#86-3/2/09-It’s Easy To Become a Technical Manager
It’s Easy To Become A Technical Manager
“You are worth gold!”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, March 2, 2009
Hello everyone!
Two or three weeks ago I received this comment to one of my blog postings that read, in part, as follows:
“My question is how do I get back to a position of manager vs IC? (Individual Contributor)
When new managers came into play - change happened and because I had the safety of a paycheck I became and now am an IC.
However I am unhappy and I would like a suggestion on how I can get back to a manager position (title not important) but leading people is. Because I let the paycheck manage my career I am now working for an organization that is all I and no WE.
Your assistance and coaching is appreciated.”
J
I truly understand everything J is asking and experiencing. So I’m going to answer his question(s).
“It’s Easy To Become A Technical Managers--Honest It Is!”
Over the last several weeks I’ve been writing in my Ezines and blogs that young people are restless and they often want the world much sooner than many would think they deserve.
Often when I coach young engineers I give them advice as well as some sense of how much patience they ought to exercise.
What I often don’t say quite this way, is: Becoming a technical manger is probably one of the easiest things to do.
Now notice I didn’t say becoming a successful technical manger is one of the easiest things to do. I said becoming one is.
You are rare indeed!
Finding an engineer who can successfully manage and lead people is very difficult. It’s a very difficult combination to find in one person. And therefore, most organizations are so eager to find someone who can, that they are constantly trying to entice engineers to make the transition.
Unfortunately, most organizations don’t understand what is needed for the successful transition, so they just grab someone who is a decent engineer and who “seems” to have some aptitude for management and presto, he or she is a manager, or sort of.
I recently was published in Mechanical Engineering, the flagship magazine of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The article was titled “The 5 Myths” and lists the five myths that many organizations use to justify the selection of engineers to be managers.
Often the selection and transition process fails because the myths are just that, myths and they are false.
Companies and organizations are constantly trying to fit engineers into the management role before they are ready, and this often leads to problems.
All of this leads to the situation in which we often find ourselves, and that is, good technical managers are difficult to find.
So what does this have to do with J?
If you want to read more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine at: Steven’s March 2, 2009 Ezine
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©2009 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 03/10 at 09:59 AM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#85-2/23/09-Engineers Are Natural Leaders
Engineers Are Natural Leaders
“Engineers Are Natural Leaders--Say What?”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, February 23, 2009
Hello everyone!
Engineers Are Natural Leaders… Say What?
I know this week’s blog may cause some controversy but I’ve got to put this out there because by being silent, I believe it’s only making the situation worse.
You see, recently I had dinner with a friend of mine. During the conversation he made a comment that nearly required that someone administer the Heimlich maneuver to me.
I was chewing on some delicious French bread when he said; “You know, a lot of people I work with think that engineers are natural leaders”. That’s when I nearly choked on my bread.
Fortunately I recovered quickly and asked, “You said what?”
He repeated his statement and this time, without food in my mouth, I laughed out loud.
Then I responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me, right?” He responded, “No, I’m not.”
“Engineers Are Natural Leaders...”
I’ll begin this discussion at the beginning. And as a beginning I will state that no one is a “natural leader”. No one is a “born leader”.
I listen, often with great frustration, to people who make proclamations about leadership. They might say that “so-and-so is just a born leader”. Or how someone “is a natural leader”. Or how “everyone can be a leader”.
Well, which is it? Are leaders born? Are they natural? Can everyone be a leader?
The bottom line is that most people who talk about leadership don’t understand the term or the concept and are merely repeating some old phrase that others have spoken. They often make statements like:
“Leaders inspire and managers perspire"… or…
“Leaders know what to do and managers know how to do it.”
Actually, these are generally useless phrases.
I wouldn’t mind in the least if someone wanted to tell me who was a born leader or a natural leader if they spent time up front defining leadership. But most don’t. They assume that everyone has the same definition and understanding of leadership.
And all I have to do is discuss leadership and leaders with these people for a while and I can quickly determine that we don’t all have the same definition of leadership.
My definition of leadership
Therefore, I’ll begin here with my definition of leadership… and it’s not a simple definition.
Leadership, in my book, is a multi-faceted term that has a complex definition. The definition of leadership has multiple parts (six to be exact) and if any part is missing it’s not leadership.
However, for this Ezine and this discussion, there are only two components of the definition that are necessary.
The first component is that leadership is about the relationship between the leader and the context. This may well be the most powerful component of leadership. The leader and the environment must be in a mutually supportive relationship. If the environment doesn’t “need” or “want” the leader, the leaders seems “out of touch with reality”. If the leader is exactly what the environment “needs”, the leaders seems to magically appear, as if out of thin air. They seem to be “born” for the job.
