Team

Teams are an essential part of engineering work, and team dynamics can be more complicated than interpersonal ones. This page provides resources and strategies for better understanding your team members and working within teams, whether they be physical or virtual.

  • Published on February 13, 2021 Moving from Student to Engineer – Part 1 By Robert Lyons, Technical and Management Consultant, and Nancy Barr, PhD The differences between academic and industrial communication projects seem to be in scope and scale of content, size and number of teams, duration of ...

  • Published on May 22, 2018 In her internationally best-selling book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, advises women to “speak your truth” but to do so in an appropriate, yet non-threatening way—to be “not brutally honest ...

  • Published on March 9, 2018 In engineering teams, gender dynamics can disproportionately impact women, limiting or circumscribing their roles in those team environments.  At our last conference in Madison,  Joanna Wolfe – Director of the Global Communication Center, Teaching Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University – discusses how ...

  • Published on November 16, 2017 Dr. Jon Leydens, co-author of Engineering Justice: Transforming Engineering Education and Practice, spoke to us at ProComm 2017 about the growing importance of intercultural communication and social justice in engineering practice, how current approaches fail to prepare our future engineers to ...

  • Published on December 8, 2016 Increasingly, engineering projects are crossing national boundaries.  Groups working together are having to work in virtual, physically dispersed teams, making communication practices both more challenging and more essential to the success of a project. While the field is still young, communication researchers have started ...

  • Published on November 18, 2016 We asked Greg Pogue of the IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, who, with Clay Spinuzzi, hosted a session and panel on entrepreneurial communication at ProComm 2016 about the fundamentals of making a good “pitch.” Watch his response here:

  • Published on July 27, 2016 Pam Estes Brewer, author of the IEEE-Wiley book International Virtual Teams: Engineering Global Success, will be giving an IEEE-USA sponsored webinar titled “Teaming at a Distance: Learn How to Make Remote Teams Work for You and Your Company” on September 8th, 2016, ...

  • Published on July 8, 2016 In Patricia Sheridan’s last post, she discussed some team process development strategies for teams that are coming together to create effective ways of working together. But: what can an individual engineer do to make group communication happen easily/better when they aren’t starting a new ...

  • Published on July 8, 2016 In my last post, I talked about some team process development strategies for teams that are coming together to create effective ways of working together. The focus of these posts has been on getting to see ‘who’ your team members are, ...

  • Published on March 4, 2016 Most working engineers work in teams on a daily basis, making teams important to a company’s productivity. Teams skills can be essential for improving and optimizing team performance. In fact, we’ve published several articles on team communication strategies over the last year, and ...

  • Published on September 30, 2015 Three key practices for getting to know and really communicating with your team members In my last post, I spoke about engineers’ and engineering students’ bias towards seeing ‘what’ their team members produce as opposed to ‘who’ their team members are and ...

  • Published on September 11, 2015 More and more, engineers are working in virtual teams, spanning the globe. What communication strategies does working in a virtual team necessitate, or what problems does it create? Yvonne Cleary and Darina Slattery of the University of Limerick present the findings of ...

  • Published on September 11, 2015 Yvonne Cleary and Darina Slattery of the University of Limerick present the finding of their research into communication strategies in virtual teams, identifying common problems, and strategies for improving group communication in virtual spaces. Their talk was delivered at the IEEE ...

  • Published on June 1, 2015 For most engineers, teamwork is an important skill that is key to success in industry, but one that is not often taught or even explicitly addressed. Educators like Patricia Sheridan are trying to change that: her work focuses on engineering student design teams, but what ...

  • Published on May 29, 2015 By Patricia Sheridan A three part series on a fundamental principle of effective group communication Too often I meet with engineers and engineering students whose teams are not functioning well. They will talk to me about the project, they will talk to me ...

  • Published on June 5, 2012 Jon Scharer introduces us to Communities of Practice (CoP) in this podcast. Communities of Practice, both for management and practitioners, have, for a variety of reasons, become more valued of late in the workplace. Listen as Scharer highlights two key factors ...

  • Published on March 16, 2012 Are you interested in becoming a more competent manager? If so, then the IEEE Expert Now course, Thinking and Interacting Like a Leader, is for you. This course was developed by Dr. Kim Sydow Campbell, Professor of Management Communication and Derrell ...