Engineer to Technical Manager
#83-2/9/09-The Young Are Restless
The Young Are Restless!
“Young People Want Everything Now!”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, February 9, 2009
Hello everyone!
Is it a bad rap?
I often hear managers and training departments in corporations complain about how young people don’t want to wait for their career advancement.
They want to get pay raises after 6 months. They want to be managers 1 year after graduating from college. They don’t want to work 5, 6, or 7 years in one position to earn the “right” to be promoted to the next career level.
This last weekend, in my class I heard it again. One young person said that after joining a company, they found that they were given more and more work, and working longer and longer hours. They were also doing the same work as others who were getting paid much more and who had been with the company many more years. When this person asked for a raise, the manager said “No”. The person subsequently left the company.
Another young person told me that even though they had not yet graduated from college (they would soon) and even though they had been an intern with a large company for several summers, they wanted to be a manager upon graduation. They didn’t want to wait the seemingly standard period before promotion to management...7 years as an engineer.
Equal pay for equal work.
For most of my career I have believed that equal pay should be given for equal work. Although, during my career, I was usually focused on equal pay for women who were doing work equivalent to that of men, my first response to young people who want equal pay for equal work has been to agree with the young people.
And yet, this weekend, when I heard my students talking about their perceptions, their expectations, and their experiences, while I initially responded that it was reasonable to expect equal pay for equal work, on the way home, what I had said just didn’t seem to sit well with me. Did I really believe that equal pay for equal work was always the correct yard-stick? My head said “yes”, but my gut said “no”. I felt that it was more complicated than that.
Here’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
You see, when the baby boomers began their careers, most of them began as “employees” of companies. They even expected to stay employees for most of their career. They expected to get health benefits, paid vacations, and even fixed benefit retirement plans. AND they expected to “work their way” up the organization.
You see, “in those days”, when an organization hired an employee there was an unwritten agreement that the company would do it’s best to keep the employee. That might mean that you might be moved around a little and that you’d do jobs you might not be perfect for, but in return, you’d do the work, you’d gain experience and that experience would actually come in handy over the long haul because you’d be even more flexible and capable of doing other jobs.
And then along came… technology.
The last generation to feel this way and to have this unspoken agreement with the company was the baby boomer generation.
With their children everything began to change. You see, technology began to put a lot of the “organization” into the hands of individuals. For baby boomers there were secretaries who wrote memos. For their children, they wrote their own memos. And so it went, on and on.
The upshot of this gigantic shift was that work became something that could be “packaged” into much smaller and smaller, quantifiable packets. With the emergence of the global economy this trend only accelerated.
At this point, equal pay for equal work took on a very new meaning. If I could pack my task into a tight, neat package, and define it well enough, I could send it to a variety of workers and now experience wouldn’t matter. The only question that mattered would be, “Can they do the job?”. Experience didn’t really matter. Knowing who was doing the work didn’t even matter.
It didn’t matter if the person doing the work was a 12-year-old kid working in her bedroom after her parents thought she was asleep. Experience just didn’t matter… only competence at doing the job at hand.
Thus emerged the profound and newly defined category of “contract worker”.
But not the contract worker of old. A contract worker who was told they could be “independent of the man” (i.e., the corporate boss).The flip side of course is that if you are not beholding to the corporation, then the corporation doesn’t owe the contract worker anything in return.
So where do we go from here?
Corporations and baby boomers and older employees (in general) still accept that companies hire “employees” and when you are an employee, experience matters.
The children of baby boomers and all those children right up to those born today, have been raised, without any of us or them realizing it, to believe that contract labor is the way all people are being judged
Here comes the class!
So now we’ve got young people who have been raised on “only performance matters”. Experience doesn’t matter.
These young people are entering a “corporate” and business structure (in most, but not all, cases) where performance is only part of the equation of success.
Is it any wonder that we have a clash?
If you want to read more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine/Newsletter at: Steven’s February 9, 2009 Newsletter
Be well,
Steven Cerri
P.S. By the way. If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software. Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment. I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere.
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 02/10 at 07:30 PM Coaching • Engineer to Technical Manager • Leadership • Engineering Leadership • Management • Engineering Management • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#79-1/12/09-Trust Your Experiences
Trust Your Experiences
“How do you recognize good management advice?”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, January 12, 2009
Hello everyone!
“Who do you trust and what is the truth in management?”
This last week I was reading some of the blogs on the people skills necessary for successful management. One blog, in particular, caught my eye. It had to do with “behaviors” that are necessary for a good manager.
