Leadership and management... and technical expertise?

In My Humble Opinion
21

In my view, the primary responsibilities of a manager is to give guidance for work priorities; make sure that employees have the tools, training, and information they need to do the job; and insulating employees from senior management demands trying to task or make unnecessary demands at cross-purposes to their existing priorities. To do the first you need a broad understanding of what employees do; for the second a more detailed understanding of their skills and work; and the while the third doesn’t require any specific technical knowledge the ability to translate technospeak into executive bullshit goes a long way to running interference.

There is another consideration that I’ve run into as well; when there is a technical disagreement between members of a team that turns into an ego fight, being able to strategically deflate one or both on technical grounds goes a long way to dissipating the posturing without grudge-nursing. I once had a couple of engineers in a pitched battle over a particular issue regarding heat transfer and plume contamination, and while it wasn’t my discipline area I knew enough to know that one of them was completely misunderstanding a basic principle (which the other was nearly shouting at him across my office). I walked him through the equations for some elementary statistical mechanics of the gas species in question and he admitted that there was no issue. If I hadn’t had the technical knowledge to resolve the issue I would have had to arbitrarily side with one or the other to someone’s certain (and possibly valid) consternation.

Well, sometimes. I’ve had managers whose belief that their knowledge in one area extends to all others, often to the exclusion of listening to actual subject matter experts. Of course, these people are just bad managers to begin with, often overestimating even their expertise in their own area.

Stranger

22

Managing different situations likely requires different skills, or at least a different weighing of those skills. I think knowledge of common situations in a specific context would usually be pretty important (not always so), but could be learned in a certain amount of time, obviously varying fir different things…

Required people skills, political skills, technical knowledge for a given situation, general business knowledge, access to “institutional memory”, willingness to learn and listen, encouraging and listening to people who may disagree with you in a productive way, required aptitudes, general and specific experience, a degree of humility and confidence (but not too much), a sensible approach to risk, understanding the importance of budget and looking after your people without unduly burdening them with scut, and other factors likely differ pretty substantially from job to job.

People won’t respect you if you demonstrate repeatedly you have no idea what they do and are unwilling to learn, cannot ask good questions and do not seek reliable advice. You do not need to understand everything, but you do need to know what is and is not relevant for making reasonable decisions.

But also what @Stranger_On_A_Train said. He always says it so well, I am pleased he is posting again. :wink:

23

Of course, there’s always the opposite situation. In my first engineering job, our division director was a horrible manager - he’d cave to higher-ups and ignore his own people. I found out he was an exceptional engineer and he’d been promoted to a position he should never have held. Nice guy, but we all suffered because he didn’t know how to be a leader or a manager. It was a relief when a major reorganization had me working for a more competent director.

24

I agree with this 100%.

I’m a group leader at work. I believe my job is to be a resource for the people who report to me.

If they do not have the tools to do their job, or there is some kind of “roadblock” that prevents them from doing their job, I first want them to try and fix the problem on their own. If they’re not able to, I want them to come to me, and I will do everything in my power (rattle cages, etc.) to get them the tools and resources they need. In this sense, I sorta work for them.

Sadly, not everyone in management has this mentality. Case in point is the new division leader at work. (I report to him.) He spends all day demanding “good metrics” and “success stores” from his group leaders in an effort to make himself look good. He desperately wants to “move up” in the organization, and wants to show his upper management that he is a “success.”

25

Yes, you often get bad management from people who are looking ahead to the next step up the ladder rather than focusing on the job they’re doing now. They often adopt a short term mentality which leads to them patching over problems rather than fixing them. Their principle is to just hold things together long enough for them to move on and put this situation behind them. And if they succeed and get promoted, they just start the pattern over again and begin thinking about their next promotion. They never settle down to do a job well.

26

So I have to wonder: is this what they’re teaching in management school nowadays? Or is it due to narcissism?

27

Totally agree that these are important parts of the manager’s job. But, as you said, most of them don’t require technical expertise.
Even the translation. We got asked to show the acceptance of a standard we were pushing, and helped to define. Getting data would be nearly impossible, time consuming, and probably worthless. So our very smart boss said “draw a curve and don’t put any values on the axes.” Worked like a charm.

