Styles of Conflict Behavior

Civil and environmental engineers address local officials, other professionals (meteorologists, geologists, and mechanical engineers), lawyers, lawmakers, citizen groups, public health practitioners, transportation engineers, consultants, contractors, and project managers. All these people and more may read civil and environmental engineers’ reports and proposals. Increasingly, these engineers work with people from other countries and cultures in locations outside the US as well as in the US. Communication instruction in civil and environmental engineering at Rice University prepares students to lead through excellence in communication.

Criteria for Leadership Communication

To lead through excellence in communication, civil and environmental engineers must be able to design communication for multiple audiences. Audiences need to (1) grasp the overall structure and content to quickly find what they want, (2) be satisfied that they understand the reasoning and information, (3) use the communication to accomplish their own purposes, and (4) feel respected by and attracted to the writer, speaker, or corporate source of the communication. These desired audience responses are the basis of four criteria for evaluating engineering communication:

Naturally, since engineers produce many types of reports and give many types of presentations, the features of a document or talk that satisfy these criteria in one situation may be quite different from those in another document. For example, the details that make a document usable will depend on the kinds of use it must serve. Even a small detail, such as being printed on waterproof paper, might help make a manual useful out in the field during rainy weather. In a different situation, a technician might need detailed drawings in order to build a scale model, regardless of paper type. However, routine situations tend to require similar documents, so some features related to these four criteria may become fairly standard in an organization. In non-routine situations engineers have to give careful thought to how to meet each of these criteria.

The first three criteria have been championed by Rebecca Burnett, author of Technical Communication (Wadsworth 2005), a widely used textbook. The fourth criterion, effective interpersonal or intercultural engagement, has been added to account for the goodwill and trust that are necessary for smooth interaction in business and that can be affected by globalization. When people with different expectations must work together, deliberate attention must be given to mitigating these differences.

For example, engineers from the US prefer introductory summaries that provide “the bottom line” message at the beginning of a report. Engineers in some other cultures consider it rude or presumptuous to offer a conclusion before presenting the information. They prefer a summary at the end of the report. If you have readers from both types of cultures in your audience, you may decide to provide a summary in both places, but title the first one an “Optional Introductory Summary.” Such a heading allows the reader who might consider such a section brash to skip over it while the reader who prefers it can read it first.

“But this isn’t what we expected!” you may object. You may be used to having instructors use other criteria for evaluating your communication. These criteria have been adopted to help students adjust to communication responsibilities they will face in industry. If you only had to “state the purpose” in the past, think how a situation in industry affects that objective: The professional engineer must state it in words that the kind of audience being addressed can make sense of (comprehensibility) and in a sentence structure that is easy to read (accessibility). The purpose must respond to the situation (usability), and be expressed in a way that maintains a good relationship between the engineer, the engineer’s firm, and the client (interpersonal and intercultural effectiveness). By attending to these functions of communication, you will learn to be versatile and effective in complex environments.

Kinds of Guidance

This site contains materials for specific courses in the CEVE required sequence. Guidance ranges from basic to advanced, as suits the experience level of students and the level of the courses.