Leading With Outcomes: Keys to Advancing Your Engineering Career – Ep 033

In this episode of The Structural Engineering Channel Podcast, we talk to Rens Hayes, Principal at H+O Structural Engineering, about strategic planning, organizational structure, leadership, management, and advancing your engineering career. Regardless of your current position and aspirations in your engineering career, if advancement is something you’d like to continue to pursue, this episode is full of big-picture insights that will help you see where opportunity for growth lies. Engineering Quotes: Here Are Some of the Questions We Ask Rens in This Episode: How did you become a business pioneer? Can you tell us more about your leadership style and values and how they can be implemented? What are some of the beliefs that can prevent someone from advancing in their career, and how do you suggest that someone can overcome those barriers? Please talk about the power of purpose and how people can use it to get through difficult times. Did you have any mentors, and how important is mentorship to you? What is your opinion on a positive work environment, and how do you enable that at H+O? Here Are Some of the Key Points Discussed About the Keys to Advancing Your Engineering Career: H+O Structural Engineering, based in Boston, Massachusetts, focuses on mid- and high-rise building structures. Rens is a co-founder and principal of the company and works on HR, business development, and marketing, and handles many of the new leads. A firm’s mission, vision, and values are very important because if your company does not have a mission, vision, or values, you cannot expect your team to work together in the same direction for the company. To be successful, a company needs the following: Mission: It should be short and concise, it should define why your company exists, and everyone in the firm should know it by heart. Vision: The vision paints the picture of where a company is going and should be written in the present tense. This makes your team actively work on becoming that company in years to come. Values: The core values of a company guide culture and decision-making. There should be up to five values, and they should be short and concise so that everyone in your team can remember them. If you do not have a clear mission, vision, and values, as well as a framework and clarity on how you deliver value to a client, you don’t have an organizational structure that is going to allow the workforce to grow and advance their career. The eight core functions of a business are planning, leadership, sales, marketing, people, operations, finance, and legal. These all need to be balanced to run a successful business. If you are thinking of advancing your engineering career and increasing your value to the company, being able to identify root causes of problems and help coming up with a solution is a tremendous opportunity to advance your career. If you want to increase your earning potential, you can apply the eight core values of a business to yourself. This will help you to identify your weaknesses and guide you on what you need to work on to improve your strengths. A toxic work environment is one where people are afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes are an opportunity for an entire organization to improve. When you can create a positive learning environment, mistakes become lessons learned and are not really mistakes. One of the biggest fears that stems from making a mistake is people think they, as a person and their character, are judged by their performance. To deal with fears, you need to define what the fear is, determine how to prevent it from happening, and how it can be fixed if it does happen. Defining what you want in life is especially important.