Why Engineers need Coaching more than ever in the 21st century?

Engineering is multi cultural, multi lingual, global at the touch of a mouse. Just like everything else, and leaving aside delivery schedules and quality, lowest cost wins. The thing is that engineering creates the manufacturing ability and more and more is going abroad.
We need to keep what we have and develop it even more. New ideas, new ways to produce better quality, create step changes in our routines, leaps not just small steps. We have to harness the power of the collective mind. It needs to be coached out. Our minds really can’t be allowed to switch off at 5.30 and come back on at 8.30 the next morning. We need to sweat the assets twenty fours a day and companies “mind banks”, made up of every single person, and are a crucial part of the assets. The challenge is for everyone to not only recognise this but to participate in the sweating/coaching process. No more them and us, all of us in it together.
As mentioned above, we engineers have very developed left-hand side brains and we need to allow the right hand side to get involved. I mean I would never have thought or even tried to write an article like this a few years ago, let alone when I was up to my ears in gauges and castings. But times change and we need to change with them.
The creativity of our engineering heritage means that we’ve done it in the past and we can do it again now, but not alone. We did it in the past because it was new and we were creating and we need to get back to that.
Companies already stripped to the bone, need all the grey cells they can lay their hands on. Cost reduction has its limits, but there is no limit to good ideas. Ideas do not hang around like wallpaper, they have to be cajoled out, Coached into life often by using the brains and words of others to unlock our own.

Einstein said, “ Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create”.

The machines and equipment of the future rely on tomorrow’s knowledge, which is not known today. Nothing is ever created without imagination because this is where ideas and dreams come from.. get your companies growing today. Start the process now. Begin to think outside the box. Get the communication flowing up and down. Help coach your company to listen and ask. It will not happen overnight but rewards will come from some of the oddest places and at the strangest of times. If you don’t know how to start the process, get a coach to help you, but one thing you do need is to start a “learn-on-the-run” Personal Development programme’ like the one I did. Over a period of time you pick up new skills and ideas from books, tapes and seminars.

©William Barron
Creating Insight
January 2000
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