The conflicts I mediated were between people with awesome technical expertise, so it wasn’t that easy. When you’re writing software that does stuff never done before there is a lot of areas of judgment. I moderated, made sure things didn’t get too heated, and asked questions illuminating the differences.
In the Bell Labs environment anyone making dumb mistakes about technology would get flattened by a colleague without a manager being involved.
Now the guy who fired me made it a practice to hire people with skills in areas not involving the stuff we were doing, which was new at the time. This might be because he had a PhD in Math from Berkeley, who taught himself electrical engineering and our field, was a poet who got state grants, and was an amateur mycologist used as a resource by the state police when someone poisoned themselves on mushrooms.
But we also have plenty of examples of your point, some involving Nobel Laureates.

28

I think managers should know enough about the work of the people they manage so they understand, or can quickly learn, the realities those people deal with on the job. That lets information flow both ways and gives the manager more insight and better judgement when dumb shit starts flowing down from above

29

The meltdown at Twitter seems to be in part a splendid example of how managers who devalue technical expertise screw up. This has clearly been a case of managers - or more likely Musk - seeing employees as cogs, with no understanding of how a lot of information is going to get lost.
I went through the exercise of making a layoff list (which didn’t have to get used) and it isn’t easy. No one is going to put any effort into thinking about critical contributors if their job is on the line and there are too many layoffs anyway. So, at Twitter, some contracts with third party vendors have expired, and all those who can fix the problem have gotten laid off. Yes, I consider knowing the details of what software is critical to be technical expertise.

30

Getting rid of your most productive and knowledgeable staff always makes a great deal of sense to people who devalue intelligence. Would it take much more time to find out what people actually do? I can’t claim to understand Twitter or highly technical business and certainly do not have Musk’s successes. But I understand the Pareto Principle well enough, and even think it is possible mistakes were made. I hope the days of glorifying chainsaw bosses are finished, one can probably combine health (in various forms) with healthy profits.

31

My manager/coach circulated this video the other day, which I think is relevant to the OP’s question.. He’s former Coast Guard, so take that as you will :smiley:

We work for a Wall Street management consulting firm, so basically we do what you are asking about for a living - namely providing guidance and leadership to companies for managing unique and complex projects (and often leading the projects for them). While we do try to align people’s skills with the roles as much as possible, the unique and complex nature of the projects and programs typically means that most of the people on the team won’t have done this exact thing before.

Now that is not to say I can be a complete dunce about the subject matter, nor are our projects a free for all of everyone just doing what they want. Not can I just mindless apply management tools like Scaled Agile (SAFe) or the PMBOK book and expect miraculous results. What typically has to happen is I assemble a team of qualified experts in their particular field, understand their strengths and weaknesses, communicate goals and objectives, and try to motivate them to success.

To @Wrenching_Spanners point (since much of my work revolves around financial systems), I would agree that it is helpful to have a general understanding of the various concepts. But no single manager is going to have an in-depth understanding of (referencing my last project for example) detailed expertise of a global investment banks architecture and technology stack, several of a Fintech’s product lines (in various states of development), AWS cloud platforms, security frameworks, VPN frameworks, regulatory and legal requirements, the lending business we are supporting, data structures, underwriting, plus understanding the various project management methodologies and ways of working of the various departments within each organization, so on and so forth.

So for this particular case, a good month of the project is me getting an understanding of what all this stuff is in the context of the engagement and who the “go to” person should be. At the same time, creating a management framework and communication plan that enables all these people to coordinate while providing information to and from the client and various levels of leadership.

Much like the captain in the video, a lot of times it can feel like I’m not doing much of anything. In fact, years ago, one of my jr PMs asked me why our Director thought I was such a great PM because it never looked like I was “doing much”. My reply was “I bet Captain Edward Smith was really busy ‘doing stuff’ for the last 90 minutes of the Titanic’s voyage. Doesn’t mean he did his job well.”

32

IMHO it’s a call back to a older hierarchical style of management more suitable to unskilled and semi-skilled manual labor instead of highly complex knowledge workers. i.e. You can build a wall twice as fast by hiring twice as many bricklayers.

OTOH, even in a highly complex and technical business, you still want business processes and functionality segmented and compartmentalized in such a way that your operations don’t consist of massive spaghetti code and bespoke business processes that only can be run by some random dude who was there when they built it 20 years ago.

33

One large factor is the level of the manager. The person managing me needs to have at least a Cliff’s Notes level of understanding of my abilities and responsibilities. Their manager only needs my job title and a back of the book synopsis of what I do. Their manager? I dunno. Sit at their desks making Gantt charts and auditing budgets?

34

Yes, that’s not a problem of a lack of technical skills; that’s a problem of a lack of management skills.

