Becoming a manager
#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
#10-10-12-06: Management Myths
Management Myths
Part-time technical and part-time manager
Posted by Steven Cerri on Thursday, October 12, 2006
Good evening!
As I indicated in my previous blog, I taught a class this week on being a technical professional and technical manager at the same time. This is usually the situation that arises when a technical person is first promoted to management. They are promoted to a position that is part-time technical and part-time manager. During the class I taught, we discussed how and why a technical person is promoted to this “schizophrenic” situation; a situation in which they have to shift from technical to manager and back and forth and back and forth. It seems pretty difficult to be both at the same time and yet this condition seems to occur with regularity.
So I thought this would be a good time to discuss the thinking process that managers go through when they promote their best technical people to part-time manager and part-time technical individual contributor.
The first point I want to make is that very, very rarely does a full-time technical person get promoted to a position of full-time technical manager, and for good reason. Experience counts for something. Judgment is important. It’s very risky to take someone who has not done management work and promote them to full-time manager. So it makes sense that a technical person will be given management responsibilities in a piecemeal approach. It’s more like a proof of concept process.
However, the issue is that it’s usually a proof of concept without adequate training. Most technical professionals get very little if any training before they are given their first management assignment. And for this reason, most technical professionals who get their first promotion to part-time manager have a very difficult time.
It’s not uncommon for a person who is 50% technical person and 50% technical manager (i.e., it might be a team lead position, or manager of a small project with one or two people) to get frustrated because the team he or she is managing isn’t delivering their tasks on time or in budget. The new manager is often trying not to look like a “micro-manager” and yet by taking such a “hands-off” approach, the tasks aren’t getting done. This was exactly the situation facing one of the students in this week’s class.
So let’s talk first about how the best technical professionals get promoted to this position of part-time technical and part-time manager usually without adequate training. Why would a manager pick the best technical person and promote them out of the job they do so well into a new job without training them?”
From the manager’s point of view, the best technical employee may seem to get their work done very quickly and effectively, and therefore, may have something to teach other employees. But most of the time, the reason the manager picks the best technical person is because the manager certainly can’t pick the worst technical person to manage technical people who are more competent.
So once the best technical person is targeted for promotion to part-time manager, the manager has to justify the selection. The rationale for the selection process is comprised of several myths. I call these myths, “The Myths of Early Management Selection”.
Myth #1
The first Myth is what I call: “Good Technical Job: Why Not Manage?” The thought here is that “if you can do your technical work well you can obviously manage people doing the same or similar work.” Underlying this myth is the belief that you can manage a small team or a small project because managing people doing the same work you do is easy.” It is, isn’t it? This myth completely ignores the fact that your technical work and the management job are completely different disciplines.
Myth #2
The second Myth is what I call “Osmosis”. This myth says “Don’t worry. Just hang out and assist a good manager in the company and you’ll learn what you need to learn from that manager.” The unfortunate part about this myth is that while you may well learn some good practices you’ll also pick up all the weaknesses and faults of your teaching manager. Myth #2 produces a series of managers that all have the same strengths and the same weaknesses.
Myth #3
The third Myth #3 is what I call, “Trial by fire”. It translates into a philosophy which is something like, just jump in there and do the management job. It’s a “sink or swim” approach. It’s similar to throwing a child who can’t swim off the deep end of the pool expecting them to dog paddle their way to the edge of the pool and thereby, gain the ability to swim. Or maybe it’s like putting a novice in the left seat of an airliner and expecting them to fly you from San Francisco to New York safely. By any stretch of the imagination, Myth #3 is a looser.
The point I’m driving home is that none of these myths include management training. They are based on the basic assumption that technical management, at least in the early stages, is a no-brainer. It’s easy. It’s obvious.
The reality is that technical people haven’t taken any training to speak of by the time they have graduated from college. They’ve focused most, if not all their time, on their technical work.
And the necessary training I’m talking about is not training in Microsoft Project, or in budgets, or schedules. I’m talking about the skills of
Communication;
Motivation;
Conflict Resolution;
Delegation;
Management Style Selction;
Personal Flexibility
and other inter-personal skills that make the difference between success and failure.
Before taking your first step up the technology management ladder, get some preparation in the inter-personal skills that truly make a manager a manager.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Posted by Steven Cerri on 10/12 at 06:49 PM Engineer to Technical Manager • Becoming a manager • Management • Engineering Management • Management for engineers • Management for technologists • Technical Management • Inter-Personal People Skills • (0) Comments • Permalink
#5-09-25-06: To Be A Manager
So You Want To Be A Manager
How Does A Technical Person Get Promoted To Manager?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, September 25, 2006
Hello everyone!
