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Being a Team Lead

TIL: What It Takes To Be A Team Lead

The team leader’s role includes the following functions:

·       Achieving maximum performance

·       Getting things done without authority

·       Understanding employee motivation

·       Setting SMART goals

·       Clarifying performance expectations

·       Training for results

·       Action planning

In order for someone to be successful at being a team leader they must have the following skills mastered:

·       Communicating effectively

·       Giving performance feedback

·       Coaching

·       Managing conflict

Achieving Maximum Performance

To achieve maximum performance you should understand the core elements of your role as both a team leader and an employee. Along with understanding the core elements, you have to be able to complete those core tasks each day to ensure the success of your team and your company. This includes doing the work, instructing your team members when they need or seek guidance, and knowing how to respond to your teams efforts. A good way to remember what all goes along with being a team leader is to look at the Team Leader circle provided. What items does the team leader directly have an impact on, or otherwise directly touch and what do those items fall under as far as overall tasks to complete as a team leader.              

The Importance of Influence

In order to have your team do the tasks provided in a correct and efficient pattern without any backlash, you must know how to influence them in a positive manner. Maintaining or enhancing the positive relationship you have with that person provides a good result for everyone involved. So, what are some key characteristics of influential people? A few I can think of include the following:

·       Confidence

·       Knowledgeable

·       Present

·       Attentive to detail

·       Active within the project/society

There are typically two major types of influence you can have on a team or a person, positional or personal. Positional influence includes influencing someone to do something based on authority level. This type of influence can gain compliance but not necessarily the commitment of the team to that person. Personal influence however is the type that is developed or earned due to personal qualities and skills. This can be developed over time and involves truly getting to know your people, what they want, and doing whatever you can to help them.

Motivation

There are two ways people are motivated, intrinsically and extrinsically. Intrinsically motivated individuals like to have pride in their work with a feeling of achievement and enjoy having a true interest in what they are doing. Extrinsically motivated individuals prefer high grades, more money, or public praise for their achievements. Generally when considering one position over another, there are 10 things that motivate or demotivate a candidate from choosing, or staying with, your team. The 10 most important motivators for potential or current employees are:

·       Respectful treatment of all employees at all levels

·       Trust between employees and senior management

·       Overall benefits

·       Compensation/pay

·       Job security

·       Feeling safe in your work environment

·       Opportunities to use your skills/abilities in your work

·       Communication between employees and senior management

·       Organizations financial stability

·       The work itself.

Knowing what specifically motivates each member of your team can assist you in finding new ways to motivate them at the job.

Setting Smart Goals

Smart Goals are:

Specific

Measureable

Attainable

Realistic

Time-bound

Smart goals allow us to set goals that can be achieved rather than wide open goals with no real end product in sight. They also allow us to better guide our team and our expectations of them.

Setting Job Expectations

There are three things to clarify when providing your team with performance expectations within their goals.

·       Results – the desired product or service

·       Measures – what specific criteria will be used to measure the final product or service in quantity, quality, cost, and time

·       Context – how does this result link to the business goals

Training for Results

Training a team for a new task, or a new member joining the current team can be a daunting task. Here are 7 steps to make this training easier to manage.

·       Define the job

·       Define tasks and resources needed

·       Determine the training needs

·       Establish training objectives

   o   Use action words/verbs to describe objectives

   o   Use measurement criteria

   o   Provide conditions for training

·       Know your audience

·       Conduct the training

·       Assess skill and knowledge mastery

To ensure your team can fulfill tasks correctly every time and not waste time asking questions, you should create job breakdowns. These breakdowns can also assist you during training sessions to ensure everyone is trained the same and the person has a document to look back on if they have questions. A job breakdown is a step-by-step procedure for a job or operations that advances the work. You can start one by making a logical segment of steps defining when something happens to advance to the next step. Finally, define the key points and notes that might make or break the job. Be sure to have someone review the job breakdown to make sure the instructions are as clear as possible and include all portions of the job’s work.

Effective Communication Skills

Being a team leader means that you are essentially the translator between two parties. That includes your team, other supporting and surrounding teams, as well as your boss. You get to relay information to all necessary parties who otherwise would not have the information. Therefore, you effectiveness to communicate plays a huge role in your success as a team leader.