As a manager you can’t adopt the principal that you know more than everyone else. That’s foolish. But some managers try to work this way and, as you note, they start thinking that any knowledge they don’t have must not be important.

A good manager understands it’s not his role to know everything. His role is to supervise other people, including those who have knowledge he doesn’t, and have them apply their knowledge to the job.

35

Actually, it is more a call back to Deming. I went through that period, and his view that 80% of factory workers are basically identical got taken to imply that 80% of highly skilled tech workers are identical. That’s also the heart of the Jack Welch policy at GE.

Doing it that way is more expensive in terms of time and money. It might look that way on the org chart, but when you get down to it someone hacked a solution to meet a deadline, and while that solution worked no one touched it.
We all know that spaghetti code is bad, and that changing requirements during the design of software causes problems, but requirement always seem to get changed while the software is deployed. A rewrite would be nice but try to get that budget through.
When are there enough changes to warrant a code review? Probably never. So a few people know why stuff got done, and if they vanish, especially before they can document anything, someone is going to be in for a big surprise.
The person writing documentation that no one has ever looked at probably got laid off years ago, and the people who are left are too busy to do it. Lean and mean, right?

36

They teach you that on the first day of management class, since the number one mistake new managers make is not delegating since they think they can do the job better than the staff - and are probably right, since that’s why they got promoted.
In my experience, managers who avoid this but still understand the work very well are better at delegating and trusting their staff than the ones who are clueless.
Understanding that their are intricacies is very different from thinking you know it all.
I’ve been in a lot of staff meetings looking at spreadsheets showing headcount, and none of those spreadsheets show what the numbers in them do. Not that important if you are managing to a headcount budget, but if you have to cut suddenly and do so by slashing the numbers in the spreadsheet you may wind up in hot water.
Before the AT&T trivestiture I had to make a rank ordered list of candidates for getting laid off in my group. As it turned out, so many people took the package the only one who got laid off was going to get laid off anyway. But it took a lot of time, was stressful, and was easier because my job wasn’t on the line. Doing it like they did it at Twitter is just stupid.

37

I routinely lead project where there is a significant technical aspect I have no background or experience with. I don’t expect to be “credible” as a technical SME (most of the time). Where I do expect to be credible is that people on my team have a clear understanding of expectations and goals and if there is a problem I will work with them to understand the nature of it and get them the organizational support they need.

Now I’m generally a curious person, so often I will ask technical people “Explain to me what you are doing, as if I were a small child.”

And if I still don’t understand, I’ll ask them “Now please explain it again to me, as if I were a smaller child.”

38

I believe it was Einstein who said, “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

39

Explaining stuff at a superficial technical level isn’t all that difficult, usually. But is that level of understanding going to result in the ability to determine if the schedules proposed by your staff are reasonable? Is it enough to evaluate the risks of a new project?
I suppose that isn’t a problem if you are basically doing more or less the same stuff over and over. Then I agree you don’t need a lot of depth. But I worked on stuff that had never been done before.
BTW, none of what I’m saying should be taken to imply that someone with technical skills will be a good or even competent manager. We all know that’s not the case.

40

The answer to your specific hypothetical, can a successful restaurant manager become a successful machine shop manager, is, in general, no. If that manager was successful in the new job, it would just be good luck and happenstance.

But the reason that this idea is so widely repeated is that it’s sometimes true, and in my experience it depends on the management level we’re talking about. At lower management levels one generally does have to have a fairly close familiarity with the processes and technology; at the highest management levels, knowledge of broad business principles and an understanding of the marketplace and the business’s role in it becomes more important. A small business (say on the order of ~100 to 200 employees) basically needs to have a leader at the top who understands both, because this person is both a middle manager and the ultimate decision maker.

I can think of two examples to back this up. I once worked for one of those small-ish tech companies, and the president, who was otherwise a pretty bright guy, got sold on this concept of fungible management. He hired a bunch of MBAs who knew nothing about the business or the relevant technology to manage the various departments. The result was an absolute catastrophic failure, as I and many others predicted it would be.

The other side of the coin is that Lou Gerstner, whose previous background was at American Express and then at Nabisco, was hired to turn around IBM when it was in a nosedive to extinction. Many pundits and employees ridiculed the idea that “the breakfast cereal guy” was going to save IBM. But he did, not by understanding the details of the technology, but by understanding the marketplace and IBM’s strengths, and redefining its role to leverage those strengths into business success.