I agree that letting go is typically a difficult thing for even experience managers to handle. I've seen even division general managers arguing fine point about acoustics and radars with working engineers during their design reviews. Extremely poor form; who's minding the story while they're playing in the sandbox?
Nonetheless, until you try doing it, you'll never know whether a) you can do it, or b) you'll like. I've had small managerial positions early on, which solidified my desire to never touch them again. As others have said, there are those that thrive on being the coordinator and expediter of successful projects.
The basic task of a manager is to manage, keep out of the way of their engineers, and to make things happen for their engineers. Unfortunately, too few managers ever achieve those goals. However, much of that is due to differences in job expectations, and requirements imposed on managers vs. engineers. In management, as well as engineering, arbitration of competing requirements and conditions is a pre-requisite of achieving any sort of completion. But, the requirements and conditions that a manager must trade and balance are completely different, and often, contrary to those of the engineers. Also, often, survival means making decisions that are completely contrary and detrimental to the rest of the troops.
As an example, I offer this scenario.
A new general manager is promoted from within our division. Our division has been losing gobs of money, along with the rest of the company, for nearly 6 years. We've had 7 GMs in the prior 4 years at the division already, including nearly a 75% RIF. So the new GM's first acts are to cancel all IR&D projects. We engineers are thinking "logic inverter" about the GM.
We have these metal-gate PMOS devices that we pretty much sub out everything, including the printing of our part numbers and logos, and still make something like 80% gross margin; they're our cash cows. Our new GM starts issuing last-buy notices to our customers, basically telling them that we're no longer going to stop production on these cash cows. We're now thinking "criminally insane" about the GM.
So, what's his story?
[white]This GM is actually the smartest one of the lot. He recognizes that his tenure at the division is measured in months, not years, and regardless of what he does, his tenure will not exceed about 6 months (7 GM/4 yr). He can do the "right" thing and work as if the division will survive and sink with the ship, or he can generate a profit and get promoted. Rightly or wrongly, he chooses to survive, so elimination of IR&D helps the bottom line, and he won't be around to deal with the lack of future products. Forcing last-buys gooses the bottom line from ~$20K/month/product to ~$300K for each product killed. By staging the last-buys, he can goose bottomline for several months. Sure enough, at month 6, he manages to be profitable for 2 months, and he's promoted. The next GM comes in, completely unaware of what had previously transpired, and is seen crying a river over the doomed ship that he's now the captain of, but that's another story. [/white]
TTFN
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