Life is full of curveballs, and they often hit us at inopportune times — sometimes in the middle of thriving careers. While some big changes are chosen — taking time off for family, for example — others arrive unexpectedly and can be quite unwelcome. How can women engineers navigate unexpected changes or even chosen disruptions that affect their careers? Are engineers naturally resilient to change because they are problem solvers to begin with?
“We are animals, so we’re wired to be creatures of habit. We take comfort in routine,” said Loren Margolis, executive coach and CEO of TLS Leaders, which specializes in training and coaching leaders around the globe. “But our work lives are constantly shaped by disruption. So, developing resilience is crucial to career success, and it’s a skill that gives you strength to adapt and flourish in the face of challenges throughout your life and career.”
While engineers spend a lot of time understanding how things work and have tremendous intellectual capacity, developing resilience involves applying emotional and social intelligence skills, according to Margolis. “Emotional intelligence can be more difficult and complicated than figuring out engineering issues because emotions are not straightforward or formulaic,” she said. “People are different, and emotions can be hard to deal with.”
But, she added, resilient behaviors can be learned and practiced. “Say you’ve just lost a great mentor or your boss has moved on to another company and can’t take you,” she said. “First of all, give yourself space to acknowledge how you are feeling — acknowledge your fears and reflect, whether through journaling, exercising, or even zoning out in some way. It sounds hokey, but it really works.”
Margolis suggests talking with friends to process the loss and help realize that we’ve all experienced volatility and changes. “Think back about when you had to be resilient (in the past) and what you had to do.” That can demonstrate that you know how to cope better than you might think and allow you to pinpoint what has worked for you in the past, she said.
After doing the inner work of processing the loss or change, move on to outer work. “Instead of listening to rumors when there are a lot of company changes, reach out to people you trust, to a sponsor or an informal mentor or manager, and ask them for a true picture of what’s going on,” Margolis suggested. If a merger is occurring, she says, you can enroll in training that will make you more attractive with a new skill set. “Find out what skills are needed in your organization down the road and network,” she advised.
“Instead of listening to rumors when there are a lot of company changes, reach out to people you trust, to a sponsor or an informal mentor or manager, and ask them for a true picture of what’s going on.”
– Loren Margolis, executive coach and CEO of TLS Leaders
View change as an opening
Kristin Ginn, currently director of project management for advanced technology at Wabtec, has weathered many changes, chosen and not chosen, during her career. She survived and even managed to thrive when she transferred to GE Oil & Gas after the first four years of her career with GE Energy. She found herself having to pivot from project engineering to engineering operations. “I was in charge of something I didn’t know anything about,” she recalled. “But I applied my technical problem-solving skills to working on how they planned their workforce and capacity and where and how many people they needed to hire globally, building some business data analytics.”
After that successful transition, Ginn decided to shift gears and focus on something she’d always wanted to do: train her horse. She worked reduced hours and then enrolled in a leadership training course to determine what she wanted to do next. She had stayed in touch with her mentors at the company and was soon offered another new and challenging position. “It was another new realm for me as a mechanical engineer,” she said. “I now had electrical and software engineers reporting to me.”
Find mentors and outside support
Ginn credits her resilience to developing good relationships with mentors and continuously building her reputation. Leaders tend to offer opportunities to people they trust and work well with, she said. So, it pays to become that person for good leaders.
One new role she took on — as a services engineering deployment manager at GE Oil & Gas — involved a lot of customer interaction. “That one definitely required me to really work on my emotional intelligence,” she explained. “Fifty rigs across our fleet had to be updated and it took us two years to deploy updates. It was an old control system and the engineers we had weren’t the ones who had designed it.” Ginn had to hire new engineers to reverse-engineer the older systems. “There were a lot of unhappy, frustrated customers,” she recalled.
Ginn had to learn to stay calm when she was feeling anxious or wound-up, she said. “I’d take walks outside, get out of the office, away from people for a while.” She also learned to view additions to her workload as learning opportunities after receiving a key piece of advice. “I was talking about the workload my boss was putting on me and a colleague told me, ‘She is giving it to you because she believes in you.’”
But Ginn has also experienced burnout and anxiety. She recommends seeking external support in addition to finding mentors within a company. “I utilize resources like therapy so I can have an unbiased third party to go to,” she says. “I dive into psychology, books, and podcasts and learn and grow from that. I have a life coach that I meet with regularly.”
Ginn now tries to view new responsibilities as opportunities to enhance her resume and gain more visibility.
