| Frequently I get resumes from people who are looking for a new job because they want to get into management. It’s natural to want to be promoted but there are tons of misconceptions about what it means to be a manager and how to get yourself a good management job.
The first step is to define what we mean by management. Basically, there are two types of management jobs. Let’s discuss each type so we are all talking about the same thing.
The first type of management job is what I call "Line Management". The best example of Line Management is operations or maintenance supervisor. In these roles you are managing an hourly workforce. In some situations this can be a skilled workforce and in some cases it might not. Either way, Line Management is best defined as managing non-professional personnel.
Line Management is the most common type of management job and the career ladder is pretty vertical. You start as a Supervisor, directly managing hourly employees and then get promoted to a Manager title where you may supervise a group of Supervisors. That is called second-level management. In second-level management you are responsible for a large number of hourly employees through their direct (first-level) supervisor.
I have found that people who move into Line Management roles either love it or hate it. There is an immediacy to it whether you are supervising 25 people in a Customer Service Call Center or a 15-person group in a production operation. Before trying to move into a Line Management role you need to understand what Line Management is and isn’t. Line Management is NOT ultra-strategic. Line Management is PERSONAL. Good Line Managers know their team and know how to motivate them. The challenges to Line Management are almost always about people and their performance. A good Line Manager knows that he shouldn’t put John next to Frank on the production line because Frank is going out with John’s old girlfriend. That may sound silly but those are important issues to a Line Manager. Many engineers or technical people who move into Line Management are shocked at how petty some of the issues are. The comment I get from people who have tried Line Management and want to get out almost all revolve around the phrase "this is not why I got my engineering degree." If you want to be technical, Line Management may not be for you. If you love the immediacy of a well-run production operation, Line Management may be for you. Yes, there are production and/or maintenance operations where the technical element is so complex that you can still get a technical challenge from Line Management, but those situations are rare.
Usually, when I probe people who say they want to get into management, Line Management is the farthest thing from their minds. If your goal is to move from a technical role into Line Management you need to do it as a junior person or within your current employer. Senior-level Line Management is a skill just like any other and you need the right track record to make the move. You can’t decide after 15 years experience that you now want a Line Management job. It’s a tough transition.
The second type of management job is what most people with manager visions in their eyes want and what I call Professional Management. Basically, they want their boss’s job. They want to manage people like themselves-other engineers, scientists, etc. Nothing wrong with wanting the corner office. Let’s explore how you get there.
Here is your situation. You have 5-10 years experience and you report to a Department Manager who isn’t leaving any time soon. At best, you can get a Senior Engineer title but there is no advancement beyond that. Most of the calls I get from people who want management jobs are in this situation. Of course, you can be patient, becoming a manager when your boss retires. But then you still have to beat out the 5 other people in your department and it may take another 10 years. You want to speed up the process. Here are the realities of the market.
First, the bad news. Most manager openings are filled internally through promotion. Most companies want to reward their employees with promotions and almost always prefer promoting from within. My estimate is that only about 10% of management slots are filled by outsiders. Generally, there are only a few reasons companies look externally for managers. One, the vacancy was unexpected. They had no time for succession planning so there is no obvious internal candidate to promote. Two, their business is growing. They need to bring in an outsider who represents either managerial or technical skills un-duplicable in the organization. And three, their business is crumbling. They need someone to fix things.
In the first situation, where a manager leaves unexpectedly, no one will be hired without having significant managerial experience. Here is why. They are passing over internal people and, even if these people are not qualified for a manager job, some probably think they are. Meaning that when a company looks externally to replace a manager who has left unexpectedly, they will go out of their way to find someone with more bona fide management experience than their current staff. If the department is composed of good individual contributors but none with management experience, these people will complain if the company hires someone with no management experience. If you are not a manager now you will not be considered for these jobs. There is logic to this. After all, how would you feel is you were passed over and the manager hired for your department had no more management experience than you have? Ouch!
