Tech Leadership: Why Great Engineers Don't Always Make Great Managers

The usual tech ladder has been a conventional route, where being a good engineer requires promotion as a head programmer and one day, they become a technical manager. However, a twenty-year life of putting technical leaders in place, and some failures, and some success has taught us that technical excellence does not necessarily make a manager successful.

Excellent engineers have a profound passion in the technical complex problems. They live on the writing of beautiful code, the building of solid systems, and deep into technical issues. Their performance is frequently judged in tangible and quantifiable achievements: higher performance measures, successful deliveries, and beautiful answers to technical issues. But it is a completely different set of skills that is needed by the management. Although technical skills are not lost, people management requires skills that are not acquired in an engineering career:

Emotional Intelligence and People Skills

Excellent managers must learn to read between the lines, to learn unread issues, and to navigate between complicated people interactions. They should also be happy living in a grey world and working in circumstances that do not have an obvious right or wrong answer.

Strategic Vision More Than Technical

Technological managers must move out of the code to concentrate on greater business goals. It may be especially difficult to engineers who can be satisfied with technical minutiae. Delegation of technical decisions, even when you do not agree with the method of doing things is very important in the leadership process.

Various Communication Requirements

Engineers communicate mostly using code, documentation and technical specifications. Managers will have to change communication styles, provide tough feedback, and explain technical concepts to the non-technical stakeholders. This necessitates an entirely new communication toolkit. Being an engineer to a manager is a radical change of skills that cannot necessarily be acquired through technical knowledge.

Promoting an outstanding engineer to management without the proper aptitude to be a leader can be costly:

• You have lost an outstanding individual contributor
• Team morale has dropped due to poor leadership
• Loss of productivity through poor management
• The manager may be frustrated and unfulfilled himself

This is where technical recruitment skills come in handy. Identifying technically-skilled individuals with leadership ability is a specialized set of skills, and with these skills, candidates can be identified with greater effectiveness through a couple of methods:

• Interviewing candidates based on emotional intelligence and people management situations
• Evaluate candidates on how well they communicate in various settings and in front of different audiences
• Evaluate strategic thinking and conduct business history and expertise along with technical ability

It is most important to note that not all the technical careers lead to becoming a manager. Organizations can shape their teams to offer other systems of development:

• Technical Architects
• Principal Engineers
• Technical Fellows
• Subject Matter Experts
• Technical Product Owners

It takes a long time in the industry to perceive the nuances between high-caliber engineers and high-caliber engineering managers. These are the following:

• Finding people with the right mixture of abilities in leadership and technical skills
• Determining leadership potential outside of technical skills
• Enabling organizations to design positions that enable people to effectively apply their technical leadership skills
• Offering insights of success in technical leadership transitions

It involves a profound knowledge of technical and leadership needs, which it has acquired over the years of successful placement in technology. You may want to recruit your next technical leader or you may want to be advised on how to build your technical organization, specialized recruiting skills can make sure that you make the appropriate decisions to succeed in your team. The expenditure on getting the appropriate technical leader is compensated in the performance of the team, and retention as well as organizational success in general.