As a hard working engineer, have you ever
raised a question that why your manager earns so much more money than you? It
seems it is individual engineers who deliver all the valuable things, they
coding, they testing, they listening to customers’ complains and so on.
Yet it’s not necessary that a manager should
earn more money than an engineer, being a manager truly requires a set of
totally different competencies/skills from being an engineer, and honestly
speaking, this kind of competency/skill is not that easy to acquired and thus,
may be worthy of the money.
I have had similar questions before, but had
my mind changed after participating a training session called “transition to
leader” today.
There is no another word than “brainwashing”
better describing the impact of the training on my way to look at the manager
role. Not going deep into many details, I would like to mention only one fact impressing me most in the session.
Charles Fan, general manager of EMC China
COE, shared with us at the session beginning his thoughts about being a
manager.
You should “让你的队员happy”, “代表你的team去争取利益”, “好的事情，让你的队员去领功，不好的事情，你要扛下来”, …
“As a manager, most of the time, you are not
ordering your people, but serving your people” I concluded from his speech.
This just reminders me of another saying made by Linda (HR manager) not long
ago “A good manager should make his/her people succeed”
As an individual contributor, you deliver
products with good quality on time, that’s wonderful. But no matter you are aware
of or not, without manager’s efforts, like communicating with global team,
coordinating with Dev team, planning the schedule, leveraging the team member
capability, and so forth, your achievements are not going to happen.
One principle of manager is “to recognize
your member”, I think this also works for engineer in “to recognize your manager”.
