Helping Technical Experts Become Leaders
It was a cold cloudy spring day in Boston. Still adjusting from Pacific to Eastern time, groggy and somewhat disoriented, I had arrived long before my 8am presentation at the annual meeting of the Society of Industrial-Organizational Psychology*.
In the IGNITE format each of our five presenters was given exactly five minutes and 20 automatically advancing PowerPoint slides to make their case. My colleagues and I (Joanie Connell, Bill Berman, Bernardo Ferdman, and Vladimir Baranov)—all well-experienced professionals with years of successful presentations and consulting behind them—had spent unusually large amounts of time preparing our slides and practicing our talks. At this stage of our careers, we don’t usually do that. But there was something fear-inducing about having slides advance outside of our control while trying to exactly fill 20 seconds per slide allowed. We did not want to screw it up.
As the room filled up, so did our anxiety. Between those watching on their apps and those in the room there would be several hundred people in attendance. Even more would see the video on YouTube where it was soon posted.
Dr. Joanie Connell, the session’s chair and an expert in coaching technical people on leadership issues, did the intros and then I pressed the advance slide button and off went my slides. My talk was intended to lay out some of the interest-ability-personality characteristics of many tech people that made it challenging for them to become effective leaders. I had precisely five minutes to summarize some major points that I had written about in a 582-page book on a related topic. There was no room for nuance in this kind of talk. I had to jump into major points for example, tech people’s interests often gravitate toward things and ideas rather than to people; neurodiversity and introversion were common among tech workers).
When I thought later about this experience, I realized we presenters were engaged in a process similar to what many technical people must address when they become leaders. It was disorienting, it necessitated learning new skills, and mistakes would inevitably be made.
Technical people—for sure they are not the only ones—are, for the most part, not natural supervisors or leaders. That’s also true of many psychologists, although we tend to enjoy working with people. The technical world often revolves around numbers and symbols and things. Many can visualize things and how they would look from different angles. It’s a great skill set, cognitively demanding and to a large degree, occurs a world of its own.
Every career has a core set of activities that account for much of the workday. Although tech people may work with other tech people in their day-to-day work, they usually aren’t responsible for others’ activities. Working alone is not unusual for this group. This tends to strengthen one’s own work (think coding or problem solving a wiring schemata), but usually don’t have to depend on their people or leadership skills.
When it comes to technical leadership, many technically gifted people avoid such roles. Others take them on because no one else is willing to do so or because that is the only way to make more money. For those not naturally gravitating to leadership roles coaching on the interpersonal aspects of the job can help.
Helping people who are in the new (to them) roles of being supervisors or managers is something we psychologists are often good at doing. Just like our presenters having to learn how to work under constraints that are new to them, tech leaders can benefit from help in navigating a new terrain with new expectations.
Lowman, R.L. (2023, April 21). The technical interest-ability-personality profile: Implications for leadership roles. In J. Connell, Chair, I/O Consulting to Technical Leaders, Teams, and Organizations: What, Why, & How? IGNITE session, annual meeting of the Society of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Boston.