“I dive into psychology, books, and podcasts and learn and grow from that. I have a life coach that I meet with regularly.”
– Kristin Ginn, director of project management for advanced technology at Wabtec
From challenge to opportunity
Shelley Stracener, principal systems engineer at LivaNova, a global medical technology firm, also experienced an unexpected career change when, as the result of a corporate reorganization, her director suddenly asked her to switch from an electrical to a systems engineering position. She’d always had a predilection for understanding how products worked within systems, she said. She viewed the change as an opportunity and contacted members of the Society of Women Engineers who could help her learn more about systems engineering.
“While it was a surprise, I did have some agency over it,” she recalled. Though she only had 24 hours to decide, it was still a decision she got to make, she explained. Stracener accepted the new position and also asked for a pay increase and promotion. While the answer was no, she decided to take the position anyway. Making the change “felt very risky at the time, but I had already spent a lot of time and energy cultivating relationships with people on other teams,” she said. She became the glue that held things together, making connections between different subsystems and teams.
Another more difficult change involved a new manager and job switch within the same company, she said. But she used that time to develop new skills and plan her next steps. “I think having a perspective of rolling with the punches versus fighting it helps. Something outside your control is always going to happen. But keep being flexible and continuously evaluate your situation, taking steps to make a change within your control when the opportunity presents itself.”
Control what you can
Indeed, a loss of control is one of the most unsettling aspects of sudden change, said Shelley Row, P.E., founder and CEO of Blue Fjord Leaders and an Inc. magazine top 100 leadership speaker. Row has experienced career changes herself — some by choice, such as when she transitioned from being a transportation engineer to a career coach and speaker, but others not so, such as losing bosses with whom she worked well. “I tell people I work with, ‘You’re in control of more than you think you are,’” she said. “There’s a lot you can manage yourself even in a situation that’s rapidly changing or unexpected.”
When she found herself working for a new boss, Row said she and her staff prepared briefing materials with messages they wanted to communicate to management. “We did everything we could to manage the situation,” she said. “If you are proactive and communicate your value anytime there’s a management change, you’re controlling the message that goes out initially. That puts you in the driver’s seat, and it feels less out of control.”
Stacy Johnson, a solution services program manager at Keysight Technologies, has been with the electronics services and testing company for 24 years in multiple capacities, including product management, technical marketing, email marketing, and service and support. She credits her longevity to remaining flexible.
Although not all her roles have called on her skills as a mechanical engineer, she has found her engineer’s critical thinking skills to be helpful. “The thing about engineering is that it teaches you how to learn, be resilient, and respond to problems!”
“Something outside your control is always going to happen. But keep being flexible and continuously evaluate your situation, taking steps to make a change within your control when the opportunity presents itself.”
– Shelley Stracener, principal systems engineer at LivaNova
When Johnson was 20 weeks pregnant with her third child and had just taken on a mortgage, her company, then a startup, was acquired by a larger company. She learned that the company planned to divest some of its businesses after she was tipped off about a press release that would come out the next day. She was shocked and concerned about her future. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to reinvent her career with a new baby. “You can’t just go interview at places when you are 20 weeks pregnant. There’s all this risk you’re already taking on,” she explained.
So, Johnson began conducting informational interviews within the company and developed an elevator pitch about herself, strategies she thinks people don’t use enough. “I started making phone calls to about 10-15 people, asking if they knew of anyone who needed a high-energy marketing professional who knew how to remove roadblocks.” One manager had a perfect six-week project that she could complete before taking maternity leave. And she didn’t panic about the future: “I thought, ‘I’ll figure this out when I get back.’”
When she returned to the workforce, she was reassigned to another position. Johnson rolled with the punches again. “I’m a gap filler by nature,” she said. “We rolled out a huge program, and then after a while I got bored and moved on to something else.”
Reframe yourself
Johnson said informational interviews are a way of building a database for yourself for the future, for when unexpected things happen and you need to reinvent or reframe yourself. “The other thing I practice is to constantly ask for more — better pay, more responsibility, etc. Men are asking, and we’re not,” she pointed out.
If you are assigned a new boss, Johnson suggests asking, “What do you need from me? What are your expectations? Who are you and why are you here?”
She also believes in making connections and asking people to become mentors. “You should always have three people you can call on and ask for help,” she said. “I have way more than three, and I’m always on someone’s calendar.” Find mentors with different strengths, she added. “I recently asked someone new to mentor me who didn’t default to what we always do,” she explained.
