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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.
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
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/
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.
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?
Actually those 11% are too busy trying to figure out how to loot the Picasso from their office without people noticing before crashing the entire business and collecting a gold parachute to send the jobs overseas to care about corporate leadership.
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 a faster way. Take a small established company with a product that people want. Add MBA's until they
outnumber engineers and designers.
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.
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"
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.
Agreed! I had a boss who was General Manager of a Boston radio station. He didn't know much about engineering or sales-but he was a great judge of people-and creative people WANTED to work for him! He hired the best people, gave them the tools they needed to do their jobs and then LET THEM! He didn't micromange. He knew that creative people occasionally pushed the barriers and let them-but was always there to pull back gently on their leashes if necessary. I enjoyed working for him-and let me assure you it was hard work. BUT you felt like you were part of a team-and he also shared the credit/spoils with all of the people who worked for him. One summer week the Tall Ships were coming to Boston, and it was my job to not only facilitate a weeks broadcasts from a pier on the waterfront, but also make sure the talent got there for their broadcasts-when half the streets were closed down. So I hired a reliable friend as station driver for the week-dressed in his best suit and with a daily freshly washed and cleaned station Jeep just to drive talent, clients and management back and forth. He had full press credentials so he could drive everywhere and since he kneew the area (and knew how to make friends with the Boston Police officers) got priority treatment from them. At the end of the week my boss told me: "when you came up with this idea I didn't like it, but decided to give you a shot-and it turned out it was one of the best ideas you have ever had". THAT'S the kind of boss he was-he made you feel great!
How hard is it to screw over you employees, over-pay yourself, steal from the company, and fuck your secretary and/or mistress?