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Leadership
is Tricky; Engineering Leadership is Really Tricky
Susan de la Vergne
The tricky thing about great
leadership is how unpredictable it is. Think of two or three people whom
you consider to be leaders. How alike are they in how they lead? Probably
not very.
That’s because leadership—unlike carpentry, gymnastics, or gourmet food
preparation—is not a precise skillset requiring expertise in proven,
repeatable techniques. There’s no leadership formula that works every
time, no standard list of competencies to guarantee success.
You can often spot great leadership when you see it, but you know as soon
as you do that the leader you admire isn’t using formulas for successful
leadership and wouldn’t be able to tell you what it was he or she was
doing to be successful. Instead of a set of skills we can pin down neatly
on a list, great leaders embody a range of characteristics. Among them
are: a vision for the future; commitment to goals; having an inner rudder
that tells you what’s “right” to do; empathy; being able to make and carry
out decisions; being circumspect; taking chances; and challenging the
status quo.
You can’t be an expert at any of those. You can’t be an expert at
being circumspect, taking chances, or having a vision. In fact, a
characteristic of leadership is the inability to be expert at it. There
are, therefore, no “expert leaders.” The people who tell us what it takes
to be a great leader are people who study them, not people who
are them.
Great leaders are the least likely people to tell you what it takes to be
a great leader. Imagine asking Abraham Lincoln, “What leadership
techniques did you use to preserve the union and end slavery?”! Leaders
can tell us what drives them to lead, but not what should drive others,
nor how they should do it.
What does all that mean to you, if you aspire to be a better leader?
It means there’s no add-water-and-stir approach to becoming a better
leader. And it means that, if you’re an engineering professional and you
prefer determinism over ambiguity, certainty over uncertainty, you may
find yourself uncomfortable and maybe even impatient with some aspects of
leadership development.
What makes engineers great at what they do (precision, process,
repeatability of results) is different from what it takes to be a great
leader. So leadership development for successful engineers may mean
stepping into unfamiliar territory, being willing to do things like put up
with ambiguity, size up the political landscape or be content with not
knowing exactly how to solve someone else’s problem.
Leadership development starts with understanding what leadership is and
assessing (honestly) which aspects of leadership you’re already doing
fairly well, already pretty comfortable with, and which you’re not. Do you
take initiative? Listen openly? Gauge other people’s reactions pretty
well? Can you speak to groups of people? Do you watch the horizon and the
bottom line with equal interest? Can you drag a project over the finish
line? Do people trust you? Those are some of the elements of leadership
ability you’ll examine. It’s not easy to look at oneself in these ways. We
all like to think we’re trustworthy, motivated, initiative-takers. But are
we really? And if we’re not, then what?
That’s where leadership development comes in. Once you have a sense of
your profile as a leader and the areas in which you’d like to improve,
that’s when the fun starts. Or the hard work.
Engineers and tech professionals are known, for the most part, as hard
workers, people who focus on a problem until it’s solved, beat the
competition, and break new ground. They rarely shy away from something
that’s hard to do, something that requires brain power, fortitude, and a
good work ethic. That’s part of the industry’s culture.
And it’s why engineers have leadership potential—because leadership
development requires strength of character, a willingness to work hard and
to take chances.
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