 How can a hostage negotiator help civil engineers? Well, in this episode, you're gonna find out, because we're gonna talk to Dan Oblinger, who is a hostage negotiator by night, but he works with civil engineers by day to help them with their active listening skills and their ability to negotiate. Let's jump right in. All right, so now I'm excited to welcome our guest onto the show for today. By night, he is a law enforcement officer and hostage negotiator, and by day, he is a consultant for engineering consultants. Let's welcome to the podcast, Dan Oblinger. Dan, welcome aboard. Anthony, it's my pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. This is certainly, I think, teed up to be an interesting episode. We haven't had too many hostage negotiators on the show. Am I the first? Yeah, you are the first. Okay, you're not gonna forget this, buddy. That's for sure. So, before we kind of jump into, you know, what you're doing now for engineers, let's get into your background a little bit. Take us through your career journey, Dan. I was studying to be a priest for the Roman Catholic Church. That's where my career starts. And then I left that with a degree in philosophy and went out into the workforce. And wouldn't you know it when you look in the one ads in like 2002, you look in philosopher, philosopher, philosopher, they're not hiring. But right after that, it's police. And I was like, dude, I can make that much money? How hard can it be? So, 20 years later, I got into law enforcement with a philosophy degree, which is a horrible mistake. Nobody should ever do that. Nobody should ever hire a philosopher and give them a gun and a badge. But I did, I had some interesting experiences early in my career that kind of shuffled me down a certain path in law enforcement. There's so many different jobs as a police officer. And I'm now a hostage negotiator. And what's interesting is before all that, I grew up in a family of AEC. My dad was a general contractor. Okay, hopefully there's still some people still listening to the podcast. And most of actually several uncles and my grandfather, they were all civil engineers. My other grandfather was a landscape architect. So I grew up in the AEC environment. I just never went into it as a career field. But about 10 years ago, my dad, he pointed out, he's like, you know, some of the things you know now and some of the things you can do, people in industry would pay to know that and be able to do that as well. Sure. So I started translating my experiences and my knowledge for clients. And wouldn't you know it? The people that immediately grasped the importance and the value and the profitability of that were consulting engineering firms and mostly civil. So now, although I know nothing about engineering, I know a lot about consulting and listening and negotiating value in scope and fee. So I get to hang out with engineers. Well, that's an interesting combination. And you know, myself who practiced as a civil engineer and of course since for the last 10 years or so, I've been doing a lot of coaching and training and learning about the inside and outs of companies. I can certainly see how the negotiating aspect of things can be critical in a lot of ways, not just the negotiating that someone might think off the top of their heads being negotiating with clients or prospective clients, but just, you know, negotiations in every day. I mean, you're dealing with contractors, you're dealing with teams, you're dealing with all kinds of things. So we're gonna dive into that in a minute, but before we go there, you know, you mentioned that there's a lot of different positions in law enforcement and you know, you had an interesting kind of road. You know, obviously right now, we got a lot of stuff going on in the country that you know, is all over in terms of, you know, with law enforcement and things like that. Just curious like from a mindset of going to work every day for someone like you at this point, I mean, I have a lot of friends in law enforcement and you know, they're good people and I know that there's been instances where cops have done not so good things. I think you get that in a lot of professions, but I'm just wondering since I'm able to talk to someone here today that's in law enforcement, is it just somewhere you have to go to work each day and just, you know, kind of say, you know, I'm gonna do my job and just kind of keep, kind of moving through this. I mean, it must be a little bit of a challenge because some of the stereotypes that are going on out there. Yeah, we, you know, I've been doing this work about two decades and it, yeah, it's very discouraging when it is very discouraging when someone in your profession brings it into a poor light and that is for any profession, but you know, my profession is a really special profession. You know, we are people of authority in our communities and we have to learn how to go about our duties and build relationships of trust in our community without using that authority, but there's no escaping the fact that you have the badge and you have these special missions in the community to use force when it's absolutely necessary and it's a constant balancing act in police. And so, you know, it's a balancing act and then all of a sudden now you're on a tightrope and oh, the tightrope's on fire. So it's, yeah, in times of crisis, our job gets even harder and when we are the focus of the crisis, then it's just magnified and amplified. And so, yeah, you're very right to point out that it's kind of tough right now to be a cop. At the same time, I think this is from the inside, like looking, you know, out. I can just assure you, no matter where you are, if you're hearing my voice, you have really amazing people, men and women, that despite all that, still put on the uniform and come in and serve their community and you. And so what a blessing, right? So in the midst of all the bad, it's still mostly good. Yeah, and that's exactly the kind of like the dinner conversation with our three kids the other night