Crucial Conversations in Engineering, with Shere Tuckey (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

Dianna Deeney interviews Shere Tuckey about Crucial Conversations® in an engineering environment: how to prepare for and have difficult conversations with peers, managers, and everyone else. Shere gave a conference presentation about Crucial Conversations® titled, “How to be Persuasive Rather than Abrasive.”

This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts”. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team for new product development. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they’re involved and work with product design engineering teammates.

About Shere

Shere is a Branch Chief in the Air Force Research Laboratory, Munitions Directorate, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. She is responsible for advocating, planning, budgeting, organizing, and directing the execution of a high-priority technology development portfolio as well as direct supervision and management of all personnel within the branch. Over the last twenty-nine years, she has managed twelve different teams across many engineering disciplines from shock physics experimentation to weapon effects modeling and simulation.

Shere has taken a special interest in leadership, mentoring, and helping teams communicate effectively. After being asked to serve as the Dean of Leadership for her organization’s workforce development program, she became certified to teach the Crucial Conversations® course as a foundational element of leadership development.

She has taught five highly rated classes to high level managers, junior employees, and everyone in between. The positive feedback received from these classes and the course’s universal applicability, has motivated Shere to share this knowledge in as many forums as possible.

Shere and Dianna talk about:

• what makes a dialogue a Crucial Conversation®
• how she discovered the Crucial Conversation® framework
• why she trains others at her work in the Crucial Conversations® model and champions its use

Shere also shares stories of success.

Listen to take your communications skills to another level, at work and everywhere else.

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Challenges Getting Team Input in Concept Development

This is the wrap-up, final episode of our series – the 7th episode in our series about generating ideas with a team toward action.

Since the start of 2023, we focused on a few quality tools and methods to both generate ideas and then choose which idea to pursue.

We’ve talked about:

• Changing our scope to a closed world, to failures or questions, or design heuristics
• Brainstorming within a problem-solving framework
• Grouping many ideas and then further refining them
• Prioritizing many ideas by comparing them to 2 criteria or by using team voting
• Choosing an idea by using paired comparisons or a structured decision-making solution like DMRCS
• Giving individuals a process to create a full design concept

We also interviewed an expert in brainstorming and learned the importance of planning for teamwork, including choosing our team.

What have we learned through the last few weeks? Let’s highlight take-aways and next steps.

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Brainstorming within Design Sprints

We’re in our 6th episode into our series about generating ideas with our team toward action. The first two episodes were all about idea generation. The 3rd through 5th episodes was about using Quality Tools to help us group, explore, prioritize, and decide on an idea.

There’s one more method to consider in this series: a design sprint.

A design sprint utilizes all of these things we’ve been talking about. We talk about the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days and how these ideas fit together.

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