Many, many years ago when I was a new Ensign in the Navy, I was required to take a Leadership and Management class. FWIW, I eventually learned that while I was OK as a manager, I sucked as a leader, but I digress…
One thing we were told that I disagreed with (and still do) was that a manager can manage anywhere. So whether it’s a dairy or a clothing manufacturer or an ISP, any manager can step in and do the job. OK, maybe in theory, that’s the case, but I think in reality, a manager needs to understand what the workers actually do and what the job requires. Just because you can manage a crew of 10 at a restaurant, can you expect to be successful managing 10 machinists in a fabrication shop?
Back me up or convince me otherwise - does a manager need to have more than a passing familiarity with the business/process being managed?
I was an officer in the Canadian Navy, both operationally and then in an HR & analysis capacity, and I’ve heard the same thing as well. It sounds good in theory but, in reality, a manager should have an understanding of the field of expertise so that, at least, he/she does know if they’re being bamboozled by their staff or not, and so that they can speak to the topic with their bosses with a modicum of credibility and understanding.
I’ll let those with more experience of managing or being managed reply, and just say it occurs to me that you’re more likely to have the respect of the people you’re managing if you understand what they’re doing and have some experience with it yourself.
If successful means being good within your field (say a restaurant with good reviews, that customers love going to, that never fails a health inspection, good staff relations, etc), maybe not.
If successful means producing the relevant KPIs and/or generating presentations that ownership or executives like to see, absolutely.
There’s certainly the conceit that management is independent of field, and there are certainly elements of management skills that are transferrable, but, I tend to see it being closer to the concept of kiss up, kick down. A “good” manager can successfully kiss the rear end of their boss no matter the field and convince the world at large that the actual field of work is not so important. And when they themselves get promoted, simply perpetuate the cycle.
I’ve seen both and while ‘professional’ managers do have a generic set of management tools and skills that can marginally improve how a business runs, the vast majority have no clue how to adapt any of that to a particular field or business (e.g. managing a McDonald’s is going to be different from managing a Michelin star restaurant) and just expect the same working style and tools to magically work no matter the context.
Basically, it comes down to people in the end. Sure, the top 1% or 5% or whatever of managers can probably transcend field but this isn’t Lake Woebegone. Not every manager can be above average, even if they nearly all claim to be so.
I am going to say that the manager needs more than a passing familiarity with the business/process being managed - but I mean just that, “familiarity”. Not that there is one specific job the manager should have worked themselves up from. At some point, managers are managing people who do different jobs. There might be a job where the manager is managing ten machinists in a shop and another manager is managing ten bookkeepers and clerks , but at some point there will be someone managing everyone in the shop - machinists and bookkeepers and clerks and the receptionist and the janitor. And that person cannot know every job in detail.
A lot of people I know , however, think that managers should have worked one specific job and that for example, a prison warden should have started as a correction officer, not in one of the many other jobs in a prison. I don’t think that is generally true , that managers should have worked one particular job.
I’m a program manager for software. I used to be an engineer, and I know how engineers work, so I’m fairly effective as a PGM. I’ve worked in several different organizations that made wildly different types of software and my knowledge of that field hasn’t really been needed.
IMO, if you understand the type of work (manufacturing, software development, publishing) you can lead/manage without knowing any specifics. I don’t need to know the details of gaming, packet capture, or geolocation to manage people doing those things.
I remember being taught that at business school at university and disagreed with it. So I’ve got an intellectual bias against the idea that a manager can move from one field to another and be successful without learning about the new field. I think the idea is that management skills are universal, and can be applied across different situations. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. However, I think the context in which those skills are applied is very important, and lack of knowledge of context leads to failure.
In my field, financial systems, managers need to have knowledge of development methodology, project management, use of project management and presentation tools such as Microsoft Project and Powerpoint, budgeting, and cost/benefit analysis. They also need soft skills such as listening, conflict resolution, delegation, and motivation. Those are generic skills. A manager could get by without possessing software language skills, accountancy skills, product knowledge, or client industry knowledge. But such a manager is going to be entirely reliant on someone like me to supply the knowledge he’s lacking. It’s going to be difficult having conversations where he doesn’t possess the vocabulary to understand a problem. And he’s going to be relying on his judgment of personalities when making decisions between differing opinions, rather than actual knowledge. Those are all severe risks, and I’ve been on projects that have failed because the project managers didn’t know enough to manage what they didn’t know, listened to the wrong people, and discovered that their well-made plan based on their knowledge of management principals contrasted too greatly with reality.
