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Leaders Aren't Being Made At Tech Firms
theodp writes "In this article Vivek Wadhwa laments that short shrift is paid to management training these days at many high-tech firms. You can't be born with the skills needed to plan projects, adhere to EEOC guidelines, prepare budgets and manage finances, or to know the intricacies of business and IP law, says Wadhwa. All this has to be learned. Stepping up to address the problems of 'engineering without leadership,' which may include morale problems, missed deadlines, customer-support disasters, and high turnover, are programs like UC Berkeley's Engineering Leadership Program and Duke's Masters of Engineering Management Program, which aim to teach product management, entrepreneurial thinking, leadership, finance, team building, business management, and motivation to techies."
Wasn't this what MBA's were originally intended for? Training engineers to be managers?
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Sociopathy ftw!
Why should a company care? Someone else in your position is going to grad school right now and can fill it when needed.
Never personally met anyone with an MBA who knew their ass from their elbow about engineering. Or had an agenda
I'm surprised only 89% of corporate executives at the companies they interviewed indicated they felt corporate leadership was increasingly important at their firm. I guess for the other 11% their decisions are already maximally important.
While they're at it, perhaps they can teach managers on how to hire competent technical people.
How does this really compare to companies that are not considered "High-tech?" Are those companies spending a lot more money and time on training management, or is it just that most MBA-type programs are geared towards that type of management role?
I know several retired engineers who became managers in companies that invested in their training throughout their career. I'd be curious to see statistics on how that's changed over the years. It could be that high-tech companies are just more likely to reflect modern business practices. Perhaps those companies are more likely to feel the effects of hiring people from a "pure management" background because managing complex engineering projects is, you know, complicated.
And this is why tech types always complain about their managers -- none of their own are getting the training they need to rise up and manage. Frankly, tech types cast such a stigma on management that the number of people who actually want to do that is very small, which is a major mistake.
http://www.tenjou.net/
Leaders! pft! My place is like a Dilbert comic
I agree. Computer technology changes every 5 years and we are now expected to keep pace with the latest technologies on our own time, I think the same is expected with management skills. In a sense, these skills are easier to develop because the required skills aren't changing as fast.
With the computer skills, I have to learn the new technologies on my own if they aren't being used at work yet. With management/leadership skills (project planning, budgets, IP law...), they are obviously being used at every company and there are more chances to learn (insert bad management joke here).
Most good managers are overworked and there are opportunities for on the job training. Do some research, read some books, and then ask your boss to take one thing off of his plate. Start small and build from there. Note: A bad boss will be unwilling to give up responsibility for fear of you showing him up and taking his job. A good manager/leader will is interested in developing those under him and realizes that you doing a good job reflects well on both of you. A good manager doesn't have to worry about you taking his job. He should be moving up (not sideways) anyway.
Some good places to start training are:
1) Agile development: By definition, SCRUM masters come from the development team, not the business/management team. This is a good intro to management & leadership skills, and the Sprint Demos give you good opportunity to communicate with the business and management teams.
2) Scheduling: In a non agile environment, this means owning the Pert chart. In agile, it might mean helping prioritize the product backlog and contributing to ROM estimates.
3) Customer Satisfaction: Sometimes product maintenance (bug fixes) can involve lots of customer interaction. Making unhappy customers happy is a useful skill that will get you noticed.
4) IP Law: Reviewing existing patents for conflicts is a boring job. Sometimes the legal team creates a huge list of patents where half of them can be dismissed right off the bat. Maybe you can take a first pass at the patent review and just summarize your thoughts in an Excel spreadsheet with High/Medium/Low priorities so that other managers can focus on the high priority ones first. This will give you insight into the whole process and a foot in the door.
