Leaders who don’t understand technology often get into trouble. Just like when the leader of xiaobian said: “You must give me a 100 thousand + reading article every week,” Xiaobian will also be lost in thought…

Peter Drucker, a management guru, famously said:

A manager is a person who works with people, whose task is to make people work together and to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

As Drucker said, our goals as managers are clear. That need help employees to achieve the above goals, managers must be able to at least understand the employee’s working process, content, clearly know the advantages and disadvantages of current working way and mode, if management is itself in this field, so he can understand the problem, also can solve the problem, like to do a good mother-in-law capable and understanding. So what if the reality is more than we think? What happens when all of a sudden you bring in a leader from another department who doesn’t know anything about technology? (In fact, this is not uncommon.) Let’s go through each one.

Lead the R&D team

Photo source:

http://jsmwebsolutions.com/blog/time-management-tips-for-small-business-owners/

A few days ago, I had dinner with a friend. He came from BAT and was used to working under the leadership of a technical giant. Then he changed his job to a big company now. In the process of interaction, they frequently did not have the same channel, and their different views on technical solutions became the direct fuse, which led to a fierce dispute between them, and then led to two bad quarterly evaluations. He once wanted to leave voluntarily, after all, the technology is still there, there is no worry about the job, but then he thought, this kind of situation may occur anywhere, even if you go back to the past environment, also can’t guarantee a lifetime not to encounter, now encounter, try to deal with it, the worst is to pay tuition.

After putting himself in his shoes, he began to adjust himself, straighten out his attitude and communicate with the leader actively to understand his difficulties. Now they are as good as brothers, and he works as a technical adviser to his boss, who treats him as his right-hand man. But really, how many employees are willing to do that? Many people don’t want to do this. They see it as a compromise, and it’s also easy to create a “ceiling situation” where the leader may not have much room for advancement.

To further expand Drucker’s idea, I think, as the leader of the R&D team, our main responsibility is to organize the work of the whole team, make reasonable arrangements and coordinate efficiently. At the same time, when they appear any problem, whether it is a technical problem, or management problem, or personal questions, we are able to give good support, make them feel someone standing behind, rather than behind a precipice, so as to achieve high quality, high efficiency to output results, whether technical or product can output high quality results. Put these requirements together, and frankly, I think it’s very easy for someone who doesn’t know the technology to lead a r&d team to have serious problems.

Understand r&d team leadership

photo

http://rumroadravings.com/community-manage/

What r & D team leaders are essentially doing is technical management. Technology management is the work of organizing teams to conduct research and development together. It is a subdivision of work. With the progress of society, the opening of human thinking and the improvement of economic level, the managers (engineers) have gradually transformed from simply solving material contradictions into pursuing the sense of belonging, participation and technical respect of work. They are increasingly interested in who they work with, in what way they work, in what technical problems they solve, in what products they produce, rather than just how much money they make. At the same time, there is a close social media connection between the managed, so they can keep communication, share their feelings about working in the company/organization, and share their ability and moral understanding of the manager, which is also a sharing process. Each of our technical team managers is being placed in front of the manager like a book. If others are too lazy to read you, it proves that you can’t give them guidance, they won’t have a sense of belonging and will leave in a hurry eventually.

Problems that might arise

photo

https://pro.psychcentral.com/exhausted-woman/2016/07/married-to-a-person-who-seems-addicted-to-chaos/

What could go wrong? For example, the R&D team will hold a variety of technical meetings, product requirements, overall design review meeting, research project technology selection meeting, pre-research project pre-research report review meeting and so on, which is basically the majority of the work content of a R&D team. So the question is, if he doesn’t know the technology, do you think he needs to be there when we hold a meeting? If it is a technical expert born, the problem becomes simple, there is no doubt that he needs to attend, because many technical design links need to be checked or approved by him, some technical problems he can lead to solve.

