Copyright © 2001 by Ethan A. Winning. All Rights Reserved.
For more than 15 years, I've been asked to conduct management development seminars, workshops, and retreats for supervisory personnel in high tech companies. The underlying assumption has always been that high tech managers are different than managers in other companies, and that they have different personality traits which make them more adept at relating to physical objects than to people.
There isn't much question but that their interests are in areas other than supervising or managing other people but when you get right down to it, there aren't too many people who get into "management" because they just love to oversee the work of others. Rather, most managers and supervisors become so because those positions are still stepping stones in the corporate hierarchy and because those positions pay more than most non-supervisory positions.
It is true that high tech companies are somewhat different than others, but people are people whether they're wearing lab coats and saying things like "Bunsen Burnerin," "Testuben," or whatever comes after "Pentium." Some would make good managers, some would make lousy managers, same as in the rest of the world. And, for those who try to set themselves apart with words that start with "cyber" or under the guise of "virtual reality," remember that virtual reality is not almost real but, by definition, real.
I sometimes start off workshops by asking the attendees why they became managers. Twenty-five years ago, the answer was almost always that it was indeed the next step on the corporate ladder, but one has to keep in mind that 25 years ago
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