Making Engineers into Managers

Engineers are geeks, they want to stay technical, and don’t do people – right?

Wrong!

Engineers can often make the best managers – if you introduce them to it the right way.

Grow Your Own

You could recruit new managers, but it’s usually better to grow your own. They will:

• Already have the respect of the technical staff.
• Understand your products and technology – in detail.
• Know how your business works.
• And you will know them.

Dipping a Toe

Engineers often shy away from management.

• They don’t want to lose touch with design.
• They think it’s just paper pushing.
• They don’t want to look after people.
• It’s just not within their experience and training.

Encourage your engineers to dip a toe into management.

Ask them to do some – without calling it management. Call it leading a team – building some new tech – where they get to carry out part of the work alongside some of their technical peers.

Let them know that what you need is for them to get the job done – in whatever way makes sense. Don’t ask them to do paper pushing – let them work out what paper pushing is essential – then it won’t be paper pushing.

Remind them that the work is bigger than one person can do alone – you’re just asking them to extend what they alone can do via others.

People Design

Ground management in the technical job your engineers already know and understand.

Designing people systems is much like designing technical systems.

• There are a bunch of objects whose behaviour you need to understand so that you can link them together sensibly to achieve a goal.
• The objects don’t always behave as advertised – sometimes you have to work out what they really do.

Debugging people systems is much like debugging technical systems.

• You need to test and probe – sometimes circuitously.
• Both things are problem solving – and that’s what engineers do.

Doing More Design

The thing that often swings an engineer into management is wanting to achieve more technically then they can achieve alone.

• Wanting to build bigger and more complex systems.
• Wanting to influence the way others carry out technical work.

Often engineers need to taste it themselves before they realise that management can be the enabler for doing more design.

Points to take away …

• Encourage your engineers to try out management, without calling it by that name.
• Let them get the job done, and work out for themselves what ‘paper pushing’ is really needed.
• Point out the similarities between building and maintaining people systems and technical systems.
• Engineering management is just doing design and development by proxy.