If you’re currently a technical professional and you’re thinking about going into management, it’s important that you be aware that your transition to management isn’t going to be an overnight process. You’re not going to go to bed one night as a technical professional and wake up the next morning as a technical manager. But you knew that, right? What you probably didn’t know is that it can be a very slow OR a relatively fast process. And it most certainly won’t be orderly because your boss or your company probably won’t prepare you well for the transition.
I’ve seen a lot of technical people get selected for management and so I’m going to tell you one of the likely scenarios you might experience.
First and foremost, most managers, and here I’m speaking of your manager; most managers don’t really understand management as a discipline. (I know, it sounds like a ridiculous statement, but all I can do is ask you to consider how competent you believe the managers are that you’ve met? Most of you will say, “not very”.) This is because most managers think that management is a no-brainer, or at the very least, it’s not a very rigorous discipline. Therefore, if you do your engineering work well, and you seem readily capable of talking to people, your manager will think that because you can do your technical work well you can manage other people doing the same or similar work.
That’s right. Most technical professionals who do a very good job at their technical work are “assumed” to be competent to manage a team of people doing the same or similar work. You manager is thinking something like this: “Well John (or Betty) is a really good engineer. He really seems to know his stuff when it comes to the technology. And he seems to be a nice enough person. He seems to communicate well enough with other people. Most people like him. He doesn’t seem to raise his voice or get into verbal disputes. He can probably manage one or two people doing similar work to what he has been doing. I’ll just give him a simple management task with a few people to manage and see how he works out.”
That’s it. That’s how you get selected for management. There is usually no more preparation than that. As you will probably notice from this scenario, you’ve been selected for a relatively small project. That’s reasonable. You’re not going to be selected to be a full-time manager without significant experience. However, the key here is that you will often be selected for your first management position without being given sufficient training. You’ll be seen as a good technical person. You’ll be seen as someone without significant inter-social faults. You’ll be asked (usually) if you want to be a manager and most of the time the response is “sure”. And that will be it.
Now once in a while a good technical person is selected to manage a small project and they are given some training in preparation for this new responsibility. The training will often come in the form of one or more of the following classes: corporate human resources/personnel policies; project management; budgeting and scheduling; good listening skills. While these classes regarding the “doing” of management at your company are useful, they are not what you need as a new manager. Primarily what you need as a new manager is a way to understand how to make the transition from individual contributor, the “doer” part to the motivator, the “doer doing less and motivating others to do”.
As an individual contributor you got your rewards from the doing. As a manager, you will get part or all of your rewards from what others are doing. This is the shift you want to make. This is what you want to learn about. This is what will make or break your transition.
I want to point out one more major dilemma in this early stage transition, and that is you will have “one foot” in the management world and “one foot” in the individual contributor world. That is, you won’t be a full-time manager and you won’t be a full-time individual contributor either. This is a very difficult situation to be in but unfortunately, we all have to go through it. There seems to be no other way to get from technical professional to manager. At some point in the early days of our transition process, we all have to be part-time manager and part-time technical professional. You will have to “change hats” frequently from manager to individual contributor and back and forth and this will definitely get confusing and it will be a challenge… I can guarantee it. But frankly, there isn’t any other way. You won’t have sufficient experience to be a full-time manager so you’ll have to make it a part-time gig. And about half of you will not succeed.
You won’t succeed because you never wanted management in the first place. If you had wanted management you certainly wouldn’t have studied all those years to be a technical professional. So let’s be clear. Being a technical professional is generally not a “people oriented” profession. Technology deals with ideas, laws of physics, machines, equations, and only peripherally, with people.
Now all of a sudden, because you do your technical work so well, you are going to be asked to focus on “people”.
I take the position, that from the technical professionals’ point of view, management is a new career. One that you didn’t ask for and one you didn’t prepare for. And yet, here it is. It’s going to require preparation and practice. And it’s going to require more than just knowledge of how to use Microsoft Project, or how to set up budgets and schedules. It’s going to require an understanding of how to deal with and communicate with and manage people. It’s going to require a personal understanding of your own motivational forces and an understanding of the motivational forces of others. This is why the transition to management is such a challenge for many technical professionals.
It’s a new career. It can be done. It can be done smoothly, elegantly, and successfully. It must be done with a conscious process of choice and an understanding that, for most technical professionals, it’s a second career.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Posted by Steven Cerri on 09/25 at 10:47 AM Engineer to Technical Manager • Becoming a manager • Technical Manager • Management • Engineering Management • Management for engineers • Management for technologists • Technical Management • Inter-Personal People Skills • Communication for engineers • Soft Skills for engineers • Soft Skills for Technologists • (0) Comments • Permalink
