Entrepreneurs: are Tech Skills Mandatory?
by Miki Saxon
Do you need to code to manage software developers?
Do you need to know circuit design to manage hardware engineers?
If you answered ‘yes’ then you’ve bought into one of the most common myths of management.
It exists because people are commonly promoted within the department in which they were originally hired.
But not always.
Neha Sampat is not only a woman, but also CEO of cloud software firm Raw Engineering, where, among other things, she runs a team of web developers.
She is not technical and certainly doesn’t code.
She attribute her success to the culture she’s built and her attitude towards her people.
“If you have the right people and the right personalities on a team, it’s magic. The smartest thing I have done in my career has been to surround myself with people who are experts in areas I know nothing about.”
Of course, that requires being secure enough in your own skills and hiring choices that you don’t need to be the smartest person on the team.
The same applies to KG Charles-Harris Charles-Harris (who, as his time permits, contributes here). He is a serial entrepreneur and founder/CEO of Quarrio, which just won the 2014 Overall Winner & Most Disruptive awards given by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) in the “NextGen” Big Data category.
KG puts enormous time and effort into hiring the right people, then gets out of their way and trusts them to get the job done.
Or as Sampat says,
“I am very deliberate about expressing how much I value people’s knowledge and their presence on my team.” (…) “My job is to be an enabler and to give my people the resources they need to make things happen.”
Good management and communication skills are as crucial to success as good coding—perhaps even more so in the long run.
Flickr image credit: Juhan Sonin
September 25th, 2014 at 7:35 pm
Thank you for your kind words. I definitely don’t believe you have to be an engineer to manage engineers, but you have to be willing to become a student again and learn about managing engineers and engineering. My experience is that after a while I have become a hybrid – i.e. I know which questions to ask when and what’s sensible to connect it to a larger business strategy. Ultimately, business people can learn about engineering and engineers can learn about business – both work.