which is kind of like, you know, as many, you're gonna see stuff on the news like that, but you also have to know that there's many, many people out there that are protecting you and that are doing good things. And so, you know, thanks for sharing that message with us kind of from the inside. And again, it goes to Dan's point, that's applicable to every profession, you know, civil engineering, notwithstanding. I mean, civil engineering, we've talked about this on the podcast many times. You have quite a bit of power and authority as a civil engineer. I mean, you're designing projects that are basically have the lives of citizens in your hands. And that's why we spend a lot of time on ethics and you know, ethical training in civil engineering because of some of the things that have happened in the past on things. So I think it is, there are different professions have different types of authority and responsibilities. And you know, as a professional, you need to obviously be aware of that and hopefully you'll be respectful of that power. So with that, Dan, let's jump in a little bit. You know, you gave us your background, you talked about how you kind of, you know, got into the world of consulting with consulting engineers. A consultant to the consultants. A consultant to the consultant. So let's talk about, talk about how you, when you first got into this and you kind of went to some A companies and kind of pitched them on the idea of negotiation and how you might be able to help them. How did you tackle that and what was the reception? Well, it started, this is the interesting story. So I started providing training to contracting companies, to GCs, both vertical and horizontal, for drug safety. Because they would invest in that because some of them had to. Like, you know, if they were a DOT compliant, if they had some DOT safety training for like drug recognition. So that's how I started. And then I developed relationships with some clients and they're like, look, we don't even care like what you're teaching, what else can you teach? And I was like, well, I mean, really what I like to teach about is active listening and negotiations. They're like, sure, come on down. Like they didn't even care. Because by then it's just, it was about a relationship that I had. Well, I started doing that. And one time I did a joint architects, engineers and contractors conference. And I spoke about active listening, which I'd been doing for several of the bigger contractors in that area. And all the engineers were there and they're like, we don't listen good. I'm like, you're out, you don't. And so I started going into, again, mostly civil engineering firms to talk to their people. And again, it's from the lens. It's usually from the, how I get in to start is from the lens of business development. Right. And because that's a scary two word phrase for a lot of engineers, you know? Sure it is. But it's so important, right? And I discovered right away that in most firms big enough to kind of be able to specialize a little bit. It's the guy or gal in that group that has a natural ability to talk. All right, you're the business development person, right? So they don't have any, necessarily, they don't have any specialized training in sales. They definitely don't have any training in negotiation. And they definitely don't have any training in active listening skills that Haas's negotiators know, which are just like the magic unicorn food that just brings people to you. And so they were eating it up. That's when my practice, my side business exploded. I was beating engineers off of sticks because they realized, do this stuff works. So that's kind of my journey into the engineering field and kind of how my message and the services I provide have evolved. Because the topic evolved, but the delivery evolved too, because I started out with just like, I'll come in and train your people, right? Like, because I figured that's what they need. But then I realized pretty quickly, you know, what you need is to change your culture. And so now it looks very, it's much more like consulting in that you certainly training can help knowledge and a little bit of skill development can help. But what you really need is coaching and negotiation support, so you can develop basically champions for these kinds of activities inside of your engineering firm so that everybody sees business development as an important mission. And those that the way that it's done is by listening to clients deeply and then negotiating the value. And when you do that, guess what, scope creep just dissipates. The scope creep comes from a lack of confidence in negotiation. So, so there's all kinds of things. You don't want to say anything, you don't want to go against anyone. Just like, we'll keep you. If you're totally uncomfortable talking about how the job got bigger and therefore the payoff needs to get bigger, people sense that and they just start asking you for more and more and more. And the fear is that we'll make a dissatisfied client. What one thing I think most important thing that I think engineers get out of the work I do with them is to realize, dissatisfaction in a client relationship actually comes when we fail to negotiate. So. That's interesting. Yeah, cause imagine, we have to step out and think about their perspective. If I'm going to Anthony, who's the project manager on this project for me, he's my engineering consultant, right? And I get a suspicion that maybe they took me for a ride on that fee, like the scope was way too small and like they're making hand over fist and I test that by saying, hey, could you do a little bit more? And you're like, sure. I can do lots more and then you're like, can you live a little more? Sure, plenty of scope here, plenty of fee. They're like, wait a minute. When in fact, what you're thinking is God, dude, we're about to go in the red on this project but I don't want to make them mad. But what they sense is, is that you got a heck of a deal on me. And so again, it's, we miscommunicate cause we don't