A quick fact, 70% of our communication efforts are misunderstood, misinterpreted, rejected, disliked, distorted, or not heard. This all happens due to filters unintentionally applied to verbal, intonation and inflection, non-verbal ques, cultural differences, and social conditioning.

A few fundamentals to effective communication include listening actively, asking questions, clearly expressing yourself, keeping people informed, and requesting action. Below are a few ways to do each of those things.

·       Listen actively

   o   Pay attention

   o   Show that you are listening

   o   Provide feedback

   o   Defer judgment

   o   Respond appropriately

·       Ask questions

   o   Closed: who which would are can have do is will

   o   Open: what how tell me describe

·       Express yourself clearly

   o   Think before speaking

   o   Propose your own ideas/solutions one at a time

   o   Keep it simple and brief

   o   Have all pertinent information

   o   Tie what you are saying to the impact it has in the organization

   o   Be specific and avoid generalizations

   o   Once two emails are exchanged and the issue is unresolved, pick up the              phone.

·       Keep people informed

   o   About the big picture

   o   About the job

   o   About the schedule

·       Request action

   o   Ask rather than tell

   o   Use specific action oriented language

   o   Explain your requests

Giving Performance Feedback

Feedback is a form of reinforcement of rules and strategies and is also a way to have improvement within your team. Steps to provide feedback include: describing what was actually said or done, explaining the results of that behavior, and asking the employee to either continue or change that behavior. Good feedback should still be a positive situation for both parties.

Coaching

Coaching a team includes a continuous series of actions from the leader to help team members improve work performance. It is similar to giving performance review but is on a continuous timing sequence and is reflected in every time you talk to your team members. It also involves asking the team a series of questions like, their point of view, impact on the team or company of a behavior, and what they could do to improve the situation.

Managing Conflict

As a team leader, you are unable to ignore conflicts within the team. If you notice a conflict occurring you should talk privately with the involved team members before the conflict escalates. During the private meeting with each person do the following:

·       Explain their conflict is disrupting work

·       Allow them to tell their side and vent

·       Ask questions to identify the real problem

·       Remain neutral

This will allow you to get each involved parties version of the story. Since we know communication is only 30% truly understood, being a mediator between two versions of what was heard/what happened is an importation part of your role as team leader. Next, you should meet with both parties at once to discuss and mediate the situation. During this time, do the following:

·       Clarify the problem

·       No accusations, blame, offensive language

·       Ask for solutions – impose one if you have to

·       Get agreement on a solution

·       Involve your HR Department

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Hmong Language and Culture

TA.TIL: Key Points about the Hmong Culture

The People

Hmong is an ethnic group primarily located in China and Southeast Asia. The Hmong people speak Hmong, which is one of the Hmong-Mien languages. The original home of the Hmong is thought to be the Huang He Basin of central China. The people were pushed south and migrated throughout the southern provinces of China. Here, they practiced shifting cultivation which included moving onto unfertile soil they had used every few decades. Slowly, the villages transitioned from using specific land for farming and specific land for living, depleting the farming soil, burning forests for new fields, and moving onto the old fields of depleted soil. Nearing the late 20th century the Hmong’s shifting cultivation was unable to thrive anywhere expect few remote areas. Due to this, and some government influence, the Hmong people moved to permanent-field cultivation.

The Hmong people are grouped through a few patrilineal clans by Chinese surnames. These surnames include Yang, Li, and Wang. Included within these clans by surnames, there is a strict rule that marriage must be outside of one’s family, or surname. Therefore a Wang cannot marry a Wang. There is also a strong feeling of familial bond within the surname clan. This meaning that any Wang can count on another Wang in a time of need, similar in fashion to that of a sibling if not directly related.

Through the ideas of clans by surname, there was also a great cultural division. Major groups of division are the Green Hmong and White Hmong people. This division was clear as the women of each culture respectively wore her culture’s colors. Traditionally, these two groups lived in different villages including different architecture styles, rarely intertwined in marriage, spoke different dialects of Hmong, and had different forms of clothing. By the late 20th century this division was blurred slightly but there was still some tension between the groups.

