers change styles when
going from first-line supervisors to managers, directors, VPs, and senior execs. When moving up,
managers’ style moves away from decisive to become more flexible. Senior executives are
predominantly of the flexible and integrative types.
Decision-making style is defined by two (2) components: According to (Brousseau et al. 2006)

• how information is used.

• how options are created.
Person who is in charge to be:
- Maximizers study data exhaustively until they have found the best answer.
- Satisficers find key facts, introduce hypotheses, test them as they go, and get ready to act.
- Single-focus managers take one course of action to pursue.
- Multifocus managers generate options and pursue multiple courses.

There are four common styles:

1. Decisive - little information, one course of action.
2. Flexible - little information, many options.
3. Hierarchic - lots of data, one course of action.
4. Integrative - lots of data, numerous options.

Framework for Decision Making

Managers need to make a variety of decisions and provide responses in their daily work. Snowden
and Boone (2007) proposed a useful framework for guiding the decision-making process, from simple
to chaotic. Such a framework helps to categorize the issues at hand and thus facilitates the right
decision-making approach:
1. Simple - This is the domain of known knowns, applicable to repeatable work processes and
procedures and eliminates deviations based on the past best practices.
2. Complicated - Experts provide multiple right answers, Leader's sense, analyze, and respond.
They define options and make a choice.
3. Complex - This is the domain of emergence. Business conditions are complex, because of
concurrent changes in many of their parts (some of them are unpredictable and in flux).
4. Chaotic -This is the domain of rapid response. It is pointless to search for the right answers.

Rational Decision-Making Processes

A rational decision-making process is generally useful in facilitating decision making for numerous
problems or issues in engineering when an adequate amount of information is available. It consists of
a set of logical steps outlined as follows:
A. Assess the apparent problem based on observed symptoms.
B. Collect the relevant facts.
Facts must be related to five decision-making factors:
1. Situation (what, how)—the sequence of events leading to the problem and
its conditions.
2. People (who)—personalities, preferences, personal needs, and egos.
3. Place (where)—significance of location.
4. Time (when)—pressure to bring forth an immediate solution.
5. Cause (why)—why the problem originally occurred, and why it occurred
in one situation but not in another.

C. Define the real problem. As the most important initial step, the real problem at hand must be
defined.
D. Develop alternatives to solve problems. Once the root causes of the problem at hand are defined,
it is then useful to come up with options to address them.
 Engineering managers should do the following:
o Freely invite creative suggestions from people who have direct knowledge
of the problem at hand.
o Brainstorm in group settings (without criticisms or comments so as not to
deter imaginative suggestions).

E. Select the optimal solution.

F. Set a course of action to implement the decision.

Kepner–Tregoe Decision Analysis Tool

The Kepner–Tregoe method is a renowned analysis tool available to support decision making
(Tregoe and Kepner 2006). It prescribes the following steps to arrive at a rational decision:
1. Define a set of decision criteria needed for making the decision
2. Rank-order the sufficiency criteria by assigning weight factors ranging from 10
(as the most preferable) to 1 (as the least preferable).
3. Evaluate all options against each of the identified as necessary decision criteria
4. Remove from further consideration those options that fail the necessary criteria.
5. Rank all remaining options relatively, with respect to specific sufficiency criteria.
6. Repeat the scoring process for each of the remaining sufficiency criteria.

Additional Support Tools for Decision Making

According to (Nagal 1993, Donker 2007, et. al). A number of spreadsheet-based tools are
commercially available to engineering managers to support the decision-making process.

The following tools, among others, are widely used in the industry:
• Forecasting (exponential smoothing, time series, and neural network computing)
• Regression analysis (single variable and multivariable)
• Risk analysis and project management
• What-if solver
• Simulation modeling (Monte Carlo)
• Decision trees
• Optimization (linear programming and integer and dynamic programming)
• Artificial intelligence and pattern recognition tools
• Expert or knowledge-based systems

Decision Making by Gut Instinct

So, what is gut instinct? According to Hayashi, our minds process information all the time. Our left
brains process conscious, rational, and logical thoughts, whereas our right brains take care of
subconscious, intuitive, and emotional thoughts. Some people claim that they can tap into right-brain
thinking by jogging, daydreaming, listening to music, or using other meditative techniques. Others have
reported that they get innovative ideas while taking long showers or placing themselves in unfamiliar
situations.