In reality, they’ve always had these traits and now the environment has shifted and their traits are perfectly matched to the occasion. (There are those situations where the leader can “morph” to match what the situation needs as well, and this kind of leader has become more common in the last 40 years or so.)
Therefore, what looks like “magic”, what looks like a leader born to the job of leadership, is actually an individual living their life, waiting in the wings, off stage, until the stage is set for them to step forth fully formed or nearly so.
As long as the environment is aligned with what the leader can provide, then the leader will flourish. However, when the environment shifts, the leader will often vanish or be significantly diminished in stature.
There are many examples of this “match-up”, and then a lack of it, throughout history. They include many military leaders, such as Napoleon, General George Patten, and many political leaders such as Boris Yeltsin, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush just after 9/11. We must wait to see how the leader-environment match-up plays out for President Barack Obama of the United States as well as President Nicolas Sarkosy of France. Both were elected in environments that were making a major transition.
This leader-environmental match-up is is exactly why successful “serial entrepreneurship” is so difficult to achieve.
How many times can a match-up occur between an entrepreneur and the environment? Apparently not very often. It is the rare entrepreneur, indeed, who can start-up several successful companies.
Only the leader who can morph to match the environment can be a leader in a variety of situations. General, and later president, Dwight Eisenhower is an example of a leader who was able to cross contextual boundaries. And Elon Musk is an example of a successful serial entrepreneur.
All one has to do is look out in the world and it becomes clear that there aren’t any born leaders or natural leaders. The phrase, “He (or she) is the leader of their time” is a truly accurate statement. Leadership is about the leader and their “time” being in alignment.
If you want to read more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine at: Steven’s February 23, 2009 Ezine
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©2009 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 03/05 at 11:13 PM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#84-2/16/09-The Young Are Restless--Once More
The Young Are Restless--Once More!
“Young people and the manager”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, February 16, 2009
Hello everyone!
Is it a bad rap?
Last week I wrote “The Young Are Restless” and I received a number of emails commenting on my evaluation of the situation. All were positive and in agreement with what I had written, and yet, there two sides to the story. In this blog I want to address the other side.
“Young People and The Manager”
Last week I told the young people, the young engineers, they had three choices.
They could either “suck it up” and deal with the fact that they are playing by the manager’s rules… or…
They could join a small company or start-up where the rules for advancement are not so structured.... or…
They could start their own company or be a contract employee and not be responsible (so much) to the organization.
But that’s only half the story.
The other half of the story concerns the role of the manager of the team in this equation.
No Pulled Punches
Management is about getting results with and through a variety of resources. Sometimes those resources include people.
Most managers tend to treat people like other resources… like money, or land, or equipment.
Most managers will modify the land to fit the need. Or they’ll get enough money or use the money to get what is desired. Or they’ll buy the right equipment to due a job or perhaps alter the equipment to do the job better or alter it to do a slightly different job.
Whatever the exact requirement, generally speaking, we often secure the right resource for the job and when we don’t need the resource any more we through it away. Or we get a resource that is close to what we need and then we modify it to fit the job.
Unfortunately, many managers treat people the same way. If the human equipment doesn’t do the job correctly, or doesn’t do the job the way the manager wants, many managers often blame the equipment and try to make the person fit the job.
“Oh, Bob is just not suited to this job. We’ll have to let him go and find someone who can do this job.”
or
“I was told to put Mary on my team and I gave her a job and she just can’t do it. I’m going to have to let her go; there’s nothing here she can do.”
Now I understand completely that sometimes people are not suited to the tasks we have available for them. And I also know that people can learn, which in a way, is like modifying a machine to do a different job than originally intended.
However, lets be clear, people learn and people are flexible.
“No, no you say. I’ve met people who were completely inflexible” and not willing to learn.
While I would agree that there are people who are inflexible, my experience tells me that people are much more desirous of being successful than of being stubborn. So the question I have for the manager who wants to blame his or her direct report for being stubborn is; “What have you, as the manager, done to amplify or diminish that stubbornness?”
Cut to the chase
9 times out of 10, the responsibility of the manger is to help the direct report be successful. IT IS NOT to make the direct report FIT the job, but rather to find a way to fit the job to the direct report so that the direct report can be successful.
Now I know… I can hear some managers complaining that my suggestion is unrealistic… and sometimes it is. Guess what? In those cases where my approach doesn’t fit, don’t use it. Do something different. Remember, I said 9 times out of 10.
So where am I going with this?
If you want to read more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine at: Steven’s February 16, 2009 Ezine
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©2009 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 03/03 at 11:18 PM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