5) Interviewing: Any potential candidate should be reviewed by multiple people. Not just the boss. Again, read some books and do some research on good interviewing techniques first. Then see if you can participate in interviewing candidates. This area can be tricky because your interviewing style might conflict with your managers. He may not like your style, but that doesn't mean you are wrong. You will probably handle the interview differently depending on whether you are doing it with your boss or not. I suggest the 5 Why's style here. As a new interviewer, your opinion will matter less. If you use the 5 Why's then you will have much more detailed facts on why the candidate did what he did in a certain situation - your comments will be based less on your opinion and more about what you got the candidate to say. During the candidate review after the interview, someone may bring up a scenario that the candidate discussed and say he did the right thing. You will be able to go 3 levels deeper into the decision process used by the candidate to verify if this is actually true.
These are good places to start. I don't think you will get much finance/budget exposure or deal with any equal opportunity issues if you are not a manager. On the leadership side, there are always changes to exercise your skills as a mentor and leader without having the official title. This is just part of doing your job.
All that managers seem to do is attend meetings and make stupid comments on what the engineers are saying, making it obvious they have no idea whatsoever of the technology involved.
They do have some minimal technical knowledge they got a long time ago, but they're completely disconnected to how the product works.
They're just people in charge of guess-valuating the engineers worth, and their associated payroll.
John, what was the background of the good MBAs? Were they originally engineers or scientists by training, who took up management later? Or was their original training in a field like commerce, business or economics?
Also, I know you worked for some time at Apple. Clearly, based on their recent success, Apple is currently a well-managed company. How prevalent are MBAs within the management hierarchy there?
Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic
Good to know this guy couldn't cut it as an entrepreneur, now he's teaching all his best tricks to anybody who is stupid enough to cough up the tuition fees.
Vivek Wadhwa Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University
I'm sure there is no conflict of interests and he is being absolutely objective in his desire to promote his excellent courses.
Whats this "these days" quote? Confusing "it is and always has been bad" with "it must have been better in the good ole days"?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It sure looks like it.
My God, how did we ever survive, much less built some amazing technology before this great mind discovered we are not "making leaders" today. We are not making leaders, or are the leaders focused in the wrong direction. IBM, HP, Wang, Dec, Microsoft, Apple, yes even Google started small and grew because their "leaders" did not focus on the next month, the next quarter, but on a long term vision of what they wanted their company to be in the market. In my thirty years in this IT industry I know of only two managers that understand that if you manage the people, they will manage the project. The rest managed the budget, the project and never took time to understand the resources they had. Whet these new classes should re-teach is the art of managing people so they become a positive, motived work force and not indentured labor.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
If you were born after 1970, which you likely were, you probably don't realize how much better life and work actually was in America during the 1950s and 1960s. Things were significantly better back then.
The wage gap between executives, managers and the people actually doing the real work was minimal. It wasn't unusual for a CEO to make a salary that was only twice as much as the salary of the lowest-paid employee. This is what allowed America's middle class to become so strong and wealthy after WWII.
The general attitude was different, as well. With the standard of living increasing so dramatically for so many people due to hard work, people would go out of their way to do well at their job. Truly good work, rather than bullshitting and deflecting blame, was the key to career advancement. Indeed, successful managers and executives put in a huge amount of effort growing businesses by providing top-notch products and services, while doing what was best for the community as a whole.
Things really started to tank in the early 1970s. That's when manufacturing started being sent off-shore, mainly to Japan at first, but eventually to Taiwan and then China. Now we see India and Mexico getting involved. The end result was that many people were put out of work, management became more about fucking people over rather than doing a good job or doing the right thing, the quality of manufactured goods became extremely shitty, and the American economy's real growth has stagnated for the past 30 to 40 years.
I can think of no faster way to doom a company than using engineers for salesmen, managers etc.. Engineering a product and the packaging that contains it is an endless task when done at its best level. Worse yet, keeping engineers up to date on machinery used in production and fabrication methods, tools, jigs etc. is a crushing burden. What often happens is that engineers get pushed into public relations, sales, and all kinds of nonsense and every tiny bit of that takes away from the job that they could be and should be doing.
People learn to lead by doing, spending years in the trenches learning the industry and craft and making the personal and shared sacrifices along the way. While being committed and aware.
Not by sitting in a classroom where some glib professor says things like, "Today we're going to talk about leadership. What is it? Who has it? How do you know it when you see it?"
