My Management Background - An Overview

My first job out of college was an engineering position with a large multinational food company. It was a Union shop, and so there was a clear demarcation between labor and management. All salaried staff were considered "Managment" and we all attended regular management meetings, where the Plant Managers shared details of both our strategic efforts as well as tactical (operational) results. I recall those meetings as somewhat exciting for a junior employee - here I was in the middle of these discussions about what was happening in the business and what we were expected to do about it. There appeared to be a unity of purpose and a strong consensus about what needed to be done for the company to be successful.

After I left that job and completed my master's degree, I went to work for another food company, and again found myself in management, although this time I had the formal title and picked up traditional management responsibilities in budgets, purchasing approvals, and direct reports.

My third company hired me on in a staff position - I was part of Corporate Engineering assigned to a local facility. I worked with the local managment, but wasn't really part of it. This was a new perspective for me, and allowed me a chance to view things from a distance - not always a big distance, but enough that I began to develop a different perspective.

The company I now work for has provided me with yet another opportunity to see a different side of things. This company employs too many salaried workers to make them all 'management', so we have 'individual contributors' - and that includes the majority of the professional staff (engineers/technicians). Over the past five years, I've been working on fewer purely technical things and have assumed more and more managerial tasks.

This changing role has culminated in my appointment as a fully titled "Engineering Manager", and I have the keys to the place, so to speak. I have the formal authority vested in a manager, along with some of the clearly identifiable accoutrements of 'manager', such as a company provided cell phone.

I've written all the above to provide the reader with some insight into my background - I want you to understand a bit of where I'm coming from and try to see things from my perspective.

In a future post, I want to explore what I regard as the pitfalls of management: irrational optimism, unreasonable expectations, and bureaucratic inertia.

I'll try to get back to this one pretty soon - it's fresh on my mind right now.

Steven