Some of the behaviors put forth by the author included things like these soft skills:
1. When you are managing, never show your emotions.
2. When you are managing, never raise your voice. Always have a calm voice. If you get frustrated you can scream into a pillow in your office.
3. Always have a smile on your face.
4. Walk around and talk to your direct reports. Ask them how they are doing and give them suggestions on how they can do their job better.
These were just a few of the “best practices” that this author put forward regarding how to behave if you want to be a good manager. The author had been a manager for five years and wanted to share what he had learned.
Fair enough.
What I find interesting is this; “How is a new manager who is reading this information, to use and apply these suggestions and to know which suggestions are true and which are false?
But wait… the truth!
How do you know that the information put forth is accurate? Is there any way that you might know if 5 years as manager is enough to give authoritative knowledge? Is the equivalent of two years of engineering school enough to allow someone to sign off on the design of a bridge or analyze the orbital velocity requirements for rendezvous with the International Space Station?
Actually there is a way to know.
In our own personal experience we know what works for management and what doesn’t. In our own personal experience we have a sense of what good managers do and what bad managers do or don’t do.
And yet, many, many people choose to discount their own personal experience in order to follow the “leader”. They discount what they know in their gut to be true, because the “leader” says that something else is true, instead. And yet, we know it’s not.
So lets take some of those “gems” put forth on the blog post and see if they align with our personal experience.
When you are managing, never show your emotions.
My experience: Not true.
It’s not a question of showing emotions, its a question of what emotions you do show and the degree to which you do so. It’s not very useful to be a tyrant and yell at people and insult them in public. But it’s certainly useful to show compassion, and determination, and even sternness, and maybe levity, politeness, and at times frustration, disappointment, and even anger. It’s impossible to not show emotions. The key is to show the right ones and at the appropriate level. (I could write a book on this.)
When you are managing, never raise your voice. Always have a calm voice. If you get frustrated you can scream into a pillow in your office.
My experience: Half true, half not true.
Never raise your voice… well it depends. I have had direct reports with whom I would never raise my voice. And I’ve had direct reports with whom a good, hearty, give-and-take, with raised voices and even yelling was the only way to build the rapport and connection that the direct report (and I for that matter) wanted. To be always calm with this direct report would have actually adversely affected our professional relationship.
And the idea of always having a calm voice… come on. Have you ever been really upset and in need of help? So you called a customer service representative and the person at the other end of the line sounded as if they were as calm as could be. What was your response?
I know that my response has been to be annoyed with them. They were too calm. They didn’t understand that my situation was important.
Always being calm is nearly as bad as always yelling, almost.
And yes, if you are going to go off on someone… go scream into a pillow until you calm down.
Always have smile on your face.
My experience: Not true.
First, have you ever been around someone who always has a smile on their face? Have you ever thought to yourself, “What are they doing… always with a smile on their face. It can’t be real.” And often it’s not real.
No one wants to be around a doom and gloom person (except other doom and gloom people) but it’s important to be authentic and yet appropriate.
So rules like “always have a smile on your face” are just not useful. A better suggestion is to always be appropriate and effective in any given situation so that you and the team can achieve your/their desired outcome. (This is a topic for another book).
Now the important point about my comments is this; the suggestions put in the blog I read were a decent attempt to quantify behaviors that would make a manager a good manager.
However, management is not a simple process. It is not given to quick and simple rules. In engineering, F=ma. The laws of physics are clear, stable, repeatable. Unfortunately or fortunately, management doesn’t have similarly clear, stable, repeatable rules. The biggest rule in management is “it depends.” The best way to know if what someone is telling you is true, is to match it to your experience. And if you have no experience in a specific are, then take it “one-step-at-a-time”.
With respect to every suggested soft skill behavior I listed from the blog, we all have personal experiences that contradict what was suggested.
We all know of times when emotion displayed by our managers was just what we wanted to see, hear, and experience. Therefore, when to display what emotion is context dependent. It depends.
We all have experiences when we didn’t want our managers to display a smile. We want to be able to “read” our managers by hearing the tone of their voice. We don’t want them to be smiling when they are laying people off. Once again, it depends.
And, there are times when we certainly don’t want our managers to come around talking to us, looking over our shoulders and giving us suggestions about how we can do things better. There are times when we will welcome the advice and other times when we’ll probably consider it micromanagement. So once again it depends.
The bottom line is...
So the bottom line is this. Management, leadership, even contributing your maximum to your organization is not something you learn in five years of on-the-job training. (How long was the intense training your received for your engineering degree?)
