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The Case Against Non-technical Managers
Kelerei writes: Lorraine Steyn, owner of a small software development company in Cape Town, has published an opinion piece that may hit too close to home for some: making a case against non-technical managers. She writes about the all too common disconnect between IT staff and the boardroom table and states that 'one of the ways to solve this, is to bring managers closer to the coal face. Technical training programs are critical for your development team to keep apace with change, and investing the time for IT management to do the training too can pay dividends... [if a manager feels he doesn't] have enough time to get that close to the detail of what your department does, think about whether you would appoint a non-financial manager to handle your money'.
How about an example with Mechanical Engineers? I've had both technical and non-technical managers. In both cases I've had good luck and bad luck. A good manager doesn't have to be a technical person, they have to listen to their subordinates. When you tell your manager that something can't be reasonably fine or shouldn't be done their job requires them to listen to the technical experts on the project. No one person can be an expert on the whole project, so you might get a guy that is a good medical engineer, but no experience in industrial design.
In my opinion, a good manger is one who knows he isn't the expert. Listen to your people. A technical guy full of preconceptions of how things should be done is a huge hindrance. While a non-technical guy that can bring multiple ideas together and just make a decision, at the end if the day, is invaluable to a project.
There are a couple of problems with that.
A company, especially a large one, would have multiple levels of management. A vice president has meeting with his directors, they can't answer until they talk to their direct reports who can't answer until they talk to their direct reports who actually know something. You end up with high latency for even simple topics.
If the intermediate managers have no technical background, you will end up with a grapevine effect. If you don't understand what you are getting from your direct reports how can you effectively write it down in preparation for the upcoming meeting?
"The application has a high turn rate and the high latency on the network is causing it to be slow"
"He said the network was too slow."
"I was told that we doubled the bandwidth on the network. What are you talking about?
"Upper management said it can't be the network, they had the bandwidth doubled."
"It's not a bandwidth problem, it's a high latency problem.
"I don't understand. Should we have networking check to see if there is a problem with the network? I''l setup a meeting with the networking group."
They have to understand the technology, otherwise the grapevine effect will kill you. The bigger the company, the worse it will get.
Finally, if you have multiple direct reports, how do you resolve a conflict of ideas when you have no idea what they are talking about? Put it to a vote? An experienced manager with a technical background would be able to ask the right questions to determine the pros and cons of each idea.
A good manager doesn't have to be a technical person, they have to listen to their subordinates. When you tell your manager that something can't be reasonably fine or shouldn't be done their job requires them to listen to the technical experts on the project.
I've been on both sides of the managerial fence, and in my experience, you can't have one without the other. A good manager can't listen to their subordinates if they can't understand what they're hearing. It's like explaining color to a blind man. One of the primary responsibilities of a manager is communication. He or she has to be technically savvy enough to not only understand the decisions his direct reports are making, but be able to translate those decisions into the appropriate level of technical detail to the people he or she reports to. And that coin has two sides: a manager must also have enough business savvy to understand the decisions of his superiors and be able to translate them to his direct reports.
A manager who makes decisions on the say-so of his subordinates without being technically conversant enough to actually understand and explain why it's a good decision, isn't a manager at all: she's a proxy. The same goes for a manager who just tells his reports what to do without understanding why his own managers want him to do it.
When I was managing multiple groups and couldn't possibly understand everything about everything that everyone did, I handled the "grapevine" problem in a very simple way. When I had a meeting with my bosses, I brought along the person on staff who knew the topic. Sometimes I had to do a little coaching, reminding them that the next level up really had no background in his or her area, but it nearly always worked out and we avoided the delays and miscommunications otherwise encountered.
Generally, the staffer liked the idea of being trusted and getting positive exposure with executive management. And in giving a voice and giving credit to the people who actually knew the topic, I definitely looked good in front of my bosses. It was almost always a win-win.