Being Effective When Management Isn't? 3

[joekm]

I recently came across a fairly astute observation about this paradigm where management is offered as a "reward" to engineers who have longevity and have performed well. The observation being that management is a skill set in and of itself and meerly being a good engineer - or even a great engineer - does not make you a good manager. This observation is extremely apropos to where I am currently working. Additionally, outside of flash animation on company policies, they don't train here...period. If you want to learn anything, you have to scrounge for it. So, by extension, I doubt managment receives any real training either.

Don't get me wrong, I think pulling managers from the engineering staff is a good idea - provided you pick people based upon managerial aptitude and are willing to really train them. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be happeing here.

So, I have two questions:

How can you effectively get things done in an ineffective managerial environment?

How can I learn the skill sets required to be a good manager?

--
Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
-- Albert Einstein

 

[FACS]

How can you effectively get things done in an ineffective managerial environment?

Become an effective manager yourself. Start acting like one, if you don't know how, then move on to the next question. The change will begin with you.


How can I learn the skill sets required to be a good manager?

Go to school. When I tired of the poor management at my company, I started acting like a manager. I enrolled in business school and ended up with an MBA and became the Director of Engineering. You can bet things changed.

You can't change Them but you can change yourself; and you can make a difference.

--



Charlie

http://www.facsco.com

 

[graybeach]

It is sad that being a manager is thought of as being the pinnacle of an engineer’s career. It gets to the point where one starts to wonder, “actually engineering something, actually figuring stuff out? Ew, I need to delegate that so I can be a manager ASAP.”

Maybe what is missing at joekm's company are good project engineers. A good project engineer is someone who hammers out the nitty gritty details of the scope, lays out the project, envisions the final product and methods of solution, shares that vision with the project team, keeps the team on track and does what it takes to get the job done.

So joekm, in answer to your first question, strive to be a good project engineer whether your task is very small or very large.

 

[joekm]

Well, there is a nearby community college but I'm limited on time and resources so I don't think taking classes is realistic at this time (i.e. - I have children and this limits both time and money). Any good books/Computer Learning Software on the subject of project management?

--
Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
-- Albert Einstein

 

[swearingen]

Check out the Project Management Institute. They offer lots of courses and certification. I've been through a 10 week training class with them and it was very informative. However, it sort of reminded me of college vs. production engineering. College gave you the tools, but it was the hard-knock school of experience where you really learned the ropes. PMI, to me, seems like that when compared with a production manager.

Best of luck!

 

[powerjunx]

Facs is right, self motivation will work on this matter.

But it's more motivating when the company exerts effort to support its constituent to provide managemant training for free, isnt' it nice?

 

[cousink]

"How can you effectively get things done in an ineffective managerial environment?"

Might I answer your question with a couple of questions, and the first one is rhetorical: are you the new guy, or are you the new sheriff in town? As a follow-up, how much of your time are you willing to sacrifice to stay where you are with patience, persevere through the challenges and then "effectively get things done"? You can start immediately to effectively get things done by having patience, but keeping still for your real opportunity to be effective is the challenge.

To be effective in your office or within your team, whichever is applicable, I would suggest taking every opportunity to understand your office's culture, what it values. Does it really value ineffective management? Probably not. Find out what its goals are supposed to be and who is supposed to be achieving them. Who accounts for the success of the office? Pick the brain of your boss and your boss's boss. Get involved with committees. Attend company functions. Partner with your co-worker. What really is driving the company, is it quality or the bottom-line? Maybe its as simple as forgetting the socializing and just making money.

After you learn the goals, determine if they are aligned with yours. If they are, then persevere. This may require many trials and errors, but at the same time you read through books and study through courses to put up with the hard knocks, all in order to become the change you want to see happen at your office and in your community. Since the desired results of the company are not to your standard, keep pushing, without committing any taboos, of course--and you recognize taboos after studying the office's culture. Since you know your standard will take your company to the next level it is striving to reach, you need to be an agent for the existing culture in order to help it evolve and progress.

---

"Happiness can only be achieved when your beliefs, your thoughts, and your actions are one and the same." Gandhi

 

[PSE]

I have found in my experiences that regardless of the management capabilities, there are always those few key individuals that ACTUALLY know how to get something done. The key has been identifying those individuals and working with them. Provide your manager(s) feedback and try to obtain priorities but work with the people who actually know what the system needs to run.