According to Matzler et al. (2007), intuitive decision making is really one’s ability to recognize patterns
at a fast speed. Because complex decision making actuates a process in which experience,
knowledge, and emotions are linked, a person’s intuitive decision-making capability may be enhanced
by five factors:
1. Experience - Extensive experience produces more patterns. “Gut instincts” refer to
recognizable patterns known in the past.
2. Network - Personal networks are helpful to offer feedback to intuitive decisions.
3. Emotional intelligence - Emotion is known to precede cognition. 90 percent of the differences
between top-performing and average-performing senior executives can be explained by
emotional intelligence which is being able to recognize an interpret one’s own emotions.
4. Tolerance - Willingness to tolerate mistakes and take risks.
5. Curiosity - A prerequisite for discovering new opportunities. An opportunity-oriented way to
think and act allows the acquisition of new experience that strengthens the foundation of
intuition.
Decision Making in Teams
According to Garvin and Roberto (2001) advanced the idea that the group decision-making process
must be managed properly to consider social and organizational aspects. Doing so will secure the
needed support for implementation, which ultimately determines the success of any decision.
Now there are three factors are important for the team to take into account when managing a
group decision-making process:
- Conflict
- Consideration
- Closure

Group decision making requires a set of leadership talents somewhat different from those demanded
in other situations.
These include:
(1) active solicitation of divergent viewpoints
(2) acceptance of ambiguity
(3) the wisdom to end a debate
(4) the ability to convince people of the merits of the decision made
(5) the ability to maintain balance to embrace divergence and unity

Hidden Traps in Decision Making

The quality of decision depends on a number of factors. These factors include :
(1) decision criteria not being independent and all-inclusive
(2) weight factors not appropriately assessed
(3) not clearly defining the alternatives and options
(4) not collecting the right information
(5) costs and benefits not accurately weighed.

According to Hammond et al. (2006), there are six hidden traps in decision making, which, if not
avoided, can result in poorly made decisions.
1. Anchoring trap - to avoid this trap, managers should view a problem from different
perspectives, establishing their own opinions about a given situation before consulting others.
2. Status quo trap - In order to avoid damaging their own egos, people tend to perpetuate and
preserve the status quo, as opposed to breaking with convention.
3. Sunk-cost trap - to avoid this trap, managers should solicit independent views from people not
involved in creating the sunk-cost events and accept the fact that good decisions may lead to
bad consequences.
4. Confirming-evidence trap - This is the selective listening bias that assigns too much weight
to supporting evidences and not enough to conflicting ones.
5. Framing trap - A frame can establish the status quo, introduce an anchor, highlight the sunk
cost or lead to confirming-evidence.
6. Estimating and forecasting trap - Some people tend to be overconfident in assessing the
probability of uncertain events, others are overcautious.

COMMUNICATING

There are four key actions to achieve efficacious communication: asking, telling, listening, and
understanding.
• Asking - A lack of information can prevent understanding. Open-ended questions—those that
cannot be answered by yes or no—should be raised to gain new knowledge.
• Telling - Managers will share information freely if it is required for performing specific work or
has an impact on the individual’s work environment.
• Listening - Engineering managers need to work on their listening skills to beget their
understanding of both words (spoken and written) and any possible subtext.
Writing- HBS Press (2003) offers seven principles of good writing:
1. Have a clear purpose.
2. Be audience focused.
3. State key message clearly.
4. Stay on topic.
5. Observe economy of words.
6. Use simple sentence.
7. Consider the right delivery strategy
Understanding- The ultimate goal of communication is to promote understanding—to hear with the head
and to feel with the heart.

Four communication barriers exist and should be taken into account by engineering managers:
1. Interpretations of words and terms.
2. Selective seeing.
3. Selective listening.
4. Emotional barriers.

MOTIVATING
The engineering manager secures results by motivating people. Examples of motivators include
opportunities to do challenging, interesting, and important work, leadership, position power, prestige,
and compensation.

Methods of Motivating
In general, engineering managers have three key methods of motivation at their disposal:
1. Inspire - Infuse a spirit of willingness into people to perform most effectually by way of their
own personality and leadership qualities, personal examples, and work completed.
2. Encourage - Stimulate people to do what has to be done through praise, approval, and help.
3. Impel - Force and incite action by any necessary means, including compulsion, coercion, fear,
and, if required, punishments.

Specific Techniques to Enhance Motivation:

• Participation - Participative management is known to have a positive motivational impact on
employees.
• Communication - Set clear standards, relate the importance of the work, keep expectations
reasonable, and give answers to suggestions offered by employees.
• Recognition - Give credit where it is due, as sincere praise tends to promote further
commitment. Fair appraisals induce employee loyalty and trust.
• Delegate authority - Trust the employees and do not overcontrol them.
• Reciprocate interest - Show interest in the desired results to motivate employees to achieve
these results.

According to Maslow, a person’s needs may be grouped into hierarchical levels, as follows:
1. Physiological needs—hunger, thirst, and need for clothing and shelter.
2. Safety —protection from threats and danger.
3. Social—giving and receiving affection, group membership, and acceptance by peers.
4. Esteem—ego and self-confidence to achieve recognition.
5. Self-actualization —continued self-development and realization of one’s own potential.

