Attn: New Engineering Managers! This Blog’s for You.
You will need to dedicate some of your own time to non-technical leadership self-development. You probably won’t have spare time, but you have to make the time.
by Dann Gustavson
Congratulations, New Engineering Managers and Project Managers!
If (1) or (2) below is true, then this Blog’s for you.
- Yesterday, you were an engineer. Today, you are a new engineering manager or project manager with probably 6 to 12 people reporting to you.
- Yesterday, you were an engineering manager with 6 to 15 engineers and technicians reporting to you. Today, you are a senior manager or director of engineering, with 3 to 5 managers and their respective teams reporting to you, and a correspondingly greater level of organizational responsibility and authority.
First of all congratulations! Well deserved, I’m sure! Such promotions don’t come easy. You’ve worked hard to get to this point, and the reward is – – – more hard work. A couple of things may not be obvious to you on Day 1 of your new assignment. The first is, to be effective as a new engineering manager you’re going to require a whole new set of skills that the job you had until yesterday did not prepare you for. And the second is, with very few exceptions, your company has no “New Manager Training” program to help you develop those skills.
Leadership "soft " skills
These leadership skills are not instinctive – you are not born with them, and they do not come to you out of The Cloud. What’s more, I’m betting that on Day 1 you don’t yet even know what these important skills are. To develop the skills required to lead people in an organization will require your focus and dedication, an open mind, your willingness sometimes to learn by trial and error, plus some good coaching from your manager, assuming he or she has those skills to share. (Not always the case, in my experience.)
So to you men and women who are new engineering managers – functional and/or project leaders – this blog’s for you. If you’re not managing in a company that provides first-rate leadership education for new managers, then you need access to “resources” to help you acquire those skills – largely people skills – that are not part of most engineers’ curricula. Fortunately, the resources are available, and it is well within your power to avail yourself of them. And if you commit the time and effort, the skills you will develop will help you in many other areas of life, not just business and management.
In this series of Next Level Leadership articles, I will give you all the answers you will ever need to solve any problem you encounter as an Engineering Manager or PM!
Sorry, just kidding… What I will endeavor to do is provide some experience-based insights to help you set your own direction, and help you find the educational resources you need, to address the leadership concerns and issues you face with your team and in interactions with others in your company network.
A short story. I grew up in western New York, so when I learned to drive a car it was important to learn how to drive in winter weather. On one snowy December day when I was 16, my Dad took me out to practice. We didn’t head for the nearest busy highway, since I only had about 40 hours of driving experience up until then, none of it in winter conditions. We went to a nearby supermarket parking lot that was practically deserted – nobody else was out in that weather. There, Dad put me behind the wheel and then guided me as I practiced accelerating, braking, skidding, turning, spinning out, losing and regaining control, all in an environment that minimized the penalty for failure. I didn’t crash into anything, and after an hour I at least had the feel for the difference between driving on dry pavement and on 3 to 6 inches of packed snow. I drove the two miles home with a little more confidence because of the time spent practicing without obstacles like pedestrians, parked cars, or oncoming traffic.
OK, Dann - What's My Take-away ?
Learning to manage people, like learning to drive in snow, requires training and practice, and works better when you have an experienced guide or coach. Everyone reporting to you is human, and they all come with a life outside their jobs; they occasionally do unexpected things for strange reasons, and that will interfere with your leadership at inopportune times. There is huge value in practicing people management skills in a classroom or workshop role-play environment using case studies or mock-ups of real situations, where you don’t create a personnel incident if you do the wrong thing in a tense situation. People who may have been your peers yesterday now report to you, and so the way you interact had better change if you and they want to succeed and grow. Try out your new people skills before you actually have to use them, especially the difficult skills involving poor job performance. You will have to counsel someone about a performance problem sooner than you might imagine. You will benefit greatly by carving out a few days a year to engage in a curriculum of people-skills development that will broaden your range of abilities.
You have accepted the challenge of an engineering management or PM assignment. Now go and be the leader you have been asked to be. Make the most of this opportunity you have earned!
That’s a great first step to Next Level Leadership!
Dann Gustavson, PMP®, Lean Six-Sigma Black Belt, helps Program Managers and their teams achieve superior results through high-impact program execution. Prepare, structure, and run successful programs in product engineering, manufacturing operations (including outsourcing), and cross-functional change initiatives.
Contact Dann@Lean6SigmaPM.com.