Regards,

 

[joekm]

cousink:

I'd be the "new guy", although I'm coming on a year at this point. I have made progress, partly by doing some of the things you've suggested. Although, some of the people here who seem most effective are also the most reviled by their co-workers. The turnover rate here is pretty high as well.

A lot of people suggest that I should "be a good leader myself", and "learn how to manage up". Good suggestions, to be sure. However, in an environment where documentation is horribly disorganized, if not non-existant, and employees tend to play their cards "close to their chest", it's very tough to make inroads.

I have hit on a couple of strategies that have worked, however. First, I started keeping a journal of observations and events here. This has enabled me to connect observations and spot patterns that I may not have been able to see otherwise. Second, I now use my PDA to track verbal follow-up items (people here don't read e-mails because everybody gets so many of them, thus rendering a powerful communication tool nearly useless). I annotate the follow up item to the PDA and set an audible alarm, usually 24 hours or at the end of the next meeting I'm scheduled to be in with them. The thing is, people here tend to prefer verbal commitments as opposed to written. However, you can always claim that you don't recall the conversation. Having the PDA alarm go off, especially in front of others, seems to add credibility to my claim that, yes we did have this conversation and you owe me data.

I've since taken to wearing that PDA on my belt and people have taken to getting back to me before it goes off.

So, I'm making progress. In the meantime, I've been contacted by two other companies who are fairly aggressively recruiting me. I'm at least going to hear them out.

--
Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
-- Albert Einstein

 

[zdas04]

How do you define "effective management"? The only definition that I've ever seen add value is "Is the company/division/group profitable or do they contribute materially to the company bottom line?" Everything else is just style, attitude, and personality.

Maybe what you see as "ineffective management" is just managers requiring knowledge workers to think for themselves? Bad management is a failure to react appropriately to changing conditions. I've worked for some people that I would have loved to strangle, people that I simply bypassed, people that I felt were micro-managing me, people that acted like they didn't have a clue what my group did, etc. The end result in every case was that the organization continued to be profitable so I guess what they were doing was effective.

On this scale, the worst managers I ever saw were the ones that developed their people (e.g., send them to 20 days training a year without any business case for that individual getting that training), that cared about family problems (e.g., can't find a sitter, work at home on your group project), that were more interested in the "career development" of their staff than being profitable. These toads are a menace.

David

 

[joekm]

zdas04:

I would concur with your definition of effective management. However, it appears you may be making some inappropriate assumptions about me.

Let's say, for example that a project manager has been required by his manager to provide a listing of critical task with deadlines that includes which resource is assigned to which task. Our project engineer does just that and in a reasonable amount of time. So far so good, right?

Now, let's say that said project engineer goes back and verbally reassigns all of those task without updating the documented listing. So, for example, I find myself with a weeks worth of engineering time invested in a project that, not only had it's due date changed, but it was assigned to someone else and this was never communicated to me. I've just wasted a week's worth of time that I could have spent on a more critical task. I'm intellegent, I'm capable of "figuring out things for myself", but I'm not psychic. If you change my assigned tasks and don't notify me, how am I supposed to know? Should I find you every morning and make sure there are no changes I should know about? That seems a little in-efficient to me.

As far as training is concerned. This has the effect of standardizing on the use of available tools. Assuming these tools are "mission critical", then I would say that a business case can be made for training.

I'm not whining here, I consider this place part of my education. It's been a good 15 years since I've seen and environment this bad, and I want to know how to make forward progress anyway.

--
Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
-- Albert Einstein

 

[joekm]

Actually zdas04, let's try a more "bottom line" example. Furthermore, just to maintain perspective, I'll pick an example other than my present employer.

A former co-worker of mine, and possibly one of the best modelers/draftsmen I know, recently had his employer switch from their current modeling software to Catia V5. While he has over 20 years experience, he's never used Catia. Problem is, the only training he's been provided with so far is the basic "getting started" documentation. He's related to me that tasks that used to take 3 hours now take more like 3 days.

Let's take that at face value and further assume that a senior experienced designer's time is worth, say, $95.00/hr.

