Who are you – engineer, manager or businessman?
24 July 2007
One of the latest features we have posted on the site (‘Buying Skills for the process engineer’ Click here) discusses the engineer’s role in buying new equipment. It set me thinking about what else the engineer is expected to do – and the answer is often ‘just about everything!’
A production engineer working for a Tier 1 contract manufacturer is probably as close to being a dedicated production engineer as it gets. These people have a job to do which principally involves making the products that the customer demands – separate departments provide the expertise and manpower for human resources, facilities management, supply chain management, customer liaison, selling the service or product…..I imagine even my Tier 1 engineers are beginning to say ‘Hold on – I do that as well.’
The truth is we all do a bit of these various alien disciplines, some do so much that their ‘day job’ becomes neglected. Sometimes this can be a good thing if there are other people coming through with competence and enthusiasm to fill the gaps left by the engineer, but more often than not what is left is a void. More significant is the role the engineer has now taken up and how well he or she can do it. I think we would probably all look at Bill Gates and say that sometimes an engineer can be a good businessman. More often than not this is not the case. The engineer’s core skill is not in managing and motivating people, or devising sales strategies - it is creating, developing and producing products. Sadly, such skills have become devalued. The rewards, and therefore the status in modern society, are heaped on the person who sells the product and so it is to the ‘business end’ of the business to which both raw recruits and engineers are increasingly being attracted.
But even if an engineer is attracted by the thought of moving up the management ladder, is it a good move? On a personal level it could mean the engineer giving up some or all responsibility for engineering, and I think that engineering is the sort of job that most of us went into in the first place because we wanted to do it.
On a corporate level we come up against the Peter Principle – an expression coined by Canadian Laurence Peters in 1969, that essentially says that in hierarchical organisations employees are promoted to their level of incompetence. Or to put another way, someone who is good at their job gets rewarded by being given a job they are not so good at. Both company and employee lose.
There is no obvious way out of this conundrum. The production engineer wants to have the best staff that suits his or her management style, but the only way to achieve this is to get involved in the recruitment process. To get the best equipment you need to be involved in the buying process. To keep your customers happy you need to talk to them about the products or service you have to offer, and how you are going to work together.
Realistically the engineer cannot be just an engineer any more. He must be a multi-faceted business machine. Perhaps the trick is to honestly identify your own weaknesses and rather than ignore them (as most of us do) address them by training or by using other people’s skills to cover them.
Maybe most important is to not leave a skill gap behind you – if you no longer make every engineering decision then who does? I have visited many electronics manufacturing facilities and it is sometimes clear which ones have problems – not because of the decisions they made, but because of the ones they didn’t.
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