The second type of management opening is the type to look for. The best way to move into management is with a growing company. There is no substitute for growth. Here is a typical scenario. A $20,000,000/yr company sees the opportunity to grow to $50,000,000/yr. They have never had a Manufacturing Engineer in their company. The Design Engineers always integrated their designs with production directly. They want to create a Manufacturing Engineering role and they want a 10-year experienced engineer who can work as an individual contributor for a few months. After that, they will hire a 2-year person under him/her, creating a department for the 10-year person to manage. Over the next 3 years that department can end up being 4 people.
Here’s another scenario. An OEM wants to upgrade their product’s controls schemes from PLC’s to microprocessor software. All their EE’s are PLC Engineers. They need to go out and hire a Software Engineer with a good real-time embedded background to initially write code, run those projects and eventually hire under them.
Please note the common theme in both scenarios. The person is initially hired to work as an individual contributor and then, after time, moved into a manager role. There are reasons for this. One, the person will learn the nuances and technical issues relevant to the product or system by working as an engineer first. It’s the quickest way to learn. Two, it’s budget friendly. Often, if a company goes out and hires someone to move immediately into a management job in the situations described above, the first thing they want to do is hire a staff. In other words, it means immediately creating 2 or more salaries instead of one. Unless there are compelling reasons to speed up the process companies will avoid this.
In some ways, the replacement vs. growth type of management opportunities require opposite types of experience. The replacement of a manager who left requires deep management experience in a candidate. The growth opportunity requires little, if any, management experience. It requires the ability to demonstrate the ability to learn how to manage. In fact, too much management experience can hurt a candidate for the growth type slot. Rightly or wrongly, a company may be reluctant to hire a person with extensive management credentials for a growth-generated slot because they may fear the tendency to empire-build to early.
The third type of management opening, a crumbling company seeking a savior, tends to speak for itself. They want an expert who has strong exposure in their situation. Not for the faint of heart or inexperienced.
So what advice can I give the 30-year-old Project Engineer who wants to move into a management role? Here are the things to do and not do:
- Be very good at what you do. Sounds simple but sometimes people forget that excellence has a tendency to be rewarded. There is no substitute for competence.
- Work for a growing company. If you are currently working in a company where the business is flat or declining, you need to move to a growing firm, even if it’s a lateral job. The combination of your competence and the company’s growth should speed up your career track and provide more options to you.
- Be a good politician. Yep, politics is the art of getting things done. You need to make yourself visible and let the appropriate people (your manager, HR, etc) know about your ambitions and goals. Don’t be shy about wanting to move up and make sure you are asking what you need to do in your company to help that happen. Of course, please don’t substitute being a good politician with excellence at your job. One builds on the other and doesn’t replace it.
- Don’t count on the MBA to help you. Too many people think the MBA is the ticket needed to move up. Of course, it doesn’t help that the schools foster this notion. An MBA can augment all the other things listed above but replaces none of them. You can’t be an average performer working in a flat company with bad communications skills and expect the MBA to get you a management job. The right MBA (and not all degrees are equal) can effectively signal your desire to move into a management role but everything else needs to be in place first.
- Be patiently opportunistic. Make sure you are well networked so that you are visible when the right job opens up outside your firm. You need to make firms like mine aware of your existence and your goals. You should be aggressive when the right situation appears. Patience may be required in waiting for the right job but if it takes a month or a year, be there when opportunity knocks. Don’t look at web sites only applying to manager jobs. That will frustrate you and may end up leading nowhere. There is no excuse for not networking.
- Be polite. Sounds strange? Don’t forget that courtesy is the lubricant of social and business relations. People respect people who respect them. In over two decades of recruiting I can tell you for a fact, polite people do better in their careers than jerks. I’ve seen it time and time again. If I have to choose between two people to refer to a client for a management job, all things being equal the polite one gets the nod. It’s a no-brainer.
- Work hard. People will notice. Honest.
I hope this helps put the challenge of getting a management job into perspective. Keep in mind that as you move up the ladder the competition gets intense. There is no substitution for excellence. The cream rises to the top. Thanks for your time. Jeff
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