negotiate. Yeah, that's interesting. And quite a few things there that you said that kind of really, really resonated. I mean, one of them is that, a lot of younger civil engineers, there's like that elephant in the room that is business development that they know at some point in their career, most likely in a lot of consulting firms, they're gonna have to do it, right? If they want to move up, it's gonna become one of their responsibilities. And so, you're dead on that they don't have training in it. They don't have training in listening. They don't have training in negotiation, kind of all the things you need to do effective sales, effective business developments. That's definitely one issue where I could see you could really be helpful. But the other thing too that you said there in terms of the scope creep, I mean, honestly, in working with civil firms, that's one of the primary problems anywhere. Every one. It's one of the biggest sources of stress. Yeah. Especially for middle management and engineering firms. Yeah, and the problem, I think the problem with it is twofold. And I think you hit on both of them. One of them is younger civil engineers will get involved in projects and start doing some project management or interacting with the client. And they haven't yet been told what scope creep is. They're not really aware of it to begin with. They're just thinking that by saying, yes, we'll do this. They're being good engineers and they're servicing their clients. Cause yeah, we want to do whatever you need us to do. Right? Whatever, whatever, whatever. They're doing good, yeah. And that's kind of in some ways an honest mistake if they're not aware of the mechanics of the business side of the engineering projects. And then the second aspect of it is, the ability, the confidence and the ability to do what you're doing and say to someone, well, hold on. That sounds great. We have to do it, but it's not in our scope of work. So I'm going to need to charge you more money, basically, which is like, you know, in order to have the confidence to be able to say that to like a contractor or another consultant that you're working with is a lot to begin with. So it's two things kind of combination there is one, they need to be schooled on what scope creep is and you know, how to be aware of it and say, oh, I gotta better check the contract. And the second thing is then they got to have to wear with all like you're saying to be able to, you know, go and do that. So to that, you know, based on all that stuff, what should consulting engineering, especially civil engineers look for to kind of, you know, evaluate their abilities of for negotiation and communication abilities? Like how do they start with that? What a great question. I'm just going to give you five signs, because the first thing I do as a consultant, just like you all is I evaluate where we're at now and what would have to be done to have client success for this project, right? I'm not building a bridge. I'm not working on a wastewater plant. I'm looking at negotiation culture. So the first thing I do is I evaluate what's the competence in negotiation craft for your workforce, for your engineers? How confident and competent are they to mix it up with clients, vendors, subcontractors, the architects, the GCs on the project? How willing are they to go anywhere on any medium and have a conversation about scope and fee? And generally speaking, if you haven't done anything intentional with your culture, the confidence level and the confidence level are very low. And I'm not talking about project management. I'm talking about, especially if you're subprime. Yeah. Because if you don't have any skill in negotiation, you're just going to default to authority. Who's in charge? Okay, I guess we got to do what they say. But negotiation is irrespective of authority. So you could be subprime and come in and get amazing value because you go to your prime and you're like, hey, we need to talk about this. Yeah. Now I was going to say no civil engineering company that I ever know answers that question high. Yeah, right. And if they're honest, but most companies can't answer high. What I'm talking about here are some pretty good benchmarks and they did a survey of, I think it was like the Inc 5000 and maybe like 1% of companies could say, yeah, we do all this. So the second thing I look for is how eager are your employees then? And it's a function of the confidence and confidence but how eager are they to have these discussions? The third thing I look at is do you have a system? So where it's consistent and measurable that you are preparing for negotiations, doing them well, but this is really important, debriefing them and learning from your mistakes. And then maybe the last two kind of related but team concept, are you treating it like a team sport or do you let your unicorns go out and do it? And again, I would call it the old model is well, whoever's got a talent or an acumen for it, okay, they're gonna go do it. Or does everybody view their job as having an impact on business development and project management? And when you negotiate really important stuff, are you using at least two people to do that? And again, that's where you start getting into some of those bolts of negotiation but there's a team concept so important. Negotiation is not a solo sport. And then again, the fifth thing would be is it a constant improvement both for your people and your culture but also for your culture? Are you constantly raising that negotiation quotient inside the firm? And when this happens, those five things, at some point you don't need me. Like I'm one of the few consultants that has an exit strategy. Like I know when it's like you guys got this because you have people that can continue to nurture that culture because they're champions and that's really cool to see. The thing I'll say is you have those five things in place, not only will you make more money, you'll have more satisfied clients and you'll have, I mean, the nature of AEC is it's relationship