SELECTING ENGINEERING EMPLOYEES

Selection Process
Typically, the employee selection process includes the following steps:
1. Define needs- Specify the needs of the new positions by taking into account the immediate
requirements and long-term growth demands of the organization.
2. Specify jobs- Compose a job description for each of the open positions to define the roles and
responsibilities of the position holders, the position grade levels, and the minimum qualifications
of the ideal candidates (i.e., levels of basic training and work experience).
3. Acquire applicants- Publicize job openings in newspapers, professional publications,
company Web sites, employment agencies, and Internet job sites to solicit candidates.
4. Review and prescreen- Select applicants by matching personal objectives with company
goals. Check documents and references carefully.
 5. Conduct interviews- The basis of assessment is typically studying the past to predict the
future.

Soft Skills
Engineers’ future success in a company is strongly affected by their soft skills in teamwork,
interpersonal relationships, leadership quality, collaborative attitude, mental flexibility, and adaptability.
These soft skills are linked to the engineers’ personality traits, psychological profiles, value systems,
and deep-rooted beliefs.
• Interpersonal skills —ability to get along with people.
• Aptitude for teamwork —team dedication and participation, focus on the impact on the team
and company instead of individual performance.
• Flexibility —learn several jobs, change shifts, and work overtime.
• Drive to improve continuously —make and take constructive criticism

Character
Guthridge et al. (2008) stressed the importance of making talent a strategic priority for all companies.
Although companies say that employees are their biggest source of competitive advantage, the reality
is that nowadays, few of them are prepared to meet the challenges of finding, motivating and retaining
capable workers.
The talent question is complicated by the following realities:
• Candidates for the engineering and general-management positions in emerging markets have
wide variations in suitability. Poor English skills, dubious education qualifications, and culture
issues (lack of teamwork experience, reluctance to take initiative or assume leadership roles)
are among the barriers to suitability.
• Generation Y (born after 1980) demand more flexibility, meaningful jobs, professional freedom,
higher rewards, and better work–life balance.
• Global companies need people who are willing to work abroad, hire local talents with an
international mindset, while understanding local ways of doing business and local customers—
the expanding middle class.
• Knowledge workers make up 35 percent of total U.S. workers. They contribute more profit than
other employees. They need minimum oversight and use, produce, and share information.
Companies are not uniformly extracting good value from these knowledge workers.
• Companies overwhelmingly focus on short-term operations and business problems, neglecting
the long-term talent sourcing and career development functions.

DEVELOPING PEOPLE
Employees
There are several ways in which engineering managers may help develop employees:
- Employees may be prompted to follow the personal examples of continuous improvement in
knowledge, attitude, and skills set by engineering managers.
- Engineering managers may coach inexperienced employees on the job by demonstrating
preferred ways of performing specific assignments.
- Engineering managers could enrich employees’ work experience by institutionalizing job
rotation.
- If the company budget and policy so allow, the engineering managers may send specific
employees to attend professional meetings, technical conferences, training seminars, and
study programs at universities.
- Team assignments may be used to permit a better utilization of the employees’ talents and
expertise to other critical projects, while offering the employees an opportunity to become
known to a larger circle within the company.

Successors
Besides training employees, engineering managers are also expected, as a part of their managerial
duties, to find suitable candidates within their organizations to succeed themselves one day. This is
consistent with career planning programs that some industrial companies are actively implementing in
order to promote leaders from within, discourage turnover, and maintain continuity.
 SPECIAL TOPICS ON LEADING
Corporate progression prompts strong leadership. Special strategies are necessary for leaders who are
promoted to new positions. Certain characteristics are shared by successful leaders.
The following section gives insight into the specific details of the managerial function of leading.
• Trust
• Leading Changes
• Advice for newly promoted leaders

TRUST
According to Hurley (2006), approximately 50% of company employees do not trust their leaders. A
high-trust work area is known for being pleasant, supportive, productive, and comfortable, whereas a
low-trust work area is known for being stressful, threatening, divisive, unproductive, and tense.

Everyone must acknowledge that trust is the result of a rational decision-making process and a mental
calculation executed by all trusters, based on a trust model that includes the ten factors listed below:
1. Risk Tolerance – the lower the risk tolerance, the harder it is to trust.
2. Level of adjustment – the trustee must be patient until the truster has already adjust to its
environment. Time is needed to build trust.
3. Relative Power – A person with a higher position can easily trust his subordinates. The trustee
may find it useful to provide a list of options and goals outlining organizational interests, so that
the truster feels more at ease becoming involved in the relationship.
4. Security – the lesser the security, the harder it is to trust.
5. Number of similarities – People trust others who are similar.
6. Alignment of interest - An alignment of interest promotes mutual trust. Misaligned interests
exacerbate doubt and suspicion.
7. Benevolent concern - Demonstrating benevolent concerns for employees will create not only
trust, bust also loyalty and commitment.
8. Capability - Managers assess subordinate’s capabilities before deciding to trust or delegate
authority to them.
9. Predictability and integrity - People who overpromise and underdeliver are not trustworthy.
10. Communication - Open and honest communication tends to support the decision to trust.

