Slashdot Mirror
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."
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/
Not for training engineers to be managers. But to make strong full company leaders. What went wrong was most MBAs went into finance or consulting, and not into upper mid level management. Because of this the MBA gets a bad name. Have gone threw an MBA myself at least at my college (that focuses on making professionals and not convince them to go into money grubbing) I found it was actually quite useful. And gives me a wider perpective of the business.
While my MBA class has a lot of engineers and IT people it also has a lot of finance people. These degrees are a little more focused then the MBA which is a good thing too. As a masters is a 2 year degree and not enough time to cover everything.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Careful with the broad brush, there. I've met MBAs who were well-trained to run a business, and I've met others who just got their ticket punched from a "name brand" school who were somewhat worse than useless.
-jcr
I haven't met any of those people. The good MBAs that I HAVE seen have an MBA pretty much as an afterthought. They were already good managers that came up from a different background. Engineering, IT, something like that.
The rest can often negotiate well and make decent business decisions but the majority of the problem with them is they think management is everything and that they don't have to listen to their employees, even when the employees are saying "Listen, theres a bridge up ahead thats only half done. At the rate you're going, when you get to it, you're going to smash into the cliff wall on the opposite side of the gap"
Often the MBAs will feel their authority is being threatened by something like that as well because in a good amount of cases their underlings are smarter than they are, if not as well trained in powerpoint. In this case the MBA over reacts to something small that someone brings to their attention, and next time it just doesn't get brought to their attention, then the MBA blames worker X and moves up the ranks.
I've met an MBA who moved up the ranks at a fairly large corporation this way, he wasn't at the top at that point, but very close to it and by all indicators going to get it when the opportunity arose. He knew almost nothing about his companies product. I don't mean knowing technical details, though at that point he should have been able to answer a few technical questions well enough to at least satisfy the average joe, but basic functions of the product.
The CEO of that company on the other hand had a technical background and could answer almost anything you wanted to know, and that is largely responsible for its success. I'm shorting stock in the company if I hear he's leaving.
There are outliers of course, I think I may have met one a year or so ago but its too early in his career to tell. The SNR is just so bad that I haven't met the folks you are talking about.
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 am willing to bet that if you take away everyones money and assets 90% of the people who were rich will be rich again. And 90% who were poor will still be poor.
That's probably a candidate for the stupidest thing I've heard in a decade.
If a magical force suddenly "took away everyone's assets" (I presume you also mean every natural resource on earth, as well) then everybody would have nothing--perpetually. What kind of ridiculous thought experiment is this?
I'll tell you what is true though: By and large, the people who started with a ton of money tend to be the ones who end up with the shit-ton of money, and the people who start with next to nothing end up with next to nothing. That's how capitalism works. That's the whole point to the system!
What's the best predictor of someone's income? Intelligence? Nope. Work ethic? Nope. Abilities? Try again. How about: Father's income