Friday, November 7, 2014

Style and Delivery in Engineering

Robert McDaffry is the project engineer of an aerospace engineering firm, Aeronozzles, Inc., which supplies fuel nozzles to military and commercial aircraft platforms.  He is responsible for project execution and customer satisfaction.  Recently a customer, Lucky Flights, has approached the firm and complained about the missed deadlines for a shipment.  In this situation, McDaffry has to address at least two specific audiences: his company employees, and the disgruntled client.  

For the first, McDaffry first needs to locate the source of the delays and address it.  Due to the diversity of the employees, he must be able to communicate to a wide variety of functional areas, such as Operations, Marketing, Planning, Finance, and Quality Assurance.   Apparently several people in Quality Assurance have been under the weather, so the few remaining have been swamped trying to meet the deadline.  Because deadlines are important and customer satisfaction more important, something needs to be done.  However, being the responsible project engineer that he is, McDaffry understands the importance of company morale as well.  After calling a group meeting with Quality Assurance, he might try to appease the demands of deadlines, and to be compassionate at the same time, by addressing them in this way:

“I’ve called this meeting to address a few items of business.  Up to this point our company has had a great reputation of being punctual and exact in our performance.  Due to obvious circumstances, we had a hiccup recently that aroused some dissatisfaction with one of our clients.  I understand that this group had been understaffed as of late.  It is my fault for not addressing the situation earlier.  In order to thwart the evil designs of the flu bug in the future, I think it would be wise of us to take necessary precautions.  Do your best to stay healthy and I’ll get you the help you need if it’s required.”


The sign of a good leader is being willing to take responsibility when things go wrong.  It would have been easy for McDaffry to accuse QA of being slackers and unhygienic, but by taking the blame he builds his ethos.  He shows understanding, which would in turn spark a desire of the employees to work that much harder.  In addition, he addressed them as equals by using pronouns such as “we” and “our”.

McDaffry still has to speak to the disgruntled client.  He might say this in a letter:

Lucky Flights:

With respect to the delayed shipment of the custom fuel nozzles that you ordered, we express our humblest apologies.  Aeronozzles has always valued your cooperation and emphasized customer satisfaction.  As we wish to retain these relations, we offer these future services to you free of charge…

Respectfully,
Robert McDaffry
Project Engineer
Aeronozzles, Inc.

When addressing the client, McDaffry does not give excuses or offer any explanations as to the nature of the delay.  Doing so would make Aeronozzles seem incompetent or negligent with its affairs.  Lucky Flights isn’t looking for excuses, they want results.  In order to preserve the relationship with Lucky Flights, McDaffry acknowledges mistakes and offers amends. 


1 comment:

  1. You bring up a good point about delivery with the employees. In addition to using plural pronouns like "we", he must deliver it in such a way that his tone and body send that message as well or it would seem to me that it would fall on deaf ears. I think that a middle style or high style is what is required in the letter to the customer, to please them and to move them (or rather keep them from moving one to another company).

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