But if it’s the other way around, that’s when trouble starts. If he attends, it will cause trouble: if he does, he may not give any advice, and may be disorderly. If he does not attend, he will feel marginalized over a long period of time, and may cause a big purge within the team. This is purely from the perspective of daily technical work. What we need to deal with every day is also what the whole team needs to deal with. We have to be on the same channel, otherwise it is really troublesome to communicate, which increases the communication cost and consumes internal resources.

Having said technical daily work, let’s look at r&d process management. For the management of the whole RESEARCH and development process, it is easy for people who do not know technology to completely start from the product perspective and ignore the difficulties and risks faced by the research and development team and the technical personnel’s longing for technology, resulting in the overload of the team and the lack of technical vision of the technical team. For example, when the business side set a too strict deadline for the completion of the requirements (actually, this is a pressure transmission problem. The business side received the pressure from the customer and could have reduced the pressure and risk of r&d by explaining to the customer, but chose to directly pressure the R&D).

At this point, the leader of your team, who doesn’t know much about technology, might say, “It doesn’t matter, we don’t need a perfect system at the beginning, you can go first and satisfy the business thirst (he doesn’t know exactly how to satisfy the business thirst).” The idea that we have time to refactor and refine later (and of course some techies use the phrase “architecture and design evolve” to justify “fail-driven” development) is fundamentally wrong.

In fact, we should not shirk the responsibility to the product thinking, I think a qualified R & D team leader himself must have a certain product thinking, so as to better let the technology serve the product, do a good job of technology landing work. We need to worry about also easy to happen a lot of time, the leading products of thinking is also a half a bucket of water, by this time the user requirements of his mouth, whether we finally have to accurately, whether can together with research and development system is more need to question, maybe just because of his ability, leading product technology ahead, rather than in an orderly way to the ground.

The R&D leader who does not understand technology, although he does not understand technology, he certainly knows something else, such as products, operations, etc. Last year, I had a chat with a senior executive of a telecom operator. She said that her company usually chose executives from three fields: product, operation and technology. No matter where he comes from a field, he must not give up our own familiar field, otherwise we are doing a little empty, for I don’t understand, such as technology, if he feels lack of gripper technically, he will quickly find their technical representative within the team, only to find such a person, he can control the team, Don’t let yourself fall down in technology. But what if you don’t find one soon, or if no one is willing to fill that role?

At this point, he might start moving into the software development process, because the management pattern at this point seems to be similar to that of other departments, taking requirements, doing things, exporting to users, receiving feedback. It does seem similar, right? No, the product needs of r&d projects in the technology industry are not the same as user needs, it is the transition of user needs. Before working in the field, it is necessary to design the system. Whether it is waterfall development model, XP or Agile, it does not deny the design link, but cuts the way of implementation and module division. By effectively cutting the tree structure of the system architecture, To achieve rapid requirements collection, design, implementation, verification, requirements re-collection, design modification, implementation, re-verification, such a rapid repeat process, to achieve efficient iteration, to meet the needs of users in various industries.

It is important to remember that, no matter for know or don’t understand the technology research and development of leadership, any of the software engineering model, are not allowed in demand completely clear, description is not clear, to technology design, also do not encourage the missing cases start coding scheme design, because no one knows exactly how to code this time.

I understand it

Without outside distractions, many programmers, when left alone on their own devices, will often be absorbed in coding and designing as they go along. Development team managers must cultivate a software development culture based on sound development practices, or programming projects may fail.

Here we need to talk about whether R&D leaders need to code. In my opinion, coding is irrelevant. If it is a mature technology company, it should evaluate the work process and achievements of technical team managers from multiple dimensions, rather than adopting a single rule. Key to see whether you whether you need the output of the coding, coding is the key to verify that your output or contribution, if is the key link, then you need to code, if the value of the code have no certainty technology global value is big, so you need to use your time outside the encoding ways, after all, for the technical team manager, Product development, technology research and pre-research, system architecture design, future technology direction, team management, etc., all belong to your job content.

