Viewpoint
Engineers often need help when they make the transition to management positions, says Neil Lewin of Festo Training & Consulting
There’s a lie that goes on in the workplace – and it’s one that is continuously perpetuated by our organisational hierarchy. The only way to progress your career is to move up from technical roles to management.
We need to ask ourselves why we have this belief. Surely, this just devalues our excellent and technically capable employees? Equally, the skills required by people managers are totally different to technical expertise. A recent survey by Festo shows that technical employees are the least likely to perform well in interpersonal skills and have self-confidence.
In this country, we afford status to those who have ‘manager’ in their job title. By our very nature, this lessens others who keep the engine of the organisation running. And it’s time that we stopped. We need to remove the ‘them’ and ‘us’ conversations that go on in the boardroom and on the shop floor. We need to give equal value to people in different roles and places in our companies. And when we identify someone who does have the well-rounded skills in place to become a manager, then we need to support them in this transition.
The other issue is one that we all face and that’s the skills gap. When we promote people out of, and above, their area of expertise, we frequently lose their knowledge. While they might appreciate the additional remuneration, unless they have a highly qualified successor in place, the impact will be felt on that team and department.
Let’s look at some of the common issues faced by people in their first management role:
- Over-reliance on their expertise. New managers often find it difficult to stop being the ‘technical expert’. They become frustrated when their team isn’t working as quickly or effectively as they can. Managers in this position will revert to ‘telling’ people what to do, rather than asking them how they would solve the problem. Their frustration will become palpable and the team will eventually stop thinking for themselves and disengage
”A common mistake is for new managers to feel that they have to know everything. An effective people manager is open to ideas and contributions from all members of the team
- Having all the answers: A common mistake is for new managers to feel that they have to know everything. An effective people manager is open to ideas and contributions from all members of the team. It’s important not to dismiss any suggestions or feedback and encourage a two-way, constructive discussion.
- Dealing with difficult conversations: This might be addressing poor performance or behaviour, or just handling a team member’s personal issues. Having difficult conversations and managing performance is a stress-point for managers. They need to be supported in terms of understanding their legal obligations, as well as listening to, and understanding, the underlying causes of behaviour.
- Knowing when to back off: Over-management is a cause of low levels of employee engagement. An effective people manager allows their team members to get on with their jobs. Of course, they’ll need to be on hand but there’s a good chance that people will perform to a higher level if they believe their manager has faith and confidence in their ability.
- Getting stuck in: When a team has to meet tough deadlines, then an extra pair of hands will be appreciated. This doesn’t mean that a manager gets bogged down in the day-to-day work, but that they are sensitive to the pressure and needs of their people.
- Taking tough decisions: Management roles have responsibility. They are the link between the organisation and the employees. This means tough decisions will need to be made that can impact their people. All managers should have a strategy in place to identify issues and negotiate a balanced, swift and lasting resolution, if the need arises.
- Communication: A shortfall of many managers is understanding how and when to communicate. This is not just sending out mass emails, it’s about engaging with the team as a whole and individuals to get the message across. Equally, communication is rarely employed when there is good news to shout about.
- Reward and recognition: People join an organisation but leave a boss, or so the old adage goes. We often think that people are motivated purely by financial rewards, but it has been found that, while these are important, recognition is just as vital.
- One eye on the future: New managers often find themselves handling the here and now, and dealing with the problems of yesterday. Good managers should always keep one eye on the future to be able to predict and influence people and company decisions.
”While an individual will likely be anxious, they will often be reticent to admit that they’re nervous or concerned about their ability
Taking on a first management position is stressful. While an individual will likely be anxious, they will often be reticent to admit that they’re nervous or concerned about their ability. That’s exactly why they need support. Don’t wait for new managers to ask for help, by then it will be too late. Put in place a training programme and transition support so that they feel more secure and confident in their position. It’s worth it, as the business will reap the rewards of good managers for years to come.
Neil is a learning and development consultant at Festo Training and Consulting
No one surely questions Neil Lewin’s comments: all good stuff, albeit perhaps a stating of the obvious. Obvious that is to any and all who have suffered from bad management.
