April 30, 2012 at 10:08 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Promoting Engineers
May 1, 2012 at 12:30 am
There's a great book covering exactly this called the E-Myth. Basically the myth is that all people who start small businesses are Entrepreneurs.
The truth is that most are technicians who are really good at their craft and know that they could make more money and be more effective if they were in charge.
The result is that most struggle with the transition between technician and manager because they are completely different skill sets. Most former technicians struggle to give up technical control and end up micro-managing and not realising that they can't do two jobs at once (or many more).
The advice is to plan a business by allocating all the roles considering expansion. Whilst you may be the technician & the consultant & the accountant & do the payroll & the hiring & the marketing & be the CEO all at once to begin with, ultimately you need to give up all of these roles as you hire new people.
May 1, 2012 at 4:05 am
Completely agree with this one. At my current job I've started as standard IT Support and in my many years here I've grown and now do additional roles like DBA, Developer, Process Manager. However my job title has never changed and as people in our dept leave (move on, fired, redundancy etc) I'm always thrust back into the standard IT Support role.
It's very frustrating that after so many years and my increased skillset I'm still viewed as a support person. I've raised this point in many appraisals and while everyone agrees that I should have and deserve a career path it just never happens.
I'm now back to being a support person again and have been pretty much told that I'll be in this role for the foreseeable future and that there are no plans to hire another support person to allow me to continue becoming something more. Very frustrating. :angry:
May 1, 2012 at 5:09 am
Never, ever promote your best salesperson
Seems to me this is treating your best salesperson as a commodity; Deploy them where they're most effective and exploit their abilities to the full. But what about what they want? As with Ian Elliott, if you keep someone in a job they're great at, you may well get lots of benefit now but not have them at all within a year. Of course you shouldn't promote someone into a job for which they're not suited, but employment is a balance of mutual benefit; only as long as both sides are getting out more than they're putting in does the contract continue.
Therefore, for all I agree with Steve's conclusions - that you need to provide wider career options than just promotion to line management - I disagree with several aspects of the article that prompted Steve to write the editorial.
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
May 1, 2012 at 6:43 am
I'm very fortunate to work for a company that understands that in many cases, the absolute last thing a skilled senior technologist wants is to be promoted into management. To account for this, we have a dual track for advancement. At a recent company meeting, our CEO re-emphasized his commitment to ensuring that all employees have the capability of moving up in a way that allows us to focus on where we want to be.
May 1, 2012 at 6:46 am
First off - the Peter Principal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/01/random-promotion-research
If you've ever thought you boss was incompetent - it could be because he was too awesome at his last job and they foolishly promoted him 🙂
I think the completely different workload from being the 'go-to' thinker/doer to meetings, delegations and touchy-feely reviews is something that most people would struggle with and would find a long learning curve for that would present as 'incompetence'.
Personally, being a people-manager is not something I'd like to do, I can admire good people-managers particularly those who have good technical knowledge but for myself the challenge of making a team the most effective possible is much less interesting than implementing a new report system.
May 1, 2012 at 6:55 am
Most sales professions get paid on commission, so it seems to me that a company's "best" sales people (those who consistently open a large number of high value accounts) should be happy with their arrangement, and the company should be happy for all their productive efforts.
If that's not the case, if the best sales people arn't happy with their commissions or the company isn't happy with what they contribute, then there is something wrong with the incentive program or the company's goals.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
May 1, 2012 at 7:04 am
Eric M Russell (5/1/2012)
Most sales professions get paid on commission, so it seems to me that a company's "best" sales people (those who consistently open a large number of high value accounts) should be happy with their arrangement, and the company should be happy for all their productive efforts.If that's not the case, if the best sales people arn't happy with their commissions or the company isn't happy with what they contribute, then there is something wrong with the incentive program or the company's goals.
That's only true whilst money remains the sales professional's major motivator. In reality, we all move on as priorities change.
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
May 1, 2012 at 7:33 am
I actually have moved to management and then back down at the same company. I and three others got promoted to Team Leads as our support team grew. Around the same time I took responsibility for our monitoring application which meant any further coding that needed to be done, managing the install process, and a major upgrade to go along with it. And, also right around the same time, I was handed the job of fixing our e-prescribe installation process for the product. Included with that was responsibility for the hosted version of the product since the only module on that was the e-prescribe module. Meanwhile, the other team leads only had their team lead responsibilities.
Needless to say that I got burnt out with all the managing since I went from being all technical to not having any time for anything technical unless there was a major fire. I switched from Support to Upgrades and that transition went very smoothly. I kept the friends in Support and was able to offer advice from my time there and get feedback on things that Upgrades (and later Dev when I moved there) could do better. I think changing departments helped out a large amount there. As was the fact that it was my choice instead of something that was recommended to me.
