blue pencil

While some would believe good leaders are born and not made, I believe you can not translate any gift into talent without training and development.  It is a crime that they don’t have decent management training in engineering schools.  In the five years I studied Engineering at university there was plenty of technical slog but little to nothing on managing people.

How many engineers do you know who are passionate about people?  How many are extroverted, good communicators and charismatic?  I’d say that they are as rare as hen’s teeth (and are probably working in sales roles).  I believe however, there are technically and interpersonally skilled people are out there; they just need to be coached, mentored and developed. Honestly recognising this issue is the first step to improvement.

At the coal face, or manufacturing bench, most engineers get promoted for solving a problem, ramping up production or doing what they do best, improving the bottom line. Sadly though, they rarely get any training or decent mentoring for the people management / interaction side of their role(s).

At best engineers may go for an MBA at night or online, at worst they get to go on a one or two day course on personality profiling.  The common result is most companies have a management layer(s) that has technical or business skills but not the interpersonal skills or experience to lead their people.

Having worked all over the world and across several industries, I find this lack of people skills in technical management roles is a disease that no company seems to be immune to.  Sadly I personally can only count a few leaders that I would work for again. Management styles seem to fluctuate between timid and tyrannical and regardless of which type of manager you have, your production teams ultimately run the shops.

Like it or not, the truth of the matter is management get the labour they deserve.  Timid managers avoid tackling behaviours and conflict. Tyrannical leaders use micro managing or controlling tactics.  You get either a jelly fish or a brick wall.  When this is the case, bad behaviour begins, as leadership fails to motivate and connect the team to the common goals of the company.

When poor practices are accepted or left to continue, especially if it is safety or quality related, a cancerous complacency builds in your organisation.  The good people get beaten back by the pervasive negative culture.  Respect is lost for management and the customer.  Trust disappears, motivation decays.  None of this is culturally conducive to growth, improvement or profit.  In the current economic climate if this exists in your workplace it could prove to be fatal.

Managers need to be both technically savvy and passionate about people to optimise the man machine interface.  They also need courage, commitment and confidence to tackle the tough stuff, the toughest of which is change.  Change is inevitable when you improve things as it means you need to do something differently to get a better result.

Change or cancer, one will kill you the other will make you stronger, what do you chose?

acm are as passionate about people as they are about machines.  For strategy and support on how to take on change and lasting improvement at your coal face contact us.

Image Credit: lumaxart

       Print this post

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.