In my youth, I did attend some military training. “There are no bad armies, only bad officers.” was one comment I recall: and a second. ” there is little point turning a first-class non-commissioned officer into a third rate officer.” The service loses twice.
I have to say that in my experience and at least four experiences, particularly in so-called Higher Education, promoting a terrible teacher, lousy lecturer or a second-rate researcher to try to manage colleagues is all to common and just as wasteful. perhaps that is why so-called Higher education is actually the shambles it is.
Engineers have three options (in some companies two):
1. Stay as engineers
2. Move into group technical staff
3. Functional management
1. You will hit a promotion and pay wall.
2. Is relatively new. Most companies do not offer this yet. Some that do still limit the promotion capability. You are a manager but in a more technical role.
3. The original route to promotion.
I have yet to see any company that offers routes to engineers above the pure engineering pay grades. The amount of management increases right from the day you cease to be a graduate.
Isn’t it time that the engineering world recognised that engineering and managing are two different skill sets, and stop wasting good engineers (a rare breed) in a role they are not suited to. There are companies that can manage to recognise this and have parallel career paths so that the engineers can progress to as high a salary level as the managers but keep doing what they are good at.
Richard C describes what was a well developed route to retain good scientists in research, who neither wished to nor were good at managing others, at a well-known pharmaceutical company based in the N West. It seemed to work well: that is until HR got into the act and covered everything in procedures, systems, career progression advancement scenarios? removing the initiative, inventiveness, skill, plain common sense that had applied before. Perhaps that is why this firm was recently the target of a take-over: and has now decided to move its Head Office to Cambridge. Cost £850 million, benefits-£? (perhaps -)
Mike B
It was Winston Churchill who famously remarked that engineers should be on tap and not on top. There is a prevailing attitude in British society today that techies do not rule. This probably had its origin when this country was ruled by aristocracy who were uninterested in anything technical.
In the past most engineers started as engineers and only later in their career did they move up to management. An increasing number of companies since the Millennium do not want purely technically minded youngsters starting out in engineering but are looking for signs of leadership experience even at the tender age of just 21 when a sizeable proportion have never had the time or opportunity to lead or manage anything. People develop at a different rate in different things, and for some, their leadership traits flourish in later life when they have the desire and the confidence to be a leader.
To put things very bluntly, if companies wanted youngsters with strong leadership traits then they should look no further than the gang leaders of yobs and thugs from the nation’s roughest council estates. They may be unintelligent and barely literate but they are assertive and can manage people unlike the introverted middle class suburbanites who spend their time studying for A Levels and working on open source software projects.
Riaz makes a fascinating point (though why am I thinking of “West Side Story”?) when he suggests the source of leaders. [I do recall a master at my school who had served in the Army during WWII telling me that he always looked for recruits to promote to non-commissioned-officers from those just released from the ‘glass-house’ after punishment!
Is it the case that like teachers, there are those who can lead and those who cannot, and no matter how many courses you send them on….?
Here is an example of reverse psychology: I am repeating a story from Hans Helmut Kirst [Night of the Generals, Gunner Ashe, etc : who served in the Wehrmacht -he had no choice] who always described himself as ‘the last civilian’ in the Reich.
Officer recruits into the German Army started with basic training just like all. In any group of recruits, members of any platoon/group quickly establishes its own ‘pecking-order’ and those who are not as good as others know it (*). Those who are better know it too.
But here’s the clever bit. The instructors then split the platoon into two: group A and group B. The recruits are told that that this is purely administrative. But group A has the pole position on parade, gets the best time-table ‘slots’ ,any extra rations going, best instructors…you get the idea…and yet it is the recruits who are of a lower standard who are put in Group A(*).
These recognise: “the Army has made a mistake. I know that I am not as good as the others, but for once, the mistake is in my favour! I will work doubly hard to stay in Group A.
Those in Group B recognise “the army has made a mistake, we are better than those slobs in “A” -we will have to work really hard to show the instructors their error! “
How subtle. “There are no bad armies, only bad officers.” Take that one step further,
“there are no poor work-forces, only poor management?” “there are no poor students, only poor lecturers?”