The Politics

During the 20th century, Hmong within Southeast Asia became divided through the communist parties and states.

Thailand

In the 1960’s many of the Hmong in Thailand joined the communist party. This made them enemies of the state. Even decades later, the Hmong population here lacks citizenship rights or appropriate titles for their land.

Laos

In the same time period, the Hmong of Laos sided against the communist party. Over 100,000 Hmong fled from Laos into refugee camps in Thailand after the Revolution of 1975. Here, they were resettled within the United States, Canada, France, Australia, and New Zealand. During this transition period, families were split apart and, in some cases, are currently being reunited through family tree tracking and visiting relatives in their homelands of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and southern China.

The Language

Hmong is a tonal based language spoken by approximately 2.6 million people. This language is mostly used in China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, the United States of America, and French Guiana. While this isn’t a widely known language for second-language-learners in the United States, like French, Spanish, and Mandarin, there are two major varieties of Hmong: White Hmong, and Green/Blue Hmong. As mentioned, this coloring description comes from the two major divisions within the culture.

Throughout China, Hmong is known as Miao. This language is written in Chinese characters or with Pollard Script which is a writing system between syllabic and alphabetic scripts that is loosely based on the Latin alphabet. In Laos they use the Pahawh Hmong alphabet on occasion and in Thailand they use the Thai alphabet. Globally today, most Hmong use the Romanized Popular Alphabet which is a version of the Latin alphabet where tones are indicated by final consonants.

Along with being a tonal language, some basics to sentence structure within Hmong are also different than that of English. In English your verb usage should be one per subject. Hmong however, strings verbs together. The Hmong verbs also do not change to show tense. To show tense in a Hmong sentence, you provide the timing information around the verb within the sentence. The good news though, is that the major sentence structure “subject-verb-object” is the same in Hmong as it is in English. There are a few other nuances that differentiate Hmong grammar from English listed here:

·       Hmong do not use verbs before predicative adjectives.

·       Hmong use hundreds of noun classifiers whereas English only has a few

·       Hmong inserts a word before the noun to make it plural rather than adding an “s”.

·       Hmong use noun classifiers to form the possessive which is not done in English

·       If Hmong speakers do not change the pronoun from subjective to objective (he to his, she to her) this could lead to them saying things like “It is she dog” rather than “It is her dog”

·       Verbs only have one form in Hmong. To change tense, they change the tone and word order.

·       Hmong speakers typically use two main verbs rather than one per clause.

·       When asking questions, word order is not changed in Hmong the way it is in English.

Pronunciation is also much different in Hmong than English since they have a tonal language.

·       In Hmong, each word is a single syllable beginning with a consonant followed by a vowel. Each word gets a special tone to change its meaning

·       The Hmong language does not have a “th” sound.

·       Hmong does not have the “w” sound.

·       Hmong speakers do not use voiced stops in “p” and “g”

·       Hmong speakers do not use the “j” or “dg” sound.

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Optical Properties

TA.TIL Optical Properties of Materials

 First, let’s define the term optical property. An optical property of a material relates to how that material responds when exposed to electromagnetic radiation. The electromagnetic spectrum spans from gamma rays of wavelengths around 10-3 nm through x-rays, ultraviolet, visible, infrared and radio waves around 105 m. The visible spectrum, what we see every day, is between 0.4 micrometers and 0.7 micrometers with various colors corresponding to specific wavelengths. For example 0.4 micrometers is violet, 0.5 micrometers is green, and 0.65 micrometers is red.

Electromagnetic radiation can be considered two ways. The first is to consider it being wavelike and consisting of electric and magnetic field components that are perpendicular to each other and the direction of propagation. The second way to view electromagnetic radiation is from a quantum-mechanical perspective where it is composed of groups of energy called photons. This second method of evaluation relies heavily on the energy of a photon having specific values, being proportional to the frequency of the radiation or inversely proportional to the wavelength.

