You probably didn’t become an engineer because you dreamed of managing difficult personalities, resolving conflicts or having uncomfortable conversations.
You became good at solving problems.
Technical problems.
Problems where you could gather the
information, analyse it, apply your knowledge and eventually arrive at a
defensible answer.
And being good at that may have helped
you progress through your career.
Then something strange happened.
You were promoted.
Suddenly, some of your most difficult
problems didn’t have calculations, standards or clearly defined solutions.
They involved people.
Someone on your team isn’t performing.
Two people don’t get along.
You need to give feedback that you know
won’t be well received.
Someone challenges your decision.
You have to delegate work you could
probably do faster yourself.
Or you’re lying awake wondering whether
you handled a conversation the right way.
For many highly capable technical people,
this can be a surprisingly difficult career transition.
It isn’t necessarily because you lack
leadership ability.
It’s partly because people problems
behave differently from technical problems.
You can analyse them endlessly and still
not arrive at certainty.
You can know intellectually what you
should say and still find the conversation difficult.
And sometimes the harder you try to think
your way through the situation, the more complicated it seems to become.
Leadership courses can teach useful
techniques. Experienced mentors can tell you how they would handle the
situation.
Both can be enormously valuable.
But sometimes the real obstacle isn’t
knowing what to do.
It’s what happens inside you when you
try to do it.
The self-doubt.
The overthinking.
The reluctance to create conflict.
The fear of getting it wrong.
The conversation you keep replaying afterwards.
I’ve spent much of my professional life
in both worlds — first as an engineer and engineering consultant, and later
helping people work through the internal barriers that can make situations like
these unnecessarily difficult.
Over the coming weeks, I’m going to
explore this transition from technical expert to people leader in more
detail.
If you’ve experienced it yourself — or
you’ve watched a talented technical person struggle with it — I’d be very
interested to hear:
What was the hardest part of the
transition for you?
#EngineeringLeadership #TechnicalLeadership #PeopleLeadership #Engineering
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