Leading Changes
Changes lead to development in the company's business practices. Change is hard to implement
because people prefer to stay in convenience. After introducing change, it is important for leaders to
ensure that change continue beyond the transformation phase. Corporate transformation requires
strong leadership.
According to Kotter (2007), there are two reasons that countless transformation efforts fail:
1. Large-scale corporate transformation takes time - Leaders must be patient in marshalling
corporate resources to push forward.
2. Corporate transformation must follow process of eight consecutive steps to succeed.

The eight consecutive steps:

1. Establish a sense of urgency - Leaders must examine the market and competitive realities
and identify the crises, potential crises, or major opportunities available in the global market.
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition – Leadership coalition must consist leader/s with high-
ranking positions and five to fifty people committed to renewal. The group must be powerful in
term of titles, reputations, and relationships. The renewal process will move forward only when
there are enough leaders in the senior ranks.
3. Create a vision - A coherent and sensible vision is needed to help direct the effort to change.
4. Communicate the vision - . Leaders should use every channel possible to communicate the
new vision and strategies, teach new behavior by the example of the guiding coalition, and
“walk the talk,” as communication occurs in both words and deeds.
5. Empower others to act on the vision - Leaders need to do away with obstacles to change,
modify systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision, and promote risk taking and
nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions.
6. Plan for producing short-term wins - Leaders need to plan for visible performance
betterment, achieve these improvements, recognize and reward employees involved in the
progressions, and achieve at least some success within the first one to two years.
 7. Consolidate improvements and procreate still more change - Leaders should resist
declaring victory too early to avoid killing the momentum.
8. Institutionalize new approach - Leaders articulate the relationship between new behaviors
and organizational success, establish measures to ensure leadership development and
succession, organize changes in organizational culture (values, behaviors, and social norms)
and ensure that those changes are passed on to the next generation.

Advice For Newly Promoted Leaders

For newly promoted engineering managers, the leadership strategy just outlined serves as a useful
guiding light during the initial six-month period of sailing through dense fog. Although the steps
recommended here cover all important aspects of a new leadership job—technical, cultural, political,
and personal—individual engineering managers may need to further customize these steps to fit their
personal style, organizational needs, and the people involved in a given situation.

Factors affecting one's influence on people

A. Credibility
1. Composure- (ways to handle oneself). Degree of poise, stability, and patience; skills to
handle a crisis situation effectively; humor under stress; self-confidence; and ability for
public speaking are important attributes. Composure is the most important factor impacting
credibility in the short term.
2. Character- Integrity and honesty (not lying, not cheating, attempting to do things above
board and maintaining high-moral standards), cooperative spirit, and professional
behavior—return all phone calls and respond to all mail; keep promises, have an open and
forthright attitude; and be fair in all situations. Character is the most important factor
affecting credibility in the long run (integrity and honesty in professional versus private
matters).
3. Competence. Technical (e.g., job-specific skills, experience, and training),managerial
(e.g., planning, organizing, leading, and controlling), and vision-ary (e.g., capability to
envision the future with strategic thinking)
4. Courage. Commitment to principles; the willingness to stand up for beliefs, challenge
others, and admit mistakes; and the ability to make tough decisions under uncertain
conditions and accept responsibility for the consequences.
5. Conviction (beliefs). Commit to the vision, demonstrate passion, and display confidence
in the direction being pursued.
6. Care for people. Know people (family, aspirations, current and future needs, favored
learning modes, upward mobility, etc.), treat people with respect and dignity (listening to
understand), comment only on issues and situations and not on the person, and be a team
player.

B. Personal Power
1. Personal attributes —physical appearance and size, drive, dedication, and personal values.
2. Knowledge—common sense, historical perspective, political knowledge needed by others
(how to get things done through which doors, by what means, and with whom—otherwise
known as tricks of the trade.
3. Relationships —business connections and power by association.

C. Variable leadership style

Leadership style needs to be varied in accordance with the circumstances involved. In general,
there are four situations that each requires a different style of leadership.
1. Need for power (40 percent)—setting goals and offering positive recognition to allow one to
stand out and be unique.
2. Need for affiliation (40 percent)—focusing on mission, vision, and the difference the
individual can make in teams.
3. Need for self-achievement (20 percent)—offering task variety, learning, devel-opment, and
growth opportunities.
D. Surveys point out that people with mission-critical jobs left because of three specific
deficiencies:

1. The work itself—meaningfulness, relevancy, learning opportunity, enjoyability, variability, and

so on.
2. Appreciation—thanks, recognition; being told that their jobs were mission critical.
3. Money —just compensation