It’s also not something you learn from a simple set of rules.
In basic terms…
Engineering is about knowledge; Management is about judgment.
Engineering is about rules; Management is about context.
Engineering is an application of knowledge in search of certainty; Management is the application of judgment in search of an outcome.
Very different worlds.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
By the way. If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software. Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment. I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere.
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 01/12 at 11:15 PM Engineer to Technical Manager • Becoming a manager • Technical Manager • Leadership • Engineering Leadership • Management • Engineering Management • Management for engineers • Inter-Personal People Skills • Soft Skills for engineers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#78-1/5/09-Choice Is A Myth!
Choice Is A Myth!
“Do you really choose anything?”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, January 5, 2009
Hello everyone!
As an engineer or engineering manager, how much of what you do is your choice?
As an engineer or engineering manager how much of what your colleagues do is their choice?
As an engineering manager, how much of the behavior of your direct reports is their choice?
Most people would answer that people are always choosing their behaviors. Right? How can it be any other way? We each choose our behaviors.
Well, as you are probably well aware, we have now entered the era of brain scanning and we can now answer these questions with data-supported statements; and it seems the answer to all three questions is an emphatic… NOT AS MUCH AS YOU MIGHT THINK!
In fact, not much at all.
Martin Lindstrom, a marketing expert, kept noticing contradictions between what people “said” they did and what they actually did when it came to making a buying choice. People told Martin they bought “Product X” for this or that reason but they also behaved in ways that seemed to refute their explanations. Martin wasn’t convinced.
So Martin embarked on a grand scientific study to determine, with real data, what was the truth.
Martin conducted a scientific research project to determine if our “buy decisions” have predictability and similarity to anything else we do, and if that predictability can be measured using the latest brain scan equipment. He wondered if our buy decisions really were structured as we explained or was there something else going on under our conscious awareness that was different from our explanations? The reason this question is so important in advertising is that much of advertising doesn’t work. So if it doesn’t work, why? And when it does work, why? (This research has important implications for management and leadership, as well.)
Martin got grants for millions of dollars, enlisted doctors and subjects, and employed two very sophisticated brain scanning systems, an fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and an SST (which is an advanced version of the electroencephalograph).
He was on a quest to determine the “honesty” of peoples’ buying explanations and the “real” mechanisms by which people decide to buy what they decide to buy.
What Martin found was that people haven’t a clue why they do things (and I’m not exaggerating his words). Whatever people “think” are their motivations, they’re usually wrong! They can’t explain their motives and therefore, they can’t explain their actions. The intellect doesn’t know, in most cases, a person’s true motives. To put it in the frame of art and literature, “The mind does not know the heart”.
It is for this reason that I don’t place much stock in books that purport to teach management by recounting the motives and actions of previously successful executives. When an executive or manager attempts to explain his or her motives for their actions, it’s always been my position, and now I even have Martin’s scientific data to back me up, that people don’t have a clue as to their true motivations. Books touting how certain managers or executives explain “why” they did something are therefore, often hollow at best and misleading at worst. Historically, people can tell us “what” they did. Seldom can they truly tell us “why” they did it.
Some people don’t need an fMRI or an SST to uncover why people do what they do. You’ve seen them. They’re the people who seem to lead naturally. They seem to have the ability to influence without trying.
What are they doing? How do they do it?
The key is that before there were fMRIs and SSTs, human beings had the ability to “read” other people so that signficant and elegant influence was possible. It’s what I call “Effective Conversational Management and Leadership”. The fMRI and SST used by Martin are designed to access brain activities in real time. Similarly, Effective Conversational Management and Leadership is designed to manage and lead individuals and teams “in real time”.
The information necessary for effective management and leadership is in the moment, with the direct report, with the team. (This is also why I’m not a fan of personality tests and surveys.) There are ways to “read” and “understand” motives. It doesn’t take brain scans, (although they can be very accurate and useful when scientific, reproducible data is desired); it takes an understanding of the human process. Great leaders know this. Great influences understand this.
If you’re interested in this topic you can check out the book. I highly recommend it. It’s titled: “buy-ology; Truth and Lies About Why We Buy”. And I would add, “Truth and Lies About Why We Do What We Do”. The book is written by Martin Lindstrom. Check it out. It’s a good read. (Click here to go to Amazon.com to purchase the book.)
Be well,
Steven Cerri
By the way. If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software. Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment. I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere.
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 01/05 at 02:41 PM Engineer to Technical Manager • Leadership • Management • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