IF you are trained to be a MASTER of Business Administration.
AND you do not run your own business, THEN you are a useless
piece of shit.
You have mastered NOTHING. You are a bean counter in disguise.
adhere to EEOC guidelines, prepare budgets and manage finances, or to know the intricacies of business and IP law
That's not leadership. That's memorizing a bunch of artificially imposed minituae that is not very interesting. That is a role suited for an assistant trained in law.
The budget part is relevant, but only to the extent that every human being ought to know how to manage their resources. The rest is suited for an assistant trained in accounting.
Leadership training has always been a lie. All the theories upon which training was based have been refuted or considered non-trainable. I believe that we will be able to settle for the right leadership training, but how can we do it if we don't even have a consensus on which Group Development theory is right? After all, the role of the leader is that of realizing which stage of group development an organization is and, then, take appropriate measures to burst productivity, either by utilizing a privileged development stage, or directing the group towards another development stage.
I like the Integrated Development Model that is used here in the University of Coimbra in many things ( http://bit.ly/90XCCA for instance). This is a modified version of Wheelan’s Integrated Model of Group Development, it's Miguez and Lourenço's Integrated Model of Group Development.
Other examples where this theory is exposed: http://bit.ly/9CmeNA and https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.psicologia.com.pt/artigos/textos/A0338.pdf (mentions it) and http://www.slideshare.net/daniellopes314/gesto-de-equipas and http://bit.ly/aU9Rvy
They may all be in Portuguese, but they show a real (and IMO, the best) approach to Leadership and the likes.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
I've been lucky to have had good managers over the years. My first IT job was under an experienced mature manager.
A good manager is one who understands what motivates each individual. A good manager also works to understand what each individual is capable of and helps to create a development plan to fill in any gaps.
However, a good manager also needs to realize that there are individuals who aren't prepared to put in the effort to improve or grow their career for whatever reason. As a worker drone, I've seen guys in IT who are happy doing what they are doing day-in day-out and aren't interested in moving into another position.
As for leaders, that takes a certain skill level. The majority of IT leaders in the company that I work for have been promoted from the IT tech pool (i.e. the IT drones that were hired early in the company's history), and it shows. Up until a recent spate of changes, there hasn't been a well thought out 5 year plan. The entire IT department is at the mercy of the business and every business initiative is a fire drill, caused by IT not being part of the project from the beginning. It's been a mess.
Very rarely do you find good quality IT leaders from the first wave of IT hires when a company is starting out. Most IT people who work for a new startup are people who don't have the training or experience to work for larger companys. They then fall into managerial and leadership positions as the company grows, despite not having the training, skill level, or qualities that makes a good manager or leader. This wouldn't be so bad if they realized that they need additional training and to grow into the role. The problem is that the majority of these guys are Alpha geeks who think that they know everything about IT and think that they are always right. The worst part is that they never develop the skills to plan 3 to 5 years ahead.
Why the fuck did you use that gawdawful bit.ly URL shortener? Now most of us surely won't click on your links, since we have absolutely no way of ensuring you didn't actually link to Goatse, Tubgirl, a site infested with Firefox-infecting malware, or something far worse.
This isn't twitter. There's no stupid artificial length limitation that'd prevent you from using the full URLs.
Once again, I'm seeing a focus on technical competence, and the usual ragging on managers who don't know anything that way. And also on competence in the technical aspects of business such as budgeting and knowing the ropes of IP law.
Managers and financial wizards are worse than useless if they are damned fools and aren't honest. They think they're telling little white lies that don't cause any harm when they mislead investors and employees. And they have funny ideas about how to motivate people. They want everyone on hot seats, all the time, thinking that's how to get the most out of people. They prowl around with the micromanagement, thinking that's how they're going to ferret out the slackers, and making it so the rest won't dare slack. They treat underlings like mushrooms, in an insulting, patronizing manner, not seeing how that can be self-fulfilling, and how it can blow back at them. As if that's not bad enough, they gratuitously indulge their fears, jealousies, petty spitefulnesses, bullying ways, and dominance gaming on the employees they've done all they can to make captive.