based now. True. So you'll have long-term clients that are just bringing work to you because they trust you. And it's because of your employees and the relationships that they built with their employees. Yeah, no, that's great. And I like that you have the framework because I'm sure going into a company you can kinda, engineers like to see frameworks and you can show them these things and try to work with them on increasing their kind of their competence across the five of them for sure, which is great. A great way to kind of see results because I do think based on the stuff you said, I mean, yeah, like you said, there's always gonna be people in the company that aren't gonna be confident that are gonna need assistance but it's kind of like identifying them and equipping them, better equipping them to do the job. Because it is true that the whole idea of listening and negotiation, I mean, especially in the AE world, I mean, what day are you going to work and not using those skills, you know what I mean? I mean, you're just always working on teams. You're usually working on big size projects or components of projects that have multiple people and deadlines and everything is kind of like a give and take. So it is really one of the skills that I can see that's most important for professionals in this industry just because of all of the back and forth. So it's good to kind of hear you talk a little bit about that. And the other thing that I liked that you said there was it sounds like having some kind of consistent framework to operate off of is very important. And the reason I like that is because engineers typically have that from the technical side of things with their projects, right? They have a checklist to go through to make sure they're hitting all the technical components. The colors are right on the drawings and the details are right. But it seems like whenever we get into things that aren't so technical, that aren't so quantitative, we're less strategic about it. And so I know here at EMI what we've always tried to do is constantly give people frameworks. Do you wanna delegate better? Here's a framework for delegation. Just follow these steps consistently and you'll get better. Is that something that you find yourself doing in your day-to-day hostage negotiations? Yeah, so people resist checklists, obviously. We talk a lot about the knowledge skill gap. So knowing what negotiation is and some dynamics and some, this is especially true too. I think a lot of people teach negotiations as tactics and that just doesn't work because you have a non-compliant counterparty. That's what we like to say. That's fancy terms for it. They don't have to do what you want. So it's much more important to develop really great habits and asking questions, making people give proposals to you about what they want instead of just demanding it. Listening well and managing emotions, managing your own biases and understanding what kind of language is persuasive and what kind of language leads to impasse. If you're doing those things well as a habit, then business development and project management become so much easier. But the danger is to think that once you have those good habits, you can just roll into a meeting and just knock it out and the good negotiators will tell you, like, I'm very good at my craft. The team I work with on the police department, very good at their craft. You know what we're constantly doing is preparing, briefing and debriefing and we are constantly paying attention to the details because they matter. So you have to have what we call a mission and purpose document for every negotiation that you do. And that can be again, business development, project management, internal negotiations with your talent. Like if you have a really critical conversation, before that you need to think about your mission and purpose, you need to anticipate emotions and bias, you need to talk about like what the dynamics will be for this negotiation. Who am I dealing with? What do I know about them on past experience and can I be open to what could be different this time? Yeah, that's interesting. And you know, you reminded me of a great quote by Sun Tzu from the art of war, which is the battle is won before the fight begins, which is basically, you know, it's all about preparation. And if you're getting to the point on an engine, let's take engineering, business development, for example, if you're giving someone a proposal, by that point in time, when you're handing them or emailing that proposal, it should be so geared towards their needs that, you know, the odds of them, if you've done it correctly and you've listened accordingly throughout the process and you've heard their needs and you've catered the proposal to their needs, the odds of you getting that business should be extremely high, whereas you don't wanna send someone a proposal and say, yeah, this isn't what we're really needed. You know, we're gonna go in another direction because that means you didn't, you know, you weren't really going through the process. You didn't do discovery is what we would say. That's the language we use. You didn't do discovery with that potential client. And obviously there's tons of ways that, you know, civil engineers are winning work now. If you're in highway, obviously you're like, no, no, there's supplies. I'm like, well, I got something for you too because you can still negotiate with the government. But yeah, the key is if you ever send a proposal to a potential client on a, especially QBS, if you send that proposal and you go like this after you send it, then you didn't negotiate well. You didn't discover with the client. If it's a crap shoot in your mind when you send the proposal, the proposal should be sent after you know what the winning proposal is gonna look like in the mind of your client. And then that's the one you sent. So yeah, negotiation is so important because that discovery process is how you do so much with it. You not only, we call it discovery and people think, oh, you're discovering