"In Search of Excellence: My Story" with Ir. Abd Rahim Bahruddin

Alhamdulillah great learning session in today's leader career sharing from Ir. Abdul Rahim Baharuddin, TP Custodian Engineer for Construction, from PD&T Division PETRONAS. Here are some interesting takeaway points I got from the session:

1. Growth mindset: Consistency is the Key 

Clearly, Ir. Abdul Rahim has an amazing list of credentials and professional certifications under his belt. But his credentials and achievements were all gradual, spanning years, even decades. They were not in one shot. What we can learn from this is that we all have what it takes to keep growing. The key is to take ownership of our own development and keep moving forward, step by step. Certification by certification. The sky is the limit, if we put our hearts and minds to it with consistency!

2. The top 3 skills of "highest importance" for engineers to survive and thrive: Communication skills, creativity, and design thinking.

I like that he confessed that this skill of communication was totally outside of his comfort zone. Especially those of us who tend to be more shy and introvert, communication isn't something that comes naturally; nor is it something that is systematically taught in typical university degree programs. We need to put in a deliberate effort to improve it!

He shared that one of the biggest priority as a new manager was communication: How to put ideas into a solid management plan (e.g. Project Execution Plan or PEP). How we can shift emotional thinking into priority, and specify business needs to fulfilling management objectives, and seeking feedback from key stakeholders to align expectations with them - focus on how our idea aligns with governance / project objective

3. My favorite takeaway: The Mental Model

Ir. Abd Rahim reads and learns a lot, and as he rightfully pointed out something which I can totally relate with: as we keep reading books, attending courses, and learning from different sources, it can be disorienting. So many methods, so many techniques, so many acronyms... which one to use? How and when to apply them?

What he did personally, and shared with us was something kinda cool: arranging them, and compartmentalizing the areas of knowledge into a mental model to reconcile all these pieces of knowledge and how they are inter-related, to make sense of it in terms of application in daily life. His approach was by anchoring them in Steven Covey's 7 Habits, funneling them into how this yields positive results.

It was a unique approach on personal knowledge management. While we may not have read as much as he did, we can use that same line of thinking to organize our areas of knowledge, so we can make them practical without getting lost or disoriented in this era of information overload!