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May 7, 2004 — The transition from technical contributor to technical manager is a difficult one. In nanotechnology companies around the world, scientists or engineers are often given the responsibility for people and projects without a second thought. Some of them make the transition. A lot more don’t.
I wrote this column as a wake-up call for the entrepreneur considering the promotion of a top technical contributor into management. A number of skill areas are detailed below. Your management candidate must exhibit strength in these areas or the promotion could be risky for both your young company and that person’s future career.
Failures in the transition to management occur because most scientists and engineers believe that adding supervision is simply a learn-as-you-go experience. I’d like to dispute this common belief. Management is not an additional set of responsibilities requiring new skills to be added to one’s professional repertoire. Management is an entirely different career from that of the individual contributor in the nanosciences.
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The Four Categories of Required Skills
Jim Lewis, who teaches the course “The Engineer as Manager” at the Lewis Institute, breaks down the required skills of a technical manager into these four categories: Technical, Organizational, Conceptual, and Human Relations. If you are currently considering adding supervision responsibilities to a top scientist’s or engineer’s role, you’ll need to look closely at this list and determine whether that person has shown these qualities in the past.
We’ll take it for granted that your candidate is strong on the technical side. The more you stray from the ideal in the other three, however, the greater your risk of losing that employee.
Organizational
Strong planning and organizational ability is a must-have for a manager, and one of the best ways to analyze whether a person has the capability to move from science to management. Has your candidate displayed strong organizational abilities in previous technical duties? Are this scientist’s presentations typically organized around a unifying theme, showing attention to detail and method?
No one teaches this kind of organization in grad school. And yet many scientists and engineers assume that they can manage projects because they have always been able to effectively plan their own responsibilities and those of one or two associates.
Project management at the managerial level, however, entails resource planning and relationships that involve an entirely different perspective on commitments and timelines. It is my recommendation that shortly after a promotion to supervision, formal training on project management be offered to that individual.
Conceptual
One key element of the planning process is the ability to see the big picture. Nano projects have an incredible degree of complexity. In order to properly utilize staff, and other resources like suppliers and internal groups, a manager must have the ability to clearly visualize the desired goal. He or she then has to communicate this concept to others. Developing good conceptual visualization is something that seems to come natural for some (but is very difficult to teach to those who don’t “get it”).
In order to determine if your management candidate has this skill, ask yourself if he or she has shown this conceptual visualization in planning and executing experiments. The very best scientists and engineers draw upon an inner ability to see how a wide variety of seemingly unrelated ideas come together in a larger context.
Human Relations
We’ve all seen examples of talented technical staff who, when given the chance to lead others, fail miserably because of their poor people skills. When a technical wizard is promoted to supervisory responsibility despite this human relations problem, the new supervisor is in jeopardy. Generally, that person will exit the firm — no one likes the loss of face.
Poor “people skills” are often a communications issue. The problem is that many new managers think it is their employee’s responsibility to be flexible in his or her communication style. To this person, the new title of supervisor somehow means that they have earned the right to be inflexible.
In reality, it is the person with the most flexibility in communication skills who succeeds as a manager. As cyberneticist Ross Ashby said, “In any system of men or machines, the element in the system with the greatest flexibility in its behavior will control the system.”
In Conclusion
In the fast-paced world of nanotechnology, it is tempting to take anyone who shows some initiative and move him or her into the management track. While this may work for some, it is a certainty that along the way your company will lose a number of highly valuable technical contributors.
My recommendation is to filter your prospects carefully through the three guidelines above, and then to support them with training and mentoring after the selection. There’s nothing wrong with growing your own managers. Just don’t forget to fertilize them now and again.