Geek To Managers
So your a Manager now! You are now in a position of true authority in this business! You will need help and tips to take in all that knowledge, especially since your a Geek! So what is it like to be a new Geek that has become a manager now? Well the book and an article or two can give you some good tips on how to become a good Geek turned Manager.
First off, you need to know what its going to be like, the book covers 4 sections that tell you what your in for. Here are the two most important ones to me.
- New Managers have no Idea what they’re getting into;
When you become a new manager, there will be a huge amount of things you will need to look over. For one thing, our beginning view of what it is like to be a manager will be corrupted, usually we look to what our previous boss did and no matter how much we observed, the viewpoint is limited. You try to hard to go of what your last boss did? you will be a confusing manager, acting out a persona that isn’t yours.
2.Great Engineers are not usually great Managers to Engineers;
It is not always a good idea to give a person a new job just because they did well on the last one. An Engineer has a whole new world to work in now that he is a manager, dealing with subordinates isn’t the same as technicality or codes.n a previous job working for my mother’s healthcare business, I remember it was a problem that our manager just ended up doing a lot of the work themselves, because they knew how to do their previous job but didn’t know how to teach us how to work. Some of my fellow employees became lazy and didn’t try to learn because they didn’t know how and figured the manager would eventually do it. The manager would become frustrated with us, and we would stay confused. So how do you properly lead as a geek leader?
This next article and the book gave me great examples on how to lead as Geeks properly. Four skills you will need to be successful are Letting go of doing, knowing what other managers do, measuring managerial success, and crossing boundaries: When your a new manager, you have to let go of all of the technical things you did in the past, you will feel weird not doing all of the technical stuff you did in the past. Measure your success accordingly, measure yourself by the productivity of your team, don’t count all of the technical things you have done anymore. Next you will need to cross boundaries, use this article for help, because you are going to have a LOT more communication going on.
Remember these tips when you become a techincal leader in the field. Practice makes perfect, with a little motivation habits will eventually kick in and you will sore as a new Manager!