October’s Professional development meeting was held October 19. Raytheon’s Women’s Network (RWN) and Dallas SWE hosted a lunch panel discussion on Effective and Practical Communication. Attendees were able to submit questions before and during the event for our panelist, Dawn Treece – HWEC Electro-Optical (EO) Electronics Department Manager (Raytheon Intelligence & Space) , Serena Dalhamer – Principal Project Engineer (Collins Aerospace), Leslie Ledda – Principal Engineering Fellow (Raytheon Intelligence & Space). The panel discussed ways managers can effectively communicate to engineers they manage, other managers and executives. The panel discussed how to firmly communicate with others in a polite way and gave tips on how to communicate when someone is not polite and may not have good intentions. “Sometimes if you continue to consider they may have good intentions, they may become high stressors” when their intentions were not good to begin with. Some of the tips given by the panel include: (1) Add a due date to the subject or highlight it in the body when you know someone is busy and your request is urgent. (2) Listen to listen, not to respond. (3) Learn to walk away to collect your thoughts in high tension situations.