I’ve recently completed a Leadership & Management course with a group of colleagues from around the University where I work. I would say that the principles of management are the same for all of us (in our HE institution), in that we adopt the same methods so in effect the “people management” is the same across the campus.
I manage a small team, I have regular 1-1 meetings with team members, we have objectives, annual reviews and interim reviews. We also have regular team meetings where we can talk about things that affect us all. We deal with delegation, conflict resolution, training, support and absence management which is all still a fairly standard thing for all of us.
Where we differ is in process management. We don’t have a “standard” method for managing what we do or how we do it, our only standard comes with managing who is doing it. I do feel that it helps me to have been in the role that my team currently have so I do understand the job, the issues and the frustrations. I also appreciate that when I have had to cover another team manager’s role, it hasn’t been straightforward because I don’t know how that team operates or what different dynamics I may be dealing with.
I think it depends on the level of management. A lot of the more difficult technical questions will be kicked up to front-line managers, and yes, I think they have to be very aware of how things work.
At higher levels, managing may more involve coordinating, making policy decisions, and supporting your group globally across the organization, which may not need that level of expertise (depending on how strong the team below you is).
A friend of mine from college is in a position where he is helping select board members and CEOs of large companies, and does a significant amount of work training and teaching boards as a group. He’s said it’s become increasingly frustrating to deal with the old school mentality of them off-loading technical duties and responsibilities. Too often, the non-CTO members of a board will laugh off their non-expertise and ignorance. He has a few articles out there about how he quickly reprimands them “what would your reaction be if someone in this room laughed off their ignorance of finance, would you think they belong here?”
I don’t know if the CEO needs to know the specifics of how each widget is made, but they should have a very good understanding of it and the process.
That’s me. I was a manager in a prison. And I did start out as a correction officer and went up through the ranks. This meant I personally had experience and knowledge of the security parts of the job.
But I also had to manage people who worked in other areas I had not worked in. I had to manage chaplains, cooks, counselors, doctors, electricians, nurses, secretaries, teachers, etc. And that led to situations were I had to manage somebody who knew their job when I did not.
There was a union policy that said that if you called an electrician in from home, he was guaranteed a minimum of four hours of overtime. There was an electrician who had a pattern. Often when he was working, he would leave at the end of his shirt and then an hour or so later, we would develop some electrical problem that needed to be addressed. I would call him in in to fix it. He lived nearby and would come in. And he had an uncanny knack of always seeming to know exactly what the problem was and could fix it in about fifteen minutes and then go home - but collecting the four hours of overtime.
I was suspicious that he was intentionally sabotaging things to create these problems in order to get his four hours of overtime for a minimal amount of work. But I’m not an electrician; I couldn’t evaluate the problems even if I asked for explanations of what he was doing. So I had to approach the issue from another direction.
The next time there was a problem, I called him in as usual. He fixed the problem in the usual short amount of time and told me he was going home. But this time, I said that as long as he was already here and was being paid for four hours of overtime, he should stay and do some of the routine work that he normally did on his regular shift. I had him stay for the full four hours rather than letting him leave after fifteen minutes. After that, these little problems stopped happening.
Here’s another situation. It was a night shift. We had a nurse on duty twenty-four hours a day to handle medical issues but not a doctor. We had a doctor on call who could check inmates via a tele-med system.
The nurse called me up and told me an inmate was saying he had abdominal pain. We had the doctor check him via the tele-med. The doctor felt the inmate was basically okay and could wait until morning to be seen during the regular sick call. But the nurse told me she thought the doctor was mistaken. She felt the inmate was seriously ill and needed immediate medical attention.
So I had a doctor, who had examined the inmate over a tele-med system, telling me he was okay. And a nurse, who had examined the inmate in person, telling me he was not okay. My professional medical knowledge is zero. I couldn’t examine the inmate and judge whether he was sick or not. But I was the person who had to decide whether or not to call an ambulance.
And I called the ambulance and had the inmate taken to the hospital. Because while I have no medical knowledge, I could see the consequences of my choices. If I kept the inmate in the prison and he was seriously sick, he might die. While if I sent the inmate to the outside hospital and he was not seriously sick, I would just be wasting money. So my choice as a manager was clear even if I lacked any medical knowledge.
As I turned out, the doctor was right and the nurse was wrong. When the inmate got to the outside hospital and was seen in person by the ER doctor, he confirmed that the inmate had no serious medical problem. My apologies to those of you who were New York taxpayers.
So my point is that you can effectively manage people even when you are not familiar with their job.
I totally agree with you! If all they mean by “managing” is to create schedules, vacation time, substitute criteria, etc, then I suppose they’re right, but that is “management” in the shallowest terms.