($95.00/hr)*[(3 days)(8 hr/day) - 3 hr)] = $1995.00

So, everytime something like this happens, you lose about $2,000.00 worth of productivity from this one designer. How many of these would you say makes an adequate business case to train him on the new software?

I'm not trying to bust on you...frivolous training is a waste of time, money, and productivity. However, if said training will improve productivity long term, then it's not a waste, it's a necessary expense.

--
Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
-- Albert Einstein

 

[rbulsara]

Trying to teach your employer how to run their business is usually not a good idea. In fact it invariably leads to your deteriment and furstration. Just think about it, they got along where they are without your advice so drop that idea.

Look for another firm which you feel has a better management style. Key is how do you know that? Well, you have do your own research by talking to people who know other firms.

 

[cousink]

Although I am unsure this is the problem in question, in my experience, ineffective technical managers are challenged to retain the staff required to effectively get things done. That is what is sad to me, that technical managers with reasonable people and presentation skills when dealing with clients fail to exercise those skills to develop even a minimal rapport with their staff. When they find themselves managing a project all by themselves with no support staff, then they can produce according to their individualized standard of perfection without having to blame anyone but themselves.

Micromanagement is not always just a local issue. It can also be an interoffice problem. For a huge corporation, sometimes ineffective management in a branch office can reasonably be blamed on ineffective management of that branch from the higher up's worknig out of a regional office. Have you ever heard talk of your office being considered for closing? See how your co-workers in different other branch offices are encouraged to effectively get things done. For example--and perhaps this is trivial, I know co-workers at our local branch became dismayed and unmotivated to be asked to produce from half-size cubicles, when they saw that their co-workers in other nearby branches were enjoying personal offices.

 

[zdas04]

Joekm, you are misunderstanding me.

I don't have a clue how effective you, your co-workers, or managers are, I was just asking you to define "good" and "bad" management to yourself. When you step back from "the jerk didn't do his job, how can I do mine" and ask "in spite of some serious busts in communication, are we making money?" things tend to shade in one direction or another. I think that these are style and personality issues, not management issues.

As to training, I spend a lot of time doing it and I'd be cutting my own throat to say that you should never train, and it would be stupid thing to say. My problem is a training quota that must be met. Like sending an AutoCad Tech to ArcView school because he needs 20 days training, even if you don't have any intention of his ever turning ArcView on in the office. I see that all the time.

I teach a class on compression and about half the people attending at most companies couldn't care less, but are there for the free lunch and to satisfy their training requiremnts before they go back to their rod-pump optimization job (or whatever). That is bad management.

David

 

[plasgears]

The best engineering company I ever worked for developed engineering managers from the engineer ranks and trained them with in-plant courses. Invariably they also had masters degrees.

The worst company I worked for employed QC techs (non-degree) in the engineering mgt role. The plant mgr was a QC type, and he employed like individuals in the mgt role. What a disaster in the making, and the company imploded after I left. They were testing for cyclic durability using ultimate failure tests!

 

[joekm]

Well, my apologies if I mis-understood you zdas04.

cousinK, I don't know if micro-management is the problem here...more the opposite, I can't get anybody to consistently communicate what they need, when they need it, or what internal standards/proceedures they need me to follow. Further research into the latter revealed that there are no published standard practices here. In fact, I've been asked to help establish them.

To that end, I've started a "think tank" of the existing analyst so we could determine what our current "best practices" are with the ultimate idea of evolving them into a set of mutually agreeable standard practices.

Like I said, I'm starting to make a little progress, but I'm accostomed to being much busier.




--
Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
-- Albert Einstein

 

[cvg]

joekm
it sounds like you finally expressed the problem - "I can't get anybody to consistently communicate..."

In my experience working up the ranks to project manager for a civil consulting firm, consistent communication with all members of the team about all facets of the project (client is also part of the team) seems to be the number one issue that determines the failure or success of the project.

 

[GrimesFrank]

Here's a funny to some up short sighted management.

Frank "Grimey" Grimes

 

[aardvarkdw]

David,

"in spite of some serious busts in communication, are we making money?"

Is that really the basis you have for judging effective management? I can think of several cases (many of which are where I currently work)in which, the company is making money despite the management practices rather than because of them. When you have good people working for you, you can be a complete and utter screw up and still have your bottom line look good.

David