Where is the "leadership" training that covers such issues? Are people just supposed to instinctively know not to treat with their fellows so? I've seen enough of that kind of foolishness in RL to know it cannot be just swept under the rug.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Don't be a total bonehead. Listen to them. Let them do their job.
Ok, the tongue is in the cheek a little there, but nothing saps my motivation more than being told to do something really stupid. Like the project I'm on ; the code is some amateur coders PhD project, the code quality is utterly excretional, and EVERY engineer working on it that I've asked agrees that we could have thrown the whole thing away and written something superior inside of 6 months.
Management were told, almost as soon as the external code arrived. But management shelled out lots of cash for the thing, so management would never dare to follow their engineers advice because it would make them look stupid.
Meanwhile, 2 years later, the thing is still causing deadlines to stretch and users to curse at it's astounding lack of user friendliness.
My previous project was a success - because management kept their snoot out of the implementation details and just let the engineers get on with it.
Just wanted to include the MMM program at Kellogg and the Accelerated MBA at Cornell for techies. The MMM program is focusing on taking a product from the "fuzzy front-end" in design all the way through the operations of supply chain management. About 75% of those enrolled have a technical background (such as myself with a masters in mechanical engineering having previously worked in robotics). Okay, I'm done with the shameless plug. =D
It's a _NON_THESIS_ (as in you don't have to write a big difficult paper) "Masters" degree. The "highly ranked" schools of business within college XYZ that run these programs are may have more challenging entry requirements but even then there's a level of name recognition & ass kissing that sets students up to play the "it's not what you know, it's who you know" game for the rest of their lives. It's not like the course material is SOOO much better at B-School Ivy vs. B-School State, it a questions of which alumni are associated and what doors will open for you.
And as far as not getting an MBA because you're a "jock", I call bullshit. The way the "high end" of the business world works, it's all about popularity & networking. Have you been paying attention to the corporate corruption & insane salary levels in the news for the past decade or two? That shit doesn't happen to an entire so-called profession by accident - it's fucking structural! There's a few bits of some simple subjects to learn compared to real Masters programs (where they make you write a REAL master's thesis, by the way, but otherwise - yes. It is EXACTLY like fucking high school. That's why when we honest, hard-working engineering students were grinding through Comp. Sci. & Electrical Engineering going to study groups 5 days a week we'd go past Greek row and see the frats stocked with the "let's skate through life on our good looks & connections" types partying while we studied our asses off since 90% of them were there for either Business or Communications degrees.
Yes, you could flunk a bunch of stuff in your undergrad and still get into an MBA school (since there's so fucking many of them). They'll be happy to take your money so you can skate through another two or even only _ONE_ year (there are "5 year MBA programs": google it.). Will it open as many doors? Probably not. But you probably also won't starve and (as with most college degrees) the dirty little secret is that after you've gone out and done something 10 years later, nobody cares about your GPA or what college you went to any more than you high school teachers cared about your finger painting and what kindergarten you went to. So long as there's a degree on your resume, you'll generally pass the corporate HR bullshit - but then again, nobody in their right mind goes through the front door hiring process if they can help it, so you're back to "who you know".
I'm in my 40s, as a kid I grew up watching my dad & other male relatives build furniture out of wood, decorate houses, build brick walls, mend washing machines, etc. etc.
I grew up in a house where I had enough free reign to take stuff apart to see how it worked and try and fix it - yes, sometimes I broke it for good or couldn't get it back together again.
Then when I got into my teens, I built electronic circuits, learnt to program Z80 CPUs in assembly and took bicycles or mower engines apart to clean and fix them - again, sometimes what I did made it worse.
Since then, I've spent 30 years in telecoms, computers and IT and done a good job over those years. Not once have I considered entering management, the closest I've ever got is writing and presenting training courses, along with some technical mentoring as necessary.
It's impossible to be trained as an expert in every piece of hardware, operating system, telecoms principle, etc. that I come across but most of the time I get by using my engineering brain and knowing my limits - so if I need to know something more about something, I ask someone or go read a book. I'm not afraid to tell anyone "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer but give me a day or two and I think I can find one."