May 1, 2012 at 8:14 am
Nothing is more frustrating than trying to relate a difficult technical issue to a non-technical manager after he/she asks you what the problem is. My dad used to have a good analogy: "If you are going to manage a bunch of janitors, then you should know how to use a mop." 😀
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
May 1, 2012 at 9:26 am
The real problem with this is the use of "never, ever". There are cases where this may be exactly what you want to do, and cases where this would be a disaster. People are different, each situation will be different.
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"stewsterl 80804 (10/16/2009)I guess when you stop and try to understand the solution provided you not only learn, but save yourself some headaches when you need to make any slight changes."
May 1, 2012 at 10:06 am
jcrawf02 (5/1/2012)
The real problem with this is the use of "never, ever". There are cases where this may be exactly what you want to do, and cases where this would be a disaster. People are different, each situation will be different.
I agree. They all said the Titanic was "unsinkable" too. Well.. we all know how that turned out.:-D
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
May 1, 2012 at 10:15 am
I had tried leadership roles in the past and found that those roles were a struggle. While I have all the various skills in adequate quantity, I don’t have the ability to let go and delegate an effective relationship within a team. I think, from my perspective, that realizing my fit in the support role is the right one and the company has been generous on the salary side, at least it meets my needs plus so not taking one of those leadership roles, which have been offered at intervals, has been absolutely right for me.
What I am trying to convey, agreeing with “jcrawf02”, is that no one way to advancement is right for everybody and that actual definition of “advancement” varies with the individual. Each individual being honest with themselves in their abilities and being comfortable in the roles they work to achieve only puts limits within those roles and on themselves if they let it happen. The trouble is that a lot of people let their perceptions of what they believe are other people’s perceptions of them (the old conundrum squared) guide them into what “majorbloodnock” realistically calls varying depths of sh__ that aren’t necessarily what they really wanted for themselves in the first place, love Latin.
The Greeks, Plato and Socrates on up raved about the difficulty “to know yourself”, “nosce te ipsum“ for the Latin lovers but I like, "nosce te ipsum, naturam sequere tuam", know thyself, be thyself or follow your nature however you want to look at it. In Poor Richard’s Almanack, Ben Franklin said "There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one's self." You have to define yourself and know yourself before being satisfied with where you find yourself in life and to hell with others “perceptions” of where you should be.
On leadership, I actually like being misdirected by the company at times by being pulled into projects to help put them back on track when they get screwed up beyond perceived resurrection, not to say “ nah, nah, na, nah nah” but because of the inner satisfaction I get from being able do the troubleshooting and help with a fix without all the responsibility of taking the blame…. More power to you guys with that ability, somebody’s gotta do it.
That’s the longest speech I’ve given in a long time. Issues with getting older I guess but I find that even at my age I’m still trying to know myself……
“esto qui es, esto laetus et carpe diem."
May 1, 2012 at 10:41 am
jcrawf02 (5/1/2012)
The real problem with this is the use of "never, ever". There are cases where this may be exactly what you want to do, and cases where this would be a disaster. People are different, each situation will be different.
I would also advance one more aspect, which is just an expansion of Travis' original point. It takes a different kind of manager in general to deal with technical folks.
A few items that make it different:
- You hire technical folks most often because you need folks who are smart and have independent thought. Many traditional management methods won't work well with a highly independent work force (such as engineers and techs)
- Technical positions are fairly well paid, so while money might have something to do with motivation, it may not be the main motivator. You may need other tools to motivate.
- the technical groups tend to value technical competence, so your social "rank" may depend on your perceived compentence in the group. A manager coming in with NO technical skills will be at a large disadvantage in such a setting.
- technical staff are often asked to deal with new situation that come up, which require creative solutions. This may require creative management approaches to measuring productivity, since creating doesn't fit well into a Taylorist view of productivity.
So - even good non-technical managers may not do so well in a technical management position.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
May 1, 2012 at 10:51 am
If a good engineer actually wants to move into a magerial role, then that OK, but it's not necessarily a logical progression. There are other ways to reward good performance, like assigning the engineer a team lead role on a high profile project or a position on an architectural board.
If a company HR policy is such that the only way an engineer can earn any seniority or break the 100k pay barrier is to stop being an engineer and become an executive, then they do this at their own peril. There are some (OK, more like a lot) of good engineers who would rather join another company and dive into a new an intersting project than have to make that choice.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
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