When this light, or radiation, travels from one medium to another (like air onto a solid) several things can happen. Light can be transmitted through the medium. It can also be absorbed by the medium or reflected at the interface between the two mediums. The intensity of the light beam that touches the surface of a solid medium must equal the sum of the intensities of the transmitted, absorbed, and reflected beams

There are various ways to describe materials based on how they respond to the light beam touching their surface. Transparent materials can transmit light with relatively little absorption and reflection. Translucent materials allow light to be transmitted diffusely, meaning the light is scattered within the interior so that objects are not distinguishable when viewed through the material. Opaque materials are impervious to the transmission of visible light and are therefore not see-through.

Some types of materials have typical traits regarding how they respond to light. All bulk metals are opaque through the entire visible spectrum meaning that all light radiation is either absorbed or reflected. Metals are opaque to all electromagnetic radiation on the low end of the frequency spectrum. This includes radio, infrared, visible and some ultra violet. However, metals are transparent for high frequency x ray and gamma ray radiation. Due to their opaqueness and high reflectivity, the perceived color of metals is determined by the wavelength distribution of the radiation that is reflected from it, not absorbed into it. Therefore, when a metal is exposed to a white light and it appears bright and silvery, it is a highly reflective metal over the entire range of the visible spectrum. Examples of this would be aluminum and silver. Copper and gold however, are red-orange and yellow in appearance. This occurs since the reflected wavelengths from these metals are the red-orange and yellow wavelengths. Nonmetal materials however, can be transparent in visible light as well as have characteristics of reflection, absorption, refraction, and transmission.

Refraction occurs when the light transmitted into the transparent material experiences a decrease in velocity and is bent at the interface. The index of refraction of a material is defined as the ratio of the velocity in a vacuum to the velocity within the medium. The magnitude of the index of refraction refers to the degree of bending and depends on the wavelength of the light. Due to each color wavelength being deflected by a different amount as the light beam goes into and out of the glass, the colors are separated from the white light in the glass prism.

Reflection occurs when light radiation passes from 1 medium to another with a different index of refraction and some light is scattered at the interface between the two media. This can occur even if both media are transparent. Since the index of refraction of air is almost unity, the higher the index of refraction of the solid, the greater the reflectivity. Reflection losses for lenses and other optical instruments are minimized by coating and reflecting the surface with very thin layers of dielectric materials.

Absorption occurs when a material captures and holds onto the energy from a radiation beam. A photon of light may be absorbed by the promotion or excitation of an electron from the nearly filled valence band across the band photon frequency.

Transmission is considered the fraction of incident light that is transmitted through the transparent material and depends on the losses that are incurred by absorption and reflection.

The color of materials is a direct relation to those wavelengths that the material absorbed. Materials that absorb all of the visible wavelengths will appear colorless such as high purity inorganic glasses, diamonds, crystal, and sapphire.

Opacity and translucency of insulators depends heavily on their internal reflectance and transmittance characteristics. Many of these materials that are intrinsically transparent may be made translucent or opaque due to interior reflection and refraction. The transmitted light beam is deflected in a direction that appears diffuse and multiple scattering events. Opacity results when scattering is so extensive that none of the incident beam is transmitted, undeflected, to the back surface. This internal scattering can result from a few sources

·       Materials with anisotropic index of refractions like polycrystalline specimens

·       Reflection and refraction occurring at grain boundaries due to the difference in index of refraction between the adjacent grains

·       Two phase materials where the beam dispersion occurs across the phase boundaries due to different refraction indexes

·       Pores within fabricated ceramics which effectively scatter light radiation

There are a few other optical properties of importance when evaluating material characteristics. This includes luminescence and photoconductivity which are important reactions that can occur when light reaches the material surface and causes a reaction.

Luminescence is the ability of some materials to absorb energy and reemit a visible light. This occurs due to the reaction between photon and electron energy levels. If the reemission of light occurs within 1 second, the phenomenon is termed fluorescence. If it is longer than 1 second it is then called phosphorescence. Many materials can be made fluorescence or phosphorescence though pure materials typically do not display these phenomena’s.

For photoconductivity, let’s first evaluate the conductivity of semiconducting materials. This conductivity depends on the number of free electrons in the conduction band and the number of available spaces in the valence band. Thermal energy within the lattice vibrations can promote electron excitation when then frees electrons and creates more available spaces within the bands. Photoconductivity occurs when light is absorbed and the conductivity increases within the material due to the photons of the light inducing electron movement and transitions.

