Project Managers: Nurturing vs. Hiring
I’ve come across an interesting thread on LinkedIn once, years ago. Someone posted it as a general, thought-provoking question, one of those complex questions that have no finite answers. As it often goes, such discussions generate the most comments; and the question was: why engineers are good project managers? I can imagine which thoughts, memories, and personal experiences whirled in your mind at this very moment 🙂 To me, a more accurate way of formulating this question would be this: why *some* engineers make good project managers, and *some* don’t?
In this post, though, I’d like to focus on just one aspect. When you need project managers (or team leads, or product managers, etc.) which option is preferable: to nurture them inside your organization, or to headhunt the superstars who have spent most of their professional lifetimes at other companies? It depends on your organizational culture. If acquiring new employees is a recruiters’ domain, you just submit a job opening to your HR department, and let them bring in the superstar candidates (luring them by high salaries, compensation benefits, etc.) Usually, such job openings come with a lengthy list of technical responsibilities that a desired candidate is supposed to fulfill. It’s largely one and the same list, for any company, and quite often communication skills, or people skills, are mentioned only as a plus. A nice-to-have icing on a cake, sort of.
Now, consider this. How often a project or a release blows up due to a lack of technical expertise, and how often does this happen due to a lack of people skills? By people skills I mean anything related to sifting an individual’s technical competence through the grid of this particular company business and human environment, in a broad sense. The challenging part about hiring someone from outside is that you never know how this person will perform in the trenches with your other folks, and how will they be able to transmit the common accumulated wisdom of your whole team to the product or project they’re supposed to be responsible for. You don’t know what this person is like, and there’s no way you can get to know him or her well enough through their CV. The trial period is of little help either. By the end of the trial period one just starts to merge into the company culture, and all seems to be going well, and you’re so eager to check this job opening as “filled”, thinking that all is fine. But you cannot be sure as of how the real *people* skills of this person will stand to a test later, in a challenging moment.
The method that might work better for an organization in need of more project managers is the “grass-roots” nurturing:
Call for the volunteers who feel they are apt for this work, and who are ready to commit to the responsibilities of leading a team/managing a project. This is the crucial first qualifying round. It must be something that a person wants to do, and is confident enough to stand up and to say: “Yes, I can. I’m taking on this responsibility, and I’m committing to it.” The next step would be to observe how the aspiring project manager is actually doing about those very *project manager* responsibilities. Given that the technical expertise of the volunteers has already been proven in their previous work as engineers, and their people skills have also been tested as they’ve been a part of your team for quite a while, and their intrinsic knowledge of the project/product is in place, all that has to be verified at this point is their confidence in driving the project development, and their ability to hold the steering wheel firmly.
With the grass-roots nurturing, the rule of a thumb is this: if you’re lucky to have the aspiring people in your team, let them try to pursue project management. If it works — great, if no — this might be less risky anyway than trusting a newcomer.
This story has been adapted and re-written from one of my earlier articles.
