Should engineering managers be technically excellent ?

Elon Musk has recently tweeted that he believed managers in tech should be technically excellent using the metaphor of a cavalry captain who should be able to ride horses !

This tweet has ignited a heated and polarizing debate on what it means to be “technically excellent”.

Trying to understand these diverse opinions, I had the intuition that something was off in the way we approached the problem. The issue was not whether managers in technical areas had to be “technically excellent” to succeed, it was rather the feeling of cognitive dissonance created by Musk’s tweet.

A cognitive dissonance is a situation that emerges where two ideas and/or behaviors are in conflict. Let’s try to understand it in our case.

There seems be a consensus in the tech sector (and beyond) that to be successful, managers should demonstrate good soft skills and embrace modern management and leadership practices. A great number of studies show that organizations that foster these new practices have better results and performance. Everyone is talking about leadership, empathy, employees well being, active listening, coaching, etc.

Now when Musk asserts that managers in the tech world should be technically excellent, it is normal that such a statement raises brows. How could managers be great specialists and at the same time devote themselves to developing and coaching their direct reports ?

And then there is Tesla and Space X. Two highly successful ventures created by Musk, which gives some kind of “legitimacy” to his assertion.

Commenting on my LinkedIn post about the recent tweet, of friend of mine joked : “Do NOT take management advice from Elon Musk”, only to find himself bullied by a guy who took the comment too seriously and was eager to defend Musk’s position.

To summarize, the two conflicting ideas are :

1. To succeed, managers in the tech sector should primarily demonstrate strong people and soft skills,

2. A leader, with a track record in building highly successful and technically advanced companies thinks that managers should primarily demonstrate great technical expertise.

This dissonance is caused by a hidden premises in the first idea : the fact that modern management is a condition for a company success.

We all know that correlation does not always imply causality. If we assess success by financial and technical indicators, then modern management is only one way to attain good performance. Directive management could be as effective as modern approaches in some contexts, even if it comes with a high human price. Think about the debate on the relationship between democracy and economic welfare. Is democracy a condition for economic development or is a result ?

Elon Musks methods works. There is no doubt on this. But do you want to have him as a manager ?

I think that the real question is not whether managers should write code or be the masters of their trades. It is rather what kind of companies do we want to work for ?