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Basic Interest Types and Economic Evaluation

TIL: Interest Types and Economic Evaluations in Engineering

The evaluation of economics for engineers revolves around the relationship between the time value of money and interest rates on money. These relationships are used to define and evaluate project criteria and assist engineers and project managers in choosing the best option on how and where to spend their money.

To decide if a project should be invested in, there are always two alternatives. When there is only one project up for evaluation, the second alternative is “do nothing.” The “do nothing” philosophy is if you cannot receive the minimum rate of return (MARR) on an investment, you should do nothing and keep your investment money. The MARR is generally determined by the company, or the bank, for the interest rate required to invest in the opportunity.

Other interest rates to consider include

·       Simple Interest

·       Compounding Interest

·       Nominal Interest

·       Effective Interest

·       Continuous Interest

Simple Interest – refers to the interest paid on a single amount of money deposited into an account.

Compounding Interest – Refers to when your interest earns interest. In this case, the interest earned in the first period, compounds onto the original amount of money, and that is the new amount calculated for the interest earned on the second period, continuing until the end of the time period of the loan.

Nominal Interest ­– This is the yearly interest rate of the loan even if payments or charges from interest are more often than each year.

Effective Interest – When the interest is charged or paid in increments of time that are not yearly, the effective interest rate is the interest rate charged or earned at each time increment.

Continuous Interest – This is only applicable in situations where the project or company is constantly earning or being charged interest. Typically, this is reserved for banks due to their essentially constant changes in accounts.

Timelines for money spent and earned on a project assist companies to choose the best alternative and visualize the entire cash flow of the project timeline. These timelines are called cash flow diagrams and they account for all of the cash in and out of a project at specified periods of time, typically based on interest periods or yearly cash flows. These timelines are not based on specific dates and include a 0th year. The 0th year reflects the initial cash investment to begin the project.

To evaluate the investment alternatives, companies can use the following financial analysis methods:

·       present worth

·       annual worth

·       future worth

Present worth ­– This method takes the entire cash flow of a project, including the future expected cash flows, and sums them into a present dollar amount. This method can be done at any point in the timeline of the project.

Annual worth – This method determines an equal amount paid or earned at each interest period of the project. It is representative of a uniform payment or earned amount that would occur for every interest period that is equivalent to the entire cash flow of the project.

Future worth – This method allows for the evaluation of the entire cash flow at any future point in time.

There are additional evaluation types and economic considerations that are involved in determining the best alternative. These topics will be covered in the near future. These initial, basic, concepts are necessary to understand the more involved alternative analysis.

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TIL: USED NUCLEAR FUEL STORAGE OPTIONS (USA)

Used nuclear fuel (UNF) is currently stored at each active, and some inactive, nuclear power plants in what is called dry cask storage. This storage system is essentially a concrete area where canisters of UNF sit, safely, waiting for a permanent solution.

The storage method for used nuclear fuel at independent sites consists in three parts.

·       UNF Welded Canister

·       UNF Transfer Cask

·       UNF Storage Cask

The welded canister contains the fuel directly. The transfer cask allows for the UNF to be transferred from the nuclear plant spent fuel pool to the outside storage area. In the outside storage area, the welded canister is loaded into the UNF storage cask. Currently, these storage solutions are the only available area for UNF to be stored in the United States.

In 1954, the US Government accepted responsibility for offering a permanent solution for UNF storage. In 1987 congress chose Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the location for this federal repository. However, Yucca Mountain has not been built and was actually shut down by the Obama administration. Although Yucca Mountain has been stopped, the federal government is still responsible for providing a permanent storage solution for UNF and nuclear plants are currently running out of space for dry cask storage. With this responsibility, and no current solution, a two companies have proposed solutions for NRC approval for centralized repositories of UNF that once built and being used, the US Government can potentially take over.