It’s my experience that the Navy doesn’t even believe its own propaganda in this regard. The first thing they did when I got to the boat was make me qualify as Engineering Officer of the Watch and then qualify in submarines. Both qualifications involved learning a lot about the equipment and tasks of the people I was managing. Didn’t mean that they didn’t know a lot more about their jobs than I did, but I had considerably more credibility, both with the crew and my captain, once I had some hands-on experience doing their jobs.
If it was phrased like that, then yeah, it’s bullshit. I would say, “A good manager can manage anywhere.” I would also say that a whole lot of managers out there aren’t good managers.
Part of managing a team that’s doing something you’re not familiar with would be figuring out who to listen to when they give advice or opinions. Knowing which person just bluffs their way through something, which person is generally reliable, and which person just tells you what they think you want to hear.
That’s a skill some people are really great at. Others, not so much.
I disagree that a manager needs technical expertise. Sure they should learn in general terms how the various processes of their department fit together with the whole but I don’t need to know that the widget has to run at 7.3V +/- 0.05V in the Heisenberg resonators we build. If I have a really good crew, I should be able to trust you to know your job and if you can’t do your job, come to me and tell me how I can support you. Oh you need PCBs at a faster rate? I don’t know what a PCB is but I do know that’s Carmen’s department. Let me call her and see what’s going on.
No apologies needed, you used compassion - you probably would have felt horrid if the patient died, I know his family would potentially been able to sue the state, so you may have actually saved the state a lot more money than was spent shipping him to the ED.
Chemical factory I managed a machine ship division in had the policy that every plant manager and department manager had to cycle through each department to get an idea of exactly what they did in the grand scheme of things. I actually started out in the machine shop as an apprentice/student at BOCES for machine tech, but when they decided to make me a manger, I cycled through all the departments like all the other management. Of course, I actually had a better grasp of the business side of things in addition to the production side because my dad was a long term member of management [actually a vice president, though the owner of the company jokingly called him his enforcer because my dad was the one they sent to underperforming or mismanaged locations to deal with the situation-he could hire and fire independently, move personnel around, contract outside experts. Really, quite a lot of liberties that many members of management don’t have.]
I worked in high tech fields, and a good manager needs both management skills and technical skills.
At some point two people are going to come to you and ask for technical direction. You don’t need to be as expert as they are, but you had better have a more than fundamental understanding of the area to make a good decision. And a bigger picture. If you don’t, you will have zero credibility and either get swayed by the last person you talked to or make stupid decisions. I had a boss, a second level manager, who knew nothing about our area, made terrible decisions, and who got laughed at. The person he replaced was not an expert either but he did have a PhD in math and was excellent at understanding the technology.
At another job I moved into a new department. I discovered that a guy was spending all his time maintaining 40 lines of code. His boss knew nothing about programming and was terrified of interfering. That’s what can happen if you know too little about what your reports do.
Another problem about a manager not having technical expertise - they may feel inferior and compensate by pretending to have more than they have. It is easier for someone with expertise in one area to admit they don’t know something about another and ask.
Well, that probably doesn’t hurt. But I’m not convinced it’s required.
Anecdotal: My uncle took over a struggling computer supply company in the late 1980s.
Sales were less than $1M per year. Ten years later the sales were $687M. He knew nothing about computers, and not much about sales, either. But he was very, very skilled when it came to business. That’s the only thing he understood - business.
Having said that, I work in engineering R&D. Our current manager has never worked in the lab, and is pretty much clueless on anything engineering-related. He would be much more effective if he had such experience, IMO.
Back in the day the policy at GE was to assign managers to positions where they were not experienced in the tech. For example, in the last group I worked in (GE Medical Systems) the manager of the electrical engineering department was a software engineer and the manager of the mechanical engineering department was an electrical engineer. Shortly before I left the electrical engineering manager was replaced by a mechanical engineer. Managers were also to move up after two years in a position or it would behoove them to find a different company.
Of course, we see how that worked out for GE in the long term…
Sometimes the problems in companies are obvious, even without knowing anything about the technology.
Back in the mid-nineties, I worked for a small local start-up that wanted to get into Computer Stuff in a big way. They had this bad habit of having an idea, doing 80-90% of the work needed to make it work, then deciding “Nah, that won’t work, let’s do something else!”
Now, sometimes you do need to bail on a bad idea, but they had at least a couple of ideas that I thought could have made money if they’d pushed through on them. But they never really did that for anything. Any real business guy could have come in and seen what the problems were. Having someone with the clout to make them finish at least a few projects could have turned this place around, but that never happened.