A tweet from Elon Musk some days ago raised an ancient question much debated in my industry: does a manager need to be a technician him/herself?
Just in case you missed it, here’s the tweet I’m talking about:
There’s so much on the table regarding this sentence, and I personally hear and see a lot of different positions about this topic. Being a manager with strong technical skills myself, obviously I have some some biases in the technical direction, so for sake of equality I’ll start talking about the pros of not being technically excellent when you manage a technical area.
If you are like me, thinking about an IT manager without technical skills reminds you about Jen from The IT Crowd Netflix serie. And you’re not so far from the reality: that kind of character exactly highlights, the benefits of not being technical, even if in a grotesque manner.
- Improving relationships: usually people from IT are not very social, or at least they are with a strong focus on their area. We laugh at jokes about binary numbers and speak more about the last technical conference than soccer. Now that TV Series are a big part of everyone’s life, there’s a better point of contact with the IT side of the force and the rest of the world, but still we prefer high complexity ones set in near-future dystopias (and trust me, Black Mirror is one of the few that everyone could enjoy) or with a certain degree of complexity. I’m experiencing this with my wife: the niche series I Love to watch are not the ones she enjoy. Having someone “from the outside” pulling the empathy of the team could raise the profile of the IT area inside the company, making it part and parcel of the company more than a small city-stat sharing company’s building.
- Better politics: God knows how much IT guys hates politic, along with being diplomatic. If there’s a problem, a strong technical guy just want to solve it, in an ancient war between the good and the evil (bugs or outages). It’s pretty common to catch one of the developer fixing a bug on a two or more years old application without any kind of application maintenance ongoing. This is a lot of fun for the developer and a great (free) service for the customer, but a very bad practice for the company. Being a non-technical manager could help the team understand when there’s space for doing something vs when there’s the need to go ahead with some contractual integrations before doing anything.
Also, keep in mind that Company’s IT training and team skills should overcome technical inefficiency from the manager, leading to a strong team that is able to continuously improve itself.
So do you think that a manager in technical area need to be technically excellent? Well, you are right.
Leaving aside that a technical guy become a manager should have increased his / her soft skills to match relationships and politics needs for that position (otherwise there would be no reasons for his / her manager qualification), being technical him / herself allow for a great degree of benefits. In my humble opinion, they are so many it’s not so useful to highlight them all, so I’ll only list the most important ones:
- Leadership: nobody wants to be managed by someone he / she don’t trust. In IT, trust is a matter of competence, believe it or not. I cannot really trust someone as a leader if he’s not able to at least understand what I’m talking about. Often, manager should not be better than the developer itself: I feel like most of my developers are better than me in implementing a promise or writing a query. But I know they trust me at least at a higher level because I did their jobs: “been there done that” is always the strongest driver for being considered reliable.
- Knowledge: I saw too many platforms / partners / whatevertechnicalthing chosen without any actual clue of what’s “under the hood”. Java platforms introduced in .NET only companies, SaaS bought without any real certification compliance with GDPR, and I could go on for days. When it comes to choose / adopt a solution, a technical leader dig into the technical details first, and concentrate on the business requirements later. If a platform fully adhere to business requirements but it’s totally outside company policies, it can do more harm than good in the long run.
As already said, I have many more but I feel the point is clear: Dilbert should have taught us that a boss is not only someone that is supposed to be here no matter what, having is job be more like a sinecure than an actual job. Role of the manager is to support, understand and lead the team, and technical skills can hardly been acquired while walking along the management path, while relationships, politics and any soft skill needed to be a good manager could. Yes, I feel Elon Musk is right. In Italy there’s a saying, “armiamoci e partite”, that sounds something like “let’s arm ourselves, so you can leave”, used when leaders are prone to do nothing more than let the team go while staying on the back watching (or not even watching, actually). Don’t do that: a battle cannot be won if the commander stays in the campsite because he can’t even ride a horse!
Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash
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