Option 1

Orano, previously Areva, who owns the Yucca Mountain project under contract with the federal government, has proposed a “consolidated interim storage facility” (CISF). The CISF is listed under a secondary company in conjunction with Waste Control Specialists that is named Interim Storage Partners (ISP). ISP, owned by Orano and Waste Control Specialists, submitted their CISF design to the NRC in 2018. The CISF will be located at an existing Waste Control Specialists owned site in Andres County, Texas. The CISF is working towards a 40-year license to store UNF with the potential limit of 40,000 metric tons of UNF. This construction will be an above ground processing and storage facility specifically for the UNF currently sitting at decommissioned nuclear power plants in the US. Currently, there are 13 decommissioned plants around the US that has UNF stored on site. While this facility will allow for that UNF to be consolidated into one location, there is still be a need for a federal repository. This CISF will also allow the Orano team to design a repackaging facility for the UNF to be used during the Yucca Mountain/Federal repository contract once that site starts accepting UNF as it will require that all storage fuel be in the same type of storage canister.

Option 2

There is a second option for a CISF under review by the NRC proposed by Holtec International (HI). This facility is planned to be located in New Mexico and is currently referenced as HI-STORE CIS. In February 2018, HI was permitted a preliminary schedule by the NRC directing that the license will be active for this site in July 2020. The overall design of HI-STORE CIS is an underground storage solution that will also use the underground thermal energy to purify water for New Mexico while the UNF waits for a federal repository. HI-STORE CIS is anticipated to be able to store all canister types, both vertical and horizontal. Additionally, HI-STORE CIS will be capable of storing up to 8680 metric tons of UNF and desired to become the first licensed effort to fulfill the Department of Energy’s consolidated interim storage facility.

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TIL: Types of Optical Fibers

Optical fibers are thin fibers used to send light signals between systems. Fiber optic cable is used in communication equipment and patch panels in order to provide a physical connection within a network or device. They can transmit voice, video, and data between locations where speed and accuracy are both important and where distance between locations can cause a challenge. Fiber optic cables supersede metal cables due to the density of information that can be transmitted per unit of time. Additionally, these cables allow for longer transmission distances with low power loss.

Fiber optic cables consist of the following five major components:

·       Core

·       Cladding

·       Coating

·       Strengthening fibers

·       Cable jacket

Cores can be made from glass or plastic. The light is guided through the core allowing for the transmission of data between locations.

Cladding prevents the light from escaping the core and being absorbed by the cable or surrounding area.

Coating protects the core and cladding with increased strength properties.

Strength member provides protection from damages incurred by stress on the cable.

Outer jacket is the final area of protection for the cable and is typically colored to assist the end user of the cable.

This basic design is used for all optical fiber cables. However, there are various types of optical fibers that the end user can choose from based on the requirements of the system being designed.

Four major types of optical fibers are:

·       Single Mode (SM)

·       Multimode (MM)

·       Polarization-Maintaining (PM)

·       Doped Fiber

Single Mode

Single mode fibers contain one mode and have a core size of 2-9 microns. This fiber type requires a laser source for input signals due to the size of the entrance aperture and light travels along the axis of the fiber.

Multimode

Multimode fibers can transmit or emit multiple modes of light. Typical core size for this type of fiber is either 62.5. microns or 50 microns. This fiber type allows for approximately 1000 modes through its core. In this fiber, light can travel along the axis of the fiber or reflect into the core-cladding boundary.

Polarization-Maintaining

Polarization-maintaining fiber polarizes the light through the fiber. Generally, stress is placed in the core through rods in the cladding of the cable. This stress aligns the fiber and light into a specific polarization. This fiber type is a special type of single mode fiber that can carry any one type of polarized light.

Doped Fiber

Doped fiber use an additional material within the core to change its optical properties and amplify an optical signal. Various materials can be used to create a doped single mode, multimode, or polarization-maintaining fiber. Typical materials used to create doped fiber include erbium and ytterbium. Erbium-doped fibers are used for erbium-doped fiber amplifiers while ytterbium-dopes fibers are used for high power fiber lasers and amplifiers.

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Hello Tumblr!

This is the introduction to TA.TIL.

TA.TIL is my way of making sure I’m doing daily research, continuously learning, and challenging myself in a new way. TA.TIL is how I plan to share interesting tidbits and facts with anyone willing to listen (read). I aspire to spark curiosity in readers with blog posts regarding a wide range of topics. I also strive to make the traditionally complex topics fun and easy to comprehend and values making sure people not only have access to information but that they can also understand the information being provided.

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