Business Management And People Leadership For Technicians
Michael Gerber is famous for remarking that many small business owners are “technicians who have suffered an entrepreneurial seizure”, but I am becoming more and more aware of a parallel class of “challenged people” in medium to large organisations: They are “technicians who have suffered a promotion to management”.
The Cause of the Challenge
I say parallel because both groups face the same challenges from the same root cause: Both have applied their talents to mastering a technical skill dealing with things or concepts (eg, in engineering, accounting, law or design) and have then been rewarded with a business or promotion to a position in which they are now responsible for managing people – and that’s a whole new ball game for which they have little or no training, and maybe little or no propensity!
Let’s face it: The type of clean, logical thinking that makes a great engineer or accountant does not exactly put one on top of the list in people skills! In fact, it’s more often a case of “au contraire”!
The New Leader Challenge
“Promoted technicians”, who once ruled their technical realm, are often overwhelmed by the very different challenges of managing people, not because they lack intelligence (quite the contrary), but because they lack the “people paradigms” that would enable them to navigate the rocky shoals of their new domain.
And the first of those paradigms may be the one encapsulated in Ross Perot’s observation, “Don’t try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed, but people must be lead.”
Is that you thinking, “Hmmm, bit of a problem here. I’ve been promoted because I have been good at managing and manipulating things, and you’re telling me those skills are the wrong ones to apply to my new role of maximising the value of the people for whom I am now responsible.”
Scary thought! Especially for a good technician, who is used to working logically through the problem to a secure – and probably permanent – answer!
What’s the Cost of Not Training Technicians to Manage?
Tom O’Toole owns this point when he says, “People say to me, ‘What happens when you train your people and they leave?’, and I say to them, ‘Ever thought of what happens if you don’t train them and they stay?’!”
Putting a good technician into a management role for which he or she is not trained is akin to putting an unskilled person in charge of a nuclear power plant: Everything may be OK at the beginning but as the situation heats up . . .
Competent people expect and respect a similar degree of task competence in their managers and, when an absence of that starts to make work under a poor leader “not worth the trouble”, they are the ones who find it easiest to find a new job. Less competent (or confident) team members recognise their own lack of mobility, and stay. So poor leaders tend to create an exodus of talent and a pooling of mediocrity, leaving them with even less resources than they started with, to get the job done.
When a State Government asked us a few years ago to identify and rank the factors limiting growth in small businesses, “lack of leadership skills” came top of the list and, from everything we have observed since, it’s still there.
The Technician’s Guide To (Managing) People
Given the frequency that the “technician-in-charge-of-people” challenge arises in our clients’ businesses, we’ve developed a “Technician’s Guide To People” as the starting point for our work in this area, but the real results are produced through a range of Leadership Training & Coaching courses that enable good technicians to become even better leaders.
While the Guide was originally developed to share with our business coaching clients, you are welcome to download a complimentary copy of A Technician’s Guide to (Managing) People here. Technicians Guide to People