“Is it the case that like teachers, there are those who can lead and those who cannot, and no matter how many courses you send them on….?”
It could well be the case. A discussion was held at my local Asperger syndrome support group about whether people really are born equal or whether they are born with different strengths and weaknesses. For example, are some people natural mathematicians or sportsmen, and others, never will be no matter how hard they train? A reference was made to different breeds of dogs having different physical and psychological traits yet they are all Canis lupus familiaris and can be interbred with each other, and whether humans really are no different. The discussion then moved onto state schools with its ‘one size to fit all one size will fail many’ National Curriculum based around the government’s definition of an average child, and whether children who fail or perform badly at school really are failures or are most of them are not but simply do not fit through the narrow window of the school system. Many children who have abandoned or been expelled from school because of incompatibilities academically or socially have flourished and succeeded elsewhere. In some cases they have managed to achieve GCSEs and A Levels as private candidates at a much younger age than if they had stayed in school. Is school actually a test of endurance or a (rather crude) method to whittle down the numbers of people who are deemed both by themselves and society to be successful more than anything else? Is genetics really where state imposed equality measures fall down? Are different genetic traits in humans the key to why Communism is doomed to fail because it is designed around an assumption that people are all born equal and can be shaped and moulded by the state?
“There are no bad armies, only bad officers.” Take that one step further,
“there are no poor work-forces, only poor management?”
Could that be said about the failure of British Leyland and the success of Jaguar Land Rover? JLR is effectively the successor of BL and has rights to the Rover brand but doesn’t currently use it. The official accepted theory for the failure of BL was the trade unions and the lazy bolshie workers during the 1970s but the public finds it hard to come up with a satisfactory theory explaining the success of JLR. Could management rather than the workers be the prominent reasons for failure of BL and success of JLR?
“there are no poor students, only poor lecturers?”
Mr Miyagi out of The Karate Kid.
I’d say that the UK has in general quite poor management in my experience, hence the number of foreign companies that do well.
To me it’s because the people who are in charge are those who couldn’t cope technically and thus spend all their time scheming and brown-nosing instead of doing their jobs. They tend to escape their disasters before they explode.
The little boys club likes to sit around sniggering about how they got one up on the clever types and they spout all sorts of nonsense about how technical types have no people skills pretty much to cover the fact that they have no skills themselves other than how to have a pint with their own boss and laugh at his jokes. Oh, and how to take credit for other people’s 18 hour days.
A manager who isn’t better, technically, than those he or she leads is a janitor, not a leader. Take Kelly Johnson at the Lockheed Skunkwords for example.
V glad that my first comments have elucidated several others. Isn’t that what academic debate and rigor requires?
Motivation of one’s colleagues -above and below- in any system is surely the key.
Arran’s comment about Communism? Even the founders of that attempt at a different state? recognised differences in ability. My thesis is that any and every society where everyone is a civil-servant (ie paid by and answerable to the state) must fail. Yes, you can struggle on for a time if you have boundless raw-materials …but its value added (not just profit) which creates wealth, in an international trading world. And I have yet to meet a civil servant (or indeed any of the conflict groups) who could spell value-added, let alone exhibit it.
I read some articles last year about companies that don’t have managers at all and manage to thrive (such as Valve), which set me thinking about it. Having worked for several companies over the years, I can count on one hand the number of managers that *really* brought people together and were fantastic to work for. The managers for which the opposite is true were much more numerous. Interestingly I think the “best” ones were notionally non-technical in background, but were prepared to listen and learn from the technical side and took all the non-engineering pressure off the engineers so they could purely concentrate on what they needed to do.
My conclusions were that, if you had a really good team of engineers in more of a development environment then managers really aren’t necessary. The more it leans towards a manufacturing or production environment and the calibre of the engineer perhaps lessens, then a decent manager can make up the difference. But a poor manager is worse than nothing at all. And those are the ones that don’t think they have anything to learn.
HR is a different story, although there are certain parallels.