Management of Technical Personnel

On the Management of Technical Personnel

Once I would have said that I was an Engineer, not a Manager. However having taken on a role of managing a team of engineers and technicians, I find that I can not only do it, but that I can do it rather well and indeed enjoy it. Perhaps this is because at the end of the day, management is just another set of problems to be solved.

Here are some of my thoughts on management:

You can only successfully manage a team that respect you.
Respect must be earned. It never comes with the title.
Teams must be led from the front, not ordered from behind.
Manage by persuasion, not by edict.
Everyone comes to work wanting to do a good job, not a bad one. A manager's role is to help them achieve this.
If a team member makes a mistake, the managers role is to support and coach, not to criticise.
A managers role is to support his team to the full in dealings outside that team. Ultimately he/she must be prepared to take responsibilty for his teams actions.
Management is a very "fashion ridden" business, with frequent new "miracle" techniques. Mostly these are just new sets of buzz-words for plain old fashioned common sense.
Total Quality Management (TQM) gets closest to the common sense for my money, and is the set of "jargon" I tend to use.
People who talk most about "team-building" are generally the worst at doing it.
There is no such word as "Proactive"!
(or Newton's Second Law would have been "Proaction and Reaction are Equal and Opposite").