The team leader, I believe, can not completely in line technology professional background, and even can not graduate in science and engineering, but he must have enthusiasm for technology, work experience includes development engineer experience before (this is necessary condition), is actually understand don’t understand the technical and professional background has nothing to do, period, the key see you have seriously to do accumulate. I had a colleague who was a law student who turned to writing code and wrote better code than a lot of people who had a lot more years of writing. Her rigorous thinking about the law was well transferred to the rigor of code logic. That’s how programmers grow. You don’t understand them in their right mind. R&d leaders need to have a reverence for technology and be able to effectively control the team’s technology output, which can be summarized as follows:

  • Basic knowledge and theoretical knowledge are very important. Leaders who do not know technology should learn more in their spare time and constantly strengthen their weaknesses so that they can gradually catch up with the team’s development pace. In fact, we all know the truth that diligence can make up for procrastination, but it depends on whether we can really practice it and keep ourselves in a state of lifelong learning. Look at Warren Buffett, he spends more than 6 hours studying every day. It can be seen that everyone needs to keep learning and thinking.

  • The key to stabilizing the current state is to use more mature existing solutions. Leaders who do not know technology need to cultivate technical spokespersons in the team. Through communication with them, their opinions and understanding of technical solutions will be gradually clarified, and gradually you will have a grasp of technology and can carry out work effectively.

  • Only in this way can you really get along with the technical staff. Without their help, the performance of the leader will not be good. It is very important to respect each other.

  • Think clearly before you do, adhere to high standards, many things can not be rushed, any software development process, is based on the software engineering model derived, are to solve a certain type of specific problems and evolution, so to understand the methodology, only to understand the ability to use.

  • Define the technical vision. This is very important for research and development team’s stability and growth, don’t understand the technology leadership is very difficult to clear vision technology, in a short time because he didn’t understand, so either look down on this, or do not know how to start, at that time, the role of internal technical team Daniel had emerged, leaders need to actively communicate with the Daniel, By assigning tasks, building team echelon and other forms, we can make substantial progress in clarifying the vision and avoid the pure supporting product status of the R&D team.

Write in the last

photo

http://www.candocareersolutions.ca/summary-of-business-plan.html

Today we talked specifically about r&d leaders who don’t understand technology. First of all, my opinion is that if the r&d leader does not know the technology, it will easily lead to the high frequency of staff turnover within the team, the technical staff will lack technical support, and the technical staff will be more likely to encounter the “ceiling phenomenon”. Second, it is easy for the business to drive technology heavily. Furthermore, misuse of project management tools may occur. Therefore, in my opinion, the top management should try to avoid such a situation and strictly control it by means of qualifications, so as to be able to go up and down. It is necessary to use professional people to lead professional teams.

But if really met, as an ordinary employee, we still need to face the reality, understand the situation clearly, since had appeared in the worst case, if you want to continue to stay, he will strive to become a technical advisor, you make it with the CEO to work, do their upward management, no matter whether future difficult, all want to bite a tooth go, As long as people don’t push you, you keep doing it.

Today’s topic: What do you think of leaders who don’t understand technology?

Have you ever worked under someone who didn’t understand technology? Have you ever acted funny when you were in a management position? What is the current status of r&d and management in your company? Let us know in the comments.

The authors introduce

Mingyao Zhou graduated from Zhejiang University with a master’s degree in engineering in 2004. 13 years of software development experience, nearly 10 years of technical team management experience, 4 years of distributed computing, big data technology experience. His books include “Big Talk about Java Performance Optimization”, “Deep Understanding of JVM&G1 GC”, and “Technical Leadership – How Code Developers Can Lead teams”.

Today’s recommendation,

Click on the image below to read it

The Go language? Docker? What do you think of the new technology?

The Geek Time App is now available in the Apple Store.

The Android version will be available soon, so stay tuned!