When approaching a new job or boss, Margolis said, think about what makes you a unique resource. “Consider your unspoken expertise, not just your skills,” she said. “The people who know and can speak about their unspoken expertise are the ones who are really special to companies.”
“If you are proactive and communicate your value anytime there’s a management change, you’re controlling the message that goes out initially. That puts you in the driver’s seat, and it feels less out of control.”
– Shelley Row, P.E., founder and CEO of Blue Fjord Leaders
You can determine that unspoken expertise by thinking about why you are invited to meetings, what people call on you for that they don’t call on others for, and why people respect your opinion. “A lot of what separates you from others and makes you resilient is your emotional intelligence,” Margolis said.
Resilient employees also do things outside their job descriptions, investigating new ideas and conducting experiments that help them gain new information so they can reinvent themselves, Margolis said. She suggests starting with small, low-stakes experiments. “You can ask yourself ‘What can I now become an expert in? How can I reframe myself to keep pace with change?’”
Communicate with empathy
Row said being open to other people’s communications styles — and learning to take things less personally — are skills that have been her biggest game changers. “[I can see that] someone is not being mean to me; they are just different from me. They just process things differently than I do, make decisions differently than I do. Maybe they need more data than I need.”
That level of empathy for others requires a lot of listening, Margolis said. “Listen more than you talk. You only learn when you listen,” she said. “Listening enables you to tune in to what is going on around your organization. Listen well when you are in team meetings, picking up on spoken and unspoken cues. Listen well during your one-on-one meetings and ask questions to draw other people out, and then listen even more.”
Row and Margolis said good verbal communication skills are particularly valuable in times of change. “I think it’s important to be able to distill what the main point is, what the issues are, and to be pretty confident that I can explain them to anyone who comes along,” said Row.
Being as clear as possible when communicating can help people deal effectively with volatility and ambiguity, Margolis said. “Be specific in the questions that you ask others to seek answers about the unknown,” she suggested. “People will be more equipped to help you if you are very clear about what you need from them.”
“You should always have three people you can call on and ask for help. I have way more than three, and I’m always on someone’s calendar.”
– Stacy Johnson, a solution services program manager at Keysight Technologies
Reinvent — or move on
Stracener pointed out that, by and large, people don’t leave jobs; they leave bad managers. In an untenable situation, the solution may not be to stick with it or change your behavior but to change your environment or job.
If you have to stay in a job with a difficult boss for whatever reason, there are mental strategies that can help. “I try to dig really deep and find what it is that motivates me and hang on to that the best I can,” Row said. “[I know I’m] good at what I do, and I’m going to continue to show up and do the best I can. You can control your attitude, how you show up, how you prepare.”
Ginn has a similar point of view. “Whenever you’re facing a really tough environment — downturns, layoffs — just knowing there’s an infinite number of jobs out there helps,” she said. “Just because this one is ending doesn’t mean that’s the end of the world. Anytime a door closes, the next one that opens is usually better.”
Developing Career Resiliency
Here are some key actions the experts in this article said can help employees navigate unexpected career changes:
- Take time to process and reflect. Give yourself space to come to terms with any changes.
- Gather the data. Find trusted sources for reliable facts about the upcoming changes, rather than relying on rumors.
- Seek support. Find mentors and experts inside and outside your company who can offer sound advice.
- Reframe. Accept extra tasks as a chance to learn new skills. Determine how your current skill set can be applied in a new situation.
- Reach out to colleagues. Seek the advice of colleagues who already have the skills you will need in a new role.
- Get professional advice. If needed, hire a career coach, therapist, or life coach to help determine your best next step. Many companies have employee assistance programs that can help with the cost.
- Practice patience. A change that seems negative at first may turn out to offer better options later.
- Control the message. If you find yourself working for a new boss or on a new team, present information about yourself to that person or team as early as possible.
- Develop an elevator pitch. Know which hard and soft skills are within your expertise and emphasize those.
- Conduct informational interviews. Whether or not your role is about to change, conduct brief fact-finding interviews with colleagues and others to learn about their jobs. This can set you up for future success.
Sources
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181845/
https://crowelec.com/engineering-areas-for-femtech-experts/
https://uhnfoundation.ca/stories/uhns-medly-is-revolutionizing-heart-failure-care/
www.dotlab.com/press-releases/clinical-validation-for-dotlab
www.nae.edu/271946/The-Role-of-Engineers-in-Womens-Health