In IT especially, there are a lot of people who are afraid to admit their limitations or even believe themselves to always be right - and on some occasions, I've taken great joy in taking them down a step or two.
The point is that logic, intuition and self-motivation are disappearing in business - sorry, but as I'm over here in the UK I blame it entirely on American-style management techniques (although we're not blameless for accepting it so readily) where everything is performance and statistically based, and as long as you achieve your targets, it doesn't matter if you can think outside the box or not.
I know that being a good engineer is not about necessarily having the answer there and then but knowing how to get towards getting the answer in a logical fashion. That is a skill that comes from real-world experience, it cannot be trained into you.
And whilst I lack management skills, I expect that the same is true for a good manager - leadership & motivation skills are not something you can be taught, they're skills you pick up as you progress through life.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I've seen that in the giant service houses like Accenture, Infosys, Cognizant and so on, almost every damn programmer dreams of becoming a 'team lead' or 'assistant project manager' as soon as they've put in 4-5 years in the company. This trend has become all-pervasive and people who really love technical stuff and who want to just keep coding are considered losers. Most of these companies just don't offer growth opportunities in a purely technical sense. Even your manager will tell you, "Congratulations, you're being promoted to the position of Team Lead" and henceforth you need to involve yourself in progress reports and 'people management'.
This, IMHO is one of the prime reasons for the lack of management skills in the software industry today.
Today's colleges and universities are hopelessly out of touch with reality-and the students they graduate are too. My late mentor-a TV pioneer who associated with people named Sarnoff and Garroway, among others once told me that in many cases "schools get in the way of your education". He meant that no 'book' education can teach you "street smarts" and "people smarts"-only experience working with others can teach you this. Now today we have companies who think experience is a BAD thing-and are laying off their (older) competant workers in droves-replacing them with fresh out of grad school MBAs who don't know the difference between a AA battery and a tank-and don't CARE to know either! And we wonder why the USA is fast becoming a third world company technology (and many other ways) wise.
With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once build a nuclear balm?
Leaders are advocates and champions of the team, not the technology or the budget.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
How about:
Punjabi Central????
You're saying that the wealthiest 70% had 10% of the money?
Eeee, we used to dream of having mathematically impossible Gini coefficients. Uphill, both ways. In the snow.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A leader leads, provides "vision," leads by example, has new ideas, defines strategy. People naturally follow leaders.
A manager produces charts of business statistics, facilitates communication, makes sure that people are behaving, getting to work on time etc. and that the holiday requests are spread out sufficiently to make sure that enough people are working on the project at all times. Managers dish out the work between staff and provide a channel for communication with other teams.
Managers should not be considered leaders by default. They should earn it like everyone else. There is no reason that technical people can't be leaders without being managers.
Stick Men
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/science/05robots.html?hp
The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You
By JOHN MARKOFF
Mobile robots have been used for years by the military and law enforcement, but with falling costs, the next frontiers are the office, the hospital and the home.
How hard is it to screw over you employees, over-pay yourself, steal from the company, and fuck your secretary and/or mistress?
Real leadership skillz are gained by attaining the most challenging of all degrees: The MBA.
not just lesson-ing
It doesn't matter if you educate people in college... when they get into the work force some control freak manager will kill any thoughts of leadership in the workplace in order to maintain their own powerbase...
In some ways it would be nice if tech folk could earn "belts" or titles like in the martial arts world. Much easier to say you have a 3rd Degree Black Belt in Wado Ryu and have folk understand than to say you have a BS in Computer Science and 10 years experience in Perl.
Or maybe I just want to be called a "Script Master" really bad. Careful, I hear that guy "Bashes" really hard!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
"Have gone threw an MBA myself" - by jellomizer (103300) on Sunday September 05, @08:58AM (#33480998)
Where did you THROW it to? The correct turn of a phrase would have been:
'Having gone through an MBA myself'
So in addition to that much quoted from you that needed correction/revision?
See my subject-line above as well... "& rinse, lather, + repeat" several times so it gets through to you.