what they know. I'm like, sometimes you're helping your client discover what will work best for them. And when you were the one that did that out of all the people they're gonna bid for that work, guess who they're gonna wanna do business with? Yeah, you took the time, yeah. No, it's important and I don't know why listening. I guess listening is something that's underrated in all professions, not just engineering, but I know for sure from doing some coaching for engineering managers when you ask their team, how could your manager improve? They say, oh, he or she doesn't really listen to me. That's it. It's like the number one, it's like family feud. Number one, we surveyed 100 professional engineers in the civil engineering field and asked them what's wrong with their boss. Number one response was ding, bad listener. Right. But if you, and then if you survey the bosses, we surveyed 100 emerging leaders and number one problem with their teams, ding, they don't listen to me. It's universally poor skill. How about if you ask parents and children? How about if you ask parents and children that it'd probably be the same thing? Okay, so let's make it real. Like number one problem in communities in crisis right now where we have protesting and rioting that's gotten out of hand. Number one complaint of the people about their police, they don't listen to us. And number one complaint about the police of the people, they're not listening to us. It's just, there's a lot of talking going on and not a lot of listening. There's a lot of advocacy, but not a lot of discovery. So let's talk a little bit, if you don't mind about your work as a hostage negotiator for a moment here. I just want to try to understand like, in terms of what you do on a daily basis, it sounds like there's a lot of preparation involved. There's a lot of this discovery that you mentioned how you term phrase it out in terms of if you're dealing with a situation, you need to understand who you're dealing with from all angles, right? I'm assuming that that's what helps you to be successful in those situations. Is there, you know, maybe you can mention a couple of strategies that you use that you kind of like, from time to time or just trying to think of what engineers might hear from you here and maybe use them in some of their instances or daily conversations or, you know, negotiations. Yeah, I think, let's do, how about three? Three hot tips for engineers. Number one, the negotiation probably begins way before you thought it did. And I could give you, I mean, we could kind of break it down all the ways we went work, right, as civil engineers, but it's like, for instance, if you're waiting to get on a call with a client to kind of negotiate out maybe some of the potential scope for this potential project, well, did you consider whether a phone call was the best medium for you to do that? Because that would be, that's the negotiation that happens before the negotiation. You're like, no, we need to meet them in person, right? And I understand corona, but if you're like, no, for us, for our skill set, for the advantages we have in this process, kind of knowing who we're up against, we're gonna do better in person. Okay, so negotiate that you're gonna meet them in person to do this. Or if you're like, no, no, no, like phone's better for us. So there's this pre-negotiation. So if you wait to get on a phone call to negotiate, then you're accepting something at face value and maybe we shouldn't have. So there's all these little things that happen, like everything's negotiable. Everything's negotiable. That's where I talk to, if you're doing work in a state where there is no QBS and it's 100% fee. And so you're getting the QR after the QRP or whatever. And you're like, this is it, this is the project. I'm like, but yeah, but see there's people that created the scope for this project and you should really be having human to human conversations with them about that. In whatever way you possibly can to clarify and discover what's behind the project because you can't build anything just with like a three-page document, right? So you find out where they're going with it. You'll have a much better proposal, right? And probably you'll have a much more accurate fee for what they were anticipating based on what they wrote those descriptions for. So that's where the negotiation tends to begin way earlier than any of us think. The second thing I would say is become a master listener. And just to make that a little bit more concrete is you need to be asking better questions. Questions should invite stories. They shouldn't collect data. You'll get the data in the process of receiving the story. But what you receive in the story is the emotions of the person that's telling the story. And that's how we make those trusted advisor relationships with people is when we have an emotional connection with them. And I know that may frighten engineers. I'll tell you, it frightens cops too. So we've learned though that if you do not manage emotions, your own emotions of like fear and a lack of confidence, but also if you don't manage the emotions of your potential or current clients, that's when communication breaks down. So when people tell stories, we get the emotions and the facts. And that is complete communication. And then the last thing is managing bias. The discovery process is really for us to manage our own biases about projects and people. And also then to discover any biases that we have to correct using active listening and negotiation with the people that we are negotiating with. So just kind of three practical tips. The negotiation begins way earlier than we thought. So prepare, ask better questions, think of it like story collecting. And then the third thing is we gotta manage bias in ourselves and in the people we do business with. Yeah, no, that's great. And along the lines of asking better questions, when I went to executive coaching school, that was something that we really learned about. And they had us ask a lot of open-ended questions. And for those of you listening, that basically means that the question can't be answered with a yes or no, especially in the engineering world. If you're asking someone a question that they can simply say yes or no, they're gonna say yes or no and move on. And you're not gonna get kind of the story that Dan's referring to there, which is really what's driving that person, what's behind what they're asking for, and so definitely asking good questions that will give you that information that you're needing to go off. I mean, we talk about that a lot when we do our training on like building relationships is a lot of times an engineer goes to a networking event, they don't really know what to say. So we kind of tell them, ask really good questions. Hey, what has really been the favorite part of your career? What have you enjoyed most about being a civil engineer? A person's gonna open up, oh, I love this, I love that, I love this, right? But if you said, hey, do you like being a civil engineer? Oh, yes, no, it's kind of an easier answer. So really think about, I think that questioning one could be really beneficial for civil engineers in terms of listening because that's kind of what's gonna set you up to have the information to listen to as opposed to just keeping a shorter conversation which is not gonna be that helpful. Dan, before we move on to the civil engineering hot seat to wrap this one up, one last question I want to ask you is just about your own career. Is there a situation or a challenging situation at work? Could be a hostage negotiation, something that you dealt with that you really had to work at and you kind of got through it. Is there anything that you could share maybe that you learned from it or just any situation that you're open to sharing so people can learn a little bit more about what you're doing, how you use some of these skill sets? Yeah, you talk about asking good questions and the very first place to start sure is this discussion of closed and diverse open-ended but through my career, I've been put in situations where it's not academic, right? I'm not thinking well closed-ended versus open-ended. I'm thinking about how can I ask a question that's going to accomplish discovery when the person I'm asking the question of has a gun to another man's head and has told me that they intend to kill him. So that's when question asking as a craft becomes very real because you know how they say there's no wrong questions. There are about a million wrong questions when someone has gotten to the point where they're holding another human being hostage with a weapon and they want to kill him. And so I do have, I coach a lot of engineers and they're like, okay, so I should be asking more open-ended questions, right? I'm like, well, sometimes no. Sometimes a closed-ended question is the proper question. And this is where it becomes tricky in the beginning and then once you break through and realize that it is a craft and you just have to apply yourself to the craft just like engineering, right? Engineers get really good at it because up front they just want a checklist. Right. Okay, so which question do I ask then? I was like, I don't know, who's the guy? And they're like, well, I don't know yet. I'm like, that's right. You just have to become, you have to see questions as tools and you wouldn't use a hammer when you need a screwdriver. Right. And so for instance, probably in your class they said, so here are how you start good open-ended questions. Who, what, when, where, how and why. Is that fair? Right, yeah, fair. The interrogatives. Okay, why questions are absolutely dangerous. Never ask a why question of a man who has a gun to another man's head. Just like you would never ask a why question of a 14-year-old teenage daughter. Why did you do that? You hear it? Like the voice of authority and invalidation. So I'm gonna give you a situation. I was negotiating with a man. He was holding another man hostage and he had a gun to his head and it was kind of a drug dealer collecting on a debt. So, you know, a civil dispute over scope and fee. And he got trapped in there. So now the SWAT team's out there and I'm talking to him on the phone. And he's very early on, we explained, we exchanged pleasantries. I explain why we're there. And then he pretty much launches into this diatribe. He says, look, you're the police. I don't trust the police. I don't trust you. I'll never trust you. You probably think you're some kind of negotiator, but that's not how this is gonna go. So imagine that. That's how we started, you know? And I looked down at my vest that says negotiator on it. I'm like, all right guys, you know, pack it up. We're done here, right? No, I mean, that's where you have to earn. That's where, I got excited. I'm like, this is gonna be a good one, right? I'm gonna earn my pay. All those years of preparation, the team concepts gonna be put to the test. And I simply said, okay, how's it gonna go? You're telling me it's not gonna go that way. Okay, you got a plan. Tell me about your plan. I didn't say what's your plan, because what's that look like? I mean, I'm doing tactical collection of data, right? I said, okay, how's it gonna go? And he started to explain kind of what he wanted. But without me saying, what do you want? So he realizes, oh, this is a demand and Dan better deliver on this. No, it's just, how's it gonna go? Tell me the story. The best questions, the true definition of open-ended questions is, questions that invite people to tell you stories. Hostage negotiators love to say, hey, tell me about that. Grammatically, not a question, but one of the most powerful open-ended questions you can ever ask is just a really polite invitation. Tell me about that. So in that case, that gentleman eventually let the hostage go and then came out and surrendered in the street and we hugged. So it's like a hallmark movie. But the way you get from this is gonna end really, really badly to hugging in the rain, right? Is asking great questions and doing discovery and managing emotions. Just like engineers do every day when they do business development project management. Yeah, that's great. I love that. And like you said, you don't always know what tools you're gonna need until you get deeper into the project. Bring them all. And you don't know. All right, well, we're talking with Dan Oblinger. We're gonna take a quick break and we're gonna bring Dan back and finish up by putting him on the civil engineering hot seat. We'll be right back. Sounds fun. I hope you are enjoying this episode of the Civil Engineering Podcast, which is produced by the Engineering Management Institute. Please be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here for more podcast episodes and for all of our engineering manager, 8020 Shorts videos that we publish weekly where we interview successful engineering managers. Now it's time to jump into our civil engineering hot seat segment. All right, we're back with Dan Oblinger and Dan, you're pretty much used to pressure situations. I like hot seats Anthony. The hot seat's not gonna be, this isn't gonna be that hot for you. All right, so the first question, Dan, are there any specific rituals that you practice every day? For example, do you have a specific morning or lunch routine or something that you do consistently on a daily basis that contributes? Okay, this is one, normally I would, consistency is really important to me. So I should be able to just recommend whatever I'm doing to every client I have. And I'm in the unenviable position of telling most people like, do what I say and not what I do, which is not great leadership. But I work nights, so I roll out of bed like nine-ish, which for those people out there crushing it and on Instagram, I'm just a total slob. But when you work the two or three in the morning, you gotta make some concessions. I also have six kids, so I'm not like, go to the gym, go for a walk, read three books. I'm like, no, it's survival, I'm surviving. I love that you say rituals because I don't really have a routine because I've been called out multiple times in the last two weeks for SWAT calls. So there goes your routine, right? The rituals are important. Make sure you're eating as regularly as you can. I make sure that I try to find balance and that I try to remember why I work, it's for my family. I do try to read outside sources, especially outside of my discipline, as much as I can. But this most important is I have a circle of other professionals who I rely upon to keep me sane and we talk a lot about our crafts and I make sure I have a couple people in my craft who I regularly talk to and work with on my skills. I have a coach and I think most people should too. So I have a coaching coach. That's great, awesome. All right, next one. Now you've written a few books yourself that we've mentioned earlier on and willing to those books. In addition to your own books, what is a book that you might recommend to engineers or just one book that you found to be helpful in your professional or personal development that you could share? I think that, I mean, there's a bunch of books on negotiation and there's not a lot of books on active listening. And I would tell you as an engineer, start with listening first. Okay. Start with listening first as a skill and then work into this complex activity of negotiation. Negotiation in and of itself, I don't think it's really a skill because it's a group of skills that kind of interlock. Gotcha. I think that start with know by Jim Camp is an excellent negotiation book for engineers. There are other negotiation books that I think are pretty good, but that one especially I think will speak to them to understand that know actually should be embraced and not run away from. I think scope creep comes from a fear of know. Yeah. Yeah. It's good to tell people know in certain situations and it's great to encourage them to tell you know. Like here's an example of scope creep. You know, hey Dan, we'd really like you guys to, we wanna do a little change here and could you rework this with give us three options for this change? We wanna see what's gonna work the best before we send it back to the GC to do. And then to be able to say, okay, it sounds like you want three more options that we hadn't talked about before. It's gonna be new work. And they'll be like, yeah, yeah, that's true. You're like, great. How do you wanna handle this since it exceeds the original scope? And just put it right back on them. And you can say, if the budget's still as tight as you said before, don't be afraid to tell us not to do the work. It's fine. Yeah, no, you're right. They might be like, yeah, no, we can't put any more money. You're like, great, so just run it as is for now. If that changes, let us know. So you're always signaling that we wanna take care of the client. You're always signaling that this is a discussion that you can have with us anytime you want. But we're also signaling that we think that the original scope and fee was fair and we're gonna stick to that. We love to work for you. So if you got more work for us, we'll take more money, right? And again, that's client satisfaction. They're like, cool, Dan's a professional, right? And we know if we want more work from Dan in the future that we should be prepared to pay for that because that's fair. And it comes from being okay with no and saying basically without saying the word in, oh, no. Yeah, and really the earlier on in that relationship you established that the better, right? Cause once you don't, it's hard to get yourself out of that hole. And we didn't talk a lot about internal negotiations, but if you have one person on your team that's not comfortable with that, guess who they're always gonna go to. And that's why we say it's a cultural competence. Although you will still have people that specialize in negotiation and business development. Everyone has to be able to be comfortable saying no, seeking no, but also just listening and doing discovery. All right, so next question you've, I'm sure you've had several managers or superiors throughout your career, of course. Everybody's got a boss. We all have. If you think back to some of the ones that you're your favorites, right? No need to name names here, but what we're getting at is if you're thinking of your favorite managers or supervisors, what made them your favorite? What did you find that was, you know, that, hey, this was my favorite manager for this reason? Were there, was there certain specific reasons that jump out to you of what makes a good manager? The, to me, the most important quality in all the managers that I have really put out for, like really produced for. The quality that was lacking in the ones I didn't. And the one I aspire to and the one I see in other professions that I admire is that the people that work for them always know where they stand. There's not a lot of ambiguity. Even in a new situation, that the boss and their vision and their preferences and their deal breakers are so clear to their team that they know exactly where, like they can begin to do the work knowing that you will back certain kinds of work and also that you would not be satisfied with certain behaviors. That is so healthy for a team. And you don't have to agree with all of them, but just the consistency and authenticity that it can be expressed with this clear vision of the team of where the boss is going to stand, no matter what, by the way, no matter the political pressure. That to me is the most admirable quality in a leader. Yeah, that's great. Having that clarity is really important in terms of being able to work effectively for sure. All right, so we've got one final question here, Dan. We call it the civil engineering career elevator advice question. If you've gotten to an elevator with a civil engineer and had about 30, 40 seconds with him or her and had to give him or her career advice in that short period of time, what would that career advice be from you? The career advice would come in the form of three questions. Oh, you've done this. I'm scared of giving advice. I'm a scary judge of what's best for people. I would say, what's the next big thing for you? And if it was a big, hairy, audacious goal, I would know that they're in a great place with a great culture and a great boss, and I'd be like, cool, just go. But if they're like, man, I'm just trying to make it through the end of the year, I'd be like, how come you're not happy? And, you know, because our brain, it can really only be in one or two modes, survive or thrive. Right. When we're under stress and we're in crisis, we are not thinking about adding to our skill set, improving our habits. We're just trying to make it through the end of the day. And then, so then the third question is, what would be best? What would be the coolest thing you could do in engineering? And because for some people, it's like they love their discipline so much and they love the work they're doing so much. I just wanna get really, really, really good at this, right? But for a lot of people it's like, I wanna lead a team. Some people it's like, I wanna have my own firm. I'm like, great. So it's more like, I wanna discover and nurture the good things you already have inside of you for your career path. And also really challenge people when they've allowed themselves to get stuck. And as a coach, I think you can appreciate that. Yeah, for sure. I mean, listen, we're about 100 and almost 150 episodes into this podcast. And I think you're the first person that answered that question with questions, which speaks to your profession. Think about that. For sure, yeah. I've done a lot of work with just questions because my answers tend to be pretty poor, but my questions tend to be better and that's how I know I'm improving. Right, and those questions that really elicit probably the most useful answers at the end of the day because it's coming from the source. They're more versatile. My answer is probably if I actually gave you three pieces of advice, it would probably work for like 5% of people. The great questions work for 100% of people because it really meets people where we have in common. Yeah, that's great. All right, Dan, well, before we let you go, where can our listeners find out about you or learn more about what you do? Master listeners. It's reversed. Masterlistener.com. But here's the, this is where I'll send them the first place, would be LinkedIn because it's free and it can't hurt. I have a, my step-brother from another mother, his name's Alan Zhang. He's a business negotiator and he's originally from Hong Kong via Africa and now he lives in Virginia. We put on a free live negotiator Q&A most Fridays. And this is an hour session and we just talk about our craft and we invite people to bring us their problems and there's quite a few civil engineers that show up because they know me. And it's an amazing way to connect with people and to begin to build up that knowledge base. And actually we get into a little bit of skill building too but you have a community of people that will support you as you grow. So I would really start there. If you wanna make an investment, reach out to me. If you go to my website, you can get a free consultation for 30 minutes and we'll just see where you or your firm is at and if there's a way I can help, that's great. And if there's not, I'll tell you that. Right, so. Or you'll ask a question, that'll elicit that. Exactly, there'll be lots of questions. Come prepared to answer questions if you go. All right, Dan Oblinger, thank you for joining us on the Civil Engineering Podcast. We appreciate your time. Anthony, people asked man, thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Civil Engineering Podcast on YouTube produced by the Engineering Management Institute. We're always looking for new ways to help engineers become effective managers and leaders. You can view all of our content on our website at engineeringmanagementinstitute.org and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here for our weekly videos. Until next time, please continue to engineer your own success.