Ron Higgs coaches engineers moving into leadership and finds they fear uncertainty because their training relied on formulas and deterministic systems. When they move into people management, they worry about losing technical skills and their identity, since their self-worth is tied to technical expertise rather than serving others.
How you do executive coaching, what pattern do you consistently see with technical professionals, with engineers that hold them back, right, from stepping into the C-suite, of becoming more of a leader than a hands-on expert operator?
I think with engineers, importantly, uncertainty is a big thing. And I think it goes with everyone. There's this big fear of uncertainty. I want to be certain about the outcome. I want to be certain about this. And so engineers, and I'm an engineer, and as engineers, we work on things, everything's very logical. You know, you plug a formula in, a mathematical formula or anything, and you get the same answer. You program a machine to do something and the output is predictable. It's the same every time. Well, human beings don't work that way, right? And most of your interactions are with human beings. So, so what I find is that they're engineers, our— a lot of our egos and well-being and everything else is wrapped up in our technical expertise and our skill. But when you take a leadership role, you have to shift your mindset to— from a technical mindset to serving people. Because most of what you do now that you've accepted the people management role are people-centered things and not the leadership thing. So maybe— or I'm sorry, not the technical And so maybe some fear on losing their technical edge, their technical proficiency, because now they're putting out all of these fires, all of this people stuff. You know, I've got all these meetings. I have a meeting with a finance person, a marketing person. This is keeping me from doing my engineering stuff, you know, and they feel they might lose the edge. At least that's what I'm seeing.
That is right on point. Actually, it was something I really had to learn myself because when you are individual contributor and you are very good at what you do. Which is how they select you to then become a manager, a leader, a director, or whatever. But then really making